The new fashioner – style forerunner

At Barneys New York yesterday afternoon for a presentation of Lanvin’s Fall collection, Alber Elbaz was feeling wistful. Barneys is the place he met his partner 18 years ago, he told the assembled crowd of lunching ladies,
straggling friends (“Hi, Giambattista!” he called out, mid-speech), and token celebrity host (a pregnant Uma Thurman). And New York is the place he began his fashion career, $800 in his pockets and two suitcases in his hands—”not Louis Vuitton, little shit ones,” he cracked.

How times have changed. Elbaz has just celebrated his tenth anniversary at the house of Lanvin, top of the fashion heap, and a major retail draw. Not only were New York’s spendthriftiest women seated front-row—Dr. Lisa Airan, Adelina Wong Ettelson, Helen Lee Schifter, et al.—but some of the biggest buyers nationwide were in town for the occasion. The L.A.-based stylist, interior designer, and feng shui practitioner Carole Shashona was one of them. “I love, love, love Lanvin,” she said before the show. “That’s the trouble as a stylist. It’s like, one for me, one for you!”

To think Elbaz at Lanvin almost wasn’t. The designer recalled a time after he was dismissed from YSL when he traveled the globe, thinking he’d never return to the fashion world that had spurned him, and considered becoming a
doctor. “I thought, I like Advil, I love Tylenol, I want to share it with everyone!” he said. Ultimately, he realized that for uplift, fashion trumps
Tylenol. And, he added, “there are no side effects.”

Out marched the likes of Julia Nobis, Sara Blomqvist, Hanne Gaby Odiele, and Patricia van der Vliet in the new collection. The crowd oohed and aahed (and immediately afterward, repaired to a table to pre-order). Afterward, Elbaz
graciously received fans professing their love. The object of affection had a simple explanation. “I think when you love someone,” he said, “they love you back.”

Madonna fans got a sneak preview of her newest music video, Girl Gone Wild, earlier this month, but this morning, Madge fans got the full picture. And as expected, it includes the pop star writhing around (surrounded by a gaggle of nearly naked men) wearing hot pants, leotards, SM gear, and a sexy pair of black stilettos (pictured). Style.com found out those shoes were custom-made for her by Paola Bay of Italian footwear label Zoraide.

She wanted them as high as possible and to be able to dance with them on, Bay tells Style.com of the heels, made of black silk embroidered with silver thread. We did three fittings to make sure they were like second skin. Call it a successthe Material Girl can not only dance in them, but do push-ups against the wall in them, too. Watch the Mert Alas and Marcus Marcus Piggott-lensed video, above.

Style.com’s executive editor, Nicole Phelps, called out Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s beautifully understated Fall 12 collection for The Row as one of her highlights of the season in our editor scrapbook. The CFDA members are decidedly on the same pagethe sister act earned a Womenswear Designer of the Year award nod, alongside seasoned veterans like Marc Jacobs and Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, on Wednesday night. Here, watch a Style.com exclusive video (below) showcasing the luxe, monochrome looks the Olsens presented at the historic Bemelmans Bar in February.
Kristin Studeman

Rather than its usual day-long open house, this season, Sergio Rossi and creative director Francesco Russo elected to host a more intimate cocktail party to debut their new Fall collection in Milan. And intimate fits the entertainment as well as the event. For the occasion, Russo and director Luca Guadagnino created a three-minute short film starring model Diana Dondoe, whose shod (but largely unclad) form is placed front and center in the erotic piece.

Eroticism is nothing new to Guadagnino, who hit big with his film I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton as a Milanese matriarch who embarks on a passionate affair with a young chef. (Russo cited a scene in which Swinton’s character and the chef first make love as a favorite.) I’ve known Luca for 15 years, and for me it’s very important to work with people I feel close and comfortable with, he explained to Style.com. It all came together quite naturally, really.

If the sensual is nothing new to Guadagnino, it’s familiar ground for Russo, too. Sex appeal has been one of his trademarks during his time at Rossi. For me, the shoe is not just an object for its own sake, but something that can change the state of mind of the person wearing or observing it, he says. I’m moving forward towards accessories addressing the entire woman’s body. I refer to this project as Skin to Skin,’ because the body pieces become a sort of a second skin playing with female transformation caused by wearing wonderful shoes.

And those shoes? Most are made of different types of leather and exotic skins like python, ostrich foot, lizard, crocodile, and kid suede, mostly in monochromatic colors to underline the different textures, Russo says of the new collection. They’re like objects in a constant mutation. The film screens at the presentation, which begins now in Milan, and debuts here on Style.com.

