This is the second Stylee Fridays dedicated to an Antipodean label in the space of the month, and it's really no coincidence, since between Scandinavia, New Zealand and Australia we could probably create an entire fantasy shopping league. Susien Chong and Nic Briand started their label Lover off a weekend market stall in 2001, and their quiet rise to international fashion fame is a happy-ever-after fairytale in itself. The line has always been a big creative collage of all the things the couple admired, from French new wave movies to Wu Tang anthems to iconic photos like Joseph Szabo's series Teenage. The Lover blog is equally awesome and intimate—Briand recently reminisced about his teenage crush on Denise Huxtable while Chong posted pictures from her high school "boy book," a glorious scrapbook of late '80s heartthrobs scribbled with hearts and full of glossy magazine clippings of River Phoenix and Ferris Bueller. The duo describes themselves as the "same album, different songs," and the new collection for spring 2010 could have been pulled from the closet of any number of musicians living on their inspiration board, like Joni Mitchell, Yoko Ono or Joanna Newsom.
