New testing facility from SGS and Boken

A new textiles and garments testing facility has been set up in Indonesia in the latest of a series of partnerships between testing companies SGS and Boken.

The facility, the ninth overseas centre set up by Japanese company Boken, is located within the SGS laboratory in Jakarta to tap into the growing demand for testing in Indonesia’s textiles and garment industry.

Open now, it will provide physical and colourfastness testing, functional quality testing, fibre analysis and restricted substances testing.

The laboratory is accredited to ISO 17025 by the National Accreditation Body of Indonesia, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and can provide physical and chemical tests to determine if products meet standards such as ISO, BS, DIN, AATCC, ASTM, CPSC and others.

Hepburn, with her coltish figure and intelligent doe eyes, was an actress drastically unlike Marilyn Monroe. Both actresses, however, had a Cinderella-like relationship with Hollywood master shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo. For Hepburn, he created elegant, restrained, “sensible” shoes. At 5 feet 7 inches, the actress was tall for a woman of her generation and had long, slim feet, which Ferragamo said were “in perfect proportion to her height.

For a dance number in “Funny Face,” Ferragamo designed a pair of black suede slip-on loafers to go with Hepburn’s Givenchy-designed black turtleneck sweater and cropped black stovepipe pants. But Hepburn balked at wearing the spotless white socks meant to go with the outfit. How could she draw gleaming arrows toward her sizeable feet? Yet director Stanley Donen wouldn’t back down, and Hepburn wore them. After seeing the film for the first time, she wrote to Donen, “You were right about the socks. Love, Audrey.”
The ’Beat Look’

After “Funny Face,” beatnik-inflected styles entered the vernacular of haute couture. In the late 1950s, after Yves Saint Laurent became head of Christian Dior’s fashion house, he presented the “Beat Look,” a collection of turtlenecks and biker jackets. It was an early instance of street style affecting high fashion. Unfortunately for Saint Laurent, Vogue criticized the experiment as designed for young women “possessed of superb legs and slim, young goddess figures,” and it cost him his job.