Simon Doonan and Julie Gilhart of Barneys New York are now officially the Regis Philbin & Kelly Ripa of high-end retail. The store's dynamic duo are the stars of a five-minute You Tube video (also available on the Barneys' website) where they engage in batty talk-show banter and push the store's eco-friendly Holiday merch.
Thank you, Come again, 2007
Forget dumping your old fashion cast-offs at the nearest consignment store; why not turn them into art? Brooklyn artist Shinique Smith is doing just that, using old clothes to create mixed-media sculptures and installations. In one piece, cheekily coined "Thank You, Come Again," an ex-boyfriend's socks and shirts serve as Smith's raw material. Her solo exhibit, "All Purpose," at New York's Moti Hasson Gallery in Chelsea and will run through Dec. 29. Come February, the former graffiti artist will also participate in the "Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture" showing at the Smithsonian.
Courtesy of the artist and Moti Hasson Gallery, New York
Once dubbed "box office poison," Katharine Hepburn proved her critics dead wrong, ultimately charming audiences—then and now—with her feisty, film characters as well as her no-nonsense style and her famous New England lilt. This month, the Smithsonian celebrates all things Hepburn with an exhibit at its National Portrait Gallery—with everything from images and clips to her record-setting four Oscar statuettes. "Kate: A Centennial" will be on view through June 1, 2008.
Katharine Hepburn By Edward Jean Steichen, Gelatin silver print, 1933
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, © 1982 Joanna T. Steichen
Transportation problems are epidemic in Europe. Recovering from the French national rail strike (see Derailed), I arrive in Venice to find the vaporetti, those lumbering water buses, on sciopero, too. Getting lost while strolling around is an essential part of the experience here, but not when you’re in black tie, which I’m supposed to be tomorrow night for the party of the season, the 40th birthday ball of Toto Bergamo Rossi, art restorer and dashing local It boy, which will draw Brandolinis, Ruspolis, Gettys and other Euro glamour folk, most in heavy jewelry, per Toto’s request.
Toto Bergamo Rossi; Robin Navrozov
But as I’m sitting in Café Florian reading a galley that fortuitously came into the office in New York just before I left — Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, a fascinating biography Knopf will be publishing in January — an email pings in on my Treo from a friend in New York telling me next time I am in Italy I have to meet an American-expatriate journalist friend of his, Robin Navrozov. After a few messages, it turns out Robin is in Venice, hosting a pre-ball party that night at an apartment she rents in the Palazzo Mocenigo, originally the home of the Lucia I am reading about, and attendees will include Lucia’s great-great-great grandson, Andrea di Robilant, author of the biography. How’s that for coincidence?
Robin proves herself to be in the great tradition of colorful, intrepid Americans in Venice. Piloting her own motor skiff, she pulls up at the dock of my hotel that night in blazing red evening gown. Finding a parking space in Venice is surely even harder than it is in Manhattan, but somehow she finds any number of handy docks at which to tie up in the course of the evening (miraculously, jumping in and out of the small shallow boat in matching red Manolos with towering heels). I didn’t ask if they give parking tickets in Venice. Cruising through the inky night, the Grand Canal is empty and silent, offering a rare view of its ghostly palazzos. This was one strike with a silver lining.
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Man Ray's Le Violon d’Ingres. 1924.
Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren may have been inspired by Pierrot for their spring collection that will hit stores around December 10th, but the Surrealist-loving duo couldn’t help but include a nod to Man Ray. At left, the photographer’s "Ingres’ Violin" from 1924. At right, Viktor & Rolf’s spring 2008 take on a model named, yes, Melody.
©2007 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris; Viktor & Rolf photo by Delphine Achard
Soho. Madison Avenue. Carnegie Hill?
