NEW FASHION EVERYTIME AND EVERYWHERE

strapless gown with front knot Dress

2011-01-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

Description

off-white matte jersey
back zip closure
100% viscose

CRITICAL SHOPPER | OSCAR DE LA RENTA

2008-11-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: November 18, 2008

BOTH the weather without and the weather within were clammy and bleak on the sniveling afternoon I visited the Oscar de La Renta boutique. But Elegance must always win in the cage match against Despair, and therefore one must drag oneself out of the customary fetal position and subway uptown to investigate luxurious clothing, however unaffordable.

Mark M. Gong for The New York Times
My own prejudices gave me a blind spot in regard to Oscar de la Renta. In my mind, he was one of those gilded old luxury designers like Valentino, worn exclusively by women so morbidly wealthy that they can wear white satin on the soles of their shoes since their daily walk involves only the floor mats of bulletproof limousines, Hereke silk carpets and the soft, clean heads of the middle class.

Anyone who ends up as a primary couture source for first ladies (e.g., Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush) arouses vast suspicion in my mind. I get dumb and belligerent about designers at nosebleed heights of price and unobtainability. Keep your septuagenarian prom tutus, I think. I’m a downtown girl. I’ll check out de la Renta the day Dita Von Tease is first lady.

I was forced to abandon this craven and faulty reasoning within about five minutes of stepping inside the boutique. I felt as if I wasn’t in a clothing store so much as a kind of museum-cum-petting zoo, where ordinary people are miraculously allowed to walk straight up to the racks and fondle hugely expensive and beautiful garments without even having to remove their shoes and belt, wait through a security line, surrender electronic devices or endure a 200-kilovolt warning Taser.

Mr. de la Renta, at 76, seems to be at that point in his career when, like Kurosawa or Fellini, he has been a master of his craft for so long that he owns a golden mean that consistently delivers symmetry, proportion and harmony and is therefore at liberty to ditch all constraints and break any rules he doesn’t feel like obeying. His framework is so refined that he can waltz through the vast closet of his long and colorful career and mash up design inspirations from his own vocabulary, to express any whacked-out impulse that shakes loose in his imagination. These are the fruits of a mature artistry; this is also the kind of blissfully relaxed creativity that emanates from a guy who knows he doesn’t have to play ball anymore, because he pretty much owns the ball and could probably buy the ball factory if he felt like it.

From the first rack, I was clutching insanely craft-saturated sleeves and staring into them as if they were kaleidoscopes, wondering, “How many nuns went blind?” Layers upon layers of meticulous, eye-crossing detail, created a mesmerizing depth of texture. There is so much going on: whole landscapes and leitmotifs wrought in black beads; hand-stitched quilting detail suggesting years of indentured servitude to the Tang dynasty; drapes and pin tucks of such alien perfection and accuracy they looked as if they were built by the Pixie Corps of Engineers.

I stared agog at a leather trench coat ($10,450) that was swirling with leather piping coiled in leafy, paisleylike shapes resembling muscle striations, so bewilderingly intricate I had an Aha! moment: Clothing this advanced could guarantee a lady the center of attention in most rooms, even if she lacked charm, looks and substance. It is the haberdashery equivalent of a Maserati. People are likely to be a bit hypnotized, no matter how unspectacular the driver may be.

I was really impressed by a standard piece one sees at charity functions for the square and elderly: a sequined, Republican banquet-wife bolero jacket. I usually find them ghastly, but Oscar de la Renta’s had soul: layered stacks of black and blood-red sequins, fused with cross-hatched black and red stitching into a compellingly rich pattern somewhat dizzying in its artistry. It was entirely counterintuitive, but this Nancy Reagan garment looked downright hardcore: primitive, even a little brutal.

This much-needed boost of savagery on a piece of ladies’ formalwear seemed very open-minded. I thought it would be like showing up with a shrunken head on your tuxedo in lieu of a boutonniere. You know you’ve got at least one conversation starter.

The favorite thing I tried on was an olive sharkskin party dress ($3,290). It fit in a zero-gravity, birthday-princess way you dream of when you are a girl-child of about 8. The skirt flared perfectly around the waist atop a weightless infrastructure of silk petticoats. It was like stepping in and out of a giant peony. Even more beguiling was its versatility — it was a dress you could wear to an illegal drag race, dinner with Henry Kissinger and a gay cruise-ship wedding, all in the same night.

There are light years of difference between serious designer clothing and the stuff we buy in malls, hence the vast differences in affordability. It’s the same gulf that resides between mayonnaisey hotel paintings that chimps could be trained to create with a spatula, and the stuff in the permanent collection at the Met. If you squint really hard, the high-end stuff and low-end stuff can look fairly similar, but the fundamental difference is in the artistic energy invested in the garment or the painting itself. Bad art won’t revive your soul.

I was in a vile mood when I walked into Oscar de la Renta, but hanging out in that little oasis was intoxicating enough to boost my spirit. There is such thought, feeling and desire to create beauty in these garments you can practically taste it.

You don’t have to own monstrously beautiful, prohibitively expensive Oscar de la Renta garments any more than you need to own a genuine Kandinsky. But your life can generally be improved just by knowing such gorgeous stuff exists. That Keats guy said it: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Merrily They Dress

2008-11-20T16:04:00.000-08:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: November 19, 2008

CHINS up, people. Hem lengths, too.

Here we are at the outset of what is shaping up to be a six-week season of grinchiness. Holiday festivities, we are told, are being downsized and will amount to little more than a plate of cold cuts with a lump of coal as the centerpiece. This year B.Y.O.B. means bring your own bonus.

So we can choose to dress in a manner appropriately morose for the times and prove the timeworn adage that hems fall with the stock market. Or we can throw caution to the wind, as John Galliano did on Monday night, when he arrived at a party wearing the traditional button-covered costume of a Pearly King (the neighborhood monarch who protected the local street vendors of Victorian London). The mother-of-pearl buttons on his suit formed a pattern of vines, and his top hat was trimmed with rings of fresh daisies. The room was hotter than an orchid house.

“I hope I don’t wilt,” Mr. Galliano said.

The party was given by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue to alleviate the pain of cash-starved young designers with financial prizes and mentoring. The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund was created five years ago, something like a Troubled Asset Relief Program for regular folk like Proenza Schouler and Phillip Lim. But seeing as Condé Nast, like many companies, has canceled its customary Christmas events this year, the occasion also served as a de facto holiday party.

The dress code on the invitation said “Dress Up,” but practically no one took that as a reason to wear black. Rather they seemed to take it as a challenge to dress in a spirit that could be described as Up With Fashion. Despite the presence of a few crabby-looking retailers who were not feeling very U.W.F., the party swarmed with famous models wearing the shortest of skirts and socialites clinging to their decadent dresses. All in all, the crowd reflected the upbeat and offhand style that seems to define the look of the season.

At the very least, they showed that hem lengths have not fallen just yet.

“I actually feel very bright and optimistic,” said Dr. Lisa Airan, the Manhattan dermatologist, who was wearing a snow-white silk Lanvin dress with feathered frippery around the bodice, white leather biker gloves from Rodarte and hot pink pumps by Giambattista Valli.

Mr. Valli happened to be standing nearby, wearing a pearl necklace. Which is to say that the mood was far from funereal.

“Now that we have a new president and we’re moving forward,” Dr. Airan said, “I think that maybe we’ve gone through the worst of it.”

As Alexander Wang, the designer who won the CFDA/Vogue prize this year, said in Harper’s Bazaar, the old rules of dressing appropriately for holiday parties no longer apply. No daytime rules or nighttime formality. Shorts can work if they have style.

That may sound like a flippant approach to the subject of party dressing, given the serious troubles facing the nation and the economy at this moment, reflected in the devastating sales numbers coming from retailers since September. But dressing up can still have an emotionally uplifting effect, even if most people are doing their shopping in their own closets.

Erin Fetherston, another designer, had considered wearing black to the party, but changed her mind and wore a floral print dress that was bold enough to have come from Murano. “I’m feeling more polished all of a sudden,” she said.

Last year, as gas prices skyrocketed and home values declined, it was actually short and skin-tight dresses that were selling. As the economy worsened, fashion moved in still stranger and less expected directions, toward bondage references, for example, but also harem pants, jumpsuits, prep school and polish, all at the same time. The result, coming out at night this holiday season, is evening wear that looks like a mash-up of “Mad Men” and “Gossip Girl.”

“Everyone’s so glum right now that it’s really time to bring out the glad rags,” said the designer Sue Stemp. “I love a great-fitting cocktail dress to lift the mood, and now is the perfect time.”

Perhaps that is wishful thinking. Robert Burke, a former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman who is now a luxury consultant, reported that women are buying “nothing too loud, nothing that screams fashion.” Elie Tahari said that taffeta gowns and extravagant looks are going to be less popular than something that can be worn beyond the season, like skirts and jackets that can be layered and gussied up with a piece of jewelry.

“Women want to dress up and make themselves feel good,” he said, “but they don’t want to spend a lot of money.”

At the same time, it has not gone unnoticed that the Obama family is setting a U.W.F. example for America that is lifting designers’ spirits. Ever since the Obamas appeared on election night as a coordinated fashion tableau, as if they had just stepped out of a holiday greeting card portrait, sales of red dresses have been terrific, said Kay Unger, who makes party frocks.

Customers are being more inventive, she added, by buying short-sleeve jackets that can be worn over a dress or with long gloves, then wearing the same jacket with jeans for an office look.

“The people who are not affected by this economy are the young people who didn’t have an I.R.A. or money invested in the stock market, so they are seeing things in a different way,” Ms. Unger said. “They’re buying things just for going out. And they are mostly buying short dresses, in 99 percent of the cases, because they are really fun and they can go a lot of places.”

Also, you can still see their cute shoes.

For those women who are shopping with value and versatility in mind, the Little Black Dress remains a popular choice, but, Ms. Unger said, there is just as much interest in flashier metallic fabrics like bronze or brushed gold, which have a more limited shelf life. Similarly, Nicole Miller cited gold and silver fabrics as the look of the season, “because it makes everyone look 10 pounds thinner,” she said.

Seriously? “The texture makes things look camouflaged, unlike a really flat fabric,” she said.

And if you’re on a budget, you can always improvise with gift wrap.

Frown Fighters

2008-11-11T02:45:00.000-08:00

By ELLEN TIEN
Published: November 7, 2008

As the economy crumbles, the Lipstick Index — that frivolous financial barometer that says cosmetics sales rise in direct relation to free-falling finances — has jumped. Sales in the last few months are up 40 percent. Here are 41 of fall’s most popular pick-me-ups, from $1.99 to over $50. What do women want when they aren’t allowed to want too much? Traditional lipsticks in more-sheer neutral shades; the bright reds of days gone by have been replaced by pinky browns and rosy taupes.

Top row, from left to right:

1. Benefit Full-Finish lipstick in Ladies’ Choice, $18 at benefitcosmetics.com.

2. Sisley Hydrating long-lasting lipstick No. L17, $55 at Neiman Marcus stores.

3. Vincent Longo Lipstain SPF lipstick in Americana, $23 at vincentlongo.com.

4. Pur Minerals lipstick in Raspberry Quartz, $15 at Ulta stores.

5. Shiseido Perfecting lipstick in P13, $22.50 at sephora.com.

6. Mark Dew Drenched Moisturlicious lip color in Pretty Posey, $6 at meetmark.com.

7. Jane Iredale PureMoist LipColour in Melisa, $19 at Vert in Los Angeles, (310) 581-6126.

8. Josie Maran lipstick in Rumi Joon, $20 at barneys.com.

9. MAC lipstick in Viva Glam VI, $14 at maccosmetics.com.

10. Clinique Long Last Soft Shine lipstick in Bamboo Pink, $14 at clinique .com.

11. Avon Beyond Color Plumping lip color in Divine Wine, $8 at avon .com.

12. Dior Addict High Shine lipstick in Casual Beige, $25 at Bloomingdale’s stores.

13. Mally Beauty lipstick in Zooey Doll, $15 at henribendel.com.

14. Origins Smileage Plus Organic Liptint in Vintage, $11 at origins.com.

15. Nars lipstick in Dolce Vita, $24 at narscosmetics.com.

16. Sally Hansen Natural Beauty in Plum Shimmer, $9.99 at Duane Reade stores.

17. Shu Uemura Rouge Unlimited Crème Matte lipstick in Red 165M, $23 at shuuemura-usa.com.

18. DuWop Prime Venom nude lip plumping balm and primer, $20 at Sephora.

19. Michael Marcus lipstick in Jenifer, $24 at michaelmarcus.com.

20. N.Y.C. New York Color Ultra Last LipWear in Brandy Sparkle, $1.99 at Wal-Mart stores.

21. Sue Devitt lipstick in Zimbabwe, $20 at Barneys New York.

Bottom row, from left to right:

22. Bobbi Brown lip color in Brown, $22 at bobbibrowncosmetics.com.

23. By Terry Rouge Delectation lipstick in Icy Praline, $41 at Barneys New York stores.

24. Jouer Lip Color in Phoebe, $22 at Henri Bendel in New York, (800) 423-6335.

25. Rimmel Lasting Finish lipstick in Coffee Shimmer, $4.95 at CVS stores.

26. Ramy lipstick in Ramy Red, $17 at ramybeautytherapy.com.

27. Estée Lauder Signature Hudra Lustre lip at bobbibrowncosmetics.com.

28. Chanel Rouge Hydrabase in Enigma $27 at chanel.com.

29. Chanel Rouge Allure in Naïve, $30 at chanel.com.

30. Calvin Klein Delicious Luxury Crème lipstick in Oasis, $18 at sephora.com.

31. Trish McEvoy sheer lipstick in Innocent Sheer, $22 at Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

32. YSL Beauté Rouge Volupté lipstick in Sweet Honey, $29 at Henri Bendel in New York, (800) 423-6335.

33. Smashbox Photo Finish lipstick in Delightful, $22 at Sephora stores.

34. Rilastil Long Lasting Color Fix in Tender Rose, $28 at C. O. Bigelow in New York, (212) 533-2700.

35. Laura Mercier lip color in Pink Champagne, $22 at lauramercier.com.

36. Paul & Joe Lipstick N in No. 17, $20 at thebeautycloset.com.

37. TheBalm Read My Lips lipstick in Letter to the Editor, $16 at C. O. Bigelow in New York (212) 533-2700.

38. Lipstick Queen by Poppy King sheer lip color in Medieval, $20 at Barneys New York stores.

39. Kat Von D Painted Love lipstick in Lolita, $18 at sephora.com.

40. Korres Mango Butter SPF 10 in Nude 33, $18 at sephora.com.

41. BeingTRUE translucent lip color in Protagonist, $22 at truelynatural.com.

A NIGHT OUT WITH | JOSEPH ARTHUR

2008-11-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

By LIZA GHORBANI
Published: November 7, 2008
JOSEPH ARTHUR, the singer, songwriter and artist, has created his own little artistic paradise in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. The Museum of Modern Arthur, open to the public every Tuesday through Sunday, serves as Mr. Arthur’s version of Andy Warhol’s Factory: a place he and his friends can get together to exercise their imaginations, which often involves creating art for the gallery, recording music in the studio in the back, silk-screening clothing or just talking.

On a recent blustery evening, Mr. Arthur, wearing the “lucky” hat that he had bought in Nottingham, England, was entertaining a couple of members of his five-piece band, the Lonely Astronauts, and some friends. He was about to embark on a solo European tour as the opening act for Tracy Chapman.

Despite the jittery sounds of the “Psycho” movie soundtrack in the background, the mood in the gallery was peaceful, with the aroma of sage incense filling the air. Sibyl Buck — a bass player and former model (and the stylish Edie to Mr. Arthur’s Warhol) — told everyone of a performance artist who had been smashing car windows in the name of art.

“The new definition of art is when you do something and other people talk about it,” she said.

Mr. Arthur, who at 6 feet 4 inches describes himself as circus tall, said that when it comes to his artistic pursuits, like the band’s new album, “Temporary People,” and his latest exhibition, “Wigs,” at Galerie Pangée in Montreal, he strives to be more contemplative. He added that he avoided spending too much time on “meaningless” diversions like Facebook.

“I just prefer real life, like this,” he said, gesturing to those around him. “This is so nice. Later we’ll see each other again in cyberspace, but it won’t be like this.”

There is a familial unity to Mr. Arthur’s band members, a closeness that can be felt by one outside their inner circle. Appropriately, they have matching tattoos of a perfect circle, a permanent bond they got just one week after they met one another two years ago.

Jen Turner, the lead guitarist, pointed out an identical circle on the sleeve of her Army jacket. “The band regalia,” she said. “We all wore these for a gig.”

Late that night, Mr. Arthur and Ms. Buck strolled the cobblestone streets of Dumbo, with its remnants of streetcar tracks, on their way to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Flanked by the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the rocky beach is a favorite haunt of Mr. Arthur’s. He goes there a lot, he said.

“I call it Joe’s place,” he said, skipping a stone toward the cityscape across the water. He added, “I think a lot of people call it Joe’s place.”

It was a soothing, if somewhat unusual, way to wind up an evening, bringing to mind a comment that David Letterman made when the Lonely Astronauts made one of their appearances on his show: “I want to go with those people. I would like to be with those people. I think they’re probably doing things I’m not.”

It’s not actually that they’re always doing “fabulous stuff,” Ms. Buck said. “But he knew it was something different than what other people are doing at midnight.”

A Goodbye Kiss for Paris

2008-11-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: October 6, 2008
Paris

At 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, the scheduled start of the Louis Vuitton show, 52 models were dressed and waiting in a line backstage. Marc Jacobs, in a three-piece suit with his hair slicked back, was kidding around. Robert Duffy, his business partner, walked along the line, and as he approached Raquel Zimmermann he mentioned that the models had on pretty lingerie. Ms. Zimmermann lifted her short skirt to show black point d’esprit underpants.

“Remember,” Mr. Jacobs said, poking his head between two girls in the line, “this is a city where even the meter readers wear high heels.” The show was slightly delayed for the arrival of Mr. Jacobs’s boss, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

But in a way, seeing the models in the line told a lot about the intensity of Mr. Jacobs’s affection for Paris, and how expressive he has become as a designer. Make it layered, make it visual, make it personal. The backbone of the collection was the structured flirty jacket — emblematic of Paris fashion. The short skirts were a collage of materials and textures. An Asian influence was marked by metallic obi belts. Ostrich feather skirts, leopard-pattern bags and decoratively beaded shoes evoked Africa.

The spirit of Yves Saint Laurent? Not quite. If anything, Mr. Jacobs’s Vuitton show was a spoof on the elements we think of as quintessentially French, like the chic jacket, the polka-dot pajama and the poodle hairdo. But in spite of the sentiment of the Édith Piaf soundtrack, the modernity of the show ultimately rested on how visual the clothes were.

Miuccia Prada closed the Paris spring shows with a fine Miu Miu collection that also combined textures — burlap and satin — in predominantly slim dresses that had detachable half skirts. She also showed Greco-Roman prints, but the use of paint-splashed burlap was most intriguing.

In his show, Alber Elbaz caught the flavor for the exotic, with lush colors and leopard prints. Africa has been a potent theme of the collections, with Azzedine Alaïa making the most exuberant display in raffia and python.

So one of the strangest Paris seasons ended, made confusing by deepening economic worries, bouts of real creativity and the feeling that, as hard as some designers worked, retailers will have to work even harder next spring to get customers to come into the stores just for a look.

A number of collections should be celebrated. Mr. Elbaz’s best dresses had a nonchalant style of draping; hardly D.I.Y., but if you’re wearing a one-shoulder dress in fireball-orange silk with a puff of fabric grazing your face and arm, the effect should be slightly unserious. Many of the outfits were in taffeta, cloqué and duchess silk, and Mr. Elbaz gave them volume in simple ways — and sometimes with an interior band of grosgrain to hold things in place — and some dresses were in fact a top and a skirt. He cut the tops long so they could also be worn in a different proportion with pants, and he twisted the fabric slightly so the shape wouldn’t look flat and boring.

What looked new were slim pants with tacked-down pleats that gave shape to the waist; there was no actual waistband. Full sleeves, set into the shoulders of jewel-neck cloqué blouses, created a very narrow line — like a twig, which of course you may not be.

But you can play. The collection was, finally, in that spirit — the stilettos joyfully blitzed with tacky beads, a bone silk dress embroidered with stones in an abstract leopard pattern.

Alexander McQueen used computer images of crushed crystals, wood grains, animals, human skeletons and the iron grid of the Eiffel Tower as the basis for dazzling digitalized prints on silk jersey. The palette includes smoky grays, delphinium blues and vibrant parrot colors that look fractured by a prism. All the dress and jacket shapes were within the realm of the imagination, especially the fluttery dresses, and then you had the particular flavor of the engineered prints.

Mr. McQueen said his show was inspired by Darwinism and the Industrial Revolution, among other world-shaping forces. That gave him the historical ground for his romantic tailoring, leather corset belts, and molded showpiece dresses (covered with pounds of crystals and duly translated into more wearable dresses in the showroom). It’s just a good thing that he managed to pull out the prints from all that antiquity.

Backstage, in his fully furnished dressing room, John Galliano said that his vividly colored collection was inspired by James Gillray, an 18th-century caricaturist.

I’m sure my eyes glazed over. “I’ll Google him,” I said.

Here is a passage from the Tate Museum site: “Gillray’s targets range from lecherous men to amateur actors and musicians, and include the passion for art collecting as well as sex and gambling; all are exposed with great wit and graphic invention but also unrelenting cruelty.”

You could have blown me over with a Chanel feather: it sounded just like the fashion world, especially the bit about a “passion for art collecting.” Mr. Galliano indeed captured Gillray’s distinctly satirical palette of sunny yellows, baby and rosy pinks, and aristocratic blues — ideal for making light of pompous things. Under Bo Peep bonnets and sleeping caps made extreme by the milliner Stephen Jones, Mr. Galliano presented clothes that were light and pretty in the best sense.

No need to analyze a draped dress in pink silk jersey with drawstrings at the waist and hem. It fell on the body in a flattering way and looked fresh and new. The same was true of puffy blouses in crisp cotton or silk that spilled off one shoulder, and looked gentle and inviting compared with some of the ugly and overwrought clothes we’ve seen in the last two weeks.

There was probably not a better evening dress anywhere in Paris (well, maybe with the exception of Chanel and Alaïa) than a square-neck gown in cream silk jersey with a lightly draped bodice, soft sleeves and a long sleek skirt. A number of Mr. Galliano’s dresses were quite transparent, requiring a slip and a decent body, but the real measure of this wonderful show was how unfussy and free it was.

Chloé’s new designer, Hannah MacGibbon, made a fair start, offering sundresses with ruffled crisscrossed backs, a sharp-shouldered jumpsuit in khaki cotton, and a cool, one-shoulder dress in nutmeg cotton with side lacing. Sandals were flat (black straps, say, with a Kelly green sole). Scalloping (around hems and dinosaur-style down the sleeves of a bitter-lemon coat) looked cute in small doses. No doubt Ms. MacGibbon, who worked at the house once before under Phoebe Philo, will hear from plenty of critics about her very large trousers, and look back upon them critically herself and feed her eye from smaller plates.

Flamboyance Gets a Face-Lift

2008-11-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: October 31, 2008
Miami Beach

Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times, top; Sam Shere/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
THEN AND NOW The new lobby of the Fontainebleau, top, echoes highlights of the original, bottom, like the bow tie floor pattern and the striated columns.
MARILYN RUBINSON recalls her stays at the Fontainebleau hotel as a series of high-fashion snapshots. There were afternoons at the cabana, “a blue hotel towel wrapped around my head like a turban and wearing high-heeled Lucite shoes,” she said. There were evenings at the Gigi Room, rubbing shoulders with New York’s dashing mayor, John V. Lindsay; and she remembers sweeping down the dramatic lobby staircase in a form-fitting, stone-colored gown. “In those days everyone made an entrance,” Mrs. Rubinson, 84, said. “I made lots of entrances.”

In that heady era the hotel was the diadem of Miami resorts, a 560-foot-long, sickle-shaped showplace dominating the Collins Avenue waterfront, where Miamians like the Rubinsons, who own a chain of clothing stores, and well-to-do snowbirds came in the winter to roost.

“Everyone who was anyone was there,” Mrs. Rubinson said. “People wore black tie and jewelry. Everyone was young.”

And everyone lived large at the flamboyant resort, conceived from its outset to evoke a modern Versailles. “It was the place for entertainment, for glamour — an icon even among the locals,” said Cathy Leff, the director of the Wolfsonian museum of design here. “Even now if one asks, ‘Within the city of Miami Beach, what is the most important landmark in the popular imagination?’ it would be the Fontainebleau.”

Can an icon of the past be restored to its former glory? New owners and architects of the Fontainebleau have invested $1 billion to buy and restore it in the conviction that it can. Its original fusion of Modernist rigor and Hollywood cheek, dreamed up by the maverick architect Morris Lapidus, was derided as Bronx baroque, until the singular style of Miami Beach was rediscovered by the Ian Schrager generation.

“In its day in the ’50s and ’60s, the Fontainebleau was state of the art in glamour,” said Jeffrey Beers, the New York architect responsible for an extensive update of the interior. “We would like to restore that in spirit.”

When the refurbished resort is officially unveiled on Nov. 14 with a series of parties and a taping for television of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show — perfect! — visitors will be able to judge for themselves if the mission succeeded. Even recently, as the hotel was still a construction site, it was clear that the old duchess had flounced out her skirts.

“How many places like this can you go in America that are not in the desert?” said Jeffrey Soffer, executive chairman and majority partner of Fontainebleau Resorts, which is building a Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. Indeed, as he strolled the raised oceanfront walkway that overlooks the property, it was obvious the resort had much in common with over-the-top hotels on the Strip.

Visible from the walkway is a pool complex fanning out across the lawns, and a new 40,000-square-foot glass-walled spa, its steam rooms and reflecting pools worthy of the emperor Hadrian. Crescent-shaped rows of cabanas edge the pools and echo the undulating outlines of the Chateau, the hotel’s original building.

Several towers, two of them new, flank the Chateau, for a combined 1,500 guest rooms, twice the number of the Fontainebleau’s largest competitor, Loews in South Beach. There are also shops, 11 restaurants and lounges, and about 200,000 square feet of meeting and convention space — all sprawling over 22 acres.

The three-year renovation was conceived, in part, to lure back fashionable crowds, which have drifted down to South Beach.

With renovated rooms from $399 and suites from $509, the Fontainebleau is reopening at a challenging time for tourism. Hotel occupancy rates in Miami-Dade County were down by 6 percent in September from a year earlier, and room revenues fell by 4 percent, said John Lancet, a senior executive in Miami for HVS, a national hotel consulting company.

But Mr. Lancet viewed the Fontainebleau development as only mildly risky. “It is my impression that the owners went through adequate planning so that the risk could be mitigated,” he said.

THE hotel has some $30 million in bookings through early next year, said Howard C. Karawan, the chief operating officer of Fontainebleau Resorts, who was brought in by the new owners to oversee renovations and operations for the company.

Rumors are widespread that the $500 million face-lift was made in anticipation that the city would legalize casino gambling. The developers deny this, and gambling has yet to win acceptance with local lawmakers.

At the hub of the resort is the Chateau’s 45,000-square-foot lobby, an elaboration on the original free-form elliptical shape completed by Lapidus in 1954.

Its original curvaceous outlines were accentuated by three enormous chandeliers, striated Greek-style columns, swirling carpets and a mural of a Piranesi print. The lobby’s famous focal point was a “staircase to nowhere,” which actually led from a discreet cloakroom, where ladies could shed their wraps before descending divalike down the white marble steps.

The new lobby, like its predecessor, is a chambered nautilus, all undulating walls and recesses. Mr. Beers stripped away ’70s-era carpeting to expose the original marble floor with its signature bow tie design. He covered the wall at the staircase in gold tile and added a light installation by the artist James Turrell and a lounge with a blue reflective floor. The staircase to nowhere is back, the jewel in a set piece expected to draw crowds who want to see and be seen.
And perhaps to retrace the footsteps of previous guests. Those who stayed at the hotel in Miami Beach’s golden age recall a resort that Lapidus, who died in 2001 at 98, had envisioned as a laboratory. It was a place, he wrote, “where I could enlarge upon all the theories I had been developing about human nature and the emotional hunger that the average man had for visual excitement.”

Fontainebleau Resorts, LLC
A rendering of one of the V.I.P. cabanas.
At bars and supper clubs — the Gigi Room, the Poodle Lounge — “women would sit with their little fur stoles and white gloves on to eat,” recalled Deborah Desilets, a Miami architect and former associate of Lapidus. Sheathed in slinky gowns, “they would stop at the mezzanine, put on their jewelry and wave at their husbands in the lobby below,” she said.

Michelle Oka Doner, an artist and a frequent guest as a girl — her father, Kenneth Oka, was mayor of Miami Beach in the late ’50s and early ’60s — remembers the resort, where she had a prom and her wedding, “as my stage and my launching pad.”

The Fontainebleau was a decadent paradise of “flashy diamonds, illicit sex and overflowing ice cream sodas,” she said. To get to her family’s cabana, “you had to walk through the downstairs shops and past a dance studio where they had all these gorgeous guys giving cha-cha lessons to all these overdressed matrons from Scarsdale.”

“People came for the half-naked girls and the revues,” she said. And, of course, for trysts. “I knew something illicit was going on, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.”

The lobby was a hub for celebrity spotting, the hotel itself a backdrop against which the Rat Pack played poker and James Bond sprang from the high dive in “Goldfinger.”

“The floor was like a mirror, so shiny you could see yourself,” said Levi Forte, a bellman at the Fontainebleau since the ’60s. “Danny Thomas couldn’t keep his eyes off that floor. He’d sit there and comb his hair and ask, ‘Levi, how do I look?’ ”

Mel Dick, who moved to Miami from Brooklyn in the ’60s, visited on his honeymoon. He recalled being drawn to a sign outside the hotel barbershop that beckoned, “Come and have your shoes shined by the former lightweight champion of the world.” It was Sidney Walker, known as Beau Jack, recalled Mr. Dick, a wine company executive. “I sat down in the seat and I gave him five dollars. I told him: ‘I don’t want you to shine my shoes. I just want to look at you.’ ”

Mrs. Rubinson was just as enthralled by her frequent star sightings. “How many times driving up to the Fontainebleau I would see Frank Sinatra walking up the drive with a glass in his hand,” she said.

“We had a more glamorous lifestyle in those days,” she added wistfully. “But then, of course, things changed.”

In succeeding decades the resort lost its sparkle. Like other supersize hotels lining Collins Avenue north of 44th Street, including the neighboring Eden Roc, another shiny Lapidus edifice, it became as dated as Grandma’s minaudière.

Fast forward to the current renovation. “We kept asking ourselves, ‘What would Morris do?’ ” Mr. Karawan said.

John Nichols, a Miami architect responsible for the adjacent Fontainebleau residential towers, the second of which has just been completed, was hired to gut and redesign the hotel. He preserved Lapidus embellishments like the perforated “Swiss cheese” outer walls. “We had to get down into a very high level of detail,” Mr. Nichols said. “You don’t just go in there and take off the eyebrows.”

Ms. Oka Doner admires the renovation, to a point. “The property is kind of post-postmodern,” she said. “Morris Lapidus had real passion,” but in its current incarnation, “irony has trumped passion.”

But Ms. Desilets, the former Lapidus associate, who visited the site last month, was over the moon. “They used incredible engineering to laser trace what was there and rebuilt it with accuracy,” she said. “It’s going to be like a Ravenna mosaic. It’s a wow type of extravagance.”

The exuberant aesthetic of the original has been resurrected in three ballrooms, lavish restaurants and five swimming and reflecting pools.

The pool cabanas have wraparound sofas and flat-panel televisions. Perched on the property’s topmost tier is a V.I.P. pool deck with six additional teak cabanas, a bar and a D.J. booth.

Mr. Forte, the bellman, recently viewed the improvements. “The place is so pretty, the first time I saw it I thought I was in the wrong hotel,” he said. “I said to my wife, ‘Just take a look at what money can do.’ ”

A Playful Romp for Chanel

2008-11-03T20:43:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: October 3, 2008
Paris

More than understanding the iconography of Chanel, a house that first opened its doors at 31, rue Cambon in 1921, he knows what the name means in the history of Paris. Unlike many other houses that have disappeared behind corporate facades or disappeared altogether, Chanel still sits like a white-gloved lady on the Rue Cambon. And probably to a great many young tourists who come to take pictures of its famous entrance and the Cassandre-designed logo, the Rue Cambon is Chanel.

Today, after it was reported by Women’s Wear Daily that Alessandra Facchinetti would be replaced at Valentino after just one year (Stefano Sassi, company’s chief executive, has been vague about plans, but indicated that a change was likely and that a lack of confidence in Ms. Facchinetti’s approach was an issue), an executive associated with the Rome-based company said, sadly, “Valentino is like Alitalia to Italy.”

Well, Alitalia has its problems, but certainly Valentino is a name that resonates beyond a chic little suit scattered with seed pearls. Ms. Facchinetti presented a charming, well-received haute couture collection in July. Friday, her ready-to-wear show of casual tunic dresses and soft shorts combinations with gold braid struggled to say something new.

But Ms. Facchinetti’s brief career at Valentino, as much the company’s owners poor handling of it, is proof that you need more than deep pockets to preserve a great name. You also need to recognize what it means in the popular imagination, and then seize it.

