Vogue Fashion's Night Out - Shop till you drop fashion in Madrid

The Madrid streets were all the rage last night at Vogue's Fashion Night Out. The usual fashion hangouts in Spain's capital were the perfect place to meet with friends, be seen in the latest fashion trends and toast with free champagne (in the Salamanca neighborhood) or beer (at Chueca-Malasaña) while enjoying store wide discounts. Fashionistas and passersby alike enjoyed the live DJ's - special mention goes to the many women DJ's at the front of H&M stores - until the shops closed at midnight. Marked by a pink carpet, stores were ready for the fashion party to go inside.

While many local and designer shops (Hoss Intropia and Comptoir des Cotonniers, for instance) and surprisingly ZARA ignored the buzz and decided to close at regular shop hours, some had long queues of customers waiting for their free bottle of Isleña beer (at Fuencarral's Springfield) or cocunut smoothie (at The Body Shop) to do their shopping well-refreshed. Others offered storewide discounts (such as Mango's 20%) but went unnoticed due to their lack of freebies and special storefront decoration.

Meanwhile, in Salamanca, fashion revellers decked out the streets in their poshest outfits while meeting for late night drinks around Lateral, Platea Madrid and even Mallorca coffee shop.

All in all, Vogue's fashion event proved once again that Madrid is a great city for shopping in any of its barrios thanks to its walkable streets and convenient public transport. We just wish there had been more buy-in from big fashion brands everywhere since the same brand hosted both open and closed stores which made it confusing for shoppers that were looking to jump to the next neighborhood for more - kudos to H&M for managing to open its 20 stores in Madrid till midnight.

More VFNO 2015 around the world:

Why fashion blogging should change and this fashion blog will

After many months of not posting at all on New Found Lust, I realized that my interest for fashion blogging had changed. The amount of fashion blogs out there, especially personal style or styling blogs is overwhelming and not personal anymore. Due to this oversupply of fashion content, I somehow became fed up of fashion myself.

Fashion blogs started as a unique and free medium of expressing one's views on the matter while steering away from popular fashion content produced by magazines, TV, celebrities and the like. However, years later, the fashion blogging bubble has achieved just the opposite. Fashion on blogs, including this one, has now become common, abundant and a copycat phenomenon - just what the fashion blogging world and its readers were trying to get away from. Bloggers are now inclined to feature fashion that they know their readers or sponsors will like, buy and share, not what they really like and would wear if they didn't have a blog. When fashion blogging became a business, fashionable bloggers transformed into a new species that sees dressing as a way of showing off to an audience that will applaud them.

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I have never posted personal style posts as I don't consider myself a fashion role model.
New Found Lust was created and still exists to be about the design behind it and those who consume it (all of us, in so many ways). There is a difference in wanting to be on the spotlight for the sake of it and reflecting how fashion changes us - because it does. The saddest and most pointless fashion is the one we copy from others without making a personal connection to it. This is how the fashion industry wants us to consume fashion because it's the most profitable one - but it is definitely not the one that makes fashion work in our favor nor why fashion design originated in the first place.

Developing one's style should be at the core of clothes and wearing them: making your life easier, expressing yourself and the most important reason of all, confronting the world. In the end, clothes function as a barrier between your body and the physical world. When one bases their own perception of fashion on that simple fact, the brand, fashion names and copycat trends become redundant - after all, design exists to make our life happier.