Best Dressed

+TWO CHIC NEW YORK GUYS
+DAN TREPANIER IS ESQUIRE'S BEST DRESSED REAL MAN IN AMERICA 2009
+GET THE LOOK (VID)

+GQ: HOW TO BUY A SUIT (VID)
+MODEL FASHION TIPS: THE PERFECT SUIT (VID)
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It's My Life

EMPTY WRAPPER
Cravings + Clothing + Cars + Culture
First Look: The Final Issue
Today I arrived back from a meeting to find the first copies of ASM #85 on my desk. These are the preliminary copies that are air-freighted to us, so before you ask, we only have two copies of each edition. They all look f*cking fantastic; even better than the proofs. [...]

The End of the Embargo (ie. Another Post on Sushi)
Whenever I return from a trip overseas, I’m turned off that country’s food for an indefinite period of time. Since my January visit to Japan I’ve cringed whenever someone suggested sushi for lunch or dinner. Nuh uh, not yet. Well now the cravings for Japanese are back so I made a beeline straight for Makoto. [...]

THE F BLOG
London fashionista's personal lookbook.
houseofholland
pretty much in love with these tights right now.
i'll do a real outfit post with them asap, but i just got them today and couldn't wait to try them out!

walkinginwindows
love having a huge window in my room, overlooking the street. i've always dreamt of having something of the sort but never did until i moved into my place here in london. i especially love that the sunshine has been streaming through so strongly as of late- such a nice way to wake up.
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Jak & Jil

Complex Geometries editorial__spring 2010

New York Fashion Week__Oct.09

Givenchy haute couture shoes__Paris Fashion Week__Oct.09

Patrik Ervell show__FW 10/11

Versace rehearsal_FW 10/11

Paris Fashion Week__Jan.10

+JAK & JIL - BLOG
+THE RETURN OF 70s CHIC - SLIDESHOW
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Nota Bene

nomenus quarterly - for sale
nomenus quarterly - official site
Erik Madigan Heck - interview
Erik Madigan Heck - official site

Male dancers - ft. Roberto Bolle

Queens of Vintage
A Daily Global Glossy for Vintage Lovers

The Outline - exhibit
Until Jan.31.10 (Tokyo)

La Roche concept chair

Ceramic sculpture by Merete Rasmussen

Fold-Out Shelving by Mark Kinsley

Alex & Chloe

The Making of a Pop-Up Store

Supima

The Pop-Up Shop is Just a Big Science Experiment

Dr. Martens pop-up

Renault pop-up__[Images: Flickr.com]

Bugatti Type 41 Royale

World's Most Beautiful Cars

Etiqueta Negra - about
Etiqueta Negra - official site

Store manager Pablo Marucco

Reine de Naples Cammea watch

Spyker C12 La Turbie
Spyker Cars - official site

Beauty

New York City__Sep.09__[The Sartorialist]

Beauty is power; a smile is its sword. -Charles Reade

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aishwarya Rai__Cannes__May 09__[jezebel.com]

Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal. -William Shakespeare

Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me? -Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cinderella
Paris__Oct.09__[The Sartorialist]

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. -Confucious

[Quotes via: here & here.]

Nicholas Kirkwood

Nicholas Kirkwood

Nicholas Kirkwood Feels For The Falling Model
[Style.com - Dec.08]

Nicholas Kirkwood better have a sturdy mantel. A bit of plywood shelving just won’t hold up under all the awards the English shoe designer has been racking up. There’s the AltaRoma Vogue Italia Who’s on Next award he took home last year, and then the Swarovski Emerging Talent Award for accessories he won at the latest British Fashion Awards, and the Footwear News Designer of the Year award that brought him to New York earlier this month. Given that it’s only been three years, Kirkwood may want to consider investing in a trophy room. For his fans, meanwhile, Kirkwood’s heels are trophies unto themselves, or perhaps something like a Santiago Calatrava skyscraper for the foot: daringly cantilevered, awe-inspiringly high, and balanced, seemingly, by will alone. That architectural sensibility has earned him a following among his fellow designers; he regularly collaborates with Rodarte and Alberta Ferretti for their runways, and this year he joined Jonathan Saunders in the revamp of Pollini. The most intriguing Kirkwood news, however, may be the fact that for Fall 2009, this sworn enemy of all things grounded is working on his first pair of flats. In the meantime, Kirkwood talks to Style.com about kitten heels, boudoir shoes, and how all good stories must come to an end.