Mr. Lagerfeld had the idea to recreate a full-size facade of 31, rue Cambon inside the Grand Palais — and not only the building but also the street, complete with curbs. The models left the maison and hit the street. There was even the suggestion that four models strolling out together in mini knit dresses and fancy net hats might be representing the hooker element. If you’ve lived in Paris, and around fashion, as long as Mr. Lagerfeld has, you wouldn’t judge women that harshly.

He seems to regularly ask himself the question “What is Chanel?” — as if he knows it’s a living thing. This season, tweeds are more graphic; there is the new proportion of a cropped jacket, over a ribbed knit or blouse, and a slim embroidered skirt, shown with two-tone black stockings that modify the actual length of the skirt.

There are plays on transparency and shine. And maybe only Mr. Lagerfeld can show, at one extreme, silvery platforms with pink powder puffs at the heels and, at the other, a gorgeously severe black evening dress with a shadow layer of tulle and a taut, sheer neckline.

“Our house, in the middle of our street,” went the corny, if upbeat soundtrack from the 1980s hit by Madness, and in the models’ hands was one of the most coveted symbols of luxury and pleasure: the Chanel shopping bag, now rendered as a leather sack. The street, one can argue, is Chanel’s real stage.

Stefano Pilati has done a lot to reignite Saint Laurent. His spring collection is a solid continuation of the graphic modernity of last season, with more of an Eastern influence. Wool crepe trousers have a dropped crotch (but are the most flattering of that trendy style). Jackets have a slight kimono look, though Mr. Pilati keeps the volumes from exploding. There are matching bras under sheer, almost iridescent blouses and new, somewhat conceptual versions of the safari jacket — now with a kind of stiff peplum laced to the body of the jacket.

Mr. Pilati offered a lot of appealing clothes — smart, wearable but somehow missing that real Saint Laurent sex appeal and mystery. Maybe he intellectualized the process too much, but you didn’t feel he grasped or took advantage of the big story that Saint Laurent is.

It takes a special woman to wear a Giambattista Valli dress, because in most respects the dress wears her and sometimes it makes her a victim. Mr. Valli has an attentive young clientele, and a press agent’s e-mail message in advance of the show announcing that Natalie Portman would be traveling to Paris to see the collection had the weird archaic import of a 1950s Pathé newsreel.

But then Mr. Valli’s clothes seemed stuck in the glamour of that period. Five decades of women being a good deal more than prized possessions have apparently escaped Mr. Valli’s consciousness, or so it would appear from his crinoline dresses, fussy necklines and tulle outfits with the wooliness of a poodle’s back. Their fingertips extended over their wide skirts, their high heels made more perilous with the addition of a recessed platform, the models seemed instructed to look elegant and unobtainable.

A more accurate word for this tranquilized mood — and the collection in general — would have been Valium.

Recharging the City of Light

2008-11-02T17:31:00.000-08:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: October 2, 2008

It was late, almost midnight, inside a plastic tent the size of a used-car dealership set down in the distant gardens of Saint-Cloud. Waiters had brought around plates of ravioli with more truffles than pasta and big sticks of crab leg wrapped in sole and buckets of Perrier-Jouët. When the models finally appeared, they wore poufy berets atop their crimped French-poodle hairdos, a little like Goldie Hawn in “Private Benjamin.” The music was Barry White, and the mood was just as smooth. The show felt as if it was from another time — specifically, the 1970s — when fashion was just for the moment and not so complicated.

It was Ms. Rykiel’s 40th anniversary, and she celebrated with a collection that snapped the life back into a Paris Fashion Week that had felt drained by the dismal economic outlook. If the ship is going down, she must have thought, let’s stick with the band. Her jackets were as sparkly as the nightly light show on the Eiffel Tower. Her pastel dresses were covered with feathered regalia fit for Louis XIV. And her dazzlingly beruffled models danced right off the stage during a show that lasted 40 minutes and ended with 30 looks made by other designers in tribute to Ms. Rykiel. (There were silk pajamas and a “Holy Smoke” T-shirt from Ann Demeulemeester, and a knit dress with needles attached and a ball of yarn trailing it from Jean Paul Gaultier).

But it all seemed like a distant, kind of fuzzy dream by Thursday morning. The reality of French fashion today is that it is, like that of most other countries, a melting pot, home to designers from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia and the United States. There is no longer a national style to speak of, only collections, some of them exemplary citizens and some in need of deportation.

Stella McCartney’s show was exceptional. If it is possible for her designs to become any more light and ephemeral, as they have season after season, eventually there will be nothing to see besides Sir Paul sitting across the runway. For spring, she showed a nearly transparent jacket and rice-paper-thin sweater the color of unripened apricots over transparent sequined bodysuits, just figments of her imagination, really. This season’s jumpsuits were more tangible, the top half structured as a dinner jacket in one case, and as a trench in another.

What really worked in her favor was that Ms. McCartney, whose clothes are generally and admirably accessible, introduced some fairly conceptual ideas that still seemed wearable — namely, a great silk shantung trench that was enveloped inside a larger version of the same coat.

Viktor & Rolf opted to show online this week instead of the runway, and the effort was largely commendable. There is a palpable sense that the runway system no longer works, but no one can figure out an alternative, so we spend a month every season chasing 400-plus shows while shoppers click through them in 15 minutes at home.

The video that the designers, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, showed was a designer’s ultimate fantasy in that every look was modeled by Shalom Harlow, who totally worked it. But you could actually get a pretty realistic idea of the dresses, dangling like paper lanterns, and how the loudly graphic striped tights and shorts combinations gave off a robotic Balenciaga vibe. Still, this is not a perfect medium for the designers, for back in their showroom, the colors looked different, and sometimes better — a dress that appeared red and yellow online was actually more of a rust and mustard.

Hurricane Hussein (Chalayan, that is) also blew through the city, subjecting his models to extreme conditions in the form of industrial wind machines pointed in their faces and aerobics-style bathing suits that exposed their rear ends, a one-two punch that delighted only the photographers. What Mr. Chalayan was getting at was the danger of speed. The idea was repeated in prints of futuristic-looking cars and zooming-by street scenes on minidresses and, inevitably, a crash scene at the end, a metaphor, he said, for the economy. Mr. Chalayan hammered the point a bit hard when he actually smashed a bar full of wineglasses at the finale.

Several dresses were fascinating, made of latex molded into whipped-cream peaks extending from the back to appear in blurry motion. But the message felt a tad preachy, like a crossing guard wagging his finger at the Treasury. Hey! Look both ways!

Esteban Cortazar’s second season at Emanuel Ungaro suggests that he may be out of his league. There were some cute minidresses with painterly brush-stroke prints from the precocious designer, but not enough to stand up to an important litmus test: Which character on “Ugly Betty” would these clothes suit best? If your collection includes a poncho, you need a makeover, pronto.

Paris Fashion Week | Yves Saint Laurent

2008-11-02T17:27:00.001-08:00

By JONATHAN S. PAUL

PARIS — The YSL show just concluded at the Grand Palais, and before we had a chance to get the reaction of T Magazine’s editor, Stefano Tonchi, he disappeared backstage to congratulate Stefano Pilati. In the meantime, tide yourself over with Cathy Horyn’s blog post (she seems to like — not love — the collection), our video of the show’s massive finale and some photos after the jump.

A Playful Romp for Chanel

2008-11-02T00:27:00.001-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: October 3, 2008

As often as Karl Lagerfeld used to be chided by some of his peers for being a mercenary and not owning a house of his own — at least not one as successful as Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino — it’s interesting how well he understands Chanel.

More than understanding the iconography of Chanel, a house that first opened its doors at 31, rue Cambon in 1921, he knows what the name means in the history of Paris. Unlike many other houses that have disappeared behind corporate facades or disappeared altogether, Chanel still sits like a white-gloved lady on the Rue Cambon. And probably to a great many young tourists who come to take pictures of its famous entrance and the Cassandre-designed logo, the Rue Cambon is Chanel.

Today, after it was reported by Women’s Wear Daily that Alessandra Facchinetti would be replaced at Valentino after just one year (Stefano Sassi, company’s chief executive, has been vague about plans, but indicated that a change was likely and that a lack of confidence in Ms. Facchinetti’s approach was an issue), an executive associated with the Rome-based company said, sadly, “Valentino is like Alitalia to Italy.”

Well, Alitalia has its problems, but certainly Valentino is a name that resonates beyond a chic little suit scattered with seed pearls. Ms. Facchinetti presented a charming, well-received haute couture collection in July. Friday, her ready-to-wear show of casual tunic dresses and soft shorts combinations with gold braid struggled to say something new.

But Ms. Facchinetti’s brief career at Valentino, as much the company’s owners poor handling of it, is proof that you need more than deep pockets to preserve a great name. You also need to recognize what it means in the popular imagination, and then seize it.

Mr. Lagerfeld had the idea to recreate a full-size facade of 31, rue Cambon inside the Grand Palais — and not only the building but also the street, complete with curbs. The models left the maison and hit the street. There was even the suggestion that four models strolling out together in mini knit dresses and fancy net hats might be representing the hooker element. If you’ve lived in Paris, and around fashion, as long as Mr. Lagerfeld has, you wouldn’t judge women that harshly.

He seems to regularly ask himself the question “What is Chanel?” — as if he knows it’s a living thing. This season, tweeds are more graphic; there is the new proportion of a cropped jacket, over a ribbed knit or blouse, and a slim embroidered skirt, shown with two-tone black stockings that modify the actual length of the skirt.

There are plays on transparency and shine. And maybe only Mr. Lagerfeld can show, at one extreme, silvery platforms with pink powder puffs at the heels and, at the other, a gorgeously severe black evening dress with a shadow layer of tulle and a taut, sheer neckline.

“Our house, in the middle of our street,” went the corny, if upbeat soundtrack from the 1980s hit by Madness, and in the models’ hands was one of the most coveted symbols of luxury and pleasure: the Chanel shopping bag, now rendered as a leather sack. The street, one can argue, is Chanel’s real stage.

Stefano Pilati has done a lot to reignite Saint Laurent. His spring collection is a solid continuation of the graphic modernity of last season, with more of an Eastern influence. Wool crepe trousers have a dropped crotch (but are the most flattering of that trendy style). Jackets have a slight kimono look, though Mr. Pilati keeps the volumes from exploding. There are matching bras under sheer, almost iridescent blouses and new, somewhat conceptual versions of the safari jacket — now with a kind of stiff peplum laced to the body of the jacket.

Mr. Pilati offered a lot of appealing clothes — smart, wearable but somehow missing that real Saint Laurent sex appeal and mystery. Maybe he intellectualized the process too much, but you didn’t feel he grasped or took advantage of the big story that Saint Laurent is.

It takes a special woman to wear a Giambattista Valli dress, because in most respects the dress wears her and sometimes it makes her a victim. Mr. Valli has an attentive young clientele, and a press agent’s e-mail message in advance of the show announcing that Natalie Portman would be traveling to Paris to see the collection had the weird archaic import of a 1950s Pathé newsreel.

But then Mr. Valli’s clothes seemed stuck in the glamour of that period. Five decades of women being a good deal more than prized possessions have apparently escaped Mr. Valli’s consciousness, or so it would appear from his crinoline dresses, fussy necklines and tulle outfits with the wooliness of a poodle’s back. Their fingertips extended over their wide skirts, their high heels made more perilous with the addition of a recessed platform, the models seemed instructed to look elegant and unobtainable.

A more accurate word for this tranquilized mood — and the collection in general — would have been Valium.

Not Just a Job, More Like an Adventure

2008-11-02T00:16:00.000-07:00

By C.J. HUGHES
Published: October 31, 2008
JEN PEPPER and Matt Jones, from opposite ends of a lime-colored hall, are furtively dating. Constantine Boym throws 100-guest vodka-fueled parties across from a room with a disco ball, under which sits Michelle DiBona, who sometimes sports a tie-dyed blouse. Gossip swirls about Ted Gottfried, whose nude seaside ukulele strumming is a source of fascination. No one seems to know who stole a sandwich from the common refrigerator a few months back, prompting a minor scandal.

G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
Welcome to 131 Varick Street, which for better or worse might be New York’s most college-dorm-like office building.

Layout partly explains it. Dozens of small companies occupy 36 cheek-by-jowl offices, which earlier this decade were carved from a warren of storage cubbyholes like those that line the 11-story SoHo building’s lower floors.

The storage cubbies weren’t being rented to people who wanted to store stuff, so the owners thought, let people rent them and put themselves in there instead. Rents now average $55 a square foot; they were as low as $40.

The building’s businesses trend creative, whether their employees are stylists, leather-workers or graphic designers (though one makes fire alarms). Many workers have backgrounds and night gigs that can be called quirky, if not downright crazy.

Indeed, the artistic ethos of the place — where workers sport yellow sneakers and dreadlocks, and internal walls can be made of nylon sheets — seems heir to the legacy of the surrounding neighborhood, where loft living was practically invented.

But the communal open-door policy can sometimes be too much, according to Nina Poon, 33, a photographer’s assistant who was wearing a thin white scarf and safety-orange nail polish as she moved a mouse to Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.”

“Any of the building gossip is about me,” said Ms. Poon, explaining that five years ago, she underwent a sex change, after which she became a fashion model who now appears on billboards and in magazines.

So, she enters the lunchroom tentatively for her daily cup of tea. “Guys are always like, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and then they wink,” Ms. Poon said. “It gets annoying.”

Others seem to thrive on the sociability — take Arthur Golden, who earned the nickname The Mayor for rallying employees for off-site pub crawls, bowling nights and movie outings. He now works as a real estate broker at a different address, but drops by 131 Varick once a week.

He also tinkered with broken phones in Room 902, where his official duties included making bags for snowboards and skates.

“Our office seemed to be one of the central points of the floor, with people walking in and out any time of day,” said Mr. Golden, adding that he, too, would circumnavigate the floor for input on certain fabric swatches.

Mr. Golden’s previous gigs included stints as a professional Rollerblader and dance club promoter. “I have friends in five offices,” he said.

There is other overlap. Last fall, Gene Kliot, Mr. Golden’s former boss, joined Aixa Sobin, who makes leatherbound journals, stacks of which tower from floor to ceiling in her cramped office, for Thanksgiving dinner.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jones, a software engineer, and Tim Meyers, an employee of a branding firm, bond over a love of Christian religious imagery. Wearing a Jesus T-shirt to work, as Mr. Jones tells it, led Mr. Meyers to share a collection of Virgin Mary figurines.

On the other hand, Mr. Gottfried hasn’t been so lucky getting co-workers to attend his naked ukulele concerts, which take place regularly on beaches on Fire Island, N.Y., and Sandy Hook, N.J., alongside three other unclad musicians. (He also stages 20 clothed shows a year in Manhattan.)

“But people know about it around the office, and they’re very open-minded,” said Mr. Gottfried, who was hunched over a calculator, punctuating the air with a yellow mechanical pencil. “And so is my boss,” he laughed.

THOUGH the offices at 131 Varick can be small and dim, their appeal for a start-up business is fairly obvious. Rents there can be lower than elsewhere per square foot, and the required down payment is three months’ rent; renters can also break their leases after nine months without penalty.
In contrast, a high-end Midtown office building can cost $80 a square foot and require a 10-year lease and a down payment of six months’ rent. Even smaller-scale executive suites, though shorter-term, can cost $150 a square foot, as they include use of conference rooms, telephones and receptionists.

Enlarge This Image

Donna Alberico for The New York Times
Enlarge This Image

Donna Alberico for The New York Times
The building is owned by Edison Properties of Newark. Jason Miller of Edison said he expected the building to maintain 100 percent occupancy for its 73 offices, spread among its three top floors, even if city office rents drop.

“There’s always going to be a need for a product like this for designers and technology companies,” Mr. Miller said. “And people can take other space here as they grow.”

If the last few years in the building have been like a raucous freshman party, there’s a sense that graduation is now looming.

A projected rent increase will likely force out Barry Rosenthal, a photographer who works with his wife, Elyn, in a space that provided Hudson River views until condos recently encroached.

In his office, a shelf of tarnished copper horses, found at flea markets, hangs on one wall; facing them is a row of framed illustrations of Native Americans in headdresses.

As the floor’s original tenant, Mr. Rosenthal said he would miss the place, especially Mr. Boym’s shindigs, which “always feature some kind of interesting vodka.” The post-parties at the Ear Inn, a nearby bar, were also highlights, said Mr. Rosenthal, who was wearing a gray-hooded “Poly Prep” sweatshirt, shorts and sandals. “But not everybody is as friendly as they used to be.”

Other tenants have outgrown their offices, including David Khouri, an architect who’s relocating his firm next month to a much larger West Chelsea space.

But he’s not sad to go, as the collegiate vibe of 131 Varick, which recalled a Columbia dorm, never really appealed to Mr. Khouri anyway.

“It always smelled like microwaved popcorn,” he said, “and nothing ever smells good coming out of a microwave.”

Graphic, Graceful and Slightly Perverse

2008-09-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: September 10, 2008

For a while, fashion’s new guard seemed to be stuck in a sophomore slump. Some, and I will be kind by not mentioning names, appear to have already fallen off the radar, gauging by the turnout at their shows this week. Even more-popular designers, though producing nice enough clothes, have been struggling to achieve more than a passing grade.

DEREK LAM A tank dress with drawstrings.
But among the newer names of Fashion Week, the spring collections have included two A-game shows, from Thakoon Panichgul and Derek Lam. Each designer has developed a signature. Mr. Panichgul’s is the floral print dress draped in an offbeat way; Mr. Lam’s is a preciously tailored ladylike look that always seemed somehow appropriate for the Midwest. And this season each was smart to ask himself, “Well, what else have I got?”

Mr. Panichgul, whose label is called Thakoon, started by cutting away panels from his dresses and replacing them with cages of tulle ribbons, suggesting a harder edge, if not quite bondage. This also gave a sense of transparency to the clothes, some of which were put together in combinations of sheer and opaque fabrics, like one dress with a skirt made of cotton organdy and an exposed bra top bound in tulle. Another chiffon slip dress was covered up with a see-through trench coat, something a flasher could wear without all the effort of buttoning and unbuttoning.

Mr. Panichgul also collaborated with the artist Laurie Simmons on a surreal print of long-stemmed roses, the stems being women’s legs, which added a slightly perverse feeling to his collection. That’s a nice contrast for a designer who had built his reputation with sweetness.

Like other designers, Mr. Lam appears to be wrestling with the heavy legacy of Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June and whose work has been the subject of major exhibitions in Montreal and San Francisco. Although Mr. Lam cited Coco Chanel as an influence, his oversize lamé chiffon peacoat, sheer blouses and elegant black evening trousers were crisp-looking in a YSL way.

He also showed a group of jersey tunic dresses and jumpsuits in the pale sandy color of microfiber raincoats from the 1990s that, with the addition of adjustable drawstrings, seemed unusually casual and relaxed. All this, and it didn’t look weird at all.

If the new guard needed reinforcements, there were plenty on hand. Of note was a playful performance by Catherine Holstein, a peppy up-and-comer who made some voluminous little dresses that looked to have bathroom tiles attached as sequins. And the models were wearing sweaters wrapped like mushroom-shape turbans on their heads. Until a dress passed by with tiles arranged like a heart on the back, it wasn’t obvious that she was drawing the pixilated characters from a Nintendo video game.

At Ohne Titel, Alexa Adams and Flora Gill turned sequins into tattoo patterns on sheer tights and bodysuits. (The American synchronized swimming team, lampooned for their ensembles, should feel a sense of validation.) More practical were beautiful pistachio and pink knit dresses, which looked like summer-camp potholders as interpreted by Balenciaga.

One of the cutest ideas to come out of the very cute Brian Reyes collection was an oversize pocket T-shirt made in an expensive silk fabric for evening. This was an old Bill Blass trick, luxing up the basics.

Mr. Reyes showed some chic shirtdresses and gazar tops that also called to mind the old guard, but his vision of transparency, in a beaded dress with a sheer panel of fabric in the back, was certainly new. It was cut low enough to reveal the model’s thong.

Bankable Glamour From Kors

2008-09-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: September 10, 2008

Michael Kors got down to business on Wednesday, sending out a smart spring collection that probably saved a few retail chiefs from watching their profits further erode. And Narciso Rodriguez, in a cooler mood, lightened up his minimalist line with stripes and offbeat prints.

RODARTE A pleated skirt with a chiffon top and laser-cut leggings.
Wherever Mr. Kors plants his oar — Portofino, Malibu — the results are inevitably and hopelessly glamorous. And with the economy entering what appears to be a long stew, Mr. Kors’s sporty American glamour seems highly bankable. And this time he has found just the right contemporary looks. The Beach Boys were on the sound system in the Bryant Park tents, but that’s about as nostalgic as the show got.

Just as in Mr. Rodgriguez’s show on Tuesday night, Mr. Kors offered a fresh take on stripes, opening with a belted tunic in royal blue and black striped cashmere over black stretch-wool shorts. Despite the surf theme, and some adorable two-piece swimsuits, the stripes were more graphic than nautical, and were complemented by bold polka-dots and gingham checks. So the style can be worn anywhere.

In every way the collection seemed thought out, full of trends like clam-digger pants and metallic fabrics as well as more-sophisticated pieces. The best of these were a pair of dresses — one in red gingham silk and the other in a lightweight navy wool pinstripe — that were cut so that the hem rose on one leg. A number of designers have shown variations on the hiked skirt, including Marc Jacobs and Mr. Rodriguez. There was also a style at Kors with a spilling top in white silk. It’s a great look.

Overlapping stripes of electrical tape gave Mr. Rodriguez the pattern for graphic black-and-white prints. They were rendered as a slim cotton skirt shown with a sharply notched black canvas jacket, and skinny print trousers worn with a clean, tailored jacket. Mr. Rodriguez evoked the line and dot theme in other sexy ways — with black stripes caging a slim dress of burnt coral silk or as a bandeau top under a lean black linen jacket.

The collection was as fresh-looking as it was varied. Jackets were generally cropped and close to the body, usually with a curving line. But the newness was really in the dresses, in the waves of stripes over a silk dress with black chiffon shoulders and a floaty, sheer back.

Let’s imagine that Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Rodarte line was designed by Alix Grès, the Paris couturier who set the postwar romantics straight with her modernist pleated dresses. What would Alix do? It’s an interesting exercise to compare the working methods of two contemporary designers, widely hailed for their “vision,” with a woman of unquestioned genius. What made Madame Grès exceptional?

For one thing, she held a set of beliefs about women. She designed for them, not for editors or abstract notions. Though she was a tyrant in her fashion, she always had women in her sights. This is not the case with the Mulleavy sisters, at least this season. Their latest collection consists of pleated skirts and body-conscious mesh tops and slick pants, all in monochromatic Pan-Cake hues with laser-cut leggings and nasty gold platforms. The mood is tough — Valkyries in chiffon — and the style clipped and pasted from other designers, mainly Azzedine Alaïa.

But that’s not the real problem. It’s that the Mulleavys didn’t seem to have a woman in mind when they put together these clothes, as they plainly did when they first showed their lovely, broken-down knits. It was as if their interest lay solely in achieving an effect with an object.

Wanted: Genius Designer

2008-09-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

By GUY TREBAY
Published: September 3, 2008

WHO will be the Next Big Thing? That’s the question that perennially fuels the rave of creativity, stitchery and circus nerves that is New York Fashion Week. It’s the tease that attracts the thousands of designers, buyers, editors, photographers, stylists, models, bookers, trend forecasters, sharp-tongued blogosphere sibyls and the strung-out accountants who attempt to ride herd on all of the above to the Bryant Park tents twice a year. It’s the dream we all dream of a sartorial Lotto win.

Even with an economy dazed and numbed, the United States remains the world’s largest market for fashion, and New York is unquestionably the center of the global fashion image machine. True, consumer pocketbooks seem to be on temporary lockdown. But the assembly line keeps cranking all the same; the maw must be fed.

But who will do it? Cast a seasoned eye across a landscape ornamented with scores of shows during the next nine days (officially Fashion Week runs today through Sept. 12) and what’s immediately apparent is that while fashion is healthily supplied with journeymen there is no clear visionary, no obvious genius in sight.

“The business is much too safe,” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barney’s New York, said last week. “There’s just too much money at stake.” Thus, we should not expect a season in which designers go out on a limb and propel models down catwalks in get-ups concocted from seaweed or kitchen utensils. (Both have actually happened.) This is not to suggest, as Ms. Gilhart also noted, that New York is suffering from talent shortfall — far from it. Among many others, we have the team of Proenza Schouler, with their knack for making middle-of-the-road design seem indie and cool. We have cartoonish pop cultural gadflies like Isaac Mizrahi, and chaste classicists like Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein. We have elder statesman like Oscar de la Renta and Ralph Lauren, who, far from seeming moss-covered and passé, have been more alert to shifts in the cultural marketplace than some who were zygotes when those men first hit professional stride.

We have loopy design theoreticians like threeAsFour, holding up the fort for Downtown Style. And — back from a barkeep hiatus in Majorca that followed his Big Apple flameout—we have Miguel Adrover, the man who captured the imagination of the fashion establishment with clothes made from a recycled mattress and Yankees caps.

Still, there is no world-beater. There are no names that suggest clear-cut potential both to reshape fashion and somehow with it the global culture of style. There is no one, to take the obvious example, likely to replace Yves Saint Laurent, who died in June and seemingly took with him not merely a genius for conjuring glamour from whole cloth, but also for draping his designs to suit the mood of his time.

What seems disorienting about this absence is that fashion is no longer a discipline of interest mainly to female consumers and a cult of aesthetes. Like it or not, fashion has become something larger, a viral cultural force that sometimes seems only incidentally concerned with clothes. Cocteau wasn’t kidding when he said style is a simple way of saying complicated things — a point the United States Olympic Committee clearly noted (American teams may not have dominated in the medals, but in the parade of nations they killed the competition in jauntily classic Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms), as do politicos. Were the Dead Sea scrolls subjected to more exegesis than Michelle Obama’s floral print sheath at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? (Thakoon, by the way.) The voices of the blogosphere say, No.

Yet, contradictory as this may seem, the notion of a Next Big Thing in fashion may itself be culturally discordant. As in film, music and other arts, consumers have wearied of big names and labels. Except on TV, they are bored with diktats, with taste legislated by self-appointed “experts” and with camphor-scented archaisms like “stars.”

They have lost the desire to partake of media in hunks: an entire musical album, or a single artist’s whole career.

The D.I.Y. ethos prevalent among young consumers has led to an overall relaxation of the boundaries of style. Given that a 12-year-old with a MySpace page and access to digital “mood boards” or electronic makeover applications (girltech.com) can become an instant authority on fashion, is there truly a need for the dictators of the front row, the editors who once chose the stars?

“No longer is fashion force-fed to the consumer,” said Robert Burke, a former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman who is now a luxury goods consultant. “They don’t have to wait for magazines and editors to tell them what they must buy and must have.”

Fun as it is to indulge in the game show fantasy retailed by programs like “Project Runway,” with its winners and losers and dubious jackpots, it is probably time to face the truth about the In or Out divide, which is that it is subjectively judged and decreed by a posse of Heathers.

“I really never understood the next big thing,” said Kim Hastreiter, an editor of Paper magazine. “How can someone be a genius this season and next season they’re not?”

She added: “This completely drives me crazy. Everyone can be raving one season about how great a designer is and then the next season they’re dumped.”

People do not become “un-brilliant,” Ms. Hastreiter said. “Designers really suffer from this because you get lifted up and put in this place and then someone else comes along and is put in that place and it’s never really about the work.”

Passionate fandom, the widespread devotion that also helps invest a star with authority, seems quaint today. Every anonymous nobody with a social networking page or a “fun wall” can build a cohort, whether imaginary or virtual. Appended to the snapshots of everyday people and their sartorial innovations on blogs like Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist (thesartorialist.blogspot.com) are kite-tails of commentary from scores or even hundreds of commentators, who hold highly evolved (and occasionally creepy) views about what fashion is and should be.

In a lot of ways, the life and career of Saint Laurent are instructive and also helpful in understanding why it is futile and also probably dumb to sit around waiting for his avatar. “That world is gone,” his former partner Pierre Bergé said days before Saint Laurent’s death.
By that Mr. Bergé meant, as Jill D’Alessandro, an associate curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, recently explained, that “fashion was more about artistic and creative output” when Saint Laurent held his first runway show in 1962 than it was about celebrity name-checking and the creation of the latest “It” bag. “He was adapted to his times,” Ms. D’Alessandro said. “He was someone who wanted to help with social change. The world was also changing a lot then, and he very consciously wanted to be part of that.”

The film director Jean Renoir once wrote a letter to Ingrid Bergman, motivated by what I am not quite sure, in which he cautioned the actress against falling for the hype axiomatically attached to the next big thing. “The cult of great ideas is dangerous and may destroy the real basis for great achievements, that is the daily, humble work within the framework of a profession,” Renoir wrote.

And it’s that quote I plan to take with me into the Fashion Week fray, with a hope that the onus of expectation placed on any single designer (even New York’s favorite son, Marc Jacobs) will eventually yield to something more flexible, plural and modern, to use a hated fashion term. The next big thing may not be a single person at all but a yeastier and more broadly based network of shared information and connections.

It’s an optimistic thought, and none too reasonable, given the financial stakes. But there has to be a role for fashion more interesting than producing a few hype artists whose greatest skill is slinging a dumb It bag off the licorice-whip arm of this season’s hot socialite.

“Very few people have this ability to be the great designers and also generate the necessary buzz and excitement,” Ms. Gilhart of Barneys said. “It’s a trap.” So formulated around star-creation right now, she added, that the business may actually be “closing out a lot of opportunities for people who are original and good and who actually have something to say.”

The Second Coming of Khaki

2008-08-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: August 20, 2008

ON Monday afternoon, as the ballyhooed new designs of Gap’s fall collection by Patrick Robinson began appearing at its store on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, a line of customers stretched well around the corner — at Abercrombie & Fitch, that is, two blocks away.

Fashion magazines have heralded the recent arrival of Mr. Robinson at Gap in reverential tones (he is actually called a “megabrand messiah” in the September issue of Elle), and the windows announce in big block letters that a “New Shape” is in store. But there has not yet been a seismic return of shoppers to a retail chain that stopped being cool around the time Abercrombie opened its doors with a reinvented brand.

In that regard, his career has had similarities with that of Mr. Ford, who left Gucci in a creative dispute several years ago. But at Gap, Mr. Robinson said, he is comfortable working within a large corporate environment. That said, he has continued to assert the need for creative control: last week the company dismissed its European design staff, adding the duties for creating lines for international markets to Mr. Robinson’s purview. The move raised eyebrows among those who have wondered whether ego had caused his problems at Perry Ellis and Paco Rabanne. But Mr. Robinson said that the hoopla had not made any difference to the success of his collections.

Gary Muto, the president of Gap’s adult and body divisions, said Mr. Robinson’s arrival at the company had revitalized its design staff, describing the difference as “night and day.” Part of the reason is that the designs are selling, he said, citing a deep V-neck shirt and pull-on skirt introduced this summer as an illustration of how classic clothes could be fashionably updated.

“Where we’re going to win is with those items that are truly versatile, that a person can dress up or dress down and still be able to express their own personal style,” he said.

Mr. Robinson has demonstrated that he is a versatile designer, and one who has learned when to let the product speak louder than the personality.

“Speaking honestly, when I was younger, I really wanted the fame thing,” he said. “It was part of the game of being a fashion designer. But that doesn’t turn me on anymore. What turns me on — my soul — is making cool clothes and being part of a company where I can actually see the difference I’m making. I’m not just spinning my wheels and getting the clothes into five stores in America.”

One thing that stands out about Mr. Robinson’s collection for Gap is how similar it looks to his work for Perry Ellis, with loose popover plaid dresses, sleeveless wool jackets and cropped cargo pants in mushroomy grays, layered up with artsy knits — clothes that fashion editors had clamored about back then but customers never had a chance to buy. Now anyone can at Gap, even those who have never heard of Mr. Robinson.

“It’s definitely a major improvement,” said Rie Cochran, a 21-year-old secretary from Marshall, Mich., as she left the Fifth Avenue store. “It’s chic, but still subdued.”

Nevertheless, she walked out empty-handed.

Inside the Gap store, a few dozen customers were trying on $58 waffle-knit cardigans and blazers made of fleece. But for a better picture, one could stand outside on the street corner for 15 minutes and count shopping bags: 6 from Gap, 27 from Abercrombie on Monday; 8 from Gap, 38 from Abercrombie on Tuesday.

Reinventing Gap, the nation’s largest specialty apparel chain, has been fashion’s equivalent of Merlin’s stone for much of the last decade, as sales and profits have dipped, along with its image among young consumers. Mr. Robinson, 41, is the third designer to attempt to pull the sword since Gap began to publicly acknowledge its creative personnel in 2003, and the most closely watched because of his popularity with industry insiders and his finesse with casual American sportswear. His fall designs have generated promising reviews, but also concern about whether a single designer — one with a mixed track record — can revive a brand with 1,155 stores in the United States in the midst of an economic crisis.

On the one hand, the company has continued to report weak sales, including an 11 percent drop last month in stores open at least a year, and on Tuesday, Brand Keys, a research consultancy, announced that Gap ranked last in customer loyalty. On the other, some retail analysts long critical of Gap’s merchandising efforts and management choices have joined the chorus that is singing Mr. Robinson’s praises.

“I just about died when I went in the store,” said Jennifer Black, the president of Jennifer Black & Associates, a research company focused on the apparel industry. “I don’t know how traffic’s been, but from an aesthetic perspective, I think it looks great. For me to be taken aback is kind of a big thing.”

