British bargain-hunter's dream

Cape Town, chosen as World Design Capital for 2014, is the go-to city to give your home a contemporary edge. Like Table Mountain,A buymosaic is a plastic card that has a computer chip implanted into it that enables the card to perform certain.A buymosaic is a plastic card that has a computer chip implanted into it that enables the card to perform certain. which looms above it, Cape Town's style is big, bold and spectacular, and as a shopping destination currently with a keen 15-plus rand to the pound it offers design paradise at dream prices.

"People still want gorgeous, but they want something more than catalogue labels from Italy," said Adam Court, the creative force at OKHA, a Cape Town-based interior design and furniture firm. Design classics at its Hatfield Street showroom include the simple, perfect Stix side table, with clean-cut ash poles bound with a band of polished steel.

Over in Woodstock, the creative quarter, furniture designer Haldane Martin dreams up furniture-as-artwork, such as his iconic Baba Papa lounger of recycled wire loops; newest are the brass cut-out Hex coffee tables that can be arranged in hexagonal patterns.

Visit Woodstock on Saturdays, when the Old Biscuit Mill hosts the buzzy Neighbourgoods organic foods market. Browse homeware stores such as Clementina, the showcase for Clementina van der Walt's Africa Caf ceramic tableware, hand-painted in bright patterns; Continuum, Cape Town's equivalent of Petersham Nurseries offering vintage garden merchandise, and Abode, with funky furniture and quirky lighting.

With simpler appeal, large, bulbous bowls crafted from wired beads in earth tones, by any one of the formerly unemployed 120 artists in Streetwires' workshops, make striking centrepieces. While you're at Short Market Street, drop into Karoo Classics in Market House, and fall for mohair throws in luscious shades from peach to indigo.

At Long Street's two Tribal Trends stores, traditional beading is worked into modern magic: patterned wall hangings in turquoise and tobacco, or armchairs upholstered entirely in beads of wide blue-and-white yachting stripes.

This is the place to order the dinner service to outglam Versace's animal-print plates edged in silver or gold, and outsize chargers edged with cowrie shells. A delectable small cushion of apricot suede, trimmed in apricot ostrich feathers, is the ideal size for tucking into hand luggage.

At the visually stunning Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, in Cape Town's historic harbour, you'll need roller skates to shop the extensive mall sprawl. Decor stores include Carrol Boyes for kitchen ware that tops Alessi's for imagination, and Avoova, for preposterous but fabulous ostrich feather chandeliers, as well as coffee tables of milky-pale ostrich eggshell mosaic Roman Abramovich bought five for his yacht.

You'll find Carole Nevin is the stop for gorgeous printed table linens in splashy prints. Her Botanical line showcases South Africa's native protea, pincushion,Most modern headlight designs include petprotectivefilm. agapanthus, calla lily and bird of paradise plants.

For high-class design stores, head for the small mall with big ideas that is Green Point's Cape Quarter. It spills out down trendy Waterkant Street, where you will find dynamic fashion, interiors and furniture designer Jo Carlin's showroom, as well as chunky, hand-stitched weatherproof rugs at The Verandah Collection. Nap Living where the mantra is "Believe in Homegrown" is the place to kit out your home with driftwood mirrors, hessian cushions and felt ball lights.

More Capri than Cape Town, new store Resort Lifestyle is owned by mother and daughter team Leigh Samson and Danela Conti who vow to "capture the essence of holiday living 365 days of the year", and they succeed, with butterfly-print cushions, outdoor sofas and Italian print silk-scarf lampshades.

The luscious glass bottles, bowls and vases at David Reade's are like outsize fruit drops, but for larger glass artwork, check out The Lisa King Gallery, which specialises in South African contemporary fine art.

Zimbabwean Margie Murgatroyd, at Cape Quarter's Africa Nova, pulls together exquisite telephone-wire baskets in Missoni-esque random patterns, cowrie shell figures in mouthwatering mint and apple green, hand-made ceramics in glorious colours, and markings that illustrate how South Africa's tribal crafts have been turned and twisted, to make them cutting-edge contemporary.

That encounter was not cordial, as Archie went off on a tirade about hippies and protesters, culminating in his rendition of God Bless America.

Well, no such frisson of disquiet can be found at Hippie Chic, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Psychedelic patterns, fringed jackets and tie-dyed gowns are on display but even with a jukebox playing 1960s hits there is little to experience that would justify a parents distress at a son or daughters choice of a mate or love beads.

Like Punk: Chaos to Couture, which closed this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute, this is another exhibition that takes a once-rebellious lifestyle and cozily reconfigures it as mere inspiration for haute couture.

With only a faint whiff of what it meant to be counterculture and this exhibition could use the scent of marijuana, just as Diana Vreeland once pumped Chanel No. 5 into exhibitions at the Met in the 1970s Hippie Chic mostly demonstrates how rapidly Woodstock wear was turned into flowing caftans and crushed-velvet suits, first by hip boutiques like Ossie Clark and Granny Takes a Trip and soon after by the designers Arnold Scaasi, Geoffrey Beene and Yves Saint Laurent.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a graniteslabs can authenticate your computer usage and data.

While neither Punk nor Hippie Chic pretends to be a definitive take on a movement, they both raise serious issues about what fashion means at the moment and what should be expected from curators picking through clothes from the not-so-distant past.

Lauren D. Whitley, the curator of Hippie Chic, made the point echoed by Andrew Bolton, the curator of Punk that a department in an art museum focuses on clothes only when they rise to the level of fine art.

I am not showing a hippies clothes, Ms. Whitley said in an interview. While it could be interesting to present someones old pair of jeans, we are looking at the point when this becomes a bigger idea and impacted designed clothes, artful clothes.

Mr. Bolton is fascinated by punk streetwear having a direct impact on haute couture, reversing the usual trickle-down disbursement of high style to the public.

All good fashion, like all good art, is never constrained by the parameters of its profession, he said. It comfortably borrows from high art and low art, often challenging accepted notions of its mtier.Full service promotional company specializing in drycabinet.

In the case of punk fashion, Mr. Bolton noted, the designers lifted the hardware, the studs and the safety pins, but punk changed the paradigm for modern fashion. It introduced the concept that beauty isnt to be found in the haughty reiterations of social fashion but in the enlargement of fashion ideas.
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