Belstaff line__spring 08__[jakandjil.com]

I understand that your interest in designing shoes grew out of an experience making hats. That’s a bit of a switch, from head to toe.
It’s funny to look back on, because this was really only a few years ago and yet the whole landscape of shoe design was different. I was working with Philip Treacy, and women would come into the shop looking to finish an outfit. They’d bring in clothes, and they’d bring in their shoes. At the time, it was just this sea of kitten heels and really girly, pretty things. It seemed like there was a space for something else.

Had you studied shoe design in school?
I went back and took classes at Cordwainers. Not in design, though—just in shoemaking. I wanted to learn the craft.

Your shoes are quite technically innovative. Did you go to Cordwainers knowing that was going to be a focus, or did your interest in the technical come out of learning the craft?
I knew I wanted to understand the technical aspect, but for me it was always about finding a way to create shoes that didn’t have any excess. That’s the DNA of the brand. Even in my very first collection, which I never produced, there’s a focus on silhouette, on negative spaces and abstract shapes. Later, once I had the resources, I began to experiment with heel shapes and platforms. I don’t think people realize how expensive it is to try those things—you have to make the molds, and so on. I had to wait for that. But I knew what look I wanted to project.

Belstaff line__fall 08__[jakandjil.com]

You say you wanted to create shoes that didn’t have any excess, but your Spring ‘09 collection does include a fair amount of embellishment—crystal-paved heels, for example, and a pearl-embedded platform.
What I try to do is find ways to integrate those elements into the architecture of the shoe, rather than just laying on decoration. I mean, I don’t even like to use fastenings. The pearl idea is one that I’ve developed from Fall. I generally work that way, letting a story evolve through a few seasons until I feel like I’ve told it. For Fall, it was a single pearl tucked into the heel; this season, I was playing with the idea of a woman standing on a string of pearls.

It’s a sexy shoe.
Yeah, a real boudoir feeling. That shoe is also interesting because it takes this story I’ve been working on—the pearls—and combines it with a new story, which is my interest in origami. I like that idea of folding. Maybe next season, there won’t be any pearls, but the origami idea will be bigger. We’ll see.

Are there any “stories,” as you put it, that you feel like you’ve concluded with the Spring ‘09 collection?
I’ve been working on the idea of suspension for a while, like a bridge or a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. That’s been going since my third season; I think I may be moving on. But we’ll see—I never really know what I’m doing until I’m doing it. I’m not a designer who starts each season making, like, a mood board or something. Like, OK, this season I’m going to be into tribal, or Native American, or whatever. I do have a mood board, but there’s nothing on it.

fall 08

That said, you must have a few instincts about the direction of your design. What are you sick of?
In general? I probably shouldn’t even answer that question. There are definitely shoes I’d like to never, ever see again. Any kind of sport shoe with a heel, for instance. I mean, ew. And I’m pretty much over the five-inch-high platform and girls tripping all over the place. Granted, I’ve been responsible for some of that.

At the Rodarte show, for example? As an aside, I’m not sure I will ever understand the fashion industry’s fascination with falling models.
Ah, it’s terrible. I have sympathy, I do. Next season’s shoes should be more manageable, I’m feeling ready for a more refined, lighter, more feminine look.