The clothes are indeed compelling. The trench coat and shirtdress styles and the muted colors — a variety of grays, browns and purple plaid — are at once basic and fashionable, a duality that could be either girly and pretty or androgynous in an Oliver Twist goes to a Nirvana concert sort of way. But will customers, especially those who look to Gap for jeans and T-shirts, get it?

In an interview in the Gap showroom in Chelsea last week, Mr. Robinson said he could best describe his vision for Gap as one of “optimism,” keying into an emotion conveyed by the company’s past advertising campaigns that spotlighted bright colors and made wearing khaki seem like a swingy choice. Having grown up in California, he recalled shopping at Gap stores and thinking how cool the white gallerylike spaces were. While he wanted to recapture that feeling, he said, the styles, fits and colors — even the weight of the T-shirt fabrics — all had to be changed.

“We can’t go back and put women in big old heavy sweatshirts,” he said. “That was Gap in the ’80s.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Robinson has demonstrated a single-mindedness about image control, including his own. In 2005, when he was hired at Paco Rabanne, the French fashion house, he compared his intended makeover of that fading collection to Tom Ford’s transformation of Gucci, a remark that proved foolhardy when the line was closed after three seasons.

He had previously worked for Giorgio Armani in Milan and Anne Klein in New York and briefly made sportswear collections under his own label in the ’90s. But his greatest critical success — and public folly — occurred in 2003, when he was hired to remake a lower-priced women’s sportswear collection for Perry Ellis. His vintage-inspired designs were so well received by the press that Mr. Robinson lobbied the label’s owners to reposition it from middle-market department stores to upscale retailers like Barneys New York. He was rebuffed in a dispute that spilled out into the press and most of the line was never sold.

On the strength of that collection, Mr. Robinson was nominated for a Council of Fashion Designers of America award. But at the awards, the designer, who is married to Virginia Smith, Vogue’s accessories director, was seated with Anna Wintour, a perceived slight to Perry Ellis executives, who had bought a large table of their own.

Mr. Robinson resigned the next season. In retrospect, he said, the conflict “was never a personal thing.”

“We just totally disagreed on the vision of the brand,” he said, “and they owned the thing, so they won.”

FALL FASHION Tiptoeing Into the Stores

2008-08-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: August 20, 2008

SINCE the shows for next spring’s clothes start in two weeks, the window for surveying the new fall fashion seems to be closing before it has fully opened. A lot of the best pieces, the runway stuff, still haven’t arrived in stores. Not everyone follows fashion so carefully as to notice what has arrived at Barneys, or in Bryant Park. (Is it runway season? Isn’t it always?) But before these columns are suddenly filled with rompers and bathing suits, let’s see what looks right for fall.

A practical elegance ran through last year’s polished clothes. This season, things are more romantic, thanks to moody prints, dramatic blouses and antique effects, but there is a sting — namely, the economy. Lots of people can’t afford, and can’t accept, paying $3,000 to $4,000 for an outfit, which is entirely possible in Designerland. You can rationalize blowing your rent on Gucci’s $1,900 swinging fringed boots — by telling yourself you’ll spend only $89 for Zara’s copy of Gucci’s mini peasant dress. But you would know immediately that your cheap-jack Doctor Zhivago outfit wasn’t working, and then what?

The best style is almost always a result of an unexpected combination of good and less costly things, of masculine and feminine elements, with a sharp eye toward what’s in fashion. Bear in mind that proportions are generally longer this season: hemlines flutter around the knee; pants are full (with classic pegged variations, like those Stefano Pilati showed for Saint Laurent); jackets have extended shoulders or an extravagant collar; blouses all seem to have a stock tie or an old-fashioned effect, like Proenza Schouler’s draped charmeuse versions (about $850). And a cropped fur or shearling vest can be a good investment, as a finish to prints and long layers.

To be sure, there are some wonderful standout looks that make you wish your family held the patent to the lug nut. While pawing through the racks of new clothes at Bergdorf Goodman, I spotted Thakoon’s all-over sequined dress in a murky rose-pink pattern, the hem and cap sleeves edged with printed chiffon ($4,900). Another great look for the individually minded shopper, at Linda Dresner, was Stephan Janson’s deep-green tweed skirt with a matching popover top, its three-quarter sleeves fluffed with gray-green marabou feathers ($3,110). You could definitely slay the fashion sisters with that outfit, as different as it is chic, especially with a pair of Christian Louboutin stiletto pumps (O.K., another thousand bucks).

But while lots of women are pretty certain that Balenciaga’s molded wool dresses are the acme of fashion, they halt before the price ($3,475). I was happy to discover a slightly more realistic alternative — and one that doesn’t show up in virtually every magazine editorial. Balenciaga has a creamy white sleeveless blouse in a stiff wool crepe that is banded in black at the waist and finished with a modest bow ($1,345). With a slim black skirt, it would convey the same minimalist look.

Fashion snobs have an exquisite understanding of store deliveries. Most of the stuff hanging in stores since mid-August is from preseason designer collections, or from moderate-priced labels like Vince and Nanette Lepore. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be spruced up with runway pieces. A few designers, like Marc Jacobs, who makes most of his clothes in New York, delivered very early. At Barneys, I saw a terrific wool pencil skirt by Mr. Jacobs with an elastic grosgrain waist — just pull it on! Considering the name and the quality of the fit, it seemed a good buy at $495.

While in the store, I went in search of trousers. Mr. Jacobs’s slouchy version in black velveteen ($1,100) sums up the season’s look, but I found other styles, too, like Alexander Wang’s paper-bagged trousers in dark gray wool ($495) and a pair of muddy glen-plaid pegged trousers by Piazza Sempione ($695), a label many women like for its consistent fit. Lanvin also had a sharp-looking pair of pegged tweed trousers, but at $1,250, you have to start rationalizing.

It’s curious the things you see when you’re looking for contemporary fashion as well as good value. After my attention at Bloomingdale’s was drawn to a well-made knitted coat in cream wool with a rolled collar by Nanette Lepore ($650) and a cute navy wool-jersey dress by James Perse ($240), I saw across the floor a sleeveless blouse in papery taffeta with a spill of rock-star ruffles down the front. Made by Vince ($165), it was a dead ringer for a L’Wren Scott blouse.

For the most part, though, cheap blouses look just that. Nearly every store has some version of the stock-tied, lantern-sleeved or Victorian frilled blouse, but I hate to think how all that drippy polyester crepe will look on sale racks next season. This is one item where it’s worth trading up, especially since a blouse with a great pair of trousers or a slinky gold sequined skirt, like Proenza Schouler’s ($850), can make such a statement. The creamy silk crepe blouses shown by Mr. Jacobs and Oscar de la Renta, with a slightly asymmetrical tie, look best. There are more affordable variations by Doo.Ri, Thakoon and Sari Gueron, from $495 to $695.

Although the swirling prints of Dries Van Noten hold a certain artsy charm, the Russian-inspired paisleys and foulards that Frida Giannini did for Gucci have more kick, it seems to me. Six months after looking at that collection, at the modern proportions, the black tights and high fringed boots, the mix of prints with tough fur or leather jackets, it still has energy and muscle. Unfortunately, shoppers will have to be content with looking at the Zara knockoffs. In the Gucci flagship on Fifth Avenue, I looked with apathy at the preseason merchandise begging at the rails. Take me, take me. Fat chance. I knew about the good stuff.

It was a similar story at Yves Saint Laurent — a collection that led in every trend — and at the new Jil Sander shop in SoHo. The runway pieces hadn’t arrived.

“Come back in September,” a Saint Laurent salesman almost sang.

But ...

“They’re samples,” a saleswoman at Jil Sander said, referring to a display of gorgeous tweed dresses.

Let’s hope the entire fall season is not a figment of my imagination

The Feminine Side of Goth

2008-08-13T18:53:00.001-07:00

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: August 12, 2008

“SO, I was at Les Deux Cafés in Los Angeles a few years ago,” enthused Nancy, who wears Rick Owens as often as possible, and was telling me why. “I was sitting by the door in a halter top, shivering a little. And this drop-dead fabulous older woman comes in: tiny-skinny, smoking; wild, black witchy-woman hair; wearing this very clingy Morticia-Addams-meets-Ginger-Rogers look, with her skirt dragging on the floor. Gobs of big wonderful rings. She looks at me and asks in her French accent, ‘Are you cold?’ And she rips this absolutely incredible leather jacket off her body and throws it around my shoulders.”

“Then she sashays away, looks at me over her shoulder, wags her finger and says, ‘Don’t forget, on your way out!’ ”

“Did she instantly become your role model for life?”

“Completely. So, she turns out to be Michele Lamy, the owner of Les Deux. Everything she’s wearing is Rick Owens, because he’s her lover. She’s his muse. She’s significantly older, but he fell madly in love with her when he was a crazy twentysomething bisexual. I never wanted to take that jacket off!”

Rick Owens’s star began its vertical ascent as soon as Los Angeles stores began carrying his designs: drape-y, rough-looking creations in gorgeous materials, wrought into a style he has dubbed “glunge” (grunge plus glamour), which tends to give the wearer an appearance of emerging from the lips of a huge, slightly tattered flower.

His new boutique — big, white and stark — is, like a lot of Owens creations, still unfinished around the edges. But this blind spot has been turned into an advantage. If Mr. Owens were an architect, he would make beautiful ruins.

When I arrived at the shop, Nancy, in the spirit of Madame Lamy, was already swaddled in a long, lean sable coat, moaning with pleasure.

“How much is it?” she asked Antino Angel Crowley, one of Mr. Owens’s willowy, tattooed, beautiful employees. “It’s an apartment, right?”

“Basically,” Mr. Crowley replied. “It’s $65,000. Which isn’t bad, if you think about it.”

I tried it, and agreed: not bad. Actually, it was a poem.

“You wouldn’t need an apartment,” I said, half-joking. “This coat is like youth and sex and butter all at the same time. You could sleep on the sidewalk and you would never feel a lack. You wouldn’t even need love.” This coat might have humanized Leona Helmsley.

In 2003, Mr. Owens became the designer for Revillon, a label that has been wrapping women in fur since 1723. Later I read an Owens quotation encapsulating his approach to Revillon:

“It’s about an elegance being tinged with a bit of the barbaric, the sloppiness of something dragging and the luxury of not caring. At Revillon, I felt it wasn’t about displaying one’s wealth, but rather giving the woman a selfish pleasure. It is about using sable as the lining under a very humble jacket, the luxury is all hers.”

A mink cave-girl stole ($22,344) and a sheared mink coat with amorously wrapping tentacles ($43,610) echoed this sentiment.

RICK OWENS designs are decidedly kinetic; the pieces are made to elongate lines of movement in three dimensions, whereas most clothing is spatially flat — conscious mainly in front and back, and best when standing still. The store employees, hanging around in these slouchy, body-conscious shapes, resemble a modern-dance company.

I tried on a smoky brown, flared coat with a cowl neck and wobbling zipper that Bea Arthur might wear in “The Matrix IV” ($4,214). It inspired fooling around in the mirror; the perfect swing-weight of the coat added an ideal billowing slo-mo effect to my bullet-dodging Keanu back bend.

Nancy tried a pair of bias-cut trousers ($995) — very sexy and sharp for something as comfy as lounge wear. The hemless hem was dragging around the unswept stone floor collecting dust, to the admiration of the staff boys, who approved of this Kate Hepburn-in-a-vacant-lot-like spectacle.

I tried a pleated Art Deco Egyptian goddess-skort. It took three tries to get both legs through the proper holes in the light-free dressing room, but once on, it was very tempting to refuse to take it off until the price ($1,136) came down.

Mr. Owens’s aesthetic sometimes requires more hippy élan than one might be capable of.

William Streng, another tattooed sales-beauty in unlaced combat boots, pulled the mohair sleeves of a $568 V-neck sweater down over my fingers.

“But I can’t see my watch!” I complained.

“Who cares?” he shrugged. “Time stops.”

He had a point.

Mr. Streng was wearing a sheer rayon tank top ($245), frayed into hanging clots at the hem. I’ve always thought it sound to buy good clothes and wear them until they rot. With Rick Owens, this is especially true, because entropy is built in as a plus factor: the tatters look better with age. Like a security blanket, the holes are proof of enduring love.

The mystique of Michele Lamy, a chanteuse with two gold front teeth, is evident all over, but especially in a shelf full of little vicious-looking rat monsters made from sable scraps.

“Those are stash bags,” Nancy whispered.

“How much?” Mr. Crowley asked Mr. Streng.

“They are five, I think.”

“Hundred?”

“Thousand.”

Formidable.

THERE is something both exhilarating and exhausting about super-hipness — its demands can inspire both admiration and a slightly desolate feeling. Hanging out on certain couches can seem as arduous as a camping trip.

The Owens-Lamy Paris home, the former headquarters of the French Socialist Party, was described by Paper magazine as “gargantuan” and “bunker-like.”

But the clothes, for all their Gothic fury, are deliriously feminine.

Mr. Owens has said he is inspired by Lou Reed’s music. This makes sense: crudely simple melodies sung in an unpretty voice, but suspended in the excruciating tension of an almost unbearably delicate softness and sensitivity.

This mood can create anxiety, like sitting under a lead-glass chandelier that would crash down if not for the brilliant efforts of a single heroic spider. But unsettling settings also inspire relaxed inhibitions, creating the possibility for sudden intimacies to occur between strangers.

Are you cold? Here!

The sable, mes amis, is on the inside.

Summering in the City? Give the Plaza a Whirl

2008-08-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

By DAN LEVIN
Published: August 8, 2008

FOR those fortunate New Yorkers who use the word summer as a verb, weeknights in the city during this humid season can be woefully lacking in socially aspirational activities.

What luck then that the recently renovated Plaza Hotel’s gilded new lounge, the Rose Club, opened in July, just in time to offer them a fresh urban haven where they can unwind for an evening — until they flee to the South Fork on Fridays.

As a first-time visitor ascends the marble staircase from the Plaza’s Fifth Avenue lobby, it can take a few moments to adjust to the faint lighting that bathes the crowd in a uniform pink glow.

Perched on an antique chair in a corner, Hilary Downing, 21, was relishing a glass of pinot grigio. “I like that I can sit here and not get kicked out for bottle service,” she said. Still, she wondered if the scene clashed with the lavish décor. “Everyone here is a hipster with long hair and a fedora, and all the girls have perms,” she said. “But I love the wood.”

At the top of the mahogany staircase by the bar, a silver-haired man gyrated to Depeche Mode as waiters carrying cocktails swerved to avoid him.

Karin Agstam, an actress from Sweden, was grooving, too. “I love the Plaza,” she said. “You can dance if you want to, and they’re much more careful at the door.”

For many Rose Bar patrons, the Plaza Hotel address is not only brag-worthy, but convenient. “All our friends live above 57th street, so it’s a great spot for a nightcap,” said Arthur Zeckendorf, 21, a college student and son of the luxury property developer of the same name. Does he normally drink on school nights? “We heard some kid was having a birthday party,” he said.

His friend Jared Baumeister, 26, was celebrating more-scholarly pursuits. “I’m supposed to be studying for the bar exam,” he said. “I blew it off the last six weeks, but everyone says you have to get serious after July 4th.” It was advice he had taken seriously. “I hadn’t had a drink in five days,” he said, beer in hand.

Around 2:30 a.m., they were ready to go. “Your car’s here,” Mr. Baumeister said to Mr. Zeckendorf as they stepped out of the hotel.

“I don’t drive,” Mr. Zeckendorf replied.

Mr. Baumeister laughed. “No dude, your chauffeur,” he said, and off they headed toward Fifth Avenue.

The Rose Club At the Plaza

Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, (212) 546-5311

GETTING IN Reservations only after 10 p.m. (and you’d better know superpromoter Danny A., who compiles the list).

DRESS CODE Pinstripes and plaid for men; cocktail dresses and animal prints for women.

SIGNATURE DRINK Park Side Smash (Hennessy VS Cognac, lemon wedges, organic mint leaves; $23).

They’ll Take Manhattan, in Cash

2008-08-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: August 3, 2008
NEGIN FARSAD, a filmmaker and comedian who lives in the East Village, recalled a time not long ago when European friends would visit New York to see her, and not, she said, to use her apartment as a “temporary locker for their shopping bags.”

Ms. Farsad, 32, recently escorted two friends from London on the inevitable Europeans-clean-out-the-Apple-store shopping excursion, where they bought a MacBook Pro for nearly $3,000, plus hundreds of dollars worth of extra memory (why not?), and continued on a spree that included East Village boutiques and Bloomingdale’s downtown. During the evenings, the couple — both of whom work in television production back home — dined at downtown restaurants and partied at a chic bars, without concern as to cost.

“I remember the next morning, my friend looked in her wallet and said, ‘Oh, apparently I spent $165 buying three rounds of shots for everybody,’ ” Ms. Farsad recalled.

“Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “but here, they’re like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995.”

This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.

But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.

Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).

“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”

Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”

Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.

She said the point was driven home to her on a recent trip to Bergdorf Goodman to help her fiancé select a pair of shoes to go with his tuxedo for their wedding.

Wearing the sort of outfit that usually acts as a siren for department store salespeople — a Tory Burch shift dress and Jimmy Choo slingback heels — she instead found herself waiting behind a European couple in sneakers and bike shorts who “had made such massive purchases that we couldn’t get anyone to give us the time of day for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.

The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”

She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”

Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.

Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.

These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.

Yes, she is jealous of friends like the one from London, who arrives with empty suitcases, ready to buy her fall wardrobe. But, she added, she tries to keep it in perspective. Last year, she went to Vietnam and enjoyed evenings of fine dining for 10 people at less than $20 a person, where, she said, “I felt like I was in my own Candyland.”

The number of international travelers who will visit New York in June, July and August is expected to rise by about 118,000 from 3.12 million last summer (that number itself was a record —and an estimated 20-percent jump from 2006), according to forecasts by NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing bureau.

Meanwhile, the euro has hovered near record highs against the dollar all summer; it is up 22 percent in the last two years, and since 2001, has nearly doubled against the dollar. Over the last five years, the yen is up nearly 12 percent against the dollar, the British pound 23 percent, the Swiss franc nearly 31 percent, the Danish krone 42 percent, the Australian dollar nearly 45 percent.

Feeling flush, foreign visitors are noticeably more lavish in their spending habits, said some New York merchants and restaurateurs.

Richard Thomas, the marketing director of Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, said he has seen a surge of European clients this summer, and even visitors who appear to be of humbler origins than the usual Gucci-clad jet-setters are now “willing to play in the arena of bottle service,” he said, referring to the practice where drinks are purchased only a bottle at a time, for hundreds of dollars or more.

These are “people with more modest incomes, who wouldn’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey, let me get a table’ if they’re back home in London, where it’s too expensive to go to Boujis,” Mr. Thomas said, referring to a popular club in that city’s Kensington district. “But in New York, they can get away with it.”

EYTAN SUGARMAN, who is an owner, along with his partners, Trace Ayala and Justin Timberlake, of the restaurant Southern Hospitality on the Upper East Side, said it is not unusual this summer to see foreign tourists order a few different entrees apiece, just to taste, and not finish any of them.

City officials and business owners welcome such extravagance. Many have hailed New York’s wave of tourists as a major factor keeping the city economy afloat during a troubled economic period.

At EOS New York, a boutique watch and accessories store in the West Village, the customer base is now about 70 percent international tourist, said the company’s owner, Mukul Lalchandani. “Needless to say, with the bad economy, we could use that extra boost of traffic,” he said.

At Buddakan, the hangar-like pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district, foreign traffic has increased by 20 to 30 percent in the last four months, said the owner, Stephen Starr.

“It’s a wonderful thing that in a tough climate economically, you sort of have this insurance policy of foreign money,” Mr. Starr said. “And to be honest with you, it’s great to be in a restaurant and to hear so many different languages. It adds to the theater of the experience.”

NYC & Company calculated that spending by international tourists rose 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. While that agency does not finish compiling statistics for tourist spending during the summer months until the end of the year, such trends usually hold strong through the warmer months, said Tiffany Townsend, an agency spokeswoman.

Earlier this decade, it was Americans snapping up bargains on the Champs-Élysées.

Marie Monte, 23, a law student from Paris who was vacationing in New York last week, said she felt sorry for today’s currency-challenged Americans. “But I remember,” she said, “it was not a very long time ago, it was much more difficult, when the money here was very strong. If you wanted to go to New York on holiday, you didn’t know what you would be able to do there.” While some New Yorkers may wrestle with envy, others admit that the trend has its side benefits, too.

Sarah Geary, a British-born marketing director for Mulberry, the English fashion company, often finds herself working pro bono for her British friends as tour guide, personal shopper and cartographer (she draws them a map of insider New York cool, starting at Barneys, meandering through the meatpacking district for stops at stores like Scoop and Jeffrey, then ending downtown for dinner at places like Freemans or Socialista).

In return, the visitors are unusually willing to pick up the check at the end of the day. “They will literally say, ‘Come meet me for dinner — and bring some friends!’ ” Ms. Geary said.

“That,” she said, “is something British people never do.”

At Magazine Offices, Another Summer of Jitney No-Shows

2008-07-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

By LAUREN LIPTON
Published: July 20, 2008

THINGS were touch-and-go at Glamour on July 3. Many employees at the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast, had the go-ahead to leave work early for the long holiday weekend. But for those toiling feverishly on Glamour’s September issue, the possibility was up in the air until the last minute. By the time Ayana Byrd, an articles editor, left at 5 p.m., the elevators that Glamour shares with magazines including Portfolio, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker felt deserted.

In their July and August issues, Glamour features the perfect $795 beach hat; O, The Oprah Magazine, shares recipes for an alfresco dinner party; and Vogue suggests a Caribbean getaway. It’s time to relax and have fun. Except, that is, for the employees at women’s magazines, who every summer find themselves languishing in the office towers of Hearst, Condé Nast, Time Inc. and other publishing companies.

At stake are the fashion-packed, advertising-filled September and October issues, which ship to the presses in July and August and are always subject to such intense scrutiny by top editors and their corporate bosses that late changes are almost guaranteed. This year, as the women’s publishing sector contends with declining advertising in most cases, and smaller staffs and major design changes in some, there is an unwelcome new twist: the traditional half-day on summer Fridays is starting to look like an endangered species.

An industry tradition that for years let publishing employees leave by lunch for the Hamptons Jitney or a drive upstate is being canceled this season at Martha Stewart Living. Instead, the company is giving employees two Fridays and the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. At Elle, summer hours that until last year went into effect on Memorial Day weekend now don’t start until July. And at In Style, which unveiled a major redesign on Friday with its August issue and is still closing the September one, summer hours are being considered on a “week by week, hour by hour” basis, said Charla Lawhon, the managing editor. “Everyone is much more on the ground this year because we have more work to do.”

To be sure, busy summers are not new at women’s magazines, and most employees understand that they come with the job. Although fall is an important time for all magazines, women’s titles are particularly dependent on advertising from fashion designers and retailers, who take advantage of the change of seasons to tout their collections to readers generally eager to get out and shop. Vogue, for example, does about 20 percent of its annual advertising business with the September issue, said Thomas A. Florio, senior vice president and publishing director of the Vogue group.

But with April, May and June ad pages sharply down at most women’s fashion and beauty magazines, there is more pressure than usual to do well this fall. Some publications, like Glamour and In Style, are redesigning their magazines. Skittish advertisers are also making more editorial demands. “It’s definitely pushed up a notch — ‘feature my clothes, do a profile on me,’ ” said Carol A. Smith, senior vice president and group publishing director of Elle, where ad pages were up for April, May and June over the same period last year.

At Seventeen, the September back-to-school issue had about 25 percent more pages than a normal issue, with no additional help other than an army of summer interns. “It’s a brutal grind,” said Ann Shoket, the magazine’s editor in chief. “When Friday afternoon rolls around, I can hear everyone’s cellphones ringing, and I see the resignation in their faces because we’ve got to ship more pages.”

Ms. Byrd, of Glamour, had her strategy figured out this year. She left for a two-week vacation in late April, before her magazine’s fall issues started production, editing and turning in her stories before flying to a wedding in Greece. “When I came back, we had a new creative director,” she said — and a complete redesign of the magazine. That meant Ms. Byrd had to rethink and rework articles that she had thought she’d finished. “You come back from vacation like, la-di-dah — oh, O.K.,” she said.

This year, Ms. Shoket took work with her to the Hamptons on Fourth of July weekend. (“It’s the chic new accessory — page proofs,” she said.) Cindi Leive, the editor in chief of Glamour, said she hasn’t had a Fourth of July since 1992.

Still, another tradition in magazine publishing — top editors leaving early while underlings are left behind — hasn’t entirely been overturned. Earlier this summer, the glass hives within the Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue buzzed with drones working late, yet Amy Gross, the editor in chief of O, could be seen going down the lobby escalator more than one Thursday afternoon, a bright yellow rolling bag in tow. (Ms. Gross, who retired this month, traveled often on business, said a spokeswoman for the magazine. “If someone saw her with a suitcase, that would not have been the least bit unusual,” she said.)

While publishing companies attribute the changes in summer hours to everything from fluctuations in printing schedules to, at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, increased business in both its media and retail areas, publishing insiders suspect other forces are at play. In the tough economy, it’s more about squeezing as much as possible from fewer employees, some say, and jobs are so scarce that nobody is going to complain.

Shea Daspin is one who’s not complaining. An intern at Interview and new to the city, she has worked long hours on the culture magazine’s September fashion issue. “Obviously I like to get out when it’s light out so I can go for a run or something, but I don’t mind if my internship takes up my whole day,” she said. “I don’t go to the Hamptons or anything.”

Fashion and beauty magazine employees also get perks those at other companies don’t enjoy. In Style gives its people summer goody bags, which this year included books, bronzer and a Rihanna CD. At Marie Claire, Joyce Corrigan, senior editor at large, said that the beauty department is always setting out free sunscreen and that there is “a ridiculous amount of chocolate around to keep the energy up.”

Still, some can’t shake the feeling that summer shouldn’t be this way. An intern at Condé Nast is envious of friends with internships in other fields. “They’re out having their cool New York summer,” the intern said in an e-mail message. “Those of us in the magazine world are here past dinner, and then by the time we leave are far too tired to go out drinking. I guess it’s a good thing. It’s an honor that they take us seriously enough to work us this hard. But, man, I’d love a nap.”

Paris Couture Catch-Up

2008-07-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

By TESS GOLDEN

The Chanel couture show at the Grand Palais in Paris. (Getty Images)

The ancient ritual of Paris’s couture shows began yesterday. (Note to the uninitiated: it’s much more haute not to use the h-word in connection with couture.) And while the one-of-a-kind superfrocks on the runway will never find their way into a boutique, die-hard fashion followers won’t want to miss a single bow. To keep you apprised, we’ve pulled together a digest of what’s being reported on the fashion wires. Here goes.

Chanel (above)

Organ-inspired tubes “dangled from a dress like gothic car-wash strips.” (International Herald Tribune)
“The kind of canny mix that has made the ponytailed Lagerfeld designer a pop culture icon.” (Associated Press)
“With clothes like these, who needs accoutrements?” (Fashion Week Daily)

Christian Lacroix. (Reuters/EPA)

Christian Lacroix

“Only a dull mind could ask for any literal explanation.” (Style.com)
“Minimalists be warned! This is not for you.” (Telegraph)
“Fit for a latter-day Marie-Antoinette.” (Associated Press)
“Even the most jaded observer forgets that these are clothes. They just have too much heart to be, technically, inanimate.” (Fashion Week Daily)

Christian Dior. (Reuters/EPA)

Christian Dior

“Irrepressible touches of perversity.” (Style.com)
“If couture offers fairy-tale gowns, however, there was something here for both its good and deliciously wicked characters.” (The Independent)
“Underlying the attention-seeking transparency, however, was a meticulous attention to sculptural cut and architectural shape.” (Telegraph)

Armani Privé. (Getty/Reuters)

Armani Privé

“The Power Woman, he seemed to say, is still around, but her hard-won confidence allows her to work a softer, more glamorous, look.” (Women’s Wear Daily)
“Softening the androgyny of the pantsuit and bringing peace to fashion’s gender warfare.” (International Herald Tribune)
“He neatly consigned the dour look of corporate uniform to the past.” (Style.com)
“Everything the well-dressed and well-heeled wealthy woman of today could conceivably want in her wardrobe” (Telegraph)

Givenchy. (EPA)

Givenchy

“The designer took his collection into the high heartland of Peru, where he created a landscape of Machu Picchu colors like tobacco brown and stony beige.” (International Herald Tribune)
“‘Young, modern, and urban take on chic dressing, punctuated with incisive tailoring and a flair for intense shots of decoration.” (Style.com)

Paris Couture: Smoke & Roses

2008-07-12T19:52:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN

One of the haute-couture pieces designed by Alessandra Facchinetti for Valentino.
Alessandra Facchinetti showed her first haute couture collection tonight for Valentino. It was held in the Place Vendôme showroom of Valentino, a little more intimate than most places here. She did a great job. This collection was so much more interesting than her ready-to-wear show, and, of course, you might expect something a little higher up for couture. But there was more expression and feeling—more work—in this collection. The first outfit was a little strange, in my opinion—a white silk jacket with an egg-shaped skirt. The proportions looked off to me, and the whole thing looked strained.

But things moved along. There are a lot of architectural clothes—stiffened edges curling, the back of a jacket pointing out, some modified egg shapes. These looks showed a range and a bit of willingness to try new things, and they were a good contrast to the softer dresses—by far my favorite things. She had one simple dress (#2) that was in pale taupe chiffon with some mohair ruffles, and another loose dress in smoky brown chiffon that was open and slightly ruffled around the neckline. Very pretty. Her embroidered suits were gutsy—very Valentino but fresh looking. I thought she completely captured the sense of Valentino but made it more youthful. I can imagine lots of women, young or old, being interested in the clothes. As I said, I’m not wild about some of the architectural effects—they were a little fashion-schoolish. But mixed in with the dresses and the smart suits, they’re fine.

On the whole, I found the season a little weak. I loved Chanel, mainly because I like Lagerfeld’s weird tangents. You just have to go with it and enjoy! The collection seems on the darker Germanic side, and I honestly don’t know how much the pipe-organ theme really mattered to him in the end. His mind seems to go everywhere…

Dior was a pleasure to watch. The colors were beautiful, the fabrics light, and of course I was glad to see a change of direction from Galliano. I kept thinking that most of the suits and dresses would look better, more interesting, if he reduced them down—cut them away, so to speak. Dior is romantic, and Galliano has shown us things before he thought were contemporary. The Matrix collection, for sure. The hobo show. And the couture collection based on dance. What separates them from this show in terms of a contemporary point of view? And how do you make romance look contemporary? I hope he stays on this track, but leaves behind more of the retro Dior bits. I don’t think he needs them.

Givenchy was disappointing. It didn’t seem couture to me: too many things like motorcycle jackets and denim pieces that had been tweaked to seem more “designed” than they actually were. I mean, after Raf Simons’ men’s show last week you have look at his standard of introducing new shapes and then ask if Tisci is really showing us something different. The stuff is on the surface.

The Gaultier show was funny and strange, a kind of toast (I think) to science fiction and lasers. I don’t know. It was all over the place. Some great classic pieces, and some of the tubular evening dresses were OTT.

Paris: Showing Off

2008-07-10T03:48:00.001-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
The French are feeling as economically pinched as Americans, but I get the sense they are busting to look fashionable. I’ve noticed it all day as I go around to shows and look at people on the streets. Heading to Montmartre, I saw a young woman—20s, thin, medium height—in a pair of slim gray shorts that ended mid-thigh, a loose navy popover top, and a classic pair of black stilettos. Super chic. I’ve seen slim-fitting shorts with a sailor front, worn with chunky black sandals and a cream silk blouse. The look is tailored and sexy. And there are lots of women in mini skirts; this afternoon I saw a woman in a flaring navy cotton skirt with a red and white striped polo shirt. The best-looking dress at the moment seems to be a dark tunic. I’ve noticed a lot of the guys in the front row also wearing shorts, especially as a kind of nerd school-boy uniform with knee socks and maybe a pastel vest and a tie. And it’s a little surprising how many shows have hats—the porkpie, the scarecrow, the snap-brim. Shades of next summer…

The Paris Accord

2008-07-10T03:40:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: July 3, 2008

PARIS
ANNA PIAGGI, the eccentrically painted and plumed editor at Italian Vogue, opened her red parasol at the Chanel haute couture show and sat under it. This was, technically, inviting bad luck, for she was indoors, under the glass dome of the Grand Palais. The sun beat down.

It was like a bell jar, and we were all plants. Ms. Piaggi sought shade, her little red parasol as vivid as a laser dot.

In contrast to high summer and the Paris girls in skimmy dresses, Karl Lagerfeld’s embroidered couture tweeds could not help but seem as heavy as six dusty volumes of Thomas Mann brought down from a forgotten library shelf. Plop! Here you are, fashionable people. Digest this!

A great Chanel collection from Mr. Lagerfeld is not necessarily an interesting collection. It often lacks interior drama, personal obsessions or the weird assertions of an individual mind. At whatever age Mr. Lagerfeld claims to be, he has the right, and certainly the ability, to make his audience uncomfortable — even to disappoint them — if it means he can try on a new idea. As a couturier, he doesn’t have to justify himself. As Mr. Lagerfeld, he doesn’t have to explain.

