One of my personal childhood obsessions was making accessories with coloured plastic beads. I could spend hours working on them and I was always asking my mum or my aunts to buy me more beads and materials to keep on creating stuff. I used to love tiny coloured beads, but I wouldn't disregard also larger ones and I still have lying around the house some of the stuff I did when I was a little girl. 
A while back I had a childhood flashback when my brother and sister in law brought back home from an antique market fair a Murano glass jar partially covered in tiny multicoloured bits and pieces of glass that looked to me very similar to the beads I used for my necklaces, bracelets and earrings when I was a little girl. Transfixed by the design 
I couldn't stop caressing the tiny glass beads of the jar as if they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life.
I recently fell into another childhood reverie when I saw some of Hussein Chalayan's multicoloured designs, paired with knitted calf boots, from his Autumn/Winter 2008-09 collection.
I'm in awe of Chalayan as I think he's no ordinary designer. His mechanical and technological dresses - think for example about his laser dresses - aren't indeed just fashion, but they should be elevated to the degree of art. 
For his Autumn 08 collection Chalayan wasn't actually thinking about plastic beads, he was indeed aiming for a more technological kind of effect and used his yarns to give a sort of pixellated quality to his garments, symbolising in his collection the way the computer age has influenced the life of modern human beings.
If you look at the designs from a distance you definitely get that intended pixellated effect
Chalayan was aiming for, but if you look better you will realise that it's actually the differently coloured yarns that
create that final kaleidoscopic effect. 
Some of the designs are characterised by a cable knit technique, but when Chalayan used wool chenille yarn in a wonderful
boucle effect he obtained an even better pixellated effect.
Yet, the more I look at Chalayan's knitwear creations for this Fall, 
the more I think about my plastic beads and wonder if I should dig them out again or if I should just go for something slightly more technological and ironic and maybe opt for a piece of out Mike and Maaike's "Stolen Jewels" collection. Well, for the time being, the doubt remains.
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