But no kitten heels.
Never. I’m working on a pair of flats, but for me, it’s either super-high or super-low. There’s no point messing with anything in between.

spring 09

5 Questions for Nicholas Kirkwood
The world's sickest cobbler takes a few minutes to answer the essential five

4. Describe your aesthetic.
I think some of it is taken from architecture in a way that is not decorative in the classic sense, but lots of the shapes I've developed are based on how the shoe looks as a silhouette. Different layers within a shoe. Like one shoe clamped over the top of another one. Repeating a pattern like something slipped out...

fall 09


Nicholas Kirkwood: To the Point
[OysterMag.com]
Wallflowers step aside, Nicholas Kirkwood's menacingly seductive heels are for legs that demand a bit of ogling. Never a kitsch frill or bow in sight, these angular kicks channel 80s power stilettos with jumped up sex appeal, rejecting ornamentation in favour of sculptural glamour. Sitting back on a sunny afternoon, London's most promising young shoe designer got talking with Indigo Clarke over a glass or two of champagne in his South London pad.

"Chicks dig it – and I can drink champagne whenever I want," says Nicholas Kirkwood with a laugh, "designing shoes and working for myself is good in that way." For a self-confessed 'leg' man, the job couldn't get much better. Ladies throughout Europe and the US are snapping up Kirkwood heels in a frenzy, with Kirkwood's own female friends proudly sporting his distinctive wares over the competition – one of them declaring at a recent gathering, "I made Nicholas courier a pair of his shoes to me at my last birthday party – I didn't want to wear the heels I had on, they were Galliano, but they just weren't right."

His characteristically dark and feminine aesthetic from the outset attracted the admiration of style icons and fashion industry professionals. From the inimitable songstress Grace Jones to Visionaire's Cecilia Dean, femmes of substance and style are avid fans. But it's not just, "Women with presence and intellect," (his desired audience) that are jumping on his bandwagon – luminary photographer and art director Jean Paul Goude is one of many to feature his brazenly sculptural heels in a recent fashion shoot, while the house of Chloe got in on the action with Kirkwood designing their Autumn 07 pre-collection.




Eying Kirkwood's last few collections, stacked haphazardly in his endearingly plush and disordered studio, it's easy to see what all the fuss is about. From vertiginous heels to platform wedges, his designs take direction from bygone eras, resurrecting noir mystique with a decidedly modern slant. With a fusion of unexpected materials including lizard, stingray, watersnake, python and buffalo horn alongside severe, architecturally inspired contours, it's evident that Kirkwood takes an artisinal approach to design, with meticulous attention to detailing and construction. "I wasn't always interested in shoe design – it could have been anything design related," says the 26 year-old of his career choice. "I've always been interested in design and form – most of my friends got into clothing design but I didn't want to pursue fashion."

Undertaking degrees at both St Martins and the prestigious Cordwainers
College, Kirkwood began his career in design working under renowned milliner Philip Treacy at 18 – doodling shoe designs on the side. "I worked with Philip for five years, creating shoes at home by hand in my spare time," Kirkwood explains. "I hand-made the majority of my first collection – I went in gung-ho, I had a vision to create shoes that were different and not at all commercial. They were designed to attract attention – not necessarily to be worn."






This first collection, released in 2005, was more object d'art than wearable (none of the shoes were for sale), but nonetheless catapulted him to cult stardom, winning him the coveted Conde Nast Footwear Emerging Talent award of 2005. Kirkwood followed with a wearable range of dramatically angular heels sans decoration– his trademark style, that debuted on the shelves of exclusive retailers Harrods, Browns Focus, Selfridges, Dover Street Market and Bergdorf Goodman, as well as on the pages of international style bibles British and Italian Vogue, The New York Times and I.D Magazine.

"My heels are like modern architecture as opposed to Baroque – there is no pointless decoration," says Kirkwood, downing champagne and sitting back in an antique gilded chair. "Decorating for the sake of decorating is a really old-fashioned notion, I'm more about form and function. Some of my heels look quite aggressive, but they are always feminine – not girly, you won't find any bows or diamonds."