He says he found the theme for his fall collection, shown on Tuesday, in some organ music. The shape of the pipes inspired the fluted pleats at the waists of gray tweed dresses and dark wool coats, and the bellows may have given him the idea for lavishly puffed sleeves. A gold-embroidered coat overlaid with black strips of fabric in a chevron pattern could have been taken from the ornate wood front of an organ.

Yet, on some level, you can imagine that tubular shapes — vermicelli fringe — would drive him up the wall. The heavy tweeds, the needle-like embroidery and the Germanic darkness seem to come from other, more interesting places in his imagination. A good many effects in this collection will seem strange, like a long dress with short sleeves shaped like square seat cushions or a short silk dress with a turtle back of densely gathered tulle. But you wonder if they are strange only to us because we lack some depth of imagination or culture.

Mr. Lagerfeld said he was going to Dubai this weekend to work on an interior design project. (He did a Fendi show on the Great Wall last year.) And he said that Chanel now has some Russian couture clients who buy 30 to 35 pieces a season. By what impulse today would Mr. Lagerfeld think small and dainty? This might explain his fascination for monolithic backdrops and bold, if puzzling, silhouettes.

A contemporary Dior is a conundrum. It seemed obvious from the full swells and simple lines, the fresh clear colors and subtle embroidery, that John Galliano wants a change. On Monday, he jettisoned the extreme retro shapes and cross-cultural references of the last few years for ultra-feminine dresses and architectural tailoring.

Waists were cinched with leather corset belts, and some jackets had stiff, curving peplums that flared over slim chiffon skirts. Lisa Fonssagrives, the late wife of the photographer Irving Penn, was a reference, and in the outline of some of the black jackets or a slim pastel evening dress draped with billowing yards of silk, you could detect her influence.

But fresher and cleaner doesn’t make Dior contemporary. It just makes it seem, well, less retro. The thing is, we don’t know what makes romantic Dior look up-to-date. Mr. Galliano has defined it in so many different ways. One hopes he will stay on this track, cutting down the shapes even more and moving the romance away from the past.

Last season, Mr. Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier both looked to the sea for inspiration. Today, Mr. Gaultier had tubular loops of fabric running over shoulders and around hems. It’s not that wonderful an idea. Mr. Gaultier’s fur coats came caged in leather straps, and tunics and knits with flaring hems evoked a comic-book futurism. Not all the classic Gaultier tailoring seemed on the same planet as laser-colored tube dresses, but it was a fun show.

“A Trip to Machu Picchu,” Riccardo Tisci’s collection for Givenchy, aimed to be contemporary. There were bomber jackets in boiled cashmere and waxed leather, cool skirts, Bermudas in stone-washed denim worn over silk jersey leggings, and some draped cocktail dresses in violet silk satin. And several ensembles in striped boiled wool, as well as a vest of woven yak hair, had Machu Picchu written all over them. But Mr. Tisci doesn’t reveal anything with his designs. It is not clear that he has actually designed something so much as taken conventional shapes and tweaked them and called them couture.

“From shadow to asphalt,” Christian Lacroix wrote in the sketchy notes for his show on Tuesday at the Pompidou Center. Only a colorist and a romantic like Mr. Lacroix could find so much variation in black. The collection was heavenly — mysterious through and through, with black in shiny and matte fabrics, paired with its close cousin navy, lightened with Chantilly lace, and often shot with a burst of color.

As somber and smoothly finessed as some of the tailoring was — close-fitting black jackets with subtle embroidery or an edge of creamy silk at the neckline — it was countered with lush skirt volumes. The effect looked fresh. A dress with a beige-pink silk top, its cap sleeves glazed with crystals, had a pleated overskirt with shadowy black stripes. Off in its own Lacroix world was a short slim dress with a front of patchwork felt.

In Milan, All Masculinity, No Pretense

2008-06-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

By GUY TREBAY
Published: June 26, 2008

“FASHION needs to generate dreams,” Roberto Cavalli said before his show here on Sunday. Figuring in the dreams of the always optimistic Mr. Cavalli this season, according to his show notes, was an “extravagant man who explores, a hippie, a nomad who wears his memories from safari on himself.”

The designer then went on to further list his inspirations: “Africa’s savage and sublime atmosphere, Magnificent colors of Morocco, Paul Bowles’ Berber fascination in ‘The Sheltering Sky,’ Devendra Banhart’s neo-hippy bohemian attitude.”

Fashion, in one’s experience of it lately, generates many things, but dreams ... not so much. Certainly it is a reliable source of amusement, particularly when you consider the gap between what is going on in designers’ minds and how that translates to what men wear. Pajamas, for instance, were seen all over the runways in the collections for spring and summer 2009, shown here through Wednesday.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking,” said Tom Kalenderian, the vice president for men’s wear at Barneys New York. Hardly anyone wears pajamas to bed, Mr. Kalenderian added, let alone to work.

This critic’s personal inspirations for the season here, should anyone wish to know, included the savage, sublime atmosphere along the via Pietro Verri on Monday when Tom Ford opened his new five-floor Temple of Testosterone, nearly inspiring a riot as party guests clamored to get past guards in order to ogle the $5,000 suits, $1,700 shoes and crocodile weekend bags.

Tucked away in a top-floor sanctum, like the idol in a Hindu temple, perma-bronzed and sweat-dewed (Italy is still coming to terms with newfangled inventions like air-conditioning), was the Texan himself. Recently hired to dress Daniel Craig in the new James Bond film, “Quantum of Solace,” Mr. Ford has remarked lately that he is his own customer.

He is equally his own fantasy creation, one who, like the early -film Bond, cultivates an aura of suave tastes and manly appetites that have been lifted from a pop cultural grab bag— Savile Row, old Hollywood, comic strips.

Unlike a Bond martini, the ones served at smart Milanese fashion parties this week came in shot glasses and with a single anomalous raspberry crowding the precious thimbleful of gin and vermouth. The music at those parties, and at many shows, was similarly bastardized, a combination of remixed dance tracks from the 1970s that sampled the spooky ethereal voice of Minnie Riperton in her whistle register, or that mined the tinny effects and pretentious lyrics of the Brooklyn-based band MGMT.

AFFECTATION can be charming, it’s true, but so can things that make no pretense at being other than what they are. The new Gommino loafers Tod’s introduced this week look stitch for stitch like the old Gommino loafers, except that they are rendered in luscious jewel colors.

There is something instructive about a label’s refusal to alter, beyond the occasional aesthetic tweak, a business formula based on a simple $395 driving shoe that has driven Tod’s to billion-dollar profitability. The spring collections for next year are primarily about bottom-line calculations, with fashion houses showing clothes that were mainly conservative, mostly monotone, and if a mite commercial and bland, appropriate for tough economic times.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.”

In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

She placed straps inside coats so the wearer could shrug the garment off his shoulders as one would a backpack. She toyed with long shirts worn over shorts in a way that suggested one was abroad in his skivvies. She used proportions that bared slivers of skin between shirt and waistband. She avoided ties and collars and left chests bared to create a kind of male décolletage.
She also made finely proportioned trousers that were full in the leg without becoming hip-hop clownish and whose waistbands sat just at the pelvic bone; and coats of translucent rubber that gave one the shivers, not because they seemed like the usual designer allusion to fetish wear but because they referenced nature with tender artistry. More than anything, they looked like cloaks of kelp.

Somewhere Ms. Prada said something about her collection combining elements of fragility and power. Somewhere Donatella Versace said that her collection was either inspired by or dedicated to Barack Obama. Somewhere (The International Herald Tribune, actually) Alexander McQueen said his collection was “smoke and mirrors translated into clothes.” Somewhere the designer Raf Simons said his Jil Sander collection was “a determined abstraction of nature and life.”

Sometimes it seems that the only way to survive a week of austere but anatomically implausible designs (Sander); Cirque du Soleil illusion effects (McQueen); chirpy Miss America assertions (Versace); and generally vaporous claims on the part of designers about the meanings behind what, after all, amount to racks of trousers and shirts, is to keep a supply of tiny martinis at hand. Hold the raspberry, please.

Among the folks one rarely hears waxing poetic about inspiration are Tomas Maier, Angela Missoni and Christopher Bailey. What these three designers seem to have in common is an aversion to showboating and a deep understanding of what corporate types call brand DNA.

Season after season, Mr. Maier refines a vocabulary and a look that have been more influential than people let on. His snug jackets, taut armholes, roped (formerly pagoda) shoulders and ostentatiously plain but luxurious materials recall the John Held 1920s as they were reinterpreted in the gay 1970s, as do the voluminous trousers with deep crumb-catcher cuffs.

If it was an adman, Peter Rogers, who first coined the Bottega Veneta slogan, “When Your Own Initials Are Enough,” it is Mr. Maier who carried the idea forward, branding a look without a logo in sight.

It is no small accomplishment to have created an unmistakable brand identity out of a handful of patterns in yarn, as did Tai and Rosita Missoni, the founders of the knitwear label that bears their family name, and which is designed by their daughter Angela. And it requires considerable humility to work from a template created by one’s mom and dad. Yet Ms. Missoni’s collection of shorts and safari jackets in sharp, almost acid colors, detailed in patterns of broken stripes, had a confident feeling, like a quirky riff on a jazz standard, something minor key but endearing, like a Blossom Dearie song.

Christopher Bailey’s Burberry show evoked another kind of music and a different breed of musician, the chicken-chested rockers you might see in Hoxton or Williamsburg. It is probably high time for those guys to lose the wallet chains and corduroy Levis and take some of the money from lucrative deals every garage band seems to be making and put it toward one of Mr. Bailey’s elongated scoop-neck cardigans, narrow trousers in mossy colors or skim-weight three-quarter length coats.

Cooler still would be a band dressed up in the Day-Glo suits that Italo Zucchelli sent out on Tuesday in a Calvin Klein collection that was cleanly proportioned, cut to suit a body type that, while not steroid-muscled, is clearly athletic, this in itself a break from the trend of recent seasons to show men’s clothes on underfed boys.

Before Calvin Klein (when it was being designed by Calvin Klein himself) became an extended porn loop passing itself off as a mass-market label, Mr. Klein’s clothes made a persuasive case for showcasing the newly toned male physique. Clothes were required to suit the broad shoulders, narrow waists and levels of aerobic fitness many guys worked so hard to attain. Mr. Klein provided them. Mr. Zucchelli does again.

The Nordic waifs favored by casting agents for other designers would look pretty pitiful in the knee-length fencing trousers or cleanly squared suits by Mr. Zucchelli. So would anybody who’d slacked off on treadmill and let himself to go to pot. Tailoring, as Mr. Ford recently told me, is great for concealing one’s anatomical flaws. A little shoulder padding helps offset a large head. Wide lapels narrow a bull neck. A deep suit vent adds length to a torso.

But there is only so much a designer can do about a widening middle except provide inspiration to stave it off. As much as anything else, Mr. Zucchelli’s fine collection was a manifesto against the muffin top.

Soft Touches, Too Heavy-Handed

2008-06-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: July 1, 2008
PARIS

Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
YVES SAINT LAURENT A silk suit worn with a sweater and suede belt.
Whether designers have been looking at the same art, reading the same books or just wishing they were anyplace but here, their spring 2009 men’s collections seem to have hit the same wall. They aren’t so much about real dreams and opinions as random thoughts.

So there is a meaninglessness about the collections, which ended on Sunday, and more than the usual serving. It’s odd to look at all the femmy touches — the puffed-sleeve blouses (can we use that word?) at Lanvin, the soft cowl-neck sweaters at Louis Vuitton, the ruffles at Comme des Garçons and Number (N)ine — and actually think that fashion is having this discussion. Now. Haven’t we had it before?

Milan designers were also obsessed with ambiguous states of gender, revealing a clavicle, um, in an arresting way. But it’s doubtful that most men care, and if they are young and already love the freak-show possibilities of fashion, they are not going to find new material here for their act.

The modern exception is Raf Simons. His show on Saturday provided a blueprint for how clothes will look.

To look at the Number (N)ine show was to imagine that its designer, Takahiro Miyashita, had gone to the Macy’s junior floors and loaded up. It was plain that he had taken a lot of contemporary styles and layered them together, making the results seem chaotic or ironic but, in any case, not thought out. And the models wore blond Dutch boy wigs. But the mood, in the end, seemed less manic than monotone.

It’s interesting to contrast Number(N)ine with Comme des Garçons, where Rei Kawakubo sent out predominantly black outfits with white or black cotton skirts. The models had mauve-colored bobby-pinned hair, and some wore the squashed, beribboned hats you associated with New England spinsters. In addition, there were black ruffled tunics, much as if a boy had borrowed one of his sister’s dresses.

So why was this collection the opposite of what it seemed to be on the surface? Because Ms. Kawakubo’s feminine gestures were not merely decorative. They were incorporated into the silhouette, and hardened by the tailored black jackets and the matchstick pants and the grid patterns of dots that appeared on some pieces. It was one of the more modern-looking collections of the weekend.

Several shows evoked the young introspective male in a warm foreign climate living on his remittance from home, a type that Gore Vidal described in one of his memoirs. He added that he avoided them. The spring 2009 version of this character (from Ann Demeulemeester) wears knee-length pants in black washed linen with a loose black jacket and sometimes a faded sweater vest. Or (from Dries Van Noten) safari linens and tie-print trousers with a natty ease.

If his remittance is rather larger, and he has no vices to support, the look might be the safety-pinned silk crepe or velvet jackets from Yves Saint Laurent, and the superfine polo shirts. Stefano Pilati, the designer at Saint Laurent, has some fresh-looking suits in this collection, in particular a three-button style in pale, silvery blue silk. And he knows how to create an individual, sophisticated palette for summer — those sand-to-blue-to-sunset-pink tones. But the character these clothes evoke seems from a well-traveled place.

This was the problem at Lanvin, too. The designer, Lucas Ossendrijver, easily constructed a bookish scenario for his loose, lightly layered clothes: washed silk khaki suits; drainpipe silk trousers with puckered side seams; washed cardigans and shirts over a beaded undershirt; and, of course, this season’s squashy straw hat. And it all came together beautifully. But without the extra styling effects of a Paris show, many of the earth-colored separates would not be all that far from Go Silk of the 1980s.

The non-event of the Paris collections was Dior. Kris Van Assche was neither feminine nor especially masculine in his slim-fitting black suits, blunted ties, white high-tops and orange-colored goggle glasses. His clothes just weren’t relevant in any way. Maybe they would have been about two years ago. Dior Homme now seems stuck in neutral.

Junya Watanabe is Mr. Reliable, delivering great jeans with hayseed patches of gingham near the back pockets and some smart casual jackets that mixed solid cotton with gingham.

And John Galliano’s big man trek from Japan to London via India produced a lot of cool, urban clothes, notably long voile Indian shirts, Japanese cartoon-colored jackets, and faded, stenciled jeans with what looked like a half kilt swinging off the backside. Mr. Galliano has taken similar head trips, but this time the effect was lighter.

The only men’s designer in Paris who seems to really think about his designs, and what they might mean to the future of dress, is Mr. Simons. No one pushes himself harder, or uses his runway as more of a public forum for ideas. Even if in your mind you can’t see someone actually wearing some of the looks he proposes this season — trim-fitting black shorts with a sleeveless white shirt or an all-in-one piece with shorts — he nonetheless opens your mind to what is possible in tailoring and fabrics.

And the future is tugging at fashion. Among the things to consider with this collection is how Mr. Simons combines the formality of the classic suit with the body-consciousness of modern sportswear. The suit jacket is stripped down — the lapels eliminated and reduced to a notch — and at the same time, the material and the finishing are impeccable. As for the black shorts, they are as sharp and spare as a modern typeface.

Mr. Simons has also used embroidery with muscle — thousands of tiny black hatch marks gradually darkening the surface of a minimalist white coat. At the moment, fashion houses are putting out mountains of products. But how much of this stuff actually means anything or has a chance of changing our eye? That’s what Mr. Simons does, now more sharply than ever.

Fashion Sees Its Shadow

2008-06-11T19:10:00.000-07:00

By GUY TREBAY
Published: March 6, 2008
Paris

Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
FROM THE CASTLE AND THE CONVENT Fashions for fall shown in Paris by Givenchy.
HUGE crowds gathered last summer at the Russian pavilion of the Venice Biennale to see a three-screen video installation by a collective known as AES+F. Filled with dreamy computer-game landscapes, scary monsters, rocket ships, carousels and nearly naked post-pubescent models engaged in elaborate mock battles, “Last Riot” was the apocalypse rendered pastel and made chic.

The artists set the piece to Wagner, as artists often have when the leitmotif is The End. This strategy worked for Francis Ford Coppola when he needed to hit the doom button (and drown out the rotor wash) in “Apocalypse Now,” and it also worked pretty well when Bugs Bunny was playing Josh Brolin to Elmer Fudd’s Javier Bardem in the 1957 cartoon “What’s Opera, Doc?”

Whether the end is nigh is rarely the point. What matters is that, when people fear shifts in the cultural tectonics, they tend to reach for myth and the verities. And, while it may seem like a stretch to extend this observation to a sphere as ostensibly superficial as fashion, it was hard to come away from the season just ended here without thinking that dressmakers are spooked by the cold breath of change.

Like the battle scenes in “Last Riot” (Miuccia Prada’s favorite piece at the Venice art fair, by the way), the Paris season gave the impression of being a valiant defense of the ramparts of chic.

And there were good reasons for this. Faced with overwhelming shifts in the way clothes are manufactured; with the widespread dispersal and pirating of information on the Internet; with markets broadening to encompass not just familiar consumer elites, but entire swaths of the globe; and with the knowledge that their boldest efforts seem puny compared with the chess moves being enacted by the multinational titans who employ them, a lot of designers are befuddled. What should they do? Change careers? Why not, instead, reach into the costume trunks and, like the pretty combatants in “Last Riot,” take up a wooden swords and play pretend.

The recurrent themes of the season’s playacting were nostalgia, full-blown romanticism and crypto-religiosity. These were everywhere visible, but most particularly at Alexander McQueen, Givenchy, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent.

The McQueen show, titled “The Girl Who Lived in a Tree,” was inspired by a fable the designer concocted about a maiden who lives in a six-century-old elm in his English garden, and who comes out at night “to meet a prince and become a queen.”

Because the designer has recently toured India, the queen in question was probably Victoria. But Mr. McQueen’s was not so much the image of the dour and hard-headed sovereign of historical record as of a Raj Barbie, a creature from a music-hall pantomime, clad in what one critic described as “ballerina-length, multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last.”

She was a skinny queen, too, trussed up in corsets that added a note of perversity easy to read as a clue to a control fetish, something autoerotic. When a designer takes a girl — a wraith, really — like the English model Lily Donaldson and binds her waist, it’s hard to avoid thinking of how unruly the world must seem from inside his skull.

No one can really blame designers for trying to conserve themselves or to regulate the growing demands on creativity. “People are becoming overwhelmed,” the D. J. Michel Gaubert remarked last Thursday, as he stood by an oval portal to a luminous biomorphic tent constructed inside the Grand Palais for the Yves Saint Laurent show.

Mr. Gaubert, a seasoned D. J. who has spent decades creating aural backgrounds for labels like Saint Laurent and Chanel, noted how the increasing rapidity of fashion’s production cycles seems to affect everyone. “Look at the number of outfits people are showing,” he said. “Look at how many shows there are a day. Look at how many cities and markets buyers have to think about.”

Even the shows themselves are getting faster, it seems, an impression confirmed if one happened to see a video that accompanies a costume exhibition Christian Lacroix assembled from the archives of Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In it, the 1980s-era mannequin Dalma is seen sauntering the catwalk at a Lacroix show, pausing, posing, cocking her head, twirling, making a moue.

In those days, Dalma was known as a fairly peppy character on the catwalk (as opposed to, say, Iman, who moved so magisterially she should have been accompanied by tugboats). Yet compared with either of those two, models now break from the gate like sprinters. They almost have to in order to make it up and back a 90-foot runway in time to whip backstage for the next change of clothes.

“The demands on everyone are constantly growing,” Mr. Gaubert said, referring not just to the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections, but also to the couture presentations some labels produce, as well as precollections and resort collections and — ka-ching! — accessories.

“People can’t keep up,” he said. “The demand is insane.”
So, perhaps in response to this, designers retrench. They embrace conservative ideas and the clothes that suit them. They look backward. They outfit models as an army of automatons, the way Stefano Pilati, the gifted Saint Laurent designer, did. His pale-faced cadres wore black lipstick, had eyes obscured by black-bowl wigs and bodies encased in clothes of a stark geometry rarely seen outside the Vatican.

Jean-Luce Huré for The New York Times
MAGNIFIED Chanel’s carousel at the Grand Palais.
“I don’t think you want to go out advertising a brand anymore,” Mr. Pilati told Style.com after the show.

Mr. Pilati was not alone in balking at the idea of becoming a logo machine. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquiere produced a collection that was as much about formalist feats as about anything as banal and frivolous as grabbing an after-work cocktail. At Prada in Milan, Miuccia Prada showed a collection of stark widow’s weeds. At Lanvin, Alber Elbaz made ribboned dresses that summoned up Victorian mourning clothes. And at Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci presented dresses that had a renunciatory feeling. They were clothes for a streetwalker who has forgone her wicked ways and taken the veil.

Even the stylized clothes Marc Jacobs showed for Louis Vuitton were devout, at least in their allegiance to traditional French style ideals. A lot of people thought that Mr. Jacobs’s designs looked like monastic vestments, and some (well, I) found the heavy woolens and kooky conical headgear evocative of the uniforms (purple shrouds and two-tone Nikes) worn by the Heaven’s Gate cultists of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

Those benighted souls will be remembered, of course, for having committed mass suicide in 1997 with the help of vodka and phenobarbital, in the hope of meeting a spaceship they thought was hidden behind Comet Hale-Bopp. Everybody, as the artists who made the “Last Riot” seemed to understand, is looking for a faith, however misguided or outright spurious.

While some find it in the imagery and crafts of the past, others remain resolutely forward thinking. Few designers treat the idea of submitting to anything other than the zeitgeist with as much lip-curling disdain as Karl Lagerfeld. “I don’t believe in anything,” he said recently in an interview with the French editor Olivier Zahm. “I envy people who have faith. It must make things easier.”

Yet Mr. Lagerfeld, who is now in his 70s, is being disingenuous. Few are more devout about promoting what one French critic called, correctly if pretentiously, “the sacralization of consumer goods.”

As if to prove this, Mr. Lagerfeld set his Chanel show at the Grand Palais this season on an immense carousel adorned with outsize versions of house classics like sling-back shoes, camellias, quilted handbags and ballerina flats. Fashion, he seemed to be saying, may not yet have attained recognition as a global creed. But it takes a true disbeliever to question its role as the outward expression of our deep faith in acquiring things.

Markets may slump. The dollar may become the peso. China and Russia may turn the United States into a rest stop on the superhighway of global economy. None of that is likely to deter people from impoverishing themselves in order to possess the latest who-knows-what.

“Everybody knows the economy is terrible,” Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, remarked last week as the sun broke through the winter clouds and gilded the city. “But whatever happens, and I believe this with all my heart,” she said, “there is always something special, that one unique thing, that one special object you want so much you’ll do without food to have.”

Be Old Money or Just Look Like It

2008-06-11T19:03:00.001-07:00

By Cintra Wilson
Published: June 12, 2008

AN arresting image in fashion, these last few weeks, was the wives from the Yearning for Zion polygamist ranch. It is a muscular look primed for cultural combat: identically starched high-collared, pastel box-pleat dresses with huge princess sleeves; shellacked, high, French-braided hair; and Oakley wraparound mercenary sunglasses. You could imagine them stalking out of the courthouse in a horizontal row, slow motion à la “Reservoir Dogs,” their brown oxfords hitting the ground to the drumbeat of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

Inside the Tory Burch Store in SoHo
There is no war of ideas at the boutiques of Tory Burch — “the most copied designer in America,” according to The Los Angeles Times. Mrs. Burch (who does not prefer “Ms.”) is a blonde of great beauty, who galloped from the Philadelphia Main Line to become a high-profile New York socialite. She introduced her clothing line with her venture capitalist (soon-to-be-ex) husband and has been enjoying a stratospheric ascent since 2005, when Oprah, a fan of her signature tunic, tapped her for the Couch of Destiny.

Now, Mrs. Burch seems to be on a mission to offset her hyperprivileged image as the personification of her thriving lifestyle-brand with a “common touch.” Speaking to The Los Angeles Times this month, shortly before winning the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for accessory design, she claimed: “Women relate to me on many different levels. I’m a working mom and I’m getting a divorce. I think not having a perfect life is something they can relate to, and I’m very honest about it.”

While Mrs. Burch may never credibly align herself with single mothers who actually need to work, it is undeniable that her fashions please a great many customers: 300,000 Reva ballet-flat fans can’t be wrong.

Mrs. Burch seems to have been so deeply imprinted in childhood by her own mother’s closet that she has devoted her life to building shrines to it. Her NoLIta boutique has huge Mandarin-orange lacquer doors, high mirrors, olive-green carpeting and her gold, Double T signature medallion everywhere — on bags, shoes, walls, doors, garment hooks, belts, jewelry and, of course, on tunics, inspired by outfits her mother wore while vacationing in Morocco.

Everything evokes a late-’60s, early-’70s country club: a type of relaxed hippie chic with all the hippies tweezed out. (In her school days, Mrs. Burch is said to have paired tie-dyed T-shirts with Hermès scarves.) Dickey sweaters and ruffly high-neck tops are ideal for the Partridge Family (or, for that matter, any all-clarinet band). Oversize pseudo-ethnic prints in AstroTurf green, mustard and white would be perfect for the beshagged Carol Brady to go from the sailboat to poolside, then straight to the Dinah Shore golf classic.

There is a generous attitude toward weight that is rare in upmarket brands. I liked a white silk shift tiled with big, square sequins, mainly because it was a size 14 ($725). It looked like a shower curtain Berry Gordy would have bought for the Shirelles. I liked the idea of the hard-drinking Texas sorority girl who might wear it: “Yeah, I’m fat,” she’d shout, wagging her eighth Cosmopolitan toward a group of cowering young men. “But I’m also loaded!”

A section devoted to nautical garments went about 20,000 leagues too far. A navy blue terrycloth tunic with white anchors all over it, and cotton rope laced through brass grommets ($275), it would have looked over-the-top on one of the society matrons in “Caddyshack.”

The kind and helpful staff was able to find almost everything in my size — another genuine rarity.

I tried a caftan squiggled with Moroccan embroidery ($695). It was flattening at the bust and a bit busy, but if your ideal dress distracts the viewer from the rest of you, it was great.

I always try a garment I would never choose for myself: this time, it was a long Missoni-esque low-cut poly-blend beach-disco dress, perfect for Rachel Zoe to wear to berate her waiter in the Maldives. It was very flattering, and I might have been tempted if I’d had a tan, and the zipper wasn’t stuck.

One garment, a jewel-collar maharajah blouse in turquoise silk ($595), was very pretty both on and off the hanger, but it was a little too “Pat Nixon goes to an upscale Chinese restaurant.”

In interviews, Mrs. Burch has become defensive when confronted with the word “socialite.” “I don’t know the definition of that word,” she once insisted, deriding it for being a “light word” and “commonplace.” To question the validity of the term suggests that Tory Burch suffers from a wont of self-acceptance that would make J. D. Salinger write “The Catcher in the Rye” all over again.

I FIND it difficult not to place visual references to the Vietnam era into the political context whence they sprang. Tory Burch’s style was the conservative sociopolitical counterpoint to the way hip peacenik women were dressing at the same time: Carly Simon, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell were long-haired, braless and empowered, while golf-club wives were still anchored in nautical prints and old-money paradigms of female repression.

Say what you will about polygamist wives, but at least they know they are dressing to please the patriarchy. Tory Burch clothing inhabits a privileged, prim, declawed, deodorized look that culturally symbolizes a state of voluntary submission to the males of her tribe.

But, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s who you are. Be comfortable and open in your squareness, and nobody will find fault with you in your Tory Burch tunic and Reva flats, whether they are made by Banana Republic, Gap or H & M — or even by Mrs. Burch herself.

TORY BURCH

257 Elizabeth Street (between Prince and Houston Streets); (212)334-3000.

PEPPY High neckline, late-’60s shift dresses in oversize prints always seemed to be choking the poet Anne Sexton, but if the Connecticut Junior League picnic look doesn’t happen to kill your soul, it’s perky summer fun!

PREPPY The clientele tends toward girls who never rebelled — and the moms who shop with them. All the matching terrycloth drawstring pants they’ll need to equip themselves for life in the eternal resort.

OVERSTEPPY If you can overlook the entitled persona of the brand herself, it is undeniable that Tory Burch fills a fashion gap large enough to push most socialites into; millions of lemmings will jump in after them.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to J.D. Salinger. He is indeed alive.

Where Ralph Buys Blouses

2008-05-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 22, 2008

AT 7 most mornings, including a lot of Saturdays and Sundays, Pat Capolupo is in his garment factory, Pat & Rose Dresses, on West 37th Street. Rose is Rose Panebianco, his sister, and for the last 40 years they have made the drive together from Cliffside Park, N.J., where they live two blocks apart.

Randy Brooke/Wireimage, left; and Biasion Studio/Wireimage, right
SHOP TO RUNWAY Outfits by Marc Jacobs, left, and Ralph Lauren, right.
She usually prepares a lunch for them — the other day it was baked zucchini — and the only other comfort of note in his drab office is a Lavazza espresso machine. Maybe because is it the only bright object in the place, it says “I’m Italian”— more than the Italian soccer poster taped to the wall, more than the postcard-size picture of the village in Calabria where Mr. Capolupo was born in 1937.

Last Thursday, Mr. Capolupo was finishing a cup of a coffee as I stepped into his office. The bell signaling the end of the lunch hour had not yet rang, and his 45 employees — seamstresses, button-machine operators, pressers — were relaxing at their work tables. Some read foreign-language newspapers. Geovanny Carreno, a presser from Ecuador, had the Mets game on his headphones and continued to listen as he delicately applied short bursts of steam to a purple satin Ralph Lauren ball gown. If you buy beautiful American clothes, there is a good chance that some of them were made at Pat & Rose.

Despite the steady and dramatic decline of garment worker jobs in New York — from 335,000 in the 1950s to 25,000 today — and the impression that one factory is as good, or bad, as another, some of the best designers depend on Mr. Capolupo. He makes clothes for Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and Sophie Théallet, and in the past, Calvin Klein, David Cameron and Isaac Mizrahi. Mr. Capolupo is sort of the backbone of what remains of the Italian clothing makers who once dominated the Midtown garment district.

“Pat & Rose are really the only game in town that’s left,” said Buffy Birrittella, the executive vice president for women’s fashion and advertising at Ralph Lauren, which has made clothes with the factory since the mid-70s. There are other high-quality manufacturers in New York, like Ferrara, a suit maker, and Rocco Ciccarelli, a tailor, who is in Long Island City, but Mr. Capolupo’s specialty is blouses, shirts and trousers.

“Nobody can make a shirt like Pat’s — the way he sets the collar,” said Danuta Denuree, the production director at Marc Jacobs, which has relied on Pat & Rose since the designer’s Perry Ellis days. It is one of 10 factories in New York that produce his women’s collection line.

One advantage of having a factory close by is that a design house can see a sample from Mr. Capolupo the next day and make changes. But it also means that Mr. Capolupo is more connected to the design process than, say, an agent in Hong Kong. A factory like Pat & Rose may not look like much, with the old Singer machines and the blazing yellow lights, but it is pleasant to think that, in at least this one respect, there is no hocus-pocus about fashion.

“People talk, they make nice talk,” Mr. Capolupo said. “But in the end, in this business, you either know what you know or you don’t.”

He finished his coffee and went out on the factory floor. He is trim and stands quite erect, as if from long habit of measuring people in the reflection of mirrors. He has wispy hair and a liver-spotted complexion. Even though he has lived in this country for 45 years, he speaks in broken English. He said that when he opened his first factory, on Eighth Avenue, all of his workers were Italian. On weekends, he played cards with Italian friends, and at first he lived with his sister and her husband, speaking a Calabrese dialect.

Any time he went to see a pattern maker at Ralph Lauren, he spoke Italian. Mr. Lauren, who began in men’s wear, hired Italian tailors, like Elio Sicilia, who was called Pop, and his son Giovanni, who is in his 80s and still goes to work.

Like them, Mr. Capolupo has tailoring in his blood. He was 11 when his father, who grew grapes and chestnuts, apprenticed him to a local tailor. After that, he went to Florence. He never married.

“I always thought about it,” he said as he stood next to a cutting table. “But then the years go by and you start to really work. I’m married to Pat and Rose the factory.”

Mr. Capolupo said he will make about 2,000 fall garments for Marc Jacobs, and perhaps twice that number for Ralph Lauren. The orders, known as tickets, are still coming in. Last Friday, Mr. Capolupo received an order from Ralph Lauren for 57 blouses — a glamorous long-sleeved style to be cut in pale silk and delivered at the end of June.

On the cutting table were tissue-thin stacks of silk pieces; these will be made into Marc Jacobs blouses with a soft tie. There were also oblong stacks of black velvet and gray flannel, for trousers by Mr. Jacobs. Although a ticket might call for 400 garments, some are for much smaller amounts. Mr. Capolupo flipped through a ticket for just five dresses, each in a different size. That means each dress must be cut separately.

“Does that matter to you?” I asked.

“It matters,” said Mr. Capolupo, pushing the ticket across the table. “But what are you going to do? What they give you, you make. You charge them a bit more.”
DEPENDING on the complexity of a style (last year Mr. Jacobs had a pants style with 15 zippers), Mr. Capolupo may charge around $50 for a pair of trousers that could sell at retail for $800. It will be much more for a sample or a small quantity.