Matthew Schneier

Karl Lagerfeld understands decor as well as he knows fashion. The premises for his new signature collection Karl are an opulently minimal series of salons in an hôtel particulier on the Left Bank, so it made sense that the food for the dinner party he hosted on Wednesday night to launch the line should also focus on the bare opulent essentials: caviar, foie gras, and lobster, with a logo-fied iPad as a takeaway. One of the T-shirts in his Karl range features a fanciful self-portrait with the handwritten message “I Love Gossip.” Plenty of that in a room full of fashion people, though I spent much of the night talking about obscure Eastern European films with the encyclopedically informed Anja Rubik. How often do you get the chance to have a real talk with anyone about Dusan Makavejev’s scatological Sweet Movie? Especially while chunks of foie gras are drifting back and forth under your nose.

Rubik stars in the commercial that Trey Laird made for the launch of Karl. It was pre-loaded on the iPad. Sui He is also in the ad. She spoke no English when she arrived in New York a year ago but now sounds as politely precise as an elocutionist. On the day of the shoot, Sui was intimidated by the ease of the more experienced models. “It was like a competition,” she said. Everyone’s a winner in the finished product, which premiered at the dinner, but Sui seemed a little taken aback at how persuasive she was as a minx.

“It’s a new mix,” murmured Lagerfeld to the camera at the end of his film. Right on cue, Azealia Banks appeared to perform. The neighborhood is “nice,” so she didn’t get to play more than two songs, but a ruckus was duly raised, and the hair of the haute bourgeoisie peering down into the yard from their windows was surely curled (presuming they could understand her four-letter wordplay). From caviar to c-you-know-what…It may have been a new mix, but it was the same old polymath Karl.

It’s hard to know what to expect, but this is all quite amazing, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, who is pregnant with her first child, tells Style.com. What I do know is I definitely need a bigger bra size! Luckily for her, Restoin-Roitfeld has designed a new capsule collection for Kiki de Montparnasse to fit those needs. She was diligent, however, to make sure her black and white, lacy silk underthings (in the store and online December 14) are tailored for women with all body shapes. It’s really, really technical, she says of her collection of slips, bras, and panties. We all have different bodies and we wanted to see what works on all of them, so there were lots of tweaks made during the design process. Here, the photographer, brand consultant, graphic designer, and model tells us about the latest additions to her rsumlingerie designer and mom-to-be.
Kristin Studeman

How did this collaboration with Kiki de Montparnasse come about?
I have always been a lingerie fan. Lingerie and shoes are my two favorite accessories, and for many years I was hoping to do a collaboration with a brand like Kiki. Out of the blue, the Kiki PR girl reached out to me about hosting an event with them and I knew I really wanted to do something more creative than that, so here we are.

Tell me about the collaboration and design process in creating your capsule collection.
I had strong ideas about what I wanted. Right away, I did sketches for the first meeting. It’s really, really technicalit’s not just doing the drawings. We all have different bodies and we wanted to see what works on all of them so there were lots of tweaks.

What do you look for in lingerie?
I do not like bandeau bras. I think it’s OK when you have really small breasts, but otherwise it just looks awful. You want lingerie that makes you feel good about yourself and makes your body look your best. Sometimes it can be too tight and uncomfortable. We were careful to have no visible panty line.

What other projects are you working on right now?
I have really focused on this one for the past few months. The team there is so amazing and I would love to work on something else with them. I have some other brand consulting and art direction projects but I don’t like to talk about them until they are out. Then I am mainly just focusing on my pregnancy.

Congratulations on that, by the way. How’s everything going?
Actually, it was really difficult because when we shot the Kiki lookbook images, I was two and a half months pregnant, but I was still hiding it at the timethe photographer, Marianna Rothen, didn’t know either. It was pretty difficult to suck in my stomach but I couldn’t say anything about it.

Has your mom given you any advice about it?
She was very young when she was pregnant but she said she loved being pregnant. At that time she didn’t have Google to look things up and answer her questions but she said she was really relaxed. It is scary though.

Do you have names picked out for the baby?
I have a few names, but I need to wait until the end. I don’t want to get too hung up on things. I thought I would want to know if it’s a boy or girl, but I will wait.

What are your plans for the holidays?
I just spend Christmas with my parents and brother in Paris. We never spend it apart. Then I will be in Italy with friends and my boyfriend for New Year’s Eve.