Walking all over pretty and tossing frou frou and pastels aside, Kirkwood has reinvented the classic stiletto, platform and wedge for AW07 in dark, muted tones interspersed with lilac and metallic khaki. As always, his latest offerings – equal portions glamorous and formidable – are intended for the feet of, "Women with presence, with a bit of rock'n'roll," says Kirkwood. "I'd like to see yummy mummy's wearing them, but only if they're really yummy." With so many dishy heels on offer, has a gal any excuse to flaunt flats? "High heels should be worn all the time, no exceptions," Kirkwood begins with a boyish grin, "except at the beach maybe."

StartTV: The Nicholas Kirkwood Dilemma (vid)
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RELATED
Omelle
Omelle - feature
Alberta__spring 09

Hazel__$895__fall 09

[Miss Delite: Pair the HAZEL shoe with opaque black tights for a sophisticated addition to your fall ensemble.]

Slideshows & Video

Blu Dot's Smart Style
(2006) John Christakos, Maurice Blanks, and Charlie Lazor are three friends who met at Williams College in the 1980s. They shared a love for cool furniture -- and a lack of funds to support their cravings. In 1996, the trio launched Blu Dot, a maker of playful, moderately priced, and easy-to-assemble pieces that filled the void between inexpensive Ikea-style goods and luxe furnishings by European firms such as Capellini.

In other words, the Minneapolis-based company's offerings are high-style but moderately priced. Blu Dot found ways to save inventory storage and shipping costs by coming up with pieces that could be stored or packed flat. They also focused on creating pieces that could be assembled without tools when possible -- and included funny directions to win over buyers used to complicated, hard-to-follow instructions. Blu Dot's strategies paid off: In 2005, the privately held company saw sales increase 50%, to $7.5 million. [...]

Buttercup Chair
Blu Dot's lounge chair is made from molded plywood shaped to gently cradle a seated body. It can be used as a comfortable, lightweight, modern alternative to heavy upholstered living room seating -- and is easy to move around when redecorating or relocating.

2D:3D Series
Blu Dot received attention for this series of assemble-it-yourself home and office accessories made from a single sheet of perforated metal. The concept: Each item, like a letter tray or coat rack, can pack totally flat, thus cutting shipping costs and assembly time. Owners put together each item without tools by simply pushing the seamed, two-dimensional cutouts into three-dimensional shapes.

Barbarella Table
This sexy, futuristic table evokes the classic Jane Fonda flick of the same name. The base is made from a single piece of folded metal with a top simply placed on top. It features a slot to accommodate magazines or newspapers. The streamlined construction was designed to pack flat -- thus staying consistent with Blu Dot's goal of keeping shipping costs down.

Series 11 Drawer
Sophisticated and sleek, this drawer set could conceivably be at home equally in a bedroom (for clothes) or a living room (as a media cabinet) -- thus staying consistent with the brand's focus on versatility.
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The Modern Wing
The 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing - at a cost of $294 million - is the largest expansion in the Art Institute of Chicago's 130-year history. Now a decade in the making, this building makes the Art Institute the second largest art museum in the United States.

The windows are covered with white screens, lending the views a soft, ghostlike quality. This effect is reinforced by the layering of glass, which shuts out street noise and gives the sight of people walking below a particularly eerie, cinematic quality.
The idea is to make you aware of the shifts in daylight — over the course of a visit, from one season to another — without distracting you from the artwork, and the effect is magical.

It is this obsessive refinement that raises Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano's best architecture to the level of art. In an age with few idealists, he exudes a touching faith in the value of slow, incremental progress. He has never fully abandoned the belief that machines can elevate as well as destroy. The beauty of his designs stems from his stubborn insistence that the placement of a column or a window, when done with enough patience and care, brings us a step closer to a more enlightened society.