HIGH-END EFFORTS At Pat & Rose Dresses, a seamstress at work near a row of Ralph Lauren blouses.

A Marc Jacobs tag is stitched inside a pair of pants at the factory.
He stopped at a table where six middle-aged women were stitching hems by hand. The women, whose backgrounds are a mix of Greek, Italian and Chinese, looked up at me with expressions of curiosity and annoyance. Mr. Capolupo said the average hourly wage in his factory, which is a union shop, is $15, although experienced workers who are fast can make more than $20 an hour.

Thirty years ago he paid $350 a month to rent a factory loft. Today, for somewhat more space, he pays $11,000. “For $11,000 a month, you have to ship a lot of pants,” he said.

The next time I went to see Mr. Capolupo, he introduced me to Gordon Hefner. “I moved to New York 10 years ago from Norfolk,” said Mr. Hefner, who is around 30. “I needed a job.” Now, in addition to running his own boutique downtown, he helps Mr. Capolupo manage the work.

“Everybody might make the same shirt but we might do the collar differently or our sewing is different,” Mr. Hefner. “I do know that compared to some factories we are a bit more time consuming. We do things the slow way. Sometimes the companies complain about that. They don’t want warehouses full of late beautiful clothes. So you have to work at a pace to keep the work in the factory.”

I wondered about the difference between the money Mr. Capolupo gets for a pair of pants and the price the stores charge.

“Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren do pay a lot to produce their garments,” Mr. Hefner said. “They use high-quality fabrics.”

He touched a pair of navy pants on his table, by Mr. Lauren. “This is cotton from Japan,” he said. “This part is silk. The thread is German. It’s expensive. If it costs a designer $75 in total to make a garment, they charge the stores $150. The stores sell it for $300.”

“But a pair of designer pants costs twice that,” I said.

“A lot of it is branding,” Mr. Hefner said. “Some customers want to buy expensive stuff. Also, it cost a lot to run a fashion company. The staff, the rents, the shows. Every time you open a magazine, you see a Ralph Lauren ad. That costs money. People pay for the marketing when they buy the magazine, plus when they buy the garment. But they live the life of wearing those clothes. It’s worth it to them.”

I asked Mr. Hefner if it made him cynical.

“No,” he said. “Fashion is fashion. You can either buy a $50 pair of pants or a $500 pair. They’d probably both be just as durable but there wouldn’t be fashion. There’d just be stuff.”

Ms. Denuree of Marc Jacobs said that while costs of living make it challenging to produce clothes in New York, “experience like Pat’s can’t be taught overnight.”

Talking one afternoon with Dario Colonna, a friend from Ralph Lauren, who dropped by with a sample, Mr. Capolupo said he doubted that the old ways would continue much longer.

Mr. Colonna suggested that manufacturing in Europe may hold less allure for Americans with the dollar so low against the euro. “They’re going to be coming back here to make clothes,” he said.

Mr. Capolupo frowned. “Yeah, but there will be no more Pat & Rose,” he said.

He could sell before that happened.

“But who would buy?” he said.

Mr. Capolupo shook his head and continued: “It’s my business. I built it in my way, from what I know. Really, there’s nothing to buy.”

A Tiny Masterpiece, Unloved, Faces Threat

2008-05-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: May 25, 2008

NEW CANAAN, Conn.

Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Cristina Ross owns a Philip Johnson house in New Canaan, Conn., that she is thinking of demolishing.
FOR $3.1 million in New Canaan, you can get a middling, multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction but sufficient grandeur to assuage your distress at not living quite as well as your hedge-fund-managing neighbors who paid twice as much.

Or you could get a house by Philip Johnson, the most celebrated American architect of the last half-century. It’s not just any Philip Johnson house, either: it’s one that a preservationist called “a livable version of the Glass House,” Johnson’s New Canaan home, a temple of transparency that opened to the public last year and now draws worshipful hordes daily to bask within the glory of high modernism.

But who actually wants to buy, let alone live in, a Philip Johnson house, particularly one that, at 1,773 square feet, might make a nice walk-in closet for the chateau down the lane?

Nobody in New Canaan, so far, at least not at that price.

And so not three miles from the Glass House, on one of New Canaan’s most estate-studded thoroughfares, the austere glass-and-concrete confection that Johnson called his “little jewel box,” built in 1953 for Alice Ball, a single woman with apparent passions for pink stucco and ruthless spatial efficiency, faces the prospect of demolition.

The Alice Ball House’s owner, an architect and developer, Cristina Ross, decided a few years ago that the building would make a worthy pool house for a much more au courant dwelling to be built at the back of the property. But that move was blocked, first by the town, which has since been mollified, and now by the neighbors to the rear, who have not.

Ms. Ross says that if she is unable to add her vision (“an English country house in the style of Lutyens”) to Johnson’s, or if she cannot find a buyer for the existing structure, she might just knock down the Ball house and build a New Canaan-style paean to maximalism atop its minimalist ruins.

This would not be an unprecedented development in New Canaan, a suburb forever of two minds about its place as epicenter and laboratory of the International Style: about two dozen of the 90-odd modernist dwellings built in New Canaan by Johnson and a group of fellow modernists known as the Harvard Five have been torn down in favor of buildings that cast more shadow on the landscape. This would be the first Johnson house to fall.

“It’s basically an option,” said Ms. Ross, who has the demolition permit to prove it. “Investment in property is only worth what you can get out of it.”

Ms. Ross, who lives in a five-bedroom colonial elsewhere in New Canaan, had her office in the Ball house for a while and now rents it out while it sits on the market. By her count, there have been at least a dozen prospective buyers in the last year, and a Finnish fashion shoot and a 50th birthday party for an architect, but there have been no takers.

The fact that such an architectural trophy has gone unbought for a year speaks less about any ambivalence for modernism, or even a softness in local property values, than about the domestic expectations of the superprivileged. “No one builds with less than five bedrooms now,” said Prudy Parris, Ms. Ross’s real estate agent. “People with no kids or one kid want five bedrooms.”

Christopher Wigren, the deputy director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, made the same point in an interview with the online edition of Preservation magazine: “People in a position to pay $3 million for a house want more than a galley kitchen.”

A tour of the Alice Ball House does not take long. Other than the living room, which measures 26 by 23 feet and seems (barely) enclosed, within more glass than wall, the rooms are shockingly small. A king-size bed nearly fills one of the two bedrooms (there is a third bedroom in an adjoining guest house, added later). The kitchen, while nicely appointed, would not look out of place on a houseboat.

“This is a space that has to be experienced directly,” said Gregory Farmer, a preservationist at the Connecticut trust, which lists the Ball house as one of the state’s most threatened treasures, “a space that’s experienced at a very personal level rather than something that’s very impressive to someone passing by on the street. Driving by, it looks like nothing.”
This is particularly the case on the road called Oenoke Ridge, one of New Canaan’s best addresses. Directly across the street from the Ball house, an 18,000-square-foot Tudor palace known as Wexford Hall is on the market for $13.9 million. All along the ridge top, monuments to architectural excess, not to say the killings made on Wall Street in recent years, echo across rolling lawns. The Ball house, now finished in beige rather than pink, sits close to the road and presents as a tan-and-glass shoebox.

Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Preservationists want to save the 1,773-square-foot house.
Ms. Ross’s plan to build a second house on the 2.2-acre property for resale ran afoul of the town environmental commission, which denied her permission to pave about 3,000 square feet of wetlands for a driveway and parking area. She scaled back the plan and won the town’s approval. But meanwhile, her neighbors to the rear, a retired investment banker and his wife, had signed on as secondary defendants in a suit Ms. Ross filed against the environmental commission, and they will not let the matter drop.

“We think it’s a capitulation on the wetlands issue,” said Linda Powell, the retired banker’s wife, adding that for what it’s worth, “building a columned colonial Italianate home in the back is not what we would consider preserving the Philip Johnson house.”

Some fans of New Canaan’s modernist heritage have taken it upon themselves to find a buyer. Jack Trifero, head of the New Canaan Village Association, the town’s chamber of commerce, buttonholes strangers and acquaintances in front of his Gramophone video store on Main Street and presses into their hands a flyer bearing a picture of the Johnson building and the plea “Save This House.”

“I’ll see somebody I know in the arts and say, ‘Mr. Smith, I can see you in this house,’ ” Mr. Trifero said. Some people express interest, he said, while others “just don’t understand why a house like that would be valuable.”

Even some modernist partisans say the price seems high. Ms. Ross bought the house for $1.5 million only three years ago, and says she has overhauled “all major systems: roofs, walls, woodwork, plaster, stonework.” But Helen Higgins, the executive director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, said, “There haven’t been enough improvements to suggest that the value is doubled.”

Ms. Ross’s hopes, though, have been buoyed by two recent sales. A quarter-mile up Oenoke Ridge, a crazy-looking 1958 pyramid-topped house by Edward Durell Stone, architect of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, just sold for $4.1 million, though it is more than twice the size of the Ball House. And on May 14, the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Calif., designed by Richard Neutra, sold at auction for $16.8 million.

The math on the Alice Ball house works out to $1,750 a square foot, ignoring for the moment the value of land, which is of course considerable. That’s about triple the average price per square foot of houses that sold in New Canaan in the last few weeks, on lots that average the same size, according to statistics from a local brokerage, Barbara Cleary’s Realty Guild.

Ms. Ross said she would sooner knock the house down than lower her price.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that if there’s a buyer out there, great. If there isn’t, then I’ve done my due diligence.”

If Ms. Ross does decide to take down the Ball house, she has plans for demolition day.

“I don’t want to be here,” she said.

Paris Hilton crime against fashion

2008-05-25T05:36:00.000-07:00

By ELIZABETH SPIRIDAKIS

Very is a regular free-association column by Elizabeth Spiridakis, in which she calls it like she sees it.

One day in the distant future, the children of our children’s children will look back upon the ‘aughts’ for retro inspiration and stumble upon the sartorial black hole that is Paris Hilton. Her egregious crimes against fashion are too numerous to list here, but in this photo of Her Tragedy, accompanied by her boyfriend Benji Madden, the offending look is:

Very next-level vanity: Really, a T-shirt with your name on it? Is it so you remember or we never forget? Maybe it should be spelled backwards because we suspect that every time she looks in the mirror there’s a split second when she wonders, “Wait, who’s Sirap?”
Very wannabe It couple: If you took a snapshot of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty from two years ago, photocopied it 27 times, covered it in Velveeta, ran it through a Hot Topic sample sale and then sold it as a cheap knock-off on Canal Street, it would look like this picture.

Very space tramp.
Very vomitrocious. The ‘L.A. Look’ needs to go away forever, please. If they banned fedoras, tacky sunglasses, blazers over T-shirts, leggings and Kitson, Los Angeles would become a nudist colony.
Very last stop in the fashion cycle: All good trends (leggings, metallics, rock star boyfriends) go to Paris to die. Clean out your closets accordingly.

Fashion’s Harlem Address

2008-05-22T00:35:00.001-07:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: May 22, 2008
Enlarge This Image

Gasuza Lwanga of Gasuza Media
STILL GOLDEN A 1960s dress from Seasoned to Perfection.
IN the self-aggrandizing nature of fashion speak, the term “emerging designer market” is often employed to mask what to the average mind would be called a “crafts fair,” where the only key to entry is a hot glue gun and a sack of beads.

But if you happened to be among the 500 or so people checking out a temporary market last weekend at the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem, you might have concluded, correctly, that the neighborhood has arrived as a fashion destination.

In the last year, Dane Huggins moved his popular shoe store, Head Over Heels, from Fort Greene in Brooklyn to 270 St. Nicholas Avenue at West 124th Street. Aissatou Ndao-Fiteni, a designer, opened a boutique called Aysa (aysaboutique.com), at 2310 Seventh Avenue at West 136th Street; it sells a mix of modern and traditional African fashions and witty handbags.

And Michelle Gittens and Enyinne Owunwanne, after leaving jobs in the financial industry, have started a Harlem-based collection called Seasoned to Perfection (s2pvintage.com), which repurposes vintage clothing into new styles. All were represented at the weekend market.

“There’s a lot of great Harlem businesses that people don’t know about,” said Ms. Gittens, who had worked for Lehman Brothers in real estate finance for five years before enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Ms. Gittens, in a belted vintage gray dress, and Ms. Owunwanne, wearing jeans she had altered with an orange tie at the back, organized the market to draw attention to what is happening in Harlem, as well as to spotlight designers from Brooklyn and New Jersey. They are planning another market in July. (For updates, visit uptownedm.com.)

Nearly all of the 40 companies selling designs on Saturday, and the 20 that had anything left to sell by Sunday, had an original concept. There was, for instance, Chalay (chalay.com), a T-shirt line with styles suited to the city’s cultural pride parades, with messages like “Puerto Rican for the Weekend.” And Brooklyn’s Cut It Out! Apparel (cutitoutapparel.com), offered T-shirt dresses, cut up at the neckline and hem, printed with messages meant to empower women. One was a succinct call to arms: “My name is not Shorty!”

Backstage All-Access Passwear

2008-05-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

By MIKE ALBO
Published: May 8, 2008

LAST Friday I walked down to the Bowery to visit the new John Varvatos store. As you probably know, Mr. Varvatos took over the legendary and recently defunct music site CBGB and turned it into a stylish space to sell his superior and expensive clothing.

I had a hard time finding it because suddenly the Bowery has all these obnoxiously fabulous luxury condos, hotels, drink spots and throngs of Heidi and Spencer types I swear weren’t there four months ago. The street is starting to look like Epcot with a drinking problem, and the John Varvatos store, beautifully styled and reverently decorated, is its high-end Hard Rock Cafe. It’s a beautiful museum of the area’s grittier, more artsy past — a time when New Yorkers lived within their means, wore incongruous garments they plucked from trash bins in SoHo, and came to this space to play loud, visceral music.

The Varvatos company took pains to preserve and cultivate the energy of this hallowed birthplace of American punk rock. It “zhuzhed” it up with dramatic lighting, velvet-curtained dressing rooms and four antique stained glass windows behind the cash register to give the room a sense of reverence. Most of the original scrawled and stickered walls remain intact. Near the entrance a gorgeous tattered palimpsest of fliers and decals is encased behind glass, as if it were stonework from the great temple to Jupiter in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

Also near the entrance, classic mint-condition albums in clear plastic sleeves are for sale from artists like the Del Fuegos and Joan Jett. Adorning the walls are colorful gig posters for D Generation and Built to Spill, a framed copy of Blondie’s “Eat to the Beat” album. Nearby, vintage stereo equipment is also for sale, like a gleaming Pioneer SX-1250 ($895) or a black scuffed-up McIntosh MC2100 amplifier ($895).

The clerks are mostly male and all model-beautiful. Many have ornate tattoos that peek out of the cuffs and collars of their lovely Varvatos shirts. An adorably gangly salesman with stalky black hair and a cough (“I’m giving up smoking, and it’s all coming up”) set up a dressing room for me, and I tried on a black tux shirt with a subtly embroidered bib ($185), a soft ivory-colored jersey ($135) and an olive-green button-front shirt ($165).

A pair of suit pants in a black and white plaid had a faint sheen ($425), and a brownish-gray linen sweater with big wooden toggle buttons fit perfectly ($298). In fact, it all fit perfectly, and I wished I could afford the garments or was punk rock enough to shoplift.

The Varvatos shoes, in particular, are always desirable, free of the gaudy overdesign and tacky stitching that seem to plague men’s footwear. I picked up a strikingly simple black boot with a side zipper ($498) as a statuesque female clerk walked up and explained that it was called the Mercer. “John’s been making it ever since he started the company,” she said. The shoes are displayed on a small stage in the middle of the space, where acts like the slithery Perry Farrell performed at the opening night gala last month.

It’s often said that Mr. Varvatos has a rocker aesthetic (the band Cheap Trick appears in the label’s ad campaign), but a lot of the styles here evoke the mellow ’70s singer-songwriter rather than the sweaty drug-fueled rock star. A caramel-colored blazer in lamb’s leather with gold studs along the lapel ($995) is something Kris Kristofferson might have worn while he canoodled with Carly; and an airy long-sleeved henley in a bluish off-white ($198) was something Cat Stevens might have worn while he canoodled with Carly.

REGARDLESS of their reference, the clothes here are unanimously amazing, even when they cost more than Joey Ramone spent on hair care in his entire life. Unfortunately, along with Mr. Varvatos’s fresh offerings, selections from “What Comes Around Goes Around,” the vintage apparel company in New York, appear in the store for prices that are downright offensive. A rack of WCAGA’s worn-in tops included a yellow Doobie Brothers shirt for $200, a beat-up Wrangler denim button-front with a frayed cut-off collar for $100, and a plain crew-neck T-shirt yellowed with age for, no joke, $75. Anarchy!

Back in the day, guys came here to be a part of a dynamic scene — they moshed, smoked, maybe got konked on the head with a beer can. But now we live in a city of aspirations and replicated cool. N.Y.U. students come in and imagine how great they will look when they get their six-figure jobs, and six-figure-salary guys come in to buy clothes so they can look as if they moshed.

Baffled by the hallucinatory expense of New New York, I gazed at the old, intact walls of CBGB, slashed and scrawled with layers of noise and history. If Mr. Varvatos and his team are smart, they will reproduce it and sell it as wallpaper for $5,000 a yard.

And why not — looks like there’s a market for it. Everyone who came through the doors seemed to be starved for authenticity, including me. I walked around transferring my rock nostalgia directly onto the deliciously displayed clothes. I would have bought something, too, but at the time my bank balance was so low I couldn’t even spring for a $69 white short-sleeved henley from Mr. Varvatos’s collaborative line with Converse, the cheapest thing I could find in the store.

Am I punky, or just poor?

JOHN VARVATOS

315 Bowery (between First and Second Streets); (212) 358-0315.

Post-Punk The old CBGB space has become a high-end clothing store full of desirable garments, vintage jackets and worn-in concert tees, all at ear-splitting prices.

FASHION HUNKS Friendly, perfectly styled and drop-dead gorgeous, the staff is about as D.I.Y. as a photo spread in Men’s Vogue.

WHO’D A’ THUNK Old show posters carefully framed, sections of the site’s original walls preserved behind glass, no photographs allowed — the downtown New York music scene has an official museum.

The world’s highest-paid supermodels

2008-05-01T02:43:00.000-07:00

By Kiri Blakeley

updated 8:29 p.m. ET April 30, 2008

In the words of supermodel and Project Runway host Heidi Klum: In fashion, one day you're in and the next you're out. One could say the same about Forbes.com's 2008 list of the World's Top-Earning Models. Some beauties moved up, some down, some off, a few on.

Then there's Gisele Bundchen, still entrenched firmly in the No. 1 spot with an estimated $35 million in earnings, more than double the $14 million banked by Heidi Klum, who came in second. The 15 models on our list were ranked primarily by estimated earnings over the past 12 months. Where necessary, prestige and relevancy of campaigns, editorials, fashion magazine covers and the opinion of those in the industry were taken into account.

Rounding out the top five are usual suspects Heidi Klum ($14 million), Kate Moss ($7.5 million), Adriana Lima ($7 million) and surprise addition Doutzen Kroes ($6 million). The 23-year-old honey from Holland made a long-legged leap up the charts from her second-to-last position last year. In 2008, the Calvin Klein and L'Oréal face expanded her deals and also hit the modeling mother lode: a Victoria's Secret contract.
"I wish we had snapped her up a long time ago," says Edward Razek, who has been selecting the company's models for a decade. Her agent, David Bonnouvrier, compares Kroes to Christy Turlington, another Calvin Klein muse. "It's that type of beauty," he says.

Bundchen may have ended her Victoria's Secret run, but her $5 million a year record-setting contract didn't expire until the end of December 2007, allowing much of it to be included in this year's tally. Even without the lingerie giant, the Brazilian bombshell continues to bag multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts, most notably as the new face of Pantene and a cosmetics powerhouse that can't be named until July.

German übermodel Heidi Klum is smiling at No. 2 by virtue of not only her television success as host and executive producer of Bravo's (soon to be Lifetime's) "Project Runway," and as the host of Germany's version of "America's Next Top Model," but with a slew of campaigns and partnerships including ones with Diet Coke, Jordache and Mouawad jewelry. In her home country, there's new deals with McDonald's, Volkswagen and hair care giant Schwarzkopf.

Waif icon Kate Moss tripped up a bit last year by ending contracts with Burberry, Stella McCartney, Dior and Versace. But her eponymous clothing line with British retailer Topshop is a hit in 29 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Russia. With a yearly guarantee fee and royalties, Moss' fashion cents banks her in an extra estimated $2 million a year.

Victoria's Secret made millionaires of two newcomers: Miranda Kerr and Selita Ebanks, striking poses at Nos. 10 and 12, respectively. "Selita has a stunning smile and is a great on-camera spokeswoman," enthuses Razek. "Miranda's got the cheeks of a chipmunk, the smile of an angel and the body of a devil."

Fresh to the list is Revlon model Isabeli Fontana, who, at 24, has come out of semi-retirement after having two children. Fontana also poses for H&M, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana. Rounding up the newbies is Russian Valentina Zelyaeva, the exclusive model for Ralph Lauren and the face of two L'Oréal fragrances.

A noticeable drop-off is last year's No. 5, Victoria's Secret angel Alessandra Ambrosio, who took a break from bikinis due to her baby bulge. Liya Kebede was edged out of Estée Lauder, pushing her five places down to last place.

Armani to Get Legion of Honor

2008-04-28T19:52:00.001-07:00

Godfrey Deeny
Mon Apr 28, 12:27 PM ET

Paris - Call him Giorgio the Legionnaire.

Fashion Wire Daily has learned that Giorgio Armani is to be awarded the Legion of Honor, and no less a figure than French President Nicholas Sarkozy will pin the medal on the designer.

Sarkozy will confer the honor on Amani this summer in Paris when the Italian designer will be in town to stage the latest collection from his haute couture line, Armani Prive, on Monday, June 30.

A spokesman for Armani declined any comment, but well informed sources told FWD that Sarkozy has invited Armani to the presidential residence in the Elysees Palace to receive his recognition.

Most designers and actors, such as Valentino, Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz or thespian Jack Nicholson, are traditionally presented their ribboned Legion of Honor at a ceremony in the grand and gilded salon of the Ministry of Culture on rue de Valois, the heart of the Palais Royal.

His new wife, Italian model and singer, the former Carla Bruni Tedeschi, will join the hyper energetic president at the ceremony. Speculation will be rife about what Madame Sarkozy will wear to the ceremony. On Sarkozys much-publicized state visit to the UK in March, Carlas wardrobe was Christian Dior.

However, Carla is not unfamiliar with Giorgios oeuvre; she wore a silvery white evening dress by Armani when she carried the Italian flag at the opening ceremony of the XX Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.

Armani will also receive the distinction just before he celebrates his 74th birthday on July 11. Armani, a one-time student of medicine and subsequently a department store window dresser, founded his fashion house in 1974. He went on to create a label that last year scored annual sales of 1.7 billion euros, or $2.95 billion.

Armani is famed for his minimalist silhouette, "non-color" palette and revolutionary mens fashion concepts, such as dressing guys in fabrics traditionally used by women.

The Debut: Still Very Valentino

2008-03-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN

Published: February 29, 2008

Paris

It seems only yesterday that Valentino was waving goodbye in a tide of red dresses. Alessandra Facchinetti made her debut Thursday as the company’s new designer, and there could not have been a tougher crowd to please than the court gathered at the Palais de Chaillot.

There was Giancarlo Giammetti, who for 45 years was Valentino’s business partner. His choice to succeed him would have been Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler, but the company’s new owner, Permira, a London-based private equity firm, chose Ms. Facchinetti, who after succeeding Tom Ford at Gucci, in 2004, had been fired.

Seated across the runway was Franca Sozzani, the editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue. She, too, had wanted Ms. Facchinetti and has advised her.

A Paris runway is a gantlet for any new designer, but only Ms. Facchinetti would have known its special pressures. The night before the show, she said a designer has to be able to deal with company politics and other considerations besides dressmaking.

Her Valentino debut was modest; Mr. Giammetti described the effort to Italian journalists as “respectful.” The Valentino archive in Rome is extensive and, according to Ms. Facchinetti, is organized by client names, with a Jackie Onassis section and so forth. Ms. Facchinetti kept her sights within human range, focusing on two or three Valentino staples, including suits and classy day coats.

Small in the shoulder and waist, with a neat sense of balance, a Valentino suit has a distinct look, just as a Saint Laurent jacket once did. But here is a problem that Ms. Facchinetti faces: If she modifies the proportions of the suit too much, she will alienate existing Valentino clients. And retail buyers at stores like Neiman Marcus say they have young customers whose choices are influenced by Valentino’s red-carpet clothes.

But if Ms. Facchinetti doesn’t bring something fresh and contemporary to the tailoring, she runs the risk of being considered irrelevant by editors. The proportions of one generation are not the same for the next, and that is one reason designers like Stefano Pilati of Saint Laurent and Raf Simons of Jil Sander have made changes in the fit and cut of their clothes.

In reality, it will take two or three seasons to know if Ms. Facchinetti’s softer, more relaxed tailoring is the right approach. Her best suit has a bicolor cashmere jacket in black and gray with sleeves shaped by darts near the wrists and a matching skirt with gathers in the front. The fit is easy, and some of the wool day coats, though polished-looking — with enameled buttons and 1960s collars — have a slouchy comfort.

Ms. Facchinetti did not stress herself out with the evening clothes. They were pleasing if lacking in drama: loose silk dresses with fluffy necklines, a strapless red chiffon gown with paper-thin pleats, and a black dress with a fizz of embroidery curls on the wand sleeves and two graphic triangles on the sheer bodice. Respectful and graphic the clothes were, but without some surprise and Valentino glamour, they will become boring.

An unusual sense of insecurity pervades the Paris runways, accounting for ubiquitous styles, like the draped dress. Probably adding to this sense are economic worries, branding pressures and the need to please editors, whose magazines give designers credibility. Few and far between are the singular visions.

Only superficially did Riccardo Tisci’s clothes for Givenchy look new. Trousers had that ultratight fit and rock attitude that one also saw at Balmain, though in a trashier form. And romantic black lace blouses and embellished coats were an obvious counterpoint. But while the tailoring was sharp and all that, the traces of Balenciaga and Christian Lacroix in the hard styling and passementerie put the collection out of touch.

Ungaro is another house in transition. Its latest designer, Esteban Cortazar, 23, is an American with French and Colombian roots and little experience but heaps of optimism. That came through in his debut collection on Wednesday, with playful cashmere sweaters with chunky braiding, draped dresses in pale blue and taupe jersey, and simple rose and pebble prints.

Soft rather than strident, Mr. Cortazar found the modern starting point for Ungaro. Now he has to put technical know-how behind his pluck.

Stella McCartney had a fine show Thursday — nothing knocked out of the park, but neither did you sense any trembling insecurity. (O.K., maybe the models occasionally trembled on their wooden platforms.) Ms. McCartney knows what she likes, whether it’s a hand-felted coat or a belted cocoon in the blotchy pattern of a stormy sky or a pretty navy dress with broderie anglaise.

She makes a blue velvet dress that’s as plain as mud look chic — because she has a quality of letting things go. And she can connect her clothes to life, by giving them honest sex appeal or the intimacy and Englishness of a boiled knit or a coat madly blazing with coats of arms.

One can try too hard, then. Dries van Noten’s prints were dense and gorgeous, a treat for the eye, but something soon felt off in his show on Wednesday.

Despite the effort applied to the floral and marbled prints, despite the romantic combinations of fur chubbies and long silhouettes, this was a thin, cold-leg, one-note collection. The hand-knits were exceptional, and surely the warmer, tailored clothes are in the showroom, but if Mr. van Noten had taken this delicacy any more seriously, the mirror would have cracked.

Saint Laurent Finally Regains Its Swagger

2008-03-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN

Published: March 1, 2008

Paris

The Chanel carousel erected in the middle of the Grand Palais, with a zoo of quilted icons bobbing up and down and great clothes, is a reminder of how big Karl Lagerfeld thinks. This is where so many of the brand revivals fall down; their designers can’t project a big picture. They are small-frame thinkers, tweaking at seams and having absolutely no impact.

Mr. Lagerfeld has been the puzzling and dazzling exception in Paris for close to two decades. For a while, Tom Ford occupied a similar position in Milan, when he blew up Gucci. John Galliano’s success at Dior has been mixed, while Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga has made a sharp instrument out of a beautiful but small gem.

Languishing, never quite happening is Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent, the prime symbol after Chanel of modern Paris chic.

Finally, on Thursday night, four years after he was appointed creative director of YSL, Mr. Pilati crossed that mysterious bridge to the big stage. In their movement, shape and attitude, the clothes evoked the swagger and spirit of the Rive Gauche era, when Saint Laurent ruled, just as surely as Mr. Lagerfeld’s capture some undefined essence of Coco Chanel.

Yet, like Mr. Lagerfeld, Mr. Pilati has imagined his clothes in stark contemporary terms. And in Mr. Pilati’s case, they are enormously appealing.

In a sense, he had been laying the foundation all along, beginning with the Parisian polka dots and bourgeois ruffles of his first collection. Even the missteps were a kind of step forward. If he had not done the coquette skirts and the over-rich violet prints — on a violet-carpeted runway — he would not have realized that Saint Laurent required iron and steel, and a good deal less colorful effect.

Building on the simplified lines of his spring 2008 collection, Mr. Pilati added flare to his geometry. For coats and jackets in Donegal tweed and black felt, this was done by keeping the shoulders clean and sharp, the body snug, and putting volume in the tails and hem, so that the unlined coats caught just enough air as the black-wigged models walked briskly along.

Underneath were dark turtlenecks and classic Saint Laurent trousers (cuffed above the ankles) or a new, wider-pegged style in black or chocolate flock.

As Mr. Pilati explained beforehand, flock has a more industrial look than velvet — and to him, that’s modern. He used the material for a close-fitting brown blouson jacket, shown with a gold-chain choker and a black felt skirt that hugged the hips and then flared out, with an off-center divide that lent it shape and interest.

Not only did the collection show a lot of versatility, with an easy-fitting pencil skirt in Donegal worn with a matching pop-over top and a tiered brown wool wrap dress that flashed a strip of cerulean blue from under the hem, but it also had the occasional eccentric piece. Among them was a sharp cocktail dress in burnt yellow Tokyo silk with a center strip of black flock, and a stiff, opulent cotton shirt with the texture (but not the old story) of piqué.

It is indeed a strange thing to realize that a brand is not just a name, or a certain silhouette, or palette. It is also the expression of a specific feeling and place in the consciousness: Rive Gauche. That is what Mr. Pilati has finally tapped into and projected in a big way.

Even people who know Mr. Lagerfeld tend to forget that despite his taste and sense of performance — if you don’t see him around town, you do catch his bronze Hummer — he is actually a down-to-earth fellow.

That is a good way, though, to view his Chanel collection. No style is ever too far from the reality of the street, whether it’s the new, longer wool jacket belted tightly over a slim short skirt, or a navy ribbed boat sweater worn over a semi-shredded denim miniskirt. The clothes are darker and more urban in mood than they were in the spring show, with some of the woolen suits scratched and subtly frayed in places to give a contemporary (if costly) élan.

Mr. Lagerfeld likes double meanings. The front view of stockings is of bare legs; from the rear, they’re opaque black. There are also lace versions. The double effect is repeated in the evening clothes, with an austere tunic in marine-blue satin that is open in the back and loosely strung with jewels, and worn with a straight long skirt.

Sometimes fashion is not about fashion. It is about social success, too. Giambattista Valli loaded his front row on Thursday with young London socialites, as well as Mary-Kate Olsen and the Fiat heir Lapo Elkann.

One wondered, though, if there was a correlation between his clients’ party skills and the preposterous couture shapes of the dresses, which featured grilles of ruffles, pillow backs of fur, inexplicable bulges and cavities of satin, and a large raspberry-like clump planted on the shoulder of a gown.

Mr. Valli makes good clothes, but would his clients necessarily care or notice when they’re not?

Sonia Rykiel opened her show Friday with candy-striped knits and some brightly charming sweaters and tops in abstract animal patterns; I could just make out a German shepherd.

The clothes were cute and friendly, with black tights and Oxford platforms, and the odd romantic fur paired with foxy wool shorts.

Not Everyone Spins Their Wheels

2008-02-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN

Published: February 27, 2008
Paris

But Monday’s Dior show represented a kind of defeat of his way of doing things. The clothes were respectable, ladylike, seemingly culled from the early 1960s pages of Paris Vogue and L’Officiel — demure A-line suits, printed silk dresses, fur coats with opera-length sleeves — and the only thing that looked really Galliano, almost as a concession to his flamboyance, were the overteased hairdos and Baby Jane lacquered eyes.

So: what of Mr. Galliano’s earlier attempts to bring Dior into the 21st century with modern cutting? What are we to think now of his famous hobo collection or the Matrix show that tore into the house’s perfect seams and produced new shapes? Were they just about a moment?

If the answer is yes, then Mr. Galliano is right to move forward and attempt to satisfy the apparently growing world of affluent shoppers. Yet, apart from the evening clothes, which drew effectively on his recent couture show, one cannot see what connects the bland minks and working-women tweeds to Mr. Galliano’s ideals. And that’s a problem not just for Dior but also for a fashion genius. It makes for a real limbo.