As far as shopping districts go in the Big Apple, Carnegie Hill — from 86th to 96th streets between Central Park and Lexington Avenue — isn’t exactly on top of everyone’s list. But the neighborhood does have a few retail gems worth boasting about, like Phoebe Cates Kline’s Blue Tree boutique. Now, there’s a new addition: the month-old Edit, at 1368 Lexington Ave. With a roster of designers ranging from Marchesa and Martin Grant to jewelers Temple St. Clair and Irene Neuwirth, owners Alissa Emerson and Valerie Felgen aim to rekindle the old salon-shopping experience with delivery, after-hours service and private shopping by appointment. The 2,500-square-foot, bi-level store is modeled to look like a townhouse, complete with a grand curved staircase, a patio out back and, to the delight of husbands and boyfriends recruited to shop, a “living room” with a working fireplace, bar and flat-screen television.
Few fashion terms are as misused by the masses as couture. It’s a phenomenon Juliana Cairone, owner of Manhattan boutique Rare Vintage, encounters often. “A lot of people think they have couture,” she says of her scouting trips. “But you get there and it ends up being Ungaro Parallel or something.” Thus, when a woman happened into her 57th Street shop claiming to have trunks of couture at home, Cairone was skeptical at best. Turned out she hit the haute jackpot — the shopkeeper made a house call and walked away with several pieces of true blue Chanel haute couture, including her favorite piece-of-the-moment, a black jacket trimmed in curly ivory feathers, from the Seventies, during the tenure of Yvonne Dudel and Jean Cazaubon. Check Cairone’s blog, rarevintageinc.com, for back story and sales updates on Rare Vintage stock.
One might call it the perfect antidote to plunging temperatures and abbreviated sunlight: this week Abrams releases Poolside with Slim Aarons ($75.00), a frothy compendium of photographs depicting the by-the-seashore (or infinity pool) life of the leisure class through the sixties, seventies, and eighties. There's Esther Williams, out of her boned-corset suit and sporting lemon-yellow capris, nibbling a canapé at the Lighthouse Club in the Bahamas; flip a few pages further and you'll find the Austrian swim-capped masses bobbling in a heated pool in Bad Gastein. A favorite of those blonde-tressed society icons, C.Z. Guest and Lilly Pulitzer, Aarons, a Life photographer whose previous books include the equally glittery Once Upon a Time and A Place in the Sun, manages to pull off the impossible: even the oiled, lobster-red couples giggling at a swim-up bar in Acapulco look glamorous.
The switch from daylight-savings time to normal time has played havoc with exercise schedules in Los Angeles, where hiking in the canyons, a popular fitness regimen, is difficult to maintain when it gets dark at 5:30. But this just in: The L.A. chapter of the Sierra Club is leading night hikes through Griffith Park, the city's sprawling wild-land park populated by coyotes, mule deer and rabbits. There's even a gay-lesbian outing, every Wednesday at 7 p.m.
Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez/Landov
Like all good Americans in Paris, I spend too much time at les puces, the sprawling weekend flea market at the city's outskirts in Saint-Ouen. Somehow, even as the dollar tanks against the Euro, I usually manage to talk myself into buying that perfect Sixties Murano lamp that I later realize is all wrong for my apartment. But in recent weeks my buyer's remorse has been relieved by the knowledge that shopping at the puces has become a political act—a way to help keep the flea markets alive.
In 2005 the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest landlords in the UK, quietly bought Saint-Ouen's two most prestigious markets, Paul Bert and Serpette. Nobody really noticed until this fall, when, dealers say, he began hiking rents and fees by as much as 70 percent. Fearful that the Duke intends to squeeze them out and turn the place into an upscale mall, the dealers are revolting against their Anglo-Saxon oppressor, printing signs and T-shirts with protest slogans and fighting the increases in court. "We have to act," one merchanttold me last weekend. "Or we will be eaten alive."
I proudly did my part for the cause, buying a leatherbound set of 19th-century French literature that I know I'll never read.
MEHDI FEDOUACH/AFP/Getty Images
