Happy Year of the Pig

The Year of the Pig has arrived and this gives me yet another opportunity to discuss my hopes, plans and dreams for the coming year and for this blog.
Since it's difficult for me to catch up with everything that's happening in fashionland in Taiwan on my own, and having no time to go to news conferences and shows all the time, I will probably be converting this blog into a base to promote my new endeavors soon.
Some of those endeavors are:
-plans for a board game on Taiwanese politics;
-plans for a Chinese-language book about a phenomenon that hasn't been written about yet in Taiwan;
-I'm very close to finishing a piece of fan fiction for a British Web site; by the way, fan fiction is a piece of 'literature' - in the loosest possible sense of the word - written in the style of an existing book, play or movie;
-I am also close - but not close enough - to completing a thriller.
All those projects have a time table of their own, and occupy me to varying degrees. The fan fiction is now about 60 pages long in Word and should be finished by mid-March. When it gets published basically depends on how the Web site operates.
The board game is also virtually finished, but I still have to go out and present it to possible publishers, and I have no idea how cold or warm their response will be. In any way, it should reach stores and news media way before next year's Taiwan presidential elections.
The Chinese-language book is something else, because first of all Mandarin is not my native lingo, and I still have to gauge what kind of interest local publishers will have for the topic, which is rather offbeat for an Asian country. However, personally, I feel that that is precisely what should make the book attractive to publishers: offbeat equals newsworthy equals easy to promote.
My 'masterpiece' if you will, is that thriller of course. I have 160 pages down in Word, but that is not enough. Once I finish it, there's editing and rewriting to be done, and there's also the slow process of finding an agent and a publisher. Even when that goes smoothly - and for most new writers it doesn't - I still have to look at some 18 months before it actually reaches the book stores, so you can see what I'm up against.
And until that happens, I still need other sources of income. That's why I'm scouting the Internet for business ideas and quirky innovations. My plans for small-scale business include food and the edge of fashion and design, but of course, all that planning needs time as well. What will make money? How much do I need to invest before I can start up production? Where do I sell my stuff, and will there be anybody interested? If I sell it over the Internet, how do I reach customers, how do I package the product so that it arrives looking good? Lots of questions, and over the following months I'll be hard at work pondering those, and writing, and wondering where my next income will come from.
2007 will be quite a year, pig or not!

Trends 2007 - The Wall Street View

The Wall Street Journal Asia is an unlikely place to go to read about fashion, but today I just have to mention their current weekend edition.
Despite being 80 percent devoted to the business world and 10 percent to food, sometimes the paper also turns its focus on fashions. Of course it counts among its writers the famous Teri Agins, the author of "The End of Fashion," a must-have book about designers.
But in one article, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan looks at how trends from the 1960s mod era are returning to the catwalk and the streets in 2007.
One of the trends she mentions comes as a surprise: metallic bags, clothes and shoes. Anyone walking around in Taipei over the past year must have seen all the dozens if not hundreds of handbags covered in gold, silver and platinum colors. Hardly a new trend for 2007, in my mind, just a continuation of what's already established. Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquiere - you know, the inventor of the motorcycle bag - apparently went one further by launching metal-plated leggings, so there.
Another 2007 trend is the appearance of oversized printed patterns in loud colors on dresses. The geometric patterns come in pink, yellow, blue, orange, and bright red. Tan also gives the opposition a voice, saying the patterns are overwhelming and makes it look like the dresses are wearing the women, instead of the other way round.
Tan also sees a resurgence of Yves Saint Laurent-era trapeze dresses and their less extreme A-line counterparts. Lanvin and, again, Balenciaga were the groundbreakers here late last year, but the trend has now expanded to hit New York as well, Tan writes.
Shoes have never caught a lot of my interest, but to be complete, I'll mention that transparent plastic is the way to go here. Even Louis Vuitton has launched shoes with heels in extravagant shapes or partly made out of plastic - let's call it Lucite. Again, Tan mentions a critic saying the plastic looks trashy and cheap.
We'll have to wait and see which of these trends make it to the streets of Taipei later this year.