The opening days of the French fall collections felt unusually bogged down, with a weak show by Martin Margiela on Monday and a heavy, introspective journey by Yohji Yamamoto, with the designer himself singing a ballad on the soundtrack.

One of the most astute and complicated designers of his generation, Mr. Margiela would have to rely on the good will of his audience if he expected people to see design virtues (or signs of effort) in beige minidresses with jumbo cowl necks, one-shoulder jersey tops sweeping over mismatched leggings, and black leather jackets that soared upward at the shoulder like a smokestack.

Nothing made sense even by Mr. Margiela’s enigmatic standards. In the past, he has always seemed a designer who reacts to things from his consciousness, a quality that not only set him apart but also gave his fashion extra perceptive power. This collection, though, looked strictly off the cuff, or maybe was the work of assistants.

That was Mr. Yamamoto scraping along with a guitar, and he wasn’t half bad, either. The strong points in this pure Yohji show were coats and jackets tailored from paper-thin black leather with some edges left raw. The underpinnings were soft and flowing, and most of the coats were also constructed with fabric.

Mr. Yamamoto likes to dissolve sartorial boundaries. Hence, you could not clearly tell if the blue suede front to a black jacket was a shirt or part of the whole. But some of the gathered skirts, with an extra tire of fabric around the middle, looked dustily Yamamoto, with pious allusions to women in bonnets and rustic stoles. He ended on a modern note at least, with lightweight cotton cloaks, pants and flat shoulder bags by Hermès.

Jun Takahashi of Undercover began with a simple premise. He asked himself a series of questions — What is tailoring? What is American sportswear? — and his responses revealed how amazingly fluent he is as a designer, able to mutate classics like the masculine pantsuit and the motorcycle jacket.

The models’ latex cone heads and mutant eyes were a case of comic overkill; Mr. Takahashi’s clothes expressed everything he had to say of the moment. The coolest looks were narrow cargo pants made from pieces of denim and outdoor fabric, like waxed cotton and a hunter plaid that resembled Barbour lining.

From shoulders to hem, tailored jackets followed rounded lines, and circular shapes transformed common sweatshirts and long cardigans. Motorcycle jackets, a favorite of Japanese designers, now came in primary colors and were layered with thick beige shrugs embellished with mounds of feathers or yarn curls. The results were eye-changing.

A designer who controls his pattern making can say the most with his clothes. It’s just like a writer with language. That’s why Karl Lagerfeld and Azzedine Alaïa are the poets of fashion and Rei Kawakubo is our Gertrude Stein. Rick Owens approaches pattern making with the same determination: to make it express the shapes and ideas he has in his mind.

Using wool and leather, sometimes in combination with denim and silver piping, Mr. Owens on Sunday gave jackets a voluptuous shape. A number of them had an hourglass line, with a peplum formed by squares of fabric, while others had cube-shaped billows at the back. If you were to mentally trace the silhouette made by a jacket’s extra volumes — the cubes, the wings of fabrics — you would roughly have the outline of the contemporary person in the street, with her layers. Ms. Kawakubo has made similar visual connections.

At the opposite extreme were cashmere tunics and biker shorts, as well as snug fur jackets or vests that looked tough despite the delicate way Mr. Owens draped them. Still, the energy and modernity came from the tailoring of the harder fabrics. It’s not difficult to see elements of Paris couture in the shapes, or the influence of Mr. Galliano’s early cutting techniques at Dior. But Mr. Owens has sought to refine the methods. The dragging flaps on the zippered boots are all of apiece, as is the collection.

Fantasyland With Eyes Wide Open

2008-02-26T23:19:00.000-08:00

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 27, 2008
PARIS

So much about fashion shows can seem astounding, in a practical sense. Each is like an unusually complex piece of 15-minute theater, and typically there are eight every day.

Estimated at random, there were dozens of performers at Dior, hundreds of costumes, a producer, a D.J., technical crews for music and lights and stage props (in this case, a waterfall staircase), wranglers responsible for the ornately hierarchical seating arrangement for (in this case) more than 1,200 people, who perched on ballroom chairs with tags affixed with a black satin ribbon, each one inscribed by a calligrapher with the occupant’s name.

There were individual crews for hair and makeup, each traveling with tons of equipment in custom-fitted vans; scores of security goons with earpieces; crafts-services people to provide the food that models never eat (the latest form of ostentatious backstage intake-avoidance is the cup of hot water, nursed as if it were sacramental wine), and all the assorted human flotsam that the industry seems to attract. By that one means models’ boyfriends, a breed apart.

People complain about fashion shows being late, but the wonder is that they happen at all. If Hollywood had to labor under fashion conditions (nonunion, by the way), it would spell the end of moviegoing as we know it. Yet somehow it all works. Ms. McGrath powered along unflappably. The same went for Orlando Pita and a posse of hairdressers charged Monday with concocting at warp speed the kind of leonine 1960s coiffures that, in the versions designed in that era by Ara Gallant and photographed by Avedon, required days of preparation and hairdressing tools like rats, falls and staple guns.

By the time they had been fully spackled and bewigged, the models were barely recognizable. And this is one of the more demented aspects of the business: how after going to the trouble of selecting prized specimens from the global gene pool, what designers like best is to render their beauty invisible.

Sometimes this takes the form of face-covering nylon headpieces that make the models’ heads look like sacks of blocks (Junya Watanabe) or funnel collars (Martin Margiela) that convey the impression that the wearer has fallen down a well. Sometimes it is just that big architectural eye.

“She’s like a homing pigeon, this one,” Ms. McGrath said Monday, referring to the Brazilian Raquel Zimmermann, who currently holds the No. 1 position on the model-rating Web site Models.com. The passion that some people bring to reading the stock market index, others devote to this site. And weird as it may seem, there is a certain utility in a Web locale dedicated to charting the fortunes of people who are beautiful occupationally. Fashion is a consensus business, after all, based to a large extent on wholly subjective markers of taste. Vogue isn’t called that for nothing.

“Raquel flies away,” Ms. McGrath said airily. “But she always comes back.”

By that Ms. McGrath was indicating that Ms. Zimmermann had gone missing from this season from the catwalks in Milan. The reason was simple: her United States visa was due for renewal. She might also have meant, though, that although Ms. Zimmermann’s good looks are incontrovertible, she is an industry anomaly.

A decade older, at 26, than most of the competition, she is proof that the immortal Heidi Klum-ism about being in fashion one day and out the next miscalculates the intervals of change. Ms. Zimmermann has been in the business since she was 16 and has had all the magazine covers and walked all the runways and shot all the campaigns and yet somehow manages to seem fresh again each season.

“Why has she lasted so long?” a Vogue editor remarked on Tuesday (speaking anonymously, for fear of going off message and being banished to a job at a knitting catalog). “Maybe it’s that combination of a Nordic head on a Brazilian body.

Fashion is a funny business, Ms. Zimmermann mused as the hairdresser Teddy Charles readied her mane at Dior. “People are always taking care of you, you have a car and driver 24 hours a day, they’re treating you like a star. You can lose yourself in the fantasy.”

For a middle-class girl from the south of Brazil who had planned on becoming an architect, she suggested, the trick to achieving longevity has been perspective. “Absolutely, you can enjoy all the shows and the creative people and the fabulousness,” she said. “But in the end, you have to know how to go back to normal.”

2008-02-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 25, 2008
HOLLYWOOD — The movie industry must have woken up from the writers’ strike with a rotten hangover, unable to even think about frivolous things like parties and frocks. It was such a buzz kill that quite a few of the actors on the red carpet at the Academy Awards looked as if they either couldn’t be bothered with fashion this year — so not superficial were they — or had dressed in the dark on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The hits were few and the misses, well, seemed to be less a result of actresses who dare to risk the wrath of the fashion police (Tilda Swinton leading the charge in a shapeless black bolt of fabric that appeared to be designed by the House of Hefty) than a general sense of red carpet malaise.

“I think a lot of people are being safe,” Kimora Lee Simmons, usually a fashion extrovert, commented on the E! channel. “Safe to me reads like boring.”

Certainly the stars deserved some leeway, but you would think that after months of Hollywood gloom and doom, the fashion would have been a little more upbeat. Instead, there seemed to be only two choices — wear red and be seriously appropriate or wear black and be appropriately serious.

The first camp belonged to Katherine Heigl in an Escada one-shoulder dress, Ruby Dee in a satin belted dress and jacket by Kevan Hall, Miley Cyrus in suitably youthful Valentino and Anne Hathaway in a stunner from Marchesa with a sash of red rosettes. The serious crowd included Amy Ryan in a flat (actually navy) Calvin Klein toga and Jennifer Garner, in embroidered silk taffeta from Oscar de la Renta. Few women wore big jewels — a sign of the sober mood — except for those dressed in black, but then they had to try harder just to be noticed as present.

Nevertheless, shown against a backdrop of gray clouds, the black dresses looked so similar that it hardly seemed worth checking the labels. That wasn’t the case for two women who wore purple: Cate Blanchett looked radiant in a satin gown with a plunging neckline that was accented with green beads, matching her earrings; and Jessica Alba wore a draped Marchesa gown that was tipped with a bit of froth.

There were also some shocking moments, the kind of loopy flubs that modern advancements in the profession of fashion styling had all but done away with years ago. Ms. Swinton, bless her Dobby the House Elf-loving heart, will most likely wake up with a few bruises tomorrow for her dress (from Lanvin), and Marion Cotillard, the French (and normally chic) actress from “La Vie en Rose,” wore a mermaid gown from Jean Paul Gaultier that was unsubtly printed with fish scales. Get it?

But the biggest faux pas tended to come from the other side of the hedgerows edging the carpet, where the commentators were climbing over one another to fawn and gawk and gently probe. On ABC, George Pennacchio must have been overwhelmed by his encounter with Heidi Klum, in a red dress with a picture-frame neckline and a woodlike bun of hair on her head.

“Is it by top American designer Michael Kors?” he asked, referring to her co-host on “Project Runway.”

“It’s not,” she said with a sour face. “It’s Galliano.”

On E!, when Ryan Seacrest was not inexplicably playing with Barbies between interviews, he grilled Amy Adams, looking quite beautiful in an emerald Proenza Schouler strapless dress that set off her pale skin and red hair. He asked about the ephemeral gold mesh bag hanging from a chain interwoven between her fingers, and found it was just for show.

“It is a bag,” Ms. Adams protested. “I have invisible lipstick in there.”

But like the fashion, it was ultimately empty.

I Have Just the Client for You

2008-02-24T20:49:00.000-08:00

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 24, 2008
LOS ANGELES

WINNER! Elie Saab became famous after Halle Berry wore this in 2002.
MARILYN HESTON scanned the faces in the gilded ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire for telltale signs of the Hollywood elite — that would be flashbulbs going off in your eyes — and came up empty. Oh, there were plenty of power brokers gathered on Tuesday for the Costume Designers Guild Awards, enough to double kiss all night: Jeanne Yang (stylist for Tom Cruise), Tanya Gill (stylist for Julie Christie), Arianne Phillips (stylist for Madonna and costume designer of “3:10 to Yuma”), Cameron Silver (owner of the vintage boutique Decades), etc.

But where were the real celebrities who were booked to present the awards?

A flashbulb went off in Ms. Heston’s eyes.

“There must be another cocktail hour upstairs for the V.I.P.’s!” she said, and a moment later, in her silver Rodo pumps, Nicole Miller bubble dress and a spiraling chain of Kwiat diamonds, she swished up the carpeted steps of the ballroom and hooked her arm around the sequined dress of the first woman she saw wearing a headset.

Ms. Heston, who owns a public relations company that specializes in wrangling actresses into gowns, shoes, jewels and bags for the red carpet, dropped the name of a client, Atelier Swarovski, a sponsor of the party. A moment later, she was heading up another flight of stairs with two badges marked “talent” in her hand, sweeping past a security guard and into the promised land of award presenters, inhabited by Katie Holmes, Kristen Chenoweth and Anjelica Huston. Ah, stars.

In the traditional pecking order of Hollywood, a fashion publicist would rank only a notch or two above the television commentators, makeup artists, hair stylists, tuxedo designers and spray-on-tan technicians who descend on the city during the week leading up to the Academy Awards — a mobile sales force of manicured Willy Lomans holed up in suites at the Raffles L’Ermitage. As many as 80 publicists are here representing blue chip designers, all competing for a shot to dress a Cate Blanchett or a Hilary Swank in a Valentino, Armani, Gucci or Calvin Klein dress.

Ms. Heston would probably stomp on an actress’s toes if it got her to change into shoes by Rodo, a client.

“If you don’t ask,” she said, “you don’t get.”

Aggressive, ingratiating and unencumbered by any sense that she might be pestering people, Ms. Heston, 53, has become a star maker for designers trying to break into Hollywood. That is because she does not stop asking. Marc Bouwer, who designed Angelina Jolie’s white satin Oscars gown in 2004, recalled bumping into Ms. Heston, with an armload of Elie Saab dresses at almost every turn, even after Ms. Jolie had committed to wearing his dress.

“She showed up at practically every fitting, invited or not,” he said. He recalled driving to Ms. Jolie’s house to make alterations and finding Ms. Heston’s car in the driveway. “We pulled over into the bushes until we heard she was on her way.”

Mr. Bouwer said he admired Ms. Heston, “but you do not want to play against her.”

After all, who, outside of the fashion news media, had ever heard of Elie Saab before Halle Berry turned up at the Oscars in 2002 in his deep purple tulle and taffeta gown? Or Roland Mouret before Scarlett Johansson wore his tight, curvy dresses at the Golden Globes and Oscars in 2005? The credit has gone largely to the actresses’ stylists, but Ms. Heston was there, one step deeper behind the scenes, pushing for her dresses, dying shoes to match and sewing an actress into a dress if she had to.

“Where she is brilliant is finding young designers and supporting them,” said Sienna Miller, who met Ms. Heston five years ago when she first arrived in Los Angeles and was still an unknown actress. Ms. Heston, representing M.A.C. cosmetics and Vidal Sassoon at the time, helped introduce her.

“She’s always there in a crisis,” Ms. Miller said. “It’s not that she does the styling — I’ve always dressed myself — but she’s a huge help.”

Ms. Heston’s client Nicole Miller recalled her amazement when she opened a magazine and saw her bohemian print scarf dress on Ms. Jolie when the actress made her first public appearance with Brad Pitt. “There was so much demand for that dress, we could have made another 10,000,” Ms. Miller said.

Watching Ms. Heston operate last week in the ivy-covered warehouse that serves as her showroom on Melrose Avenue, or attending a marathon of parties on Thursday night where she kiss-kissed Tilda Swinton, Michelle Trachtenberg, Donna Karan and Roberto Cavalli, was like following a chess match as she moved pieces strategically from one stylist to another. At times, it was boring. And at times it was scintillating, as when she made an especially brash play or picked up her phone, brushing aside her Vidal Sassoon blowout, to say, “Hellohoneyhowareyou. ...”

“I’ll send you JPEGs!” she yelled to Rachel Zoe (stylist to Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Garner), who had been avoiding her entreaties to see Kwiat.

“She needs a shorter heel?” she asked of Ms. Gill, who was browsing for Ms. Christie. “We can chop them off!”

“Canadian! Canadian!” she squealed to Linda Medvene (stylist for Sarah Polley, a best-director nominee for “Away from Her” and a Toronto native). “Me, too!”

Ms. Heston, originally Marilyn Grace Pernfuss in Kitchener, Ontario, has displayed a knack for handling big personalities since she was 16, working a summer job at the Vancouver Aquarium as an announcer for the dolphin and whale performances. In 1975, she landed a job managing V.I.P. cruise passengers arriving on the Island Princess (a star in “The Love Boat”).

That summer, Charlton Heston and his family disembarked and asked her to arrange their return to Los Angeles. The actor’s son, Fraser, a film director and producer, later asked her on a date and invited her to attend the Oscars when Charlton Heston was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1978. She arrived, in the greatest humiliation of her life, wearing a simple skirt and a blouse.

Like Scarlett O’Hara, she would never be hungry again — not on a red carpet anyway.

After marrying Fraser Heston in 1980, she worked as a film publicist (her credits include “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), then shifted to fashion, introducing Jimmy Choo to Los Angeles. Now companies like Emanuel Ungaro, Alexander McQueen, Reem Acra and Collette Dinnigan typically pay her a $5,000 monthly retainer to lure celebrities.

Some say Ms. Heston would stop at nothing to get her labels on a hot actress, and indeed that seemed to be the case when she turned up at a studio in Culver City on Wednesday with a garment bag full of Reem Acra and Biba dresses and $50,000 worth of Kwiat diamonds stuffed in a FedEx envelope. Anna Friel, a rising young star, was being photographed by a major fashion glossy, so Ms. Heston showed up with samples.

There was an uncomfortable moment as a publicist, a photography director and the magazine’s stylist stared down Ms. Heston, delicately pointing out her diplomatic faux pas. Ms. Friel stepped in.

“Remember when I wore that spotted dress?” she said. “That was Marilyn.”

“Remember the green one? That was Marilyn.”

Ms. Heston began gathering the diamonds until the publicist stopped her.

“I want to keep them just in case,” the publicist said.

Do You Get Where He’s Coming From?

2008-02-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: February 21, 2008
WHEN I first visited Adam, the picture windows displayed a female mannequin that was trapped inside a bell-shaped bird cage, wearing a fur-lined silver vest. A male mannequin in the opposite window was paradoxically free: seated on a wooden bench in a comfortable Mr. Rogers zip cardigan, reading a book about architecture, surrounded by a nifty collection of ornamental bird cages.

In many stores, one feels starved of proper influence from the past. Sophomoric designs spring into the fashion world that are so right-this-second as to be divorced from any history or future; they resolve no tensions that fashion has been feeling for the last several hundred years, or even the last five. They feel haplessly marooned in the present.

The designer Adam Lippes doesn’t have this problem. His designs seem to be moving toward something, or back to something. But this, too, has its dangers: if the specific influences the designer is drawing from lack depth, or he isn’t influenced deeply enough, his overall message can be inscrutable.

The first stuff I glommed onto at Adam was shiny holiday finery, on sale. Gold lamé dollybird dresses with high boat necks, studded along the collarbones with classic rings of Greek goddess/regal Egyptian rhinestones ($169, down from $250).

They transported me to Oscar nights in the mid-to-late 1960s: back when the Oscars meant something. Real men with sideburns wore butterfly bow ties and were fighting drunk, and women back-combed their hair into ice sculptures and painted Cleopatra eyeliner halfway up each temple.

This rack brought to mind the movie “Darling,” a portrait of London right as its behavioral pendulum was swingin’ away from the repressions of the ruling-class establishment into a breezy decadence (that proved as clunky and as bloodless as the old mores it was subverting). New cultural adventures were swirling around those dresses; wars were beginning to end. Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura in a space beyond race. Barbra Streisand strapped on a Nefertiti headdress, with no irony whatsoever. Colors were bleeding and minds were beginning to open. It was the tipping point of suggestion that girls still locked in their Goldwater girdles might want to burn their bras in a few years.

The mannequin at Adam obviously wanted to escape her cage... but did she know why?

This wasn’t vital information. There was a laudably uplifting and clever mood pervading the place. Mr. Lippes hits his inspirational nails rather exactly on their heads, but they’re art nails. Fellini beach party bonanzissima! Blouson dresses in billowing stripes made from the cotton of faded circus tents. A yellow chiffon halter dress transports J-Lo through time, to guest star on “The Love Boat.”

Designers generally make the shopper aware of their muses through their clothing; Mr. Lippes takes a bit of a shortcut by displaying his personal library. Art and architecture books by Alex Katz, Jackson Pollock, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Tord Boontje and Jean Nouvel are scattered on coffee tables and lean in thick wooden bookshelves alongside hand-blown Danish water glasses ($26) and pastel T-shirts folded in stacks of gradient color.

A tiny woman with a shag haircut and little round librarian glasses emerged from a dressing room wearing a button-up turquoise smock. Smurf veterinary clinic, was what first came to my mind.

“That is so almost there,” I said, hurling my unsolicited opinion at her.

“I don’t really like it.” She tugged at the hem.

“I don’t like it, either, but I see where it wants to go. It’s almost incredibly cute. I like the idea of it on you exponentially more than I like it on you.”

It had bulbous pockets on the hips, which made it an unforgivably eggy, shapeless shmatte such as one might wear to serve pies at the Hickory Pit. But there was something precious about the blouse. It was weirdly innocent and benignly nurse-like. If she had been teaching knee-high children to finger-paint, it would have been glorious. As a garment, though, it was way too spayed. June Cleaver jokes aren’t funny anymore, since our collective sexual maturity started going retrograde.

My sales assistant was a gentle, blushing boy with shaggy hair and a necktie zipped under one of Adam’s baby-blue cardigans, and a pair of thick, square plastic glasses I identified as Early Air Force — a frame once referred to as “birth control,” for its efficacy in repelling girls (which just goes to show, one man’s poison is another boy’s date).

The more expansive the imagination of the designer, the more the clothes invite you to romp around onstage in the lifestyle of the designer’s imaginary playhouse. I nearly succumbed to a black knit dress with a peekaboo neckline, pleated sleeves and silk braiding around the neck and belt ($295). But it was wholly transparent; the fantasy wasn’t my style. It required a Lindsay Lohan-esque urge to stand around at a Hollywood bar showing your panties in a way that looks unintentional.

The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1965 review of “Darling”: “The heroine, as played by Julie Christie, is a vigorous, vivacious sort, full of feline impulses and occasional disarming charms, but uncommunicative of the urges that make her tick.”

Adam’s caged woman must have been imprisoned for something, and we can only hope that she eventually figured out why. Perhaps Mr. Lippes is telling us that in an unpredictable world, it’s best to dress hopefully: white canvas, Rita Hayworthy sailor tap-pants ($185) could be just the ticket for weathering the tail of a long winter. Just add silver tap shoes and fan-kick, sister: this, too, shall pass.

Adam

678 Hudson Street (near West 14th Street); (212) 229-2838.

ADAM-IZED The golden-boy designer Adam Lippes brings his label to a black-tiled showplace in the meatpacking district. Spiffy, trendy confections wrapped in soft-baked minimalism. Girl-friendly.

ADAM-ANT All the stuff you need for play dates with the beautiful art-youths of Bushwick (roll over, Williamsburg).

MADAM, I’M EXPENSIVE Most of the prices are reasonable, but I really wanted the silver fox blanket (sorry, PETA!) to put in a hammock and never get out: $2,300, and that’s just cruel.

The Bride Wore Very Little

2008-02-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: February 21, 2008
THE gown was almost wanton — fluid but curvy with a neckline that plummeted dangerously. “It makes me feel sexy and beautiful,” said Natasha DaSilva, who slipped it on for a fitting last week.

Except that Ms. DaSilva, who will be married on Long Island in September, plans to wear it at the altar.

“Why not?” she asked. “I want to look back in 20 years and feel like I looked hot on my wedding day.”

Ms. DaSilva, 26, thinks of herself as adventurous, but not so brash that she is about to cross a line. Dressing for a wedding as if it were an after-party is accepted among her family and friends. “For my generation, looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even,” she said. “Who cares about that part anymore?”

Ms. DaSilva is typical of a growing number of brides flouting convention by flaunting their curves. More vamp than virgin, many are selecting gowns that bare a generous expanse of cleavage, midsection, lower back or thigh, temptress styles that may be better suited to a gala or boudoir than to a church or ballroom.

“Brides today absolutely want to look sexy and glamorous,” said Mara Urshel, an owner and the president of Kleinfeld, the venerable Manhattan bridal salon. In recent months, the store has seen a spike in demand for plunging necklines and negligee looks, one that has only intensified since the spring bridal collections began arriving in stores. For brides shopping now for gowns to wear at summer or early fall weddings, “there is a lot of freedom of choice, and these girls exercise every bit of it,” Ms. Urshel said.

Determined to look torrid on their wedding day, they are picking dresses modeled, say, on the one worn by Christina Aguilera, who was married in 2005 in a gown with a plummeting neckline and ruffled fishtail hem. Or maybe the hope is to emulate Sarah Jessica Parker, who, in the forthcoming film version of “Sex and the City,” spills out of the front of her wedding dress.

“Young women increasingly look to the red carpet for style ideas,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine. “They are very aware of how they look,” she added. “They diet, they work out. And when they marry, they want to be the celebrity of their own event.”

To accommodate them, the once rigidly corseted bridal industry has loosened its stays. At the spring bridal shows in New York last October, tastemakers like Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, Reem Acra, Angel Sanchez and Carolina Herrera unveiled a preponderance of strapless styles, trumpet shapes and even a few above-the-knee looks. More-daring designers offered filmy peignoir dresses, two-piece looks and skirts slit all the way to the hip.

Some of these va-voom confections seem tailor-made for the bride who envisions the march down the aisle as a long-dreamed-of photo op, and the reception as an after-party on the scale of Oscars night.

“Women now are looking at their weddings more like a movie premiere,” said Jose Dias, a designer for Sarah Danielle, a New York bridal house.

These steamy fantasies extend to their choice of location. “It used to be that unless you married at home, you were married in a church,” Ms. Bratten said. But today fewer weddings take place in a house of worship, and fewer still in the bride’s hometown.

According to a 2006 survey by Condé Nast Bridal Media, 16 percent of couples choose a destination wedding — a fourfold increase from a decade ago. The same survey found that only 46 percent of brides are married in a church or synagogue, down from 55 percent the year before. With weddings transported to other locales comes a loosening of conventions.

Whether they marry in a walled garden, on a tennis court, on a yacht or at the beach, “brides are more focused on the after-party, and on personalizing it,” Ms. Bratten said.

Beginning with the gown. Today the prevailing fantasy is no longer, “ ‘I want to be a princess in my ball gown,’ ” Mr. Dias said. “A lot of women have done that already for their prom.”

Mr. Dias, who is based in Los Angeles, accommodates clients’ desires for dresses that echo runway trends with halter-tops and off-the-shoulder gowns that are more emphatically provocative than the strapless looks that have become commonplace. His dresses are cut to appeal to the bride who is “confident in her sexuality,” he said.
Similar considerations prompted the designer Monique Lhuillier, a favorite in Hollywood, to fashion a dress with an Empire bodice, wide lace straps and a wispy chiffon skirt — features more often found in a nightgown. A hit of Ms. Lhuillier’s spring bridal collection, the dress is available at Kleinfeld.

Yielding to clients’ demands, Pnina Tornai, an Israeli-born designer, specializes in patently vixenish gowns. Only a couple of years ago Ms. Tornai’s dresses — often cut from semi-sheer panels of lace — met with a chilly reception in New York. “When I first came to show my collection at Kleinfeld, I was thrown out the door,” she said. Undaunted, she modified her dresses and several months later returned. Today her gowns are among the store’s best sellers.

For brides who want to maintain the traditional modesty during the wedding ceremony but cut loose at the reception, there is the increasingly popular option of topping the dress with a shawl, stole or bolero.

When Jana Pasquel, a New York society figure and jewelry designer, said her vows in a convent in Mexico City last November, she wore bouffant dress by Vera Wang; effusively romantic, it was traditional except for the neckline, which revealed more than Ms. Pasquel cared to show.

Her father, who is Mexican, “is a traditional Catholic,” said Ms. Pasquel, 31. “He would not have liked me to walk down the aisle like that, so I had the designer make a cover-up, a kind of a bolero, very full and infanta-looking. It came all the way up to my neck.”

At a second marriage ceremony later that week on a beach in Acapulco, Ms. Pasquel thought only of pleasing herself. Inspired by a trip to India, she wore a tiny midriff-baring bodice and an abundant skirt made of gold leaf. More sensuous than brazen, it made an impression, she recalled. “People talked about it — a lot.”

Catherine Cuddy, an insurance analyst in New Jersey, was similarly focused on turning heads when she married in Bryant Park in New York last October. She dispensed with the customary long, fitted sleeves and train in favor of a halter style that dipped to the small of her back.

Even a veil was too much for her. “I didn’t want to cover up my dress,” said Ms. Cuddy, 33, a self-described Rita Hayworth type. Or the torrents of curls that rushed past her shoulders. Or, for that matter, her gym-toned back.

To get in shape for her gown, a white lace sheath that appeared to have been turned on a lathe, she stepped up visits with her trainer from one to three sessions a week. Ms. Cuddy had no thought of defying tradition or making a statement of any kind. She simply wanted to make the most of her curves, she said.

When she marries in Long Island City next fall, Ms. DaSilva, too, will dress as she sees fit — and with her mother’s blessing. “My mom loves my gown,” she said delightedly. “She thinks it’s very figure-flattering.”

Would her male relatives object?

“Oh, no, no, no,” Ms. DaSilva said. “Besides, in my family, we’re mostly women. It’s pretty much — we’re in control.”

2008-02-20T04:58:00.000-08:00

By CATHY HORYN
Published: February 20, 2008
Milan

Nothing about Prada or Jil Sander is easy, though simplicity — and tradition — are at the core of both fall collections. Miuccia Prada turned lace into a holy and fetishistic enterprise, while Raf Simons of Jil Sander tested the structural foundations of minimalism.

Yet these are the two designers who, quite simply, matter in Milan.

In contrast to the firefly transparency for spring, Mr. Simons went heavier, warmer, the tweed and dark woolen collars spiraling against the face — and that may be a turn-off. But in virtually every outfit in his show on Monday night, Mr. Simons put purpose to his tailoring. And Milan has been awash in clothes without interest or real design.

Under Mr. Simons, Jil Sander has become a source for beautiful dresses and modern tailoring. This time, he said, he wanted the tailoring patternmakers to think more like the drapers, and vice versa. That exercise produced a slim navy wool sheath with a chevron of pressed pleats from neckline to hem, as well as a remarkable dress with a bow effect at the neck done with an inner structure of padding under speckled gray tweed.

Structure is the essence of fashion, and many designers have shied away from it — or do it cheaply with a gather. Mr. Simons sees only contemporary possibilities with the most traditional values, like a tweed jacket in a blend of navy and purple that breaks interestingly above the elbows and holds your attention with the way the fabric spills and drapes across the front. And this hard-core interest has put him in the vanguard of women’s fashion.

“You want to be more simple in fashion now, and more minimal,” Ms. Prada said after her fascinating show on Tuesday night. Of course, she is not talking about lovely dresses, like those that Tomas Maier showed earlier in the day at Bottega Veneta. Mr. Maier’s chic, liquidlike dresses — complemented this season with rounded blue-violet coats pasted with felt curls — have the ardent-heartedness of a man pressing his case with chocolates and roses. (O.K., O.K., you big slob, make me a lady!)

No, Ms. Prada’s black lace dresses are something else. Lace is the fabric of women’s lives, from christening robes to bridal gowns to widow’s weeds. (And let us harmonize: We are fashion nuns!) So, like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and perhaps like Azzedine Alaïa, Ms. Prada took a single idea and stayed with it, working the black and beige lace (or orange and blue lace) into coats and slim dresses and tops with stiff satin peplums, all over bodysuits or white cotton shirts. As she said: “You have to go all the way. A little touch of lace becomes pretty.”

Structurally, proportionally, the clothes were very direct and simple — the ruffled edges of some of the 1940s dresses repeated in the suede and patent-leather pumps and nylon bags. The lace becomes the intellectual and emotional catalyst. You can’t not ask if the dresses are indecent — many of them are, after all, transparent. But Ms. Prada has made sure that it’s not the only question her collection raises against the female self.

To an outsider — woman or man, straight or gay — many of the clothes on the Milan runways would look peculiar. They have no precise fit, no clear design values; and, apart from Sander and Prada, only a superficial waxing of authority. A weird sensitivity has captivated designers, like too many readings of Virginia Woolf, and it has resulted in sagging shapes with carefully placed flounces, practical cloaks and a suicidal palette saved by a bright touch of peacock blue.

Collections like Alberta Ferretti and Pringle, designed by Clare Waight Keller, have the range of a conversation conducted over a backyard fence. Ms. Waight Keller has a flair for knits, but her Pringle is all discreet sensibility and no humor. Her press notes refer to a “clean, disciplined correctness,” and that meant capes and austere poncho dresses. But only to a fashion person disciplined in little details would these “correct” clothes have value. To someone else, a blank husband, they would read as “nag, nag, nag: take out the trash.”

Christopher Bailey has steadily moved away from the idiosyncratic groundwork he first laid at Burberry. Those clothes were always surprising and informative, a mix of British heritage, new influences and masculine uniform, and they made Mr. Bailey a contemporary pathfinder.

His show on Monday restored some of that freshness, particularly in the A-line wool coats worn with bric-a-brac jeweled necklaces (hung on chains like decanter labels), and smart, sculptural knit tops worn with sexy silk trousers. But he still gets lost in the couture effects, like frumpy Empire lines and pleated cloqué, the stiffness and fit making beetles out of supermodels.

It took giants to build the Milan fashion houses, and apparently it takes corporations to bury them. Gianfranco Ferré is the latest management fiasco; after Mr. Ferré’s death last June, the company hired the designer Lars Nilsson. That marriage was swiftly annulled — did somebody not ask enough questions at the start? — and the collection on Monday was a respectful team effort that stopped short of embarrassment.

Mr. Ferré’s fashion was modernist architecture with the blood thirst of a diva. It always said: Go for it. Designers are fumbling all over Milan, doing delightful things with seams. This would be a lucrative moment for someone at Ferré to get it right.

No words could properly describe Cristina Ortiz’s first effort for Salvatore Ferragamo, another house in perpetual transition, until I looked out the car window on my way to Prada and saw a billboard of the tawny mane and cleavage of Celine Dion. But exactly!