Diane Pernet generally observes the world from behind dark lenses. In Miami (for the first time in her life) to showcase her annual film festival A Shaded View on Fashion, the inimitable editor and curator has already gotten an eyeful. “I’ve been here about 24 hours and seen a lot of plastic surgery,” she reported last night at the Delano. “It’s fun. It’s so America, you know. I mean, I saw strange things, like people in the art fair with no shoes. Sometimes it’s a bit casual.” The hotel was playing films by Mike Figgis on elevator landings and projecting other greatest hits from Pernet’s latest edition on a building wall visible from its rooftop, where French shirtmaker Equipment hosted a cocktail party with ACRIA.

Nowness.com took an identical approach, wall-projecting a compilation of its video work atop Soho Beach House. The LVMH-owned culture site’s main draw of the evening, however, was a sneak peek at The Artist Is Present, a forthcoming documentary about Marina Abramovic‘s herculean sit-and-stare marathon last year at MoMA. And present she was, fielding questions after the truncated but tantalizing screening. ”I really decided to show all my contradictions and to show the unique parts, the things you’re ashamed of,” Abramovic said. “How I can be interested in fashion and at the same time do this kind of stuff? I can, and that’s what the movie shows.” The movie plays next month at Sundance, followed by airings on HBO.

Yet another film was being offered up at the Standard, where Interview magazine and the Andy Warhol Museum screened a soundless preview of Warhol’s little-seen movie San Diego Surf. In it, a married couple in La Jolla rent their beach house to a group of surfers, to whom they try to marry off their pregnant daughter. By Basel standards, the party was fairly quiet—that is, until a flash mob of a dozen or so dancers wearing white Warhol wigs and sunglasses ran through the crowd.

Meanwhile, Erin Wasson was headlining a party at the Alchemist boutique at 1111 Lincoln Road, Herzog & de Meuron’s landmark parking garage. The shop’s owner, Roma Cohen, was the first retailer to carry her diamond body chains, and Wasson told Style.com that she’s planning to launch her first collection of leather goods next year. “Beautiful materials, yet you could’ve picked it up off the street in San Telmo, Argentina—I wanted it to have that same sort of soulful feel as my jewelry,” she said between mouthfuls of chocolate mousse. The building’s developer, Robert Wennett, was plying her with desserts in his sprawling top-floor residence, but Wasson joined co-host Todd Selby downstairs after offering a word of advice to all the collectors in town: “I got drunk with Erick Swenson when I was 17 and convinced him to give me a monkey head. Now he’s doing shows at the Whitney and I’m one of three people with a monkey head. So liquor does sometimes work to your advantage.”

Lancôme and W had canceled their party in the parking garage on account of wind, and so Elettra Wiedemann, who’d flown down for it, found herself toasting Ever Manifesto at the Webster instead. Gucci bankrolled the eco-oriented style publication’s latest issue, which is ad-free, and Stefano Tonchi came on as guest editor. The theme this time is bamboo, with which editor Alexia Niedzielski declared herself and co-founders Elizabeth von Guttman and Charlotte Casiraghi “obsessed.”

Elsewhere, the wild and woolly revels included Art Basel Miami Beach’s 10th anniversary bash at the New World Symphony, which made use of live alligators, and Vito Schnabel, Stavros Niarchos, and Alex Dellal’s party with Dom Pérignon at Wall. Filmmaker Harmony Korine was playing it comparatively low-key at the Mondrian, where he screened Caput, a reinterpretation of the observatory fight scene from Rebel Without a Cause. (Picture female BMX gangs duking it out in the buff with machetes.) The six-minute film is part of the blockbuster exhibition James Franco is organizing at L.A.’s MOCA in May. The do-it-all actor plays a gang leader in it, but couldn’t make it down to Miami because he’s currently filming Oz: The Great and Powerful in Detroit. Before heading off to bed, though, Korine was happy to explain their collaboration process: “We talked about it, he showed up, and we did it.”

What do you give the girl (or guy) who has everything? That’s what Style.com’s senior market editor Marina Larroude set out to discover when she polled style setters and tastemakers about what they’d get their equally stylish pals for the holidays. It wasn’t always easy to find that special somethinghow do you get noted bibliophile Karl Lagerfeld a book he doesn’t have?but the likes of Miranda Kerr, Jen Brill, Lily and Ruby Aldridge, Scott Schuman and Garance Dor, and more managed nicely. (And in the case of the Kaiser? Brill found a book she’s almost sure isn’t on his shelves: Bunny Yeager’s Camera in Jamaica.) Read on to find out what fashion’s royalty is getting this year.