The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum__New York City


QUOTES
The Guggenheim Museum was an aggressive act: Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. His spiralling museum was, in a way, an attack against the Manhattan street grid.

Many critics see his building as unsympathetic to art: too rigid; a difficult place to install art.

Wright died 6 months before the museum opened.
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On the Street with Bill Cunningham: Swoosh!
As the petals of the dogwoods fall, saucy skirts are causing men to turn their heads.

RELATED: Azzedine Alaia - Fall 08
What Azzedine Alaia is able to do with knitting is remarkable. He produces ruffles and poodle curls that look like lace. The skirt of one outfit, in a boiled black knit, consisted of vertical rows of overlapping circles, like sugar cookies arranged on a buffet tray. And all of these effects are a technical extension of recent work, like the pleated caterpillar dresses worn at last year’s Costume Institute party by Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell, and the new crinkled cotton shirt dresses for spring that use embroidery anglaise.

COMMENTS
Alaia just hits the nail on the head, doesn’t he? What’s disappointing is how little his work is photographed- I never see it in magazines or the internet or anywhere, really. I hope this collection is more widely diffused.

Thanks for the inside peek, Cathy. Alaia’s knitwear is indeed incredible - I am still aching at the thought of a skirt of his I neglected to buy on sale from Dover Street Market in January. It was simply but beautifully composed of rounded folds gathered at the waste. What struck me was really the weight of the fabric, which you don’t generally see with modern knitwear, but which was entrancingly muscular here without being stiff in the normal way we think of “constructed” garments.

Thank you for the descriptive process of Alaia…this genius at work. The invisible collaboration of his staff just to reach the stage of the designs that you saw just boggles my mind. He falls in love everytime and surrenders to his ideas and fabrics. What confidence.
C’est difficile, bien sur.

Thanks for the peek inside Mr. Alaia’s atelier. I agree that he is a master of his craft, and too seldom featured in the fashion press (although maybe by his own design). His knitwear is amazing and his techniques always innovative and highly imitated. Like __, I regret not buying an Alaia skirt I should have scooped up for a fraction of the retail price at Filene’s Basement. His work is timeless and, although recognizable, it doesn’t ever succomb to trendiness.

This is going to sound a little selfish on my part, but I’m almost glad Alaïa doesn’t get splashed all over the pages of magazines, because part of the allure is that you have to seek out his work. His most faithful clients aren’t exactly buying his stuff at Barney’s but make the trek out to his fabled atelier in the Marais. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of sumptuousness where they can truly experience (and purchase) the full breadth of his creativity. He closed down his one freestanding store in New York almost a decade ago, and despite the fact various boutiques and specialty department stores stock his wares, you’re still left with the feeling that there is much more to see at his atelier, which has a seductive pull that’s very rare in this age of fast fashion.

What’s interesting about Alaïa’s work is that you notice a clear progression in his thinking. We’ve watched him evolve from very sleek almost skin tight dressing (as if he were trying to whittle the dress down to his purest form) only to move on to shapes that are almost sculptural with more volume (but still body conscious).
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Under the Bonnet
The Tulips and Pansies show, a fund-raiser for Village Care of New York, a health care agency, held at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan, gave florists a chance to unspool their giddiest fantasies.
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Rasika__Washington, D.C.

Top Chefs on Opening Shop: Starting a Restaurant
So you want to open your own restaurant despite the bad economy? While it may be one of the most rewarding business ventures, it is also one of the riskiest. Conventional wisdom holds that nine out of 10 new restaurants fail during their first year of operation. Although that rate has been debunked, the fact is, opening a restaurant isn't always what it appears from the outside looking in.
With that in mind, BusinessWeek sought out top chef-restaurateurs who've earned rave reviews and awards, respect within the foodie world, and perhaps most importantly—enduring business success.