Like a lot of designers, Angela Missoni finds inspiration in “The Women,” the George Cukor film now in remake, and as she observed on Sunday, “135 actresses and not even the shadow of a man.”

Well, not quite. There is the incredible influence of Adrian, the MGM costume designer of the film. Ms. Missoni didn’t attempt to channel Adrian — that would be pointless — but she did appreciate his feeling for asymmetry and unusual prints, among other bygone qualities.

Who doesn’t admire self-expressive fashion and wish there were more choices for women? Ms. Missoni’s trouble is that while she understands the principle of having an independent style, she doesn’t have the imaginative powers to realize it in a contemporary way.

She may believe that women would feel happier in a poncho lined in a Missoni print, more sophisticated in a turquoise print silk dress over a turtleneck, and more mysterious in a pair of gray flannels with a stiff floral stole, but the results, on this outing, looked self-conscious.

It’s Lonely at the Top, the Middle in the Plaza Hotel ...

2008-02-16T06:04:00.001-08:00

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Published: February 17, 2008
KATHY RULAND decorated her family’s new two-bedroom condo at the Plaza Hotel with care. The windows, overlooking Central Park, are draped with gold silk, and the living room showcases her beloved Indonesian painting of the Hindu goddess Sita, which was bought at a gallery near her main residence in Laguna Beach, Calif. When she wakes up to front-row views of Central Park, she says she feels like a princess.

In the time she has been living, on and off, at the newly converted Plaza Hotel, she has met five residents of the 181-unit building. In fact, she has no idea who lives on either side of her; of the 10 apartments on her floor, she knows not a soul, not a face, not a name.

She wouldn’t mind meeting someone other than the decorators, real estate brokers and other service workers fussing over the apartments. But even the building’s security guards can’t offer much information.

“I keep asking, ‘Has anybody else moved in?’ and they shake their heads,” she said. “The place has been deserted.”

The Plaza Hotel, which has spent much of its 100-year history packed with guests like the Vanderbilts and the Beatles, not to mention debutantes and Frank Lloyd Wright, closed in 2005 to reopen as part hotel and part condominium. The hotel is scheduled to reopen March 1, and the condominiums have been finished for months. Buyers have closed on nearly 100 apartments.

Yet for the most part, no one is home. Only a half-dozen residents live there full time and another three dozen residents live there on weekends, according to Lloyd Kaplan, spokesman for the Plaza’s owner, Elad Properties.

On any night, the Plaza has rows and rows of darkened windows. The hallways on upper floors are silent except for the occasional shudder of wind. When young girls ask Ed the doorman whether Eloise is home, they are told she is on vacation in Paris.

So the buyers actually residing at the Plaza are finding life a little strange. Not that they regret their decision to move in. It’s hard to complain, after all, about living in multimillion-dollar apartments in one of Manhattan’s most legendary buildings, or to grouse about too much privacy. In New York, with its doubled-up roommates, clotted sidewalks and elbow-to-elbow dining, privacy is one of the ultimate luxuries.

But the Plaza does provide a window into the transient lives of the latest wave of the ultrarich in New York. Most of the buyers of luxury condos like those at the Plaza — including current and former top executives of Staples, JetBlue, Viacom and Esprit, as well as a few Russian billionaires — are rarely there. The city is just one more place they spend time around the country or the world. When they are living at the Plaza, some say they find themselves longing for a nod from a neighbor by the elevator, a hello in the lobby, a friendly wine and cheese gathering. Like anyone else, they long for a community, albeit a community of the megawealthy.

Kathy Ruland’s family owns two apartments in the Plaza. Her parents, Betty and Fred Farago, bought a one-bedroom $5.8-million apartment in July on the 15th floor, and a two-bedroom in October for themselves, the children and the grandchildren.

When they first bought the one-bedroom, the Faragos encouraged Ms. Ruland’s 17-year-old son, Stan, to spend the night by himself in the Plaza, one of the first people to overnight there.

The family knew the building was nearly empty, but thought Stan could be like the character Macaulay Culkin played in the movie “Home Alone.” That night, Stan ordered pizza, Cokes and cheese bread for the security guards and hung out with them downstairs. When it was time for bed, he reluctantly went upstairs to the family apartment. “It was a little bit spooky because it was totally dead,” he said. “It was this huge hotel, and I was the only one up there.”

In the fall, his 21-year-old sister, Kelley, moved into the apartment.

She had just transferred to Columbia University and didn’t want to stay in her dorm room, because she was lonely. Her roommate, it turned out, was always away with her boyfriend.

Kelley thought the Plaza would be busier, she said. But security guards called her Eloise as she headed in and out. Although her mother and grandmother often visited, she felt isolated. Last month, Kelley transferred back to the University of California, Los Angeles, moving into a shoe-box-size room at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house. “It doesn’t matter where you are or how nice the place is — you get lonely,” she said. “The only time I wasn’t lonely was when my mom and grandma were there.”

Of course, New York can be a lonely place, even for the rich who make Manhattan their primary home and live in the equivalent of private clubs — 740 Park, for instance. Entry into those co-ops requires not just money, but also the right credentials. That means that they are closed off to the Russian billionaires and wealthy entrepreneurs from other American cities who live here part time.

Bernard and Joan Spain, who also live there, have held three cocktail parties for people who live nearby.
Contrary to what outsiders think, those residents can also be isolated. Michael Gross, who wrote a book about 740 Park, said the residents he interviewed talked about how they rarely saw one another and often rode elevators alone. The only exception was in the early 1970s when one vertical line of apartments, the D-line, filled with young families. But that closeness quickly disappeared when the D-line became known as the divorce line, because of all the marriages that fell apart.

“They don’t do secret deals to rule the world in the elevator,” he said. “They rarely see these people.”

The Plaza residents are isolated partly because the building is still filling up. Some buyers are waiting for decorators to customize their apartments for their art collections. Other buyers are staying at their third and fourth — or in some cases eighth and ninth — homes until the building’s restaurant and gym are open. That may not be until the spring.

In some ways, the Plaza Hotel’s residents are like newly wealthy New Yorkers during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century. Back then, newly transplanted New Yorkers lived in luxury hotels rich with dining rooms and men’s and women’s lounges.

David Nasaw, a biographer of Andrew Carnegie and a history professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, said that Mr. Carnegie lived in amenity-rich hotels like the St. Nicholas when he first moved to New York.

He later upgraded to the Windsor Hotel, and established himself socially by spending time in the hotel’s dining, drawing and reading rooms. Back then, Mr. Carnegie’s accommodations were looked down upon by older New York families who lived in private residences.

“Nobody who had any kind of money would dare live in an apartment building where there weren’t services,” he said. “You wouldn’t imagine in the 1870s or 1880s getting your services anywhere else. These places prided themselves on the amenities.”

Mr. Nasaw said the superwealthy in the 19th century may have had an easier time figuring out how to meet the neighbors. The social rules on how and when to call on one another were far more explicit, and it was easy to tell whether social overtures were accepted or rejected. Think of the invitations and rejections Countess Olenska receives in Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence.”

“These formal structure and rituals allowed people to navigate,” Mr. Nasaw said.

THERE are, of course, no real rules anymore. That’s why when all the decorating is done, brokers say, it may not be easier for the neighbors to be neighborly. For many residents, this will be just fine. “The ones who bought there are not looking to be part of a community,” said Kathryn Steinberg, a broker with Edward Lee Cave, who sold two apartments at the Plaza. “They have their community.”

John Coustas, president of the Greek shipping company Danaos, closed last month on a two-bedroom apartment. He doesn’t plan on living there full time, but isn’t worried about being lonely. He has three sets of friends who also bought there. “Of course we hope that we’re going to meet more people,” he said. “We’ll see how it develops.”

Ms. Ruland said meeting people is hard simply because it’s hard to tell the residents from the help. One neighbor cast his eyes away from her one day when she walked through the lobby with a mop and bucket. She said she felt like telling him her family owns two apartments in the Plaza.

She hopes, she said, that over time she will meet someone there who shares her love of art and running. Her mother hopes that she will find neighbors who like to play canasta or bridge.

“It’s going to be easier when we go to the fitness center,” she said. “I would love to meet people. The sooner the better. It’s getting. ... It’s getting. ... We’re ready.”

Bernard and Joan Spain say the fitness center may not be the answer. The couple, whose main home is in Philadelphia, bought their $7 million two-bedroom apartment in June. After renovations, they moved in last month, replacing their space at the nearby Sherry-Netherland Hotel. In their five years at the Sherry-Netherland, they said, they never saw any neighbors at the gym.

They have high hopes for the Plaza. In August, they attended the 100th anniversary party to see if they could meet future neighbors. And when they moved in, the Spains introduced themselves to the single woman who lives on their floor with her mammoth dog, and also to a Swedish family they met in the lobby.

Ms. Spain has held three cocktail parties for friends who live nearby. “We popped some popcorn and put out some mixed nuts,” she said.

They invited the neighbor with the dog, but she took a rain check. And last week, Mr. Spain said, he met another neighbor while taking out the trash.

The views help prevent them from getting lonely. They entertain themselves by watching thousands of people mill in and out of the Apple Store below. They also talk on the phone with a friend’s friend who bought a third-floor apartment, but has not yet moved in. They hope that they will meet people when the shops and restaurants open.

“We expect that we’ll meet very interesting people,” Ms. Spain said. Her husband added, “We’re optimistic people.”

Boys Will Be Boys, Girls Will Be Hounded by the Media

2008-02-16T05:55:00.000-08:00

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: February 17, 2008

A VIDEO of Heath Ledger hanging out at a drug-fueled party two years before his death would seem to constitute must-see material for a tabloid entertainment show.

Relatively speaking, the late Heath Ledger has been treated gently by the news media.
But when such a video ended up in the hands of the producers of “Entertainment Tonight,” the program declined to broadcast it, a spokeswoman said, “out of respect for Heath Ledger’s family.” The 28-year-old actor died on Jan. 22 from what the medical examiner called an accidental overdose of prescription medications.

Amy Winehouse did not merit the same discretion. Images from a video that showed her smoking what a British tabloid, The Sun, said was a pipe of crack cocaine, as well as admitting to having taken “about six” Valium, were widely disseminated in the news media around the same time.

When Owen Wilson was hospitalized in August after an apparent suicide attempt, his plight was the subject of a single US Weekly cover story. Not so Britney Spears, recently confined in a psychiatric ward, who has inspired six cover stories for the magazine during the same time span.

When Kiefer Sutherland was released from the jail in Glendale, Calif., after serving a 48-day sentence for a drunken driving conviction, the event merited little more than buried blurbs.

Contrast this to Paris Hilton’s return to jail last year after a brief release to serve the rest of a 45-day sentence for a probation violation involving alcohol-related reckless driving. The event invited a level of attention that evoked the O. J. Simpson trial. Hordes of cameras enveloped the limousine that ferried the tear-streaked heiress to jail.

Yes, women are hardly the only targets of harsh news media scrutiny — just ask Mel Gibson. But months of parallel incidents like these seem to demonstrate disparate standards of coverage. Men who fall from grace are treated with gravity and distance, while women in similar circumstances are objects of derision, titillation and black comedy.

Some celebrities and their handlers are now saying straight out that the news media have a double standard.

“Without a doubt, women get rougher treatment, less sensitive treatment, more outrageous treatment,” said Ken Sunshine, a publicist whose clients include Ben Affleck and Barbra Streisand. “I represent some pretty good-looking guys, and I complain constantly about the way they’re treated and covered. But it’s absolutely harder for the women I represent.”

Liz Rosenberg, a publicist at Warner Bros./Reprise Records who represents Madonna, among others, also thinks sexism is at work. “Do you see them following Owen Wilson morning, noon and night?” she asked.

Some editors confirm that they handle female celebrities differently. But the reason, they say, is rooted not in sexism, but in the demographics of their audience.

The readership of US Weekly, for example, is 70 percent female; for People, it’s more than 90 percent, according to the editors of these magazines.

“Almost no female magazines will put a solo male on the cover,” said Janice Min, the editor in chief of US Weekly. “You just don’t. It’s cover death. Women don’t want to read about men unless it’s through another woman: a marriage, a baby, a breakup.”

Thus, magazine coverage of Mr. Ledger’s death gave way to stories about Michelle Williams, Mr. Ledger’s former girlfriend and the mother of his daughter; US Weekly, for instance, put the headlines “A Mother’s Pain” and “My Heart is Broken” atop a four-page spread. Mary-Kate Olsen, telephoned several times by the discoverer of Mr. Ledger’s body, came in for it, too: “What Mary-Kate Knows” trumpeted In Touch Weekly.

Indeed, while one of People’s best-selling issues of the last year was its cover story on Mr. Wilson’s suicide attempt, a follow-up cover on his recovery was one of the worst sellers, said Larry Hackett, the managing editor.

Conversely, he said, the Britney Spears story continues to flourish precisely because women are fascinated by the challenges facing a young mother.

“If Britney weren’t a mother, this story wouldn’t be getting a fraction of attention it’s getting,” Mr. Hackett said. “The fact that the custody of her children is at stake is the fuel of this narrative. If she were a single woman, bombing around in her car with paparazzi following, it wouldn’t be the same.”

Others, like Roger Friedman, an entertainment reporter for FoxNews.com, said that female stars tend to make more-compelling stories because “they are more emotional and open” about their problems. Male stars, he said, tend to be “circumspect.”

Rebecca Roy, a psychotherapist in Beverly Hills, Calif., who has several clients in the entertainment industry, said that male celebrities can often wriggle out of trouble with a rakish bad-boy shrug. But, she said, the double standard can reinforce the destructive behavior of female stars, pushing them to further depths of substance abuse and erratic behavior.

Ms. Roy said that troubled male stars like Robert Downey Jr. are encouraged to move past problems to a second act in their careers, while the personal battles of women like Lindsay Lohan or the late Anna Nicole Smith are often played for maximum entertainment value.

“With men, there’s an emphasis on, ‘he had this issue, but he’s getting over it,’ ” Ms. Roy said. “But with women, it’s like they keep at it, keep at it. It’s almost like taking the wings off of a fly.”

Ms. Min acknowledged that her magazine played down its coverage of Owen Wilson and Heath Ledger. Part of the reason, she said, was that female readers tend to be sympathetic toward young men in crisis.

“With Heath Ledger, people walked on eggshells trying to strike the right tone,” Ms. Min said, adding that “public sentiment for Heath Ledger factored into our coverage.”

Edna Herrmann, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, said that while schadenfreude is part of the enjoyment of star travails, women especially respond to female celebrities with commonplace demons. “Misery likes company,” Dr. Herrmann said.

But some believe the power of a celebrity’s publicist has more bearing on coverage than gender. “Entertainment Tonight” reversed its plans to show the video of Mr. Ledger following protests from stars like Natalie Portman and Josh Brolin organized by ID, which represented Mr. Ledger and still represents Ms. Williams.

In some cases, celebrities may be victims of their own appetites for media attention.

“It would seem to me that no one who demanded, who expected privacy, at the get-go was denied that privacy,” said Stan Rosenfield, a publicist who represents George Clooney.

And Harvey Levin, the managing editor of the gossip Web site TMZ.com, said that female stars are afforded every opportunity to move past their sins, as long as they clean up their behavior.

“Nicole Richie, who took a beating generally for being a screw-up, has turned it around, and everyone’s cheering for her now,” Mr. Levin said of the former Paris Hilton sidekick and tabloid staple, now the mother of a month-old daughter.

Even if news media coverage is weighted in their favor, male celebrities aren’t exactly feeling immune from harsh scrutiny.

“There is certainly an argument for it being incredibly sexist, the attention that’s given to women and the hounding of them,” the actor Colin Farrell said at a recent party for his new film, “In Bruges.”

Mr. Farrell, who has attracted his share of attention, said such potential bias did not make him any less of a news media target. “If they catch me out and about,” he said, “they’ll go for it.”

As Mr. Farrell spoke in a room filled with journalists and photographers, he was not even sipping a beer.

Additional reporting by Paula Schwartz.

Art and Life, Steeping in a Teapot

2008-02-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

By DAVID COLMAN
Published: February 17, 2008

FRITZ HAEG is not the best-known artist in the Whitney Biennial, opening next month. He has not had a breakout solo show at the Zach Feuer Gallery. He is not being wooed by Larry Gagosian. His prices at auction are nonexistent.

“I don’t even sell work,” he said with a laugh.

But in an art world growing jaded with such signifiers, Mr. Haeg, an architect by training and a landscaper by nature, may end up the surprise star of the Whitney show. Among the “homes” he designed for 12 “clients” are a beaver lodge and pond for the sculpture court, an eagle’s nest over the entry and other cribs around the museum for a mud turtle, mason bees, a flying squirrel, a bobcat and other critters that once lived on the Upper East Side.

Given that Madison Avenue is one of the world’s fanciest shopping streets, you would think Mr. Haeg is casting stones. In 2005, for his first nature-ruption series, “Edible Estates,” he replanted front lawns in places from Salina, Kan., to London, with vegetable gardens.

But his work is more than simple eco-commentary. From his Los Angeles home (a vintage geodesic dome), Mr. Haeg has carved out an intriguing niche within modern architecture, performance art and eco-activism.

This is clear even with his new “Animal Estates,” as the Whitney installation is called. The beaver lodge, for one, will be stained black. “It’s going to look as if Marcel Breuer had designed a beaver lodge,” he said.

Mr. Haeg grew up northwest of Minneapolis, near St. John’s University, with its buildings that, like the Whitney, Breuer designed in the 1960s. St. John’s, a Roman Catholic university run by Benedictine monks, made an impact on the young Mr. Haeg, whose father graduated from the school. “The Abbey Church there is burned into my subconscious,” he said.

Today, even as Mr. Haeg is putting his beloved geodome on the market and deaccessioning unnecessary objects, there is one thing he is hanging onto. That is a teapot made in the late 1990s by Richard Bresnahan, who since 1980 has run the St. John’s pottery program, working only with local materials, from clays and glazes to wood for the kiln.

“It’s one of the only things I’m keeping,” he said. He bought the pot, a traditional Japanese double-gourd shape, a few years ago on a return visit with his father to the campus. “The first time I visited Bresnahan’s studio, I was blown away,” he said. “This is a part of the art world that’s really been marginalized: handcrafts and the stories of how things are made. I don’t think many artists think about where their materials come from.”

The teapot meshes not only with his ideals equating art’s ends and means, but with his retro ’60s aesthetic, a blend of pop-kitsch and eco-sincere. “It reminds me of my geodesic dome a bit, the way it’s this sphere up on three feet,” he said. “And the glaze — it’s very hippie, like it’s still forming itself. And there’s a nice conversation between the light, handmade cane handle and this big orb that’s solid and made of clay.”

And despite the exalted pedigree of the piece, he uses it all the time. “I drink a lot of tea,” he said.

Though Mr. Haeg calls himself a lapsed Catholic, the teapot reminds him of his admiration for the integrated way of life observed by the Benedictines at St. John’s: praying, teaching, farming, hiring high-modern architects.

“They really believe that everything matters,” he said. “There’s something so simple and primitive in the best possible way of what the life at St. John’s is and what the clay pot represents. It’s sort of a reminder that design isn’t just about physical acquisitiveness. It can be a means to a more fulfilled life.”

If it doesn’t make you embrace the Benedictine creed, it at least makes you think about switching to tea.

A Spoonful of Immunity?

2008-02-16T04:40:00.000-08:00

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: February 17, 2008

LOS ANGELES

DR. TEA KNOWS BEST Mark Ukra prepares a tea blend in West Hollywood.
FIRST there was vegetarianism, which begot veganism, macrobiotic adherents, raw foodists and something known simply as “the cleanse.” Now make way for immunity-enhancement, via your chopped salad and salmon tartar.

California has long led the country in the creation and fortification of urban food ways. The state was on the forefront of restaurants devoted to raw food and was the birthplace of the organic produce movement. In Los Angeles, vegan restaurants are nearly as prevalent as hamburger joints.

Now, restaurant menus here are marrying the broader commercial movement of “functional” foods — those stuffed with heavy doses of vitamins and antioxidants — and a national fixation on immunity boosting (a fizzy gulp of Airborne is as much a part of the pre-flight experience as a baggage check).

In Beverly Hills, Crustacean, a modern Vietnamese restaurant, has attached an icon to the left side of several menu items letting diners know that those dishes supposedly boost immunity. At M Café de Chaya in Hollywood, a macrobiotic restaurant often dotted with celebrities, the chef, Shigefumi Tachibe, has “items that offer both immune boosting and healthful benefits for everybody,” said his spokeswoman, Cindy Choi.

Down Melrose Avenue a bit from M Café is Dr. Tea’s Tea Garden and Herbal Emporium, where immunity enhancement is always part of the menu, said Dr. Tea, a k a Mark Ukra. “We work a lot with cancer patients to bring their immunity up, and lots of people come in to get our tonics to get rid of the flu,” he said.

Foods that its makers claim enhance the immunity system have become increasingly mainstream over the last several years. Jamba Juice led the charge years ago, and has spawned many competitors serving juices sprinkled with supplements that claim to strengthen the body’s ability to prevent illnesses. Airborne, drinkable vitamin blends that claim to be armor against germ-filled environments, have flooded drug stores over the last several years.

There is supplement-infused Spava coffee, which offers an immunity formulation with rose hips and echinacea. Green Giant, the food manufacturer, has something in the marketplace called Immunity Boost, which are microwaveable frozen vegetables. Yoplait Essence Immunity Boost has “probiotics with zinc and iron,” also meant to charge up the system.

But in Los Angeles, the connubial relationship of farm and pharmacy in restaurants is on the march. The former unadulterated pleasure of simply dining has been replaced with the feeling of a very expensive clinic.

“People more and more are understanding the importance of good health, and how priceless it is,” said GT Dave, a former Beverly Hills High School student who started his company, Millennium Products, in his kitchen at age 16. He now distributes Kombucha juice, which claims to enhance immunity, in restaurants around Los Angeles and Whole Foods stores nationwide. “Previously, health foods and health products were a very niche product, like for Berkeley free-spirited tree-hugging people,” he said. “Now people realize that the immune system is the foundation of our lives.”

At Crustacean, immunity-enhancing menu items do not have supplements. Instead, the chef and owner, in consultation with a nutritionist, went through the existing menu and plucked out offerings that they believed were already naturally helpful.

Each item is marked on the menu by a little leaf representing a Vietnamese herb, just as one might see a heart icon next to an egg-white omelet at a diner, indicating that the meal is low in cholesterol. “The hope is that this system could be used by other restaurants,” said Ashley Koff, the nutritionist who consulted on the menu.

For example, there is the Buddha roll, which has shiitake mushrooms (which have iron and Vitamin C, Ms. Koff said), lemongrass mushroom soup (lemon grass has folate, zinc and iron) and wild salmon tartar, which features cucumbers (vitamin C, folate and vitamin A), wild salmon (omega 3, selenium), garlic (selenium, phytochemicals) and red onion (vitamin C and copper, among other things).

“What I looked for were ingredients that brought forward minerals and phytochemicals,” Ms. Koff said, referring to chemical compounds derived from edible plants and fruits that are believed to aid cancer prevention. So how did it taste to this reporter? The lemon grass soup has a nice bite, and the Buddha roll has a clean fresh flavor. The chicken roulade and roasted fillet of sole were dull to this tongue; all was far more delicious than standard health-food fare.

The immunity enhancement does not end at the table — you can sit at the bar and pickle yourself while ostensibly warding off disease and calamity. There are martinis made with vodka and goji berries (antioxidants) or cucumbers. Taste note: both have a strong vodka top and fruity finish.

Experts on microbiology are decidedly mixed on the value of such menu designations. Michael Starnbach, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, said the heart icon might help diners, because it would warn of foods proven to be bad for your cardiovascular system.

But, he said, there is not enough hard evidence to prove that any food can enhance the immune system. “There is no doubt these menu items have these nutrients,” Mr. Starnbach said. “But that is different from the claim being made on the menu.” Unlike many health-food restaurants, Crustacean, a family business, started out as a Vietnamese restaurant, without overt health claims. The An family’s first restaurant, Thanh Long, opened in San Francisco in the ’70s in an old deli purchased by the family, still in Vietnam at that time, as a foothold into the United States. The restaurant remains there today.

The An sisters, eager for a hipper place to go with their friends in the city (four out of five girls are in the business) pushed for Crustacean, which opened in 1991. Then came the Beverly Hills outpost in 1997.

The Ans were always health conscious. “I was born into a family where we care about health,” said Helen An, the matriarch of the family, who is also head chef. “I learned Eastern medicine from my grandparents.”

Whether the immunity-marking trend has legs remains to be seen, but given the packed scene at M Café every lunch hour eating “the big macro burger,” and kale salad with peanut dressing, it certainly is hot.

Whether patrons are warding off illness will remain a subject of debate. “I would have a positive reaction to seeing that menu,” said Linda Gooding, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Emory University School of Medicine. “But as a scientist I would say that’s a personal preference. That’s not a scientific fact. Eating is a lifelong experiment. I think that’s all you can do.”

Dog Running: Easier Does It

2008-02-14T02:27:00.000-08:00

By SARAH TUFF
Published: February 14, 2008

FOR those who run with their dogs, trying to stay fleet of foot with a dog on a leash can be an exercise in futility. While the two-legged jogger aims for an even pace, the four-legged set sniffs, pulls, doubles back and dashes forward, yanking the shoulder socket. Regular leashes can also cause gait problems for serious runners, said Kelly Liljeblad, a dog owner and marathoner from Boulder, Colo. “If you run with the leash in the left hand, you’ll naturally bend to the left,” she explained.

In the last few years, some entrepreneurs and pet-gear companies have introduced hands-free systems, which loop a belt, attached to leash, around the runner’s waist. Recent innovations include swiveling mechanisms for tangle-free runs, quick-release buckles, fixtures for multiple dogs, reflective trim and pouches for personal items.

While recovering from a 2:47:13 finish (the women’s winning time) at the Miami Marathon last month, Ms. Liljeblad tested five sets of hands-free leashes on 20- to 30-minute runs around the Boulder Reservoir. Her co-testers were her yellow Labradors, Aggie and Pre.

LARZ PET GEAR Z-HANDS FREE LEASH $56 ($85 and up for multiple dogs), www.larzpetgear.com. At first, Ms. Liljeblad said, she found the modular attachments “overwhelming” but added that “it is nice to have options.” She rated this system her second favorite. She said, “This swivel mechanism was the best out of all the leashes” and “the padding is great on the belt if your dog pulls a little.” Because of the variety of attachments, “you can basically design your own belt.”

THE BUDDY SYSTEM $26, ($20 for smaller dogs); Lunge Buster, $12.50, www.buddysys.com. A “lightweight, easy-to-use and nonbulky” design earned this “simple” leash best-in-show for Ms. Liljeblad. She liked how it slid around the belt as she ran with Aggie. Also “nice” was the “bungee like” Lunge Buster (the Buddy System has a regular leash). “It was a perfect stiffness and length because it didn’t jerk me around,” Ms. Liljeblad said.

CARDIO CANINE $55, www.cardiocanine.com. Ms. Liljeblad appreciated the water-bottle holder and pocket on the back of this system, modeled after a rock-climbing belt. “This would be great for a long run or even a hike,” said Ms. Liljeblad, who also used the leash’s shortened loop to help steer Aggie. But the “metal latches were bulky and heavy” and she missed the bungee leash and swivel action of some other systems. Pre and Aggie, top, fight over the Cardio Canine.

RUNNING DAWG $21.95, www.runningdawg.com. “This is a nice, simple leash,” said Ms. Liljeblad, who thought the nylon belt pack was very useful. But the bungee-type leash was “a little too soft and flexible” for Ms. Liljeblad and Pre, who “kept forgetting he was on the leash.” She also wished it had a swivel system, and she had concerns about chafing. “The belt strap wasn’t that comfortable,” Ms. Liljeblad said. “But I like the simplicity.”

DOGMATIC FREELEASH PRO $24.99, www.dogmaticproducts.com. New this month, the updated Freeleash Pro has a buckle system designed to withstand 500 pounds of force, but after using it on Pre, Ms. Liljeblad said she “wasn’t crazy about the heavy metal latches.” She did like the quick-release system and the anti-tangle swivel, though it got caught on her jacket a few times. She gave a thumbs-up to the simple design and lightweight, reflective strap.

A Long-Running Mystery, the Common Cramp

2008-02-14T02:23:00.000-08:00

By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 14, 2008

IT can happen for no reason, it seems, taking you completely by surprise. And it can be excruciating. Suddenly, a muscle contracts violently, as if it had been prodded with a jolt of electricity. And it remains balled in a tight knot as painful second after painful second drags on.

A seized calf muscle or a hamstring can be frightening. Swimmers fear they will drown. Cyclists nearly fall off their bikes. Runners drop to the ground, grimacing, gritting their teeth.

The contraction is so strong that you could not will yourself to ball your muscle that tightly. And your muscle is likely to feel sore the next day.

You have had a cramp, an experience so common among endurance athletes, researchers say, that almost everyone who has tried endurance sports has had a muscle cramp or has a friend who has had one.

Cramps afflict 39 percent of marathon runners, 79 percent of triathletes, and 60 percent of cyclists at one time or another, said Dr. Martin P. Schwellnus, a professor of sports medicine at the University of Cape Town.

Cramps can occur during exercise, immediately after, or he said, as long as six hours later.

Yet common as they are and terrible as they can be, no one really understands cramps. They are a medical mystery.

“I would say, bottom line, there is no really convincing biological explanation for muscle cramps,” said Dr. Andrew Marks, a muscle researcher and chairman of the department of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Medical textbooks skirt the topic, he added, often avoiding any explanation. And few scientists have studied cramps.

But as anyone who has ever complained of cramps will attest, lots of advice is circulating on how to avoid them and lots of people — friends, coaches, doctors — think they have a solution.

Take a multivitamin pill to get zinc and magnesium. Massage the muscles. Drink plenty of water. Be sure to get enough electrolytes like sodium and potassium. Stretch before you start to exercise. No, stretch as soon as you finish. See a nutritionist to correct imbalances in your diet. See a trainer to be sure you are moving correctly.

Of course, Dr. Marks said, medical conditions can lead to cramps, including narrowed blood vessels, usually from atherosclerosis, or compression of a nerve, as happens in spinal stenosis. Cramps also can arise from hypothyroidism. And they can be a side effect of medications like diuretics, used to lower blood pressure, which can lead to a potassium deficiency that can cause cramps.

But, he and others said, those conditions do not explain the vast majority of cramps.

“You are left with the fact that cramping usually occurs in healthy people without any underlying disease,” Dr. Marks said.

There are three leading hypotheses about how to treat cramps and how to prevent them.

There’s the dehydration proposal: you just need more fluid. But, Dr. Schwellnus said, he studied athletes who cramped and found that they were no more dehydrated before or after a race than those who did not have cramps.

Then there’s the electrolyte hypothesis: what you really need is sodium and potassium.

Michael F. Bergeron, who directs the environmental physiology laboratory at the Medical College of Georgia, said the electrolyte hypothesis applies to a specific type of cramp that is related to excessive sweating. It occurs, he said, when the fluid that bathes the connection between muscle and nerve is depleted of sodium and potassium, which was lost through sweat. The nerve then becomes hypersensitive, Dr. Bergeron said.

“Usually you feel little twitches first,” he explained. “They last for 20 to 30 minutes and if you don’t do anything you can be in full-blown cramps.” Those cramps, he continued can move from place to place on your body, from one leg to the next, to your arms, stomach, even your fingers or your face.

The solution, Dr. Bergeron said, is to drink salty fluids like Gatorade (the company sponsors his research). He said he had prevented cramps in tennis players this way.

But asked whether there are any rigorous studies to confirm this hypothesis, he said no. “We haven’t done the study yet,” he said. “We’re at the point of kind of connecting the dots.”

The third hypothesis is advanced by Dr. Schwellnus. He questions the electrolyte hypothesis because his studies of Ironman-distance triathletes as well as other studies of endurance athletes found no difference in electrolyte levels between those who suffered cramps and those who did not.

DR. SCHWELLNUS proposes that the real cause of cramping is an imbalance between nerve signals that excite a muscle and those that inhibit its contractions. And that imbalance, he said, occurs when a muscle is growing fatigued.

His solutions for cramps are to exercise less intensely and for shorter times, to be sure you had enough carbohydrates to fuel your muscles, to train sufficiently and to regularly stretch the muscles that give you problems. These recommendations are based on his recent study of Ironman triathletes, Dr. Schwellnus said.

But while he advocates those practices, he said, they have not been proved in a rigorous study.

In the meantime, some doctors have resorted to experimenting on themselves, devising their own explanations and cures.

Dr. Charles van der Horst, an AIDS researcher at the University of North Carolina, said he was stunned when his calf started to cramp without warning when he was running. The pain was almost unbearable, he said, and even when the muscle finally relaxed, it cramped again when he resumed running.

“I started carrying a cellphone with me on long runs,” Dr. van der Horst said. When a cramp struck, he called his wife to ask her to drive out and get him.

“I think I was getting calcium deposits or something,” Dr. van der Horst said.

His solution was to massage his calves at all hours, pushing deep into the muscle. This seems to work, he said, explaining that it’s been a year now since he had a cramp.

Dr. Stephen Liggett, a professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland, has a different solution. He got terrible cramps in his calf during yoga. The culprit, he decided, was the drugs he takes for asthma, which can diminish the body’s supply of potassium. He knew that potassium is sold over the counter. But because high levels of potassium can be dangerous, store-bought potassium supplements are not very strong.

