:: Dispatches from London Fashion Week ::
During London Fashion Week, Somerset House is not the only place wear fashion mavens congregate.
Just a stones throw away from that iconic venue, at the Strand Hotel, an event is taking place bringing together lesser known and emerging, but in many ways, equally talented designers, under the banner ‘Fashion Mavericks’

:: Dispatches from London Fashion Week ::
Sometimes a sense of a shared history, and clues to who you are come in the unlikeliest of places. In this case, on a London Fashion Week catwalk.
At the Caroline Charles show to be exact.

So This Is Worldtown drops by London Fashion Week (LFW)– taking place Feb 19 to Feb 24– sneaking in to a couple of runways shows at LFW’s home at Somerset House, as well as reporting from a range of other events in the city focusing on fresh, diverse and up-and-coming designers to watch.

For this endeavour, we keep in mind the Oscar Wilde quote: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Fitting?

This Is Worldtown captures the Hypernova’s coordinated black and white hypster chic outfits, as they keep the crowd going with their tunes from upcoming album ‘Through the Chaos’ & provocative banter.

For ‘Hypernova’, the fast rising indie rock band from Iran (Yeah, they are from Iran), politics is personal, it’s all about the music (and it’s good!) and as they navigate between the worlds of humble musicians, travelling artists and aspiring rockstars it makes for a familiar yet atypical experience.

Report after report and survey after survey repeatedly indicate that Islamophobia in America and Europe is on the rise, not on the decline. America can elect a Black president and delude itself into believing a post-racial society has suddenly replaced one erected on racist legacy. America does have a history of tolerance and acceptance, but an accepted discourse of Islamophobia relinquishes any hopes conjuring up “post-race” America.

Is ethno-techno the new turn in appropriated world music? The sounds are widening in their scope and popularity but usually thousands of miles away from the subterraneans producers who unleash the source of these mixes. So, asks the Guardian, is the ethno-techno trend just another form of neo-colonialism?

On December 27th, 2008 Israel commenced a brutal attack on the people of Gaza. One year on, the power of the people to live and their struggle for freedom continues. These videos portray a sense of that vitality.

This one comes via MTV Iggy. Hollywood with an international tilt usually comes with a butchered foreign accent, Chinese takeout and a hand full of ignorant claims about countries they can’t even pronounce correctly. The Whilred Interactive team put together an amusing project called “Let Hollywood Teach You Geography” poking fun at Hollywood’s ignorant social and cultural geography through mashing up over 40 clips from sunny Hollywood productions that mention countries the producers probably couldn’t even place on a map.

Lately, Japan’s reinterpreted the Dancehall music craze that’s swept the country in the footsteps of an already popular reggae fanbase. According to the Guardian, there’s less than a sizeable Jamaican population in the country, but Jamaican dancehall is very popular - obscure club nights and all - around the country. But it’s not the Jamaican artists that have helped spread the dancehall bug - there’s an authentic Japanese form of dancehall that’s growing in popularity, where it’s not unheard of some Japanese dancehall artists selling out stadiums.