Lidia Bastianich
Known for her national TV shows, cookbooks and restaurants, Bastianich received the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Chef award in 2002. The crown jewel in her restaurant empire, Felidia, which she opened in 1981, earned three stars from The New York Times in 1995 and 2006.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
Keep it small, value-driven, and in a beautiful setting. Keep it small, so you can control it and create something of value. It's the survival of the fittest right now—it's not the time to think about getting rich. But if you can build a business in these times and keep it stable—then you can expand on it. Remember that [success] goes beyond a pure formula.
"It's time to be frugal and to be giving. Don't be afraid to give a little extra to your customers. And don't work in a vacuum. Do research. Make seasonal dishes. There's also a philosophy of cooking I was raised on: use as much of your ingredients as you can. Everybody wants a chicken breast, but what happens to the rest of the chicken? Use it.

Mario Batali
Michelin-starred chef-restaurateur behind 14 restaurants, including flagship Babbo in New York City, is the former host of the Food Network's Molto Mario and Ciao America and the author of six cookbooks. He recently launched the PBS series Spain… On The Road Again with his friend Gwyneth Paltrow.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
This month… wait and keep your day job to see just what kind of world we are heading into. The one thing an economic dive does to the restaurant business is weed out the hacks and rookies. If a steady economy prevails and a miracle appears, my advice is to define your customer base in the broadest terms possible and create food and service from the heart, not the textbook or mimicry.

Daniel Boulud
The French-born, Michelin-starred chef-restaurateur behind nine restaurants, including famed Daniel in New York, is the author of six cookbooks and is credited with introducing the gourmet burger at his DB Bistro Moderne restaurant in Manhattan. He was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur by the French government in 2006.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
First, you must be financially sound. Make sure your business plan is more pessimistic than optimistic. One can always deal with success—it is easier to manage than failure. You should raise enough money [to go] for the first three months without the expectation of profitability. If you are profitable in your first month, it is a good sign of longevity. But if it takes six months to profitability, it will be very hard for the rest of your life [in business].
It is very important when you want to open a restaurant to have a name and a reputation or to create one for yourself. You have to have something special to offer people, so that they come back to you again and again.
There are three things you can control in a restaurant: the costs of rent, food, and payroll. Once you have this equation and a little bit of a following, create a wonderful place and build a good team of people who can deal with any task.

Todd English
Chef Todd English was named best chef in the Northeast by the James Beard Foundation in 1994 for Olives, his Charlestown (Mass.) Mediterranean flagship restaurant. English now has four other Olives locations from New York to Las Vegas, as well as nine other restaurant concepts that bear his name. In 2001, Bon Appetit magazine named him restaurateur of the year.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
It is important to make sure you have enough extra capital in the bank when you open a restaurant. It should be enough to get you through your first several months, but it would be even better if it could get you through your first year.

Wolfgang Puck
The Austrian born, Michelin-starred chef-restaurateur is perhaps best known for his Beverly Hills celebrity haunt Spago and several other fine dining eateries such as Cut, a chain of fast-casual establishments across the country, and a restaurant empire that now spans the globe. He is the author of six cookbooks, the licensor of numerous cooking-related products, and a regular on the Food Network.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
Make your mistakes at someone else's expense, at someone else's restaurant, so that when you open your own, you won't have to pay for it. This means be patient, work hard, mix in a little talent, and when everything comes together, you might be ready to open your own restaurant.

Annie Somerville
The head chef of Greens restaurant in San Francisco earned a national reputation for imaginative vegetarian cooking. Her bestselling cookbooks include Everyday Greens and Fields Of Greens.
Advice to aspiring restaurateurs:
The food makes a restaurant and draws customers in, but you have to have a great business sense or a partner with experience who understands the money flows. At times, the money flows out faster than it flows in. It is a serious business and the profit margins are so slim. Many people don't realize how complicated it is.
If at all possible, I'd say that when you start go into an existing restaurant space. That is a way to go so that you don't spend all of your money just furnishing the kitchen. So many people start out undercapitalized. They spend it all opening and never make it back.