Dr. Liggett’s solution is not one anyone who is not a doctor should try at home. Before he does yoga, he measures the potassium levels in his blood before and after taking what he describes as a hefty dose of over-the-counter supplement. Then he calculates how much additional potassium he thinks he needs, securing it from concentrated potassium tablets from his research lab — how much he declined to say.

“I didn’t want to drink two gallons of Gatorade,” Dr. Liggett explained. He hasn’t had cramps since he began “preloading,” as he calls it, with potassium. But, he said, “I haven’t done a controlled trial.”

Dr. Marks, for one, is not convinced by the evidence for any of the hypotheses, nor by any of the proposed remedies.

What causes cramps?

“I would say the answer to that question is still open to investigation,” he said. And, he added, he hopes someone takes it up.

Beautiful Models, Hairy Legs and All

2008-02-14T02:20:00.000-08:00

Diane Ehricht, with Gidget, at the Westminster dog show in New York on Tuesday.

By GUY TREBAY
Published: February 14, 2008

NOW that Uno, the 15-inch beagle, has captured the crown, becoming the first of his breed to win best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, and now that more than 2,600 other canine competitors have been leashed and crated and hauled home to familiar kennels and sofas, it seems fitting to consider an overlooked aspect of this crowd-pleasing sport: the strange collision of fashion and dog shows.

“You want something sparkly,” Teri Rosenblatt-Tevlin explained on Monday as she circled her dog through the sawdust of a fenced enclosure by the staging area at Madison Square Garden. “But tasteful,” she added. “You want to look classy but not draw attention away from the dog.”

The dog in question was an Afghan hound named Ch. Poseidon of Mountain Top One, known familiarly as J. P., and based on what he was wearing before the show, he would be a hard dog to outshine. There were the patterned snood and the glossy belted jumpsuit, custom made by Ms. Rosenblatt-Tevlin’s mother to protect the dog from his urine stream.

He also had a luxuriant coat, combed to the texture of the cascading tresses in a L’Oréal ad. The coat was his own, of course, developed to help cope with the frigid winters in mountainous Afghanistan.

While nature provided J. P. with a reason for his foppish appearance, dog show humans have no such excuse for the strangeness of their attire. The rule of thumb at dog shows is “for handlers to be invisible, so they don’t take away from the breed,” said David Frei, the director of communications for the 132-year-old Westminster Kennel Club show.

And for the final night of judging, that rule was generally observed. Under the bright lights in a packed arena, the dogs shone and the handlers, in their dark suits and rubber-soled shoes, tended to recede. Or most did, if one omits Alessandra Folz, who appeared to be making a style statement by wearing a suit of bubble gum pink to conduct the 4-year-old Weimaraner called Marge through the ring.

And why shouldn’t she wear it? Dog shows are essentially fashion shows, after all, demonstrations of the many ways that selective breeding can be used to accommodate alterations in taste. Despite all the marketing and mythologizing about bloodlines extending backward into antiquity, many canine breeds are relatively modern and man-made.

In more than one sense, Westminster bears a resemblance to the New York fashion shows that folded up tents just days before the dog show rolled into town. Both are hybrid forms that marry entertainment to merchandising. Both have a tendency to stir up questions about the relationship between aesthetics and genetics. Both take place in a setting one associates with a circus, although they sell hot dogs at the Garden, and that will never happen under the big top at Bryant Park.

Replace the poodles with Latvian giantesses and the staging area at the Garden could have been any backstage segment from “Full Frontal Fashion.” Everywhere you looked there were fur-bearing divas parked passively on tables, surrounded by adoring and long-suffering handlers who primped and arranged their coiffures. In every corner were Jiffy Steamers, blow-dryers, rat combs, curlers, manicure scissors, cylinder brushes, hot combs and all the other weaponry of the beauty arsenal.

As at many fashion shows, a pale nimbus of hair spray floated above the backstage area. And this caused one to think that when people of the future wonder why they are forced to live in underground tunnels, it will be explained that in the early 21st century the hair spray used to make models look like poodles and poodles look like Lady Bunny ate a hole in the atmosphere.

At Madison Square Garden, as at many fashion shows, a chasm yawns between those who are blessed by nature and those whose job it is to prepare Cinderella for the ball. At Madison Square Garden, as at fashion shows, the anointed beauties perform for a moment and then rush to let down their fur. At Madison Square Garden, there are many reasons to envy dogs their essential nakedness.

These reasons include metallic brocade jackets, novelty jumpers, purple sweatsuit ensembles, sweatshirts with dog portraits outlined in Swarovski crystals, trousers with origami pleats and lug-soled walking shoes of a sort one associates with the lady ornithologist in Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

“Her coat is called oyster brindle,” said Juan Miranda, a Mexican breeder, as he methodically used a hot comb to straighten the fur of an Afghan bitch known as Ch. Dolce Gabbana of Damos. Unlike many of the handlers at Westminster, Mr. Miranda was simply attired, in a trim D & G suit. He was three hours into a grooming process, he explained, all for perhaps a half-hour in the ring.

In this way, too, dog and fashion shows are alike: orgies of effort yielding transitory effects. “It’s about eight hours altogether,” explained a groomer slumped in a chair beside Remy, the white standard poodle formally known as Ch. Brighton Minimoto. “It’s three hours just for the bath and a couple hours more to clipper her,” the groomer went on, adding that two more hours would be devoted to washing the hair spray out of Remy’s tortured Bret Michaels bouffant, using Dawn dish soap.

Although a favorite to win Westminster, Remy was ultimately beaten by the little beagle Uno. And even in this unanticipated result could be detected elements of fashion.

With her topiary hairdo and visual allusions to the go-go ’80s (“a masterpiece carved with a pair of clippers,” in the words of The Associated Press), Remy’s was probably the wrong look for tough economic times. She was a Christian Lacroix pouf, to strain the analogy. And Uno the beagle was an honest cloth coat, much like the ones Michael Kors showed a week ago in Bryant Park.

The Sweet Smell of ... Nothing

2008-02-14T02:11:00.000-08:00

By NATASHA SINGER
Published: February 14, 2008

PERFUME has long been an aphrodisiac decanted sparingly from an iconic glass bottle. But for Leslie Ware, a fashion editor at a quarterly magazine in Huntsville, Ala., fragrance has worked its magic in the opposite direction, as a romantic deal breaker.

SNIFF, SNIFF The fragrance display at Barneys New York.
Several years ago, Ms. Ware was engaged to a gentleman who did not like Trish McEvoy 9, the fruity vanilla blend she had been wearing for seven years.

“He thought I smelled like a traveling carnival, the kind where they sell corn dogs, because I guess the smell was reminiscent of cotton candy,” Ms. Ware, 28, said. “This was the demise of Trish No. 9.”

It was a bad omen.

Soon after, Ms. Ware said she broke up with the perfume-averse boyfriend. She has not worn fragrance since.

A more recent boyfriend fared no better after he bought Ms. Ware what she called “an old-lady perfume” against her wishes.

“It made me mad,” she said. “I told him not to bother buying me fragrance since I am picky, and now I have a $125 bottle of perfume sitting in a closet.”

Like red roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, perfume has traditionally been one of the fail-safe offerings of Valentine’s Day. But this year, as couples sit down to romantic dinners, a small but growing cohort of American women will emit scents that are more corporal and less Chanel. At a time when the number of perfumes on shelves has dramatically increased, consumption of fragrances is declining, industry analysts said. Last year, department stores carried 1,160 different fragrances for women compared with 756 in 2002, according to NPD Group, a market research firm that tracks consumer product sales.

Yet, last year in the United States, spending on upscale women’s fragrances declined, as part of a multiyear trend. The group said $1.97 billion was spent, down from $2 billion in 2002.

Like Ms. Ware, more women are forgoing scent altogether. Last year, about 15 percent of women said they did not wear fragrance, up from 13 percent in 2003, according to a survey of 9,800 women conducted by NPD.

“That may sound like a small number, but nationally that translates into two million more women who are saying ‘I don’t wear fragrance,’ ” said Karen Grant, the senior beauty industry analyst at NPD. “Eighty-five percent of women are still buying fragrance, but an increasing number tell us they are wearing fewer scents, less frequently or not at all.”

Fragrance fatigue is probably inevitable, with heavily fruited scents wafting out of everything from dishwashing liquids to hotel linens to candle displays at the mall. But perfume aversion seems to be tapping into a larger societal phenomenon that may have its origins in bans on cellphones and cigarettes: the idea that the collective demands of the public space trump one’s personal space.

“People are shying away from fragrances not for the traditional reasons that you’d expect, that it is too expensive or that they are wearing alternative products like body sprays or lotions,” Ms. Grant said. “Many people said it bothers them that fragrance has an effect on other people, that they are trying to be considerate by not overcoming others with scent.”

Indeed, Rochelle R. Bloom, the president of the Fragrance Foundation, an industry trade group, said that people who worry that their fragrance may offend others simply may be wearing perfume improperly.

“Your fragrance should never be perceived beyond an arm’s length, it should not proceed you into the room,” Ms. Bloom said.

She suggested that people wear ancillary scent products, like body lotion and bath gel, during the day and save perfume for the evenings and weekends. “The art of wearing fragrance involves not having it interfere with your neighbor.”

People may be noticing and shying away from perfume more at the moment because of a current vogue for potent scents, said Tania Sanchez, an author of “Perfumes: The Guide” (Viking), which is to come out in April. Other industry observers point to the changing nature of romance — less intimacy combined with the greater license to comment on a partner’s personal habits — as, pardon the pun, a disincentive.
“Something in the fabric of relationships is contributing to women, or the men who would have given them fragrance, buying less,” said Leigh Anne Rowinski, a director of client solutions at Information Resources Inc., a market research firm that tracks sales of mass consumer products.

Lapo Elkann, right, spritzes Simon Doonan, Barneys’ creative director, with Outrageous by Frédéric Malle.
Americans spent about $340 million last year on women’s fragrances at chains of big box, food and drug stores, down from about $346 million in 2004, according to Information Resources.

“As people’s lives have gotten busier, their relationships are less intimate, and you have to know someone pretty well to walk into a store and explain what kind of fragrance they might like or not like,” Ms. Rowinski said.

Several women interviewed for this article said their mates had complained on occasion about strong scents that leave a trail in their wake. Daryl Rubin, 21, an account coordinator at a beauty marketing firm in Manhattan, recalled how a college boyfriend begged her to stop wearing her favorite perfume, Angel by Thierry Mugler, which emits a scent not unlike chocolate fondue.

“One day it was just too much for him,” Ms. Rubin said.

Although the relationship ended, she has not risked wearing Angel again because she is worried other people might not be as forthcoming with their distaste as her old boyfriend. “A man is in your personal space, so perfume is like a collective decision for the both of you,” she said.

The idea that some people’s perfumes are other people’s fumes is not new.

In 1738, Alexander Pope wrote in a disparaging verse about over-fragranced nobles: “And all your courtly civet-cats can vent, Perfume to you, to me is excrement.”

Now a few workplaces and cultural sites are trying to become fragrance-free zones. Some doctors’ offices ask patients not to wear perfume because some medical personnel or patients may have allergies or asthma that could be exacerbated by scent. Some schools ask students to forgo perfume and even scented deodorants if a teacher has a fragrance allergy — much like peanut butter has been removed from some cafeterias.

Halifax, Nova Scotia has instituted a “no-scent awareness policy,” which encourages its employees to wear fragrance-free cosmetics. Some arts groups, like the Madison Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin and the Orlando Opera Company in Florida, ask patrons to curb the cologne.

Wendy Roberts, a mystery writer, said she attends many literary conferences, some of which are designated as fragrance-free. Other conferences, she finds, are mightily perfumed.

“If I am a wearing my strawberry lotion and the person next to me is wearing her apricot soap, then together we smell like a fruit salad gone wrong,” Ms. Roberts said. “If it is a romance conference, my God, you are ready to keel over when you are trapped in an elevator with those smells.”

Indeed, the pervasiveness of such ambient smell may be putting some consumers off scent.

Ms. Roberts said she recently recommended that a fragrance-fatigued friend rip the scent strips out of magazines and throw them in the trash before she carried the periodicals into the house.

The sheer abundance of fragrances on the market these days also may paralyze consumers, said Ms. Sanchez, the author.

“The exhaustion of wading through a tremendous number of fragrances which all smell alike has just turned people off,” Ms. Sanchez said. “If the perfume in the $80 bottle smells like the thing you have in the shower you wash your hair with that you bought for five bucks, then I can imagine you want to hold off until you have the right scent.”

But sometimes couples can reach olfactory accord. Last fall, Robert Flood, a retired technology platform tester in Allen, Tex., worried how to tell his wife of 25 years, Amy, that he could not abide her new perfume, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.

“It was very atrocious, at least to me,” Mr. Flood, 52, said in a phone interview last week.

The couple later worked out a compromise so that he would not be discomfited should her scent again stray into his air space. Henceforth, each will choose a fragrance for the other to wear.

“On Valentine’s Day, we will go to one of her favorite stores and she will buy me English Leather and I will buy her Jean Naté, which is the fragrance she was wearing when we had just met and she was 17 going on 18,” Mr. Flood said. “We are not smelling the perfume so much as the memories.”

Indeed, for the Floods, fragrance brings with it the Proustian power of recall. One could argue that those who forgo perfume now may inadvertently diminish at some future date the textural memories of relationships past.

The Fun Starts Here

2008-02-14T02:05:00.000-08:00

Left to right, from top: Tatty Devine Lovely Lady Leigh flower brooch, £26 (about $51) at tattydevine .com. Tarina Tarantino Kokeshi lucite and crystal drop earrings, $75 at tarinatarantino .com. Luc Kieffer resin and crystal cuff, $490, and ring, $250, both at Henri Bendel. Delphine Charlotte Parmentier Gloria Lucite ring, $130, via e-mail, yann.lp@dcp-corp .com. Tatty Devine Lovely Lady Leigh brooch, £53 (about $104) at tattydevine .com. Chanel resin and metal cuff, $1,950 at Chanel. Tarina Tarantino carved Lucite earrings, $45 at Tarina Tarantino (117 Greene Street).

By KRISTINA DECHTER
Published: February 14, 2008

LIGHTEN up, people. When times are tough, take a cue from Mary Poppins and eat some sugar, or go fly a kite. If that doesn’t put a smile on your face, you might delve a little further into the Disney songbook for inspiration. Think a little more “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” and less “Oh, Bother.”

Fortunately, many of this spring’s accessories — bright, playful and plastic — offer a droll antidote for these worrisome days. Created before the “R” word (no, not ruffles) was jumping out at us from the front page, some baubles — from the cultish London label Tatty Devine, from the Paris designer Luc Kieffer, even from Chanel — look straight out of Tom and Jerry.

“Even when clothing trends veer toward conservatism, accessories can break the mold,” said Cynthia Rowley, whose accessories are always good-humored and amusing (as is she). “A playful, unconventional necklace or handbag remains an expression of personal style, even paired with a basic wardrobe.”

While these may be designer pieces, you won’t have to take the hammer to the piggy bank. Actually, that sounds like fun.

And What About the Straws?

2008-02-14T01:58:00.000-08:00

SIP BY SIP Soyeon Lee in a dress from the Nina Valenti juice-pouch collection.
If she wanted it to be purple, she needed more grapes.

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 14, 2008

IF ever Nina Valenti had fielded a client’s request that sounded less like a challenge from “Project Runway,” she did not know what it was. Ms. Valenti, a Brooklyn designer, was at work on an ensemble for the concert pianist Soyeon Lee, who had asked for a dress made entirely of used juice pouches.

Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

Ms. Lee, who will perform a series of reinvented or reimagined classical pieces at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, had asked for a dress that was also recycled to promote a program started by her fiancé, Tom Szaky, who collects the juice pouches from schools to be remade into new designs.

“It’s not the most comfortable dress for her to be wearing onstage,” said Ms. Valenti, who designs a line called Naturevsfuture. “But this is about what it represents.”

More than five billion juice pouches are discarded annually by American consumers, said Mr. Szaky, the chief executive of TerraCycle, a company that makes products like plant food and fertilizer from waste. Millions of the pouches have also been sewn into handbags, pencil cases and totes that some of the nation’s largest retailers, including Target, OfficeMax and Walgreens, are to begin selling for $3.99 to $7.99 in April.

The idea, Mr. Szaky said, is to teach young consumers about reusing garbage to make new products, since some children will presumably be able to carry their lunches to school in bags made from the refuse of their lunches.

Ms. Lee’s dress offers a prettier way of seeing the bigger picture. In total, Ms. Valenti stitched together square panels cut from more than 5,000 pouches of Honest Kids Goodness Grapeness (grape flavor had the prettiest shade of purple) into a strapless dress with elaborate layers and wings. It has a silk taffeta lining to give Ms. Lee some breathing room.

“The only thing I’m having trouble with now is figuring out how to come on stage and sit down elegantly,” Ms. Lee said. “The dress sort of has an octopus effect — lots of arms and tentacles.”

Inelegant, perhaps, but easier for playing the piano.

Chug-a-Lugging Aphrodisiacs

2008-02-14T01:42:00.000-08:00

By CINTRA WILSON
Published: February 14, 2008

GRAVITY shifted the items in my dish rack the other day, making the blade of one of my better knives suddenly slide its entire length along the stem of a wet wineglass. It gave me goose bumps, it was such an unexpectedly erotic sound; the kind of foley you’d hear if Liliana Cavani (“The Night Porter”) directed a Batman movie: Zing!

The wineglass shatters on the floor. The finger of a huge black glove stops the quiver of the pale vixen’s lower lip.

Subtleties of eroticism can turn the banal into the fantastic, but Victoria’s Secret has not made its money by being subtle. Its apparent formula for mass-marketing fantasies is to turn the erotic into the banal.

Like a porn star with too many memoirs, Victoria’s secrets are pretty much overexposed at this point. “Ahh, whatever,” Victoria says. “Let me let you in on a little something, girls. You want sex? Hit the guy real hard with blunt sex objects.”

Voilà: Eros demythologized. All double entendres reduced to one big fat entendre for your retail convenience.

The Victoria’s Secret near Herald Square is a slick, two-story mega-sexopolis, catering mainly to the boudoir needs of angry tourists. If Siegfried & Roy ever wanted to start a Nevada chicken-ranch-plus-amusement park — a stretch-lace and animal-print McDonaldland of acceptable corporate erotica for the family casino crowd — this would be the ideal jumping-off point.

Valentine’s Day is a big deal for this chain that regards itself as the answer to the question, “What is sexy?” Victoria’s Secret is, to this holiday, what Toys “R” Us was to Christmas: your one stop for totally unimaginative shopping.

Victoria, after all, can’t be bothered with nuance: She’s got thousands of seductions to perform today. There is a slow striptease happening on the product shelves, at a subconscious level.

Judging by their names — Love Spell, Romantic Wish, Endless Love — lotions on a perfectly innocent, nursery-color wall seem to be hoping a nice boy will ask them to dance at the church mixer. The smell of these hormone-sick unguents is, without exception, both sanitary and cloying, and remarkably like those cardboard fruit deodorizers that livery service drivers hang on their rearview mirrors.

Next comes an entire section of novelties devoted to the martyrdom of St. Valentine: gifts that do all the bedroom begging for you — e.g., boxer shorts that say “Love Me.” A plastic didgeridoo full of Sexy Candy turns out to be those sugar hearts from grade school, but with a PG-13 power dynamic: Beg Me, Dare Me.

“Dream Angels,” according to Victoria’s propaganda, is America’s No. 1 fragrance, which makes sense in an obese nation with no self-control: it smells like an alcoholic Twinkie. In any case, shiny his and her gift boxes are an eyebrow-raising $69.

For lovers aspiring to cannibalism, there is a Very Sexy Edible Body Icing package ($19.50), featuring jars labeled Hot Vanilla, Craving Chocolate and Strawberry Kiss. (A handful of Duncan Hines tubes wrapped in a note that says “Remove Your Clothes” apparently doesn’t pack the same wallop.)

A sticker on the Sexy Little Things body mist begs, “Pick Me Up ... I Purr!” ($20). Sure enough, when I lifted this bottle off the shelf, it propositioned me. I set it down quickly and wiped my hand on my pants.

The nail polish is decidedly more flirty in its pursuit of puppy love: I Won’t Bite, Nibble, Skinny Dip.

And Pet. (Come hither, Gloria Steinem, and bring your flamethrower.)

The lipstick colors are brazenly uninhibited: Satin Sheets, Beg Me, Don’t Stop, Sex Kitten, Sensual.

But the Lip Stain is basically just an all-out, no-frills, escort service drive-thru menu: Quickie, Nubile, Proposition, Unzipped.

“Very Sexy,” shout the rhinestones of a velvet makeup bag, just to hammer the point into a wet pink pulp.

Upstairs, the jailbait orgy is in full swing. “Pink” squeal the bottoms on an entire wing of sorority-style underpants and slumber-sportswear. Mamas, don’t let your babies go to the Royal Academy of Pink. After all, one of the primary goals of parenthood, to paraphrase Chris Rock, is to keep your daughter “off the pole.”

There is a certain charm in directness, if it’s done right. I am concerned, however, that Victoria seems to be acting out feelings of low self-esteem through indiscriminate promiscuity.

Victoria’s Secret did nail my consumer reptile brain a couple of times. There was a small section devoted to rockabilly-esque, vintage undergarments, ripped right off a 1950s pinup girl.

I was taken by a pair of black, high-waist lace knickers that had that paneled, retro-support garment look I think is fetching with garters and black seam thigh-highs ($24). Very Mickey Spillane.

An attractive saleswoman, whose chest was covered in enough body glitter to be a solar panel, disagreed: “Put that down! You don’t need that. You got nothing to hold in.”

I asked about her experience of this annual rush.

“At least people are happy when they come in for Valentine’s Day. The rest of the time? Thpppppf.” She punctuated this raspberry with a thumbs-down.

She consoled me after informing me they have discontinued Size 32C in my favorite push-up bra, and offered alternatives. (I bought the 34B, but I must say, it doesn’t hold the same magic.) When I finally reached the cashiers at the end of the long, casino-buffet-style, human-cattle-processing line, I confess I also bought the Mickey Spillane panties. They don’t go overboard. They’re almost subtle.

Batman, I thought, might like them. Hey, Dark Knight. Wanna be my Valentine? I’ll crack open a bottle of sparkling body mist. It talks a blue streak, but it smells like a bundt cake.

Puurrrrrrfect.

Victoria’s Secret

1328 Broadway (Herald Square); (212) 356-8380.

SEXY An exhaustive inventory offers goods suggestive enough for even the most torpid imaginations.

TOO SEXY Among the vampish sateens on the second floor, look for the batch of ruffly pastel costume-drama pantaloons, perfect for that Malmaison weekend, or perhaps a community production of “The Best Little Whorehouse on the Prairie.”

O.K., ENOUGH WITH THE SEXY Avoid the shamelessly overpriced Just Cavalli collection, a line of Vegas-style bras and thongs halfheartedly graffitied with the Cavalli signature in rhinestones. But a certain red lace push-up with rhinestones flourishes and leopard-print interior might inspire even Miss Havisham to put a trapeze in the bedroom ($68).

8-8-2008 Limited Edition

2008-02-12T08:31:00.000-08:00

8-8-2008
LIMITED EDITION

Gucci is pleased to announce the creation of a special collection, "8-8-2008 Limited Edition”.

Taking her cue from competitive sports, Creative Director Frida Giannini has conceived 8 exclusive accessories that epitomize sporty luxury.

A noteworthy product in this collection is the hot new I-Gucci watch, unique to the "8-8-2008 Limited Collection". It is Gucci's first ever digital timepiece, it will be offered worldwide and is a tantalizing option for cosmopolitan watch fans.

Its clean digital face (which features both numerical or clock hand formats), black dial and steel frame epitomize sporty elegance. The surface of its red monochrome rubber strap is engraved with the Gucci logo on the exterior, while the interior has been embossed with Gucci's iconic GG pattern.

The rear face commemorates the year 2008 with a chic red and green logo. All functions are easily executed using lateral push buttons embedded in the smooth circular frame of the 44mm case. Its high-tech capabilities even allow the wearer to select a dedicated Beijing time zone code on the display.

The "8-8-2008 Limited Edition" collection also includes a unique bicycle, with bold red double GG leather details and collectable items such as a luxurious Mah Jong set covered in red "La Pelle Guccissima" and, to pay homage to China, a panda in soft leather. Though intended for leisure, the products bear the hallmarks of Gucci's impeccable quality.

Frida also proposes the bold "La Pelle Guccissima" for two pieces of luggage. The first is a chic, sturdy leather duffel and the other a soft leather messenger bag with Gucci's iconic green-red-green web on the shoulder strap. Also included in the collection are sports shoes, for both men and women, articulated in a fresh patchwork of suede, patent leather and gold trim and a necklace

inspired by military tags, in sterling silver and enamel making it the perfect accessory for casual looks.

"La Pelle Guccissima" is, as usual, buffed and finished by hand and the products feature a specially created metal plaque that combines the interlocking GG logo and the year 2008.

As for the bold red that permeates this standout collection, Frida comments: "Not only does red evoke "Happiness" and "Celebration" - two emotions that couldn't be more appropriate to describe the excitement in the world of sports - but it also happens to be a very fashionable color for 2008! I also designed just 8 products for this collection, which mirror the lucky number 8 in Chinese culture".

Though the I-Gucci watch will be offered worldwide, all other designs of this special collection will be sold exclusively in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Gucci ‘8-8-2008 limited edition’ merchandise is available in the following stores only:

HONG KONG:

Shop G23-30
The Landmark
Central
tel 852.2524.4492

Shop 368
Pacific Place
Admiralty
tel 852.2524.0412

Shop G102
Times Square
Causeway Bay
tel 852.2506.4262

Shop 2064
Elements
Kowloon
Tel: 852.2196.8088

CHINA:

Full Collection:

Shop LL1-3
The Peninsula Palace
Beijing
tel 86.10.6526.1739

Shop L109-110
China World Shopping Mall
Beijing
tel 86.10.6505.9821

Shop M1018, M2013
Shin Kong Place
Beijing
tel 86.10.6598.1606

Shop B105, L104-105
Seasons Place
Beijing
tel 86.10.6622.0536

Shop A03
Shanghai Centre Retail Plaza
Shanghai
tel 86.21.6279.8028

Shop 104 Tower B
Hangzhou Tower Shopping Center
Hangzhou
tel 86.571.8506.6263

Shop N101-301
The MixC Mall
Shenzhen
tel 86.755.8269.0533

Selective Items:

Shop 102
Maison Mode Department Store
Beijing
tel 86.10.8391.4318

Shop L105-107
Shanghai Times Square
Shanghai
tel 86.21.5351.0212

Shop 106B-109
Jin Jiang Dickson Centre
Shanghai
tel 86.21.5466.1505

Shop 121
Suzhou Matro Shopping Mall South
Suzhou
tel 86.512.6523.9581

Shop 109
Maison Mode Department Store
Chengdu
tel 86.28.8619.9515

Shop 1115-1116
Sunshine Department Store
Qingdao
tel 86.532.8667.7123

Shop 101
Maison Mode Chang An Department Store
Xian
tel 86.29.8765.1568

Shop 1120-1121
Charter Shopping Centre
Shenyang
tel 86.24.2279.5515

Shop 101
Hisense Plaza
Tianjin
tel 86.22.2319.8138

Shop B1102-1103, B212
Charter Shopping Centre
Changchun
tel 86.431.8840.5565

Hard at Work, the Model Whisperer

2008-02-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: February 10, 2008

DURING Fashion Week, any given table at any trendy restaurant might yield characters worthy of a novel about the ephemeral value of youth and beauty. It would be airplane reading, quickly adapted for cable television. “I’ll Never Be Alone,” it might be called.

Open with a casual glance at the gray-haired man at a sidewalk table at Downtown Cipriani, who appears to be wearing a rodent pelt as an ascot as he quaffs white wine and nuzzles a raven-haired model with a British accent.

Let your eye flit a few blocks uptown to a booth against the south wall of the Coffee Shop on Union Square, where a dark-haired man in a baseball cap and sunglasses is eating herbed French fries desultorily with a fork, while Samantha, a next-to-the-last-round loser from the eighth “America’s Next Top Model,” snuggles against him.

Finally, track a few tables over to the banquette near the hostess station. Zoom in on Oscar Batori, who has just turned 21.

He is 6-foot-3, lean and English, with a faintly menacing sharpness to his face, which bears a resemblance to that of a young Mick Jagger.

Two years ago, Mr. Batori was working as a male model earning about $75 a day, sharing an apartment with others and eating ramen noodles for dinner. Two years from now, who knows where he will be. But last week, he was in his element: 21 and good-looking, during a week when youth and beauty hold full value.

“They weren’t lying when they said the streets are paved with gold,” Mr. Batori said. “If you’re observant here, the sky’s the limit.” A new nightclub in the meatpacking district named Kiss & Fly had just hired Mr. Batori and given him the title “image director.” The club plans to send him to Milan, Paris and London during their Fashion Weeks, and to the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s to create relationships with agents, designers, model agencies and with the celebs,” said an owner of the club, Remi Laba. “He could be our connection between the A-list and our venue. Oscar is our product. He’s a well-spoken person. He’s very bright.”

At the Coffee Shop, Mr. Batori was discussing with Annette Amundsen, a marketer for Karlsson’s Gold Vodka, a party he was planning for a modeling agency at Kiss & Fly. Ms. Amundsen agreed to provide 10 cases of vodka.

Mr. Batori wore Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, Paul Smith striped socks, brown corduroy pants and a gray cashmere hoodie from Marc Jacobs underneath a navy blue Gucci overcoat, which cost $1,500, he said.

Although he attended the prestigious City of London School for Boys on an academic scholarship, he said: “When it was time to apply for college, I was going out every night until 5 or 6 in the morning to Movida, Aura, Boujis. That was three or four years ago. They’re all over now.”

When you are 21, three years ago is a long time.

Instead of college, he was recruited to be a model. He walked in a Prada show in Milan and for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.

“It’s boring,” he said of modeling, sipping a double espresso. “You can’t make any money if you’re a guy.”

Money did start flowing once a friend fixed him up with a job as a nightclub promoter at Retox in Chelsea. His job was to bring models to the club, where they in turn would attract big-spending guys. Retox paid Mr. Batori $150 a night.

“Get a new hat, meet a few people, move up in the world,” Mr. Batori said.

He likes the people he meets in clubs. “You might not meet left-wings, liberals and bookworms,” he said. “But then again, I’m not into bookworms.”

Though educated in England, Mr. Batori has an American passport because, he said, his father was a Hungarian refugee who escaped to the United States. Mr. Batori said his father was an alcoholic, that his parents split when he was 11 and that his father died two years ago.

What of, exactly?

“I don’t really know,” he said, stiffening his bottom lip. “Don’t really care.”

Mr. Batori is angry about his father, said his mother, Rebecca Collings, speaking from London. “Oscar doesn’t know how like him he is,” she said. “He was a totally brilliant guy who lost it.”

At the Coffee Shop, Mr. Batori found fault with the slightly wilted lettuce on his burger. “That’s typical of American agricultural practice,” he said. He asked the waitress for extra ketchup. Then he looked at the fellow seated with Samantha, who had not removed his iPod earbuds, his hat or his sunglasses as he ate.

The guy was the biggest loser in the world, Mr. Batori said.

These days Mr. Batori lives in Chelsea with a model named Alana Zimmer, a Christy Turlington lookalike whom he met shopping at an H & M on Fifth Avenue. Ms. Zimmer, 21, does not like to go to clubs, to drink or to be interviewed, he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Batori went without her to Tenjune, another meatpacking district club. It turned out that many of the New York Giants, including Eli Manning, Plaxico Burress and Michael Strahan, showed up to celebrate after their parade along the Canyon of Heroes. The mayor had given them the key to the city and they were using it.

Despite walking the catwalks last week for Calvin Klein, Proenza Schouler and others, Ms. Zimmer found time Wednesday morning to give Mr. Batori a few birthday presents: a cookbook, the third and fourth seasons of “Family Guy” and a $1,000 gift certificate to Prada.

He spent it fast. That night at Kiss & Fly, before the modeling agency party he was giving, he was wearing a new Prada sports jacket.

Mr. Laba, the club owner, said Mr. Batori had impressed him the night Kiss & Fly opened in December. “He brought us Andy Roddick and a lot of the more respected, over-21 models,” Mr. Laba said. “And so, after we discussed it, we offered him a position, which was 10 days ago.”

Before the party began, Mr. Batori was sitting at a round table in the club’s restaurant, Bagatelle, tearing into a rare filet mignon, two martinis and a cosmopolitan. Mr. Laba approached and spoke about a model wrangler he had ejected from the club the previous night, because he was getting too hands-on with one of the girls.

Mr. Laba pays the wrangler $700 a night, he said, to bring in about 8 to 10 exceptionally attractive women. “He’s good except when he drinks,” Mr. Laba said. “He starts throwing things, breaking glasses.”

After he walked away, Mr. Batori said of the fellow promoter, whom he knows: “He’s like 29. Look at him, small time. Came to New York 10 years ago, still small time. Dragging models around.

“And look at me, a couple years ago living in a model apartment eating ramen for dinner.” He used his steak knife to smear mashed potatoes onto a slice of filet before dragging it through the sauce on his plate and moving it into his mouth. “Look at me now.”

On the back of his chair hung the Prada coat. To the touch, the fine wool was as soft as the underbelly of a lamb.