I LOVE NICE THINGS.

Revolutionising the fashion industry for just over fifty years, Balenciaga altered the fashion silhouette of women in the mid-20 th century, and became one of the most influential fashion innovators of all time. “No woman can make herself chic if she is not chic herself.” Balenciaga accentuated the essence of how a woman could embody his garments. He demonstrated how shape and silhouettes could correspond around the physique to exemplify the figure. Similarly to Vionnet, Balenciaga used the technique of wrapping material away from the body, applying volume to his garments whilst at the same time enhancing femininity. He achieved this by revealing certain aspects of the body, such as elongating the neck. Often, he would use one piece of material and cut in only designated areas such as arm-holes or the neckline. Notorious for incorporating his Spanish roots into his designs, Balenciaga mastered the art of captivating the essence of both culture and chic. The Infanta Gown was inspired by...

Marisa Berenson has spent a good portion of her time on this planet being photographed, whether as a model playing muse to the likes of Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn, or as an actress appearing in films such as Luchino Visconti’s  Death in Venice  (1971), Bob Fosse’s  Cabaret  (1972), and Stanley Kubrick’s  Barry Lyndon  (1975), or as a woman whose very life has unfolded like a transatlantic cinematic narrative filled with lots of high glamour, dramatic twists, and tragic turns. So there was no shortage of material to mine in compiling the new book, Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures  (Rizzoli), a sweeping visual biography due out next month. The book traces Berenson’s journey: from growing up as the daughter of U.S. diplomat Robert L. Berenson and countess Gogo Schiaparelli in the substantial—and at times difficult—orbit of her grandmother, the legendary designer Elsa Schiaparelli; to her move to New York...

T he call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles. Later, Thompson reviewed weeks’ worth of the Safeway’s security footage. He ...

“I wanted to share my method with the women in my life,” says Giambattista Valli, the Roman designer whose intricate couture techniques have found a Hollywood following in Diane Kruger, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. Documenting the journey from concept to runway, Valli has collected photographs, mood boards and sketches of eight years’ work in a 400-page book, previewed here. The designer behind the eponymous ready-to-wear and couture labels made his Paris debut in 2005, taking inspiration from Louise Bourgeois, red-tipped flowers and, for his recent Paris Fashion Week show, Pier Paolo Pasolini. “All the people in the book come from specific chapters in my career,” explains Valli of the Rizzoli-published title, spliced with essays from muses including Francesco Clemente, Franca Sozzani and Lee Radziwill, and dedicated to his collaborator, the Italian architect and jeweler Luigi Scialanga. “It was great to do a work-in-progress book; one that has no start, and almost no e...

Popularized by the American tennis player of the same name in 1971 after winning the U.S. Open, production was interrupted in 2011.  The end of the controversial career launched in 1964. Whatever the Stan Smith returns and the opportunity to reissue the Stan Smith, the German brand is launching a contest on Twitter.  adidas offers users to save their own custom pair of Stan Smith with their photo on the tongue.  The principle is simple: just twitter his photo with # hashtags and @ stansmith adidasfr between 01/13/2014 and 17/01/2014 10am to noon included. 1500 winners will be amended and circulated by adidas Originals photo and receive the shot turned into custom logo tab and each day one of the winners will be randomly selected and will receive a custom pair of shoes Stan Smith (worth 95 euros) with its own custom logo tab. It was time, mine began to no longer power.

That simplicity has very little to do with the kind of pristine Minimalism that has often dominated the design scene in recent decades. When Biesenbach bought the Manhattan apartment in 2007—after seeing it listed in The New York Times online classifieds—he took out a few walls and refinished the dark wood floors, but he left most of the place untouched, not even bothering to repaint the living room walls. (You can still see faint outlines where the previous owner’s pictures hung.) Clearly it’s an approach that allows him a break from the countless aesthetic judgments that his day job requires. As MoMA’s chief curator of media, Biesenbach oversees the museum’s fast-growing collection of multimedia installations and video and performance pieces. (He co-organized last year’s Olafur Eliasson survey, curated the current Pipilotti Rist exhibit and is preparing upcoming shows of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh.) “Normally I have to make so many decisions about the tone of white and the t...

ith her swanlike neck and clever sense of humor, Gloria Guinness effortlessly reigned over the jetset in the Sixties and Seventies. Born to modest means in Mexico, she rose to the top of the social heap after wedding banking heir Loel Guinness. (It was either her third or fourth marriage, depending on the account.) Despite being a fixture on best-dressed lists, Guinness, who favored Balenciaga and Halston, insisted she was no slave to fashion. “I think everyone envisions me sitting at Alexandre’s all day, picking out beautiful clothes from passing couturiers,” she told W between puffs of a cigarette at her 600-acre Normandy stud farm in 1980. “My God, could you imagine the boredom?” She did, however, appreciate elegance in others. “I love to look at women with good bones and good bodies in good clothes,” she informed W in 1976. In addition to the Normandy place, Guinness also maintained residences in London; Paris; Lausanne, Switzerland; Acapulco, Mexico; and Palm Beach. She loved host...

Comme des Garçons is partnering once again with Disney to produce a new capsule collection for Spring / Summer 2014, a colorful and unique collection. Applying their rebellious aesthetic Comme des Garçons icons of our childhood, the capsule "Camo" collection includes two t-shirts with slightly different cuts and a shirt. The grounds and use the face of our beloved Mickey Mouse and achieve a kind of camouflage printed.  The work is also made more interesting when we look more closely, since it is an all-over printed with Mickey silhouettes disparate shapes and colors that merge onto the fabric.

There are those who assert that Lynn Wyatt's sale of her River Oaks mansion and her move to a smaller mansion nearby means nothing to the life and times of Houston. Wyatt is now a woman of a certain age, but she looks great: She's still a blonde, still appears at charity galas, and is still featured in the pages of Vogue and W. She's also the woman who for decades gave Houston its international social cachet, an extremely valuable donation to a city that, despite being the country's fourth largest, still smarts at the slightest suggestion of hickdom. During the height of the oil boom in the 1970s and early '80s, the Wyatt mansion was a party house for the likes of Princess Grace, Bill Blass, Mick Jagger—and a temple of envy for those who weren't invited. Hence any hint that she might be withdrawing from the spotlight fills Houstonians with an odd mixture of fascination and dread. "Lynn Wyatt is NOT stepping aside," insists Franci Crane, a well-placed o...

Saperstein and boyfriend Christopher Roselli in their office, with designs for the Chiave clothing line. The woman in question, everyone quickly learned, was Suzanne Saperstein, the Swedish-born chatelaine of Fleur de Lys, one of Los Angeles’s most extravagant homes. Although Saperstein, a former model and competitive skier, was no newcomer to Paris (she’s been a dedicated couture client since the Nineties), she had been mostly absent in recent seasons as she weathered a bitter divorce from her husband of 21 years, Texas billionaire David Saperstein. Among the jaded onlookers at the shows, Saperstein’s fashion-victim ensembles and 33-year-old boyfriend (former pro soccer player Christopher Roselli) sparked a range of comments, some kinder than others. But any critiques from the crowd were mild in comparison to the torpedoes Saperstein fires at herself a few weeks later, over lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. As she amusingly mocks her physical imperfections, her taste in cloth...

One of the city's grandest apartment buildings, the 12-story limestone palazzo at 820 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner at 63 rd  Street has only one apartment per floor.  Designed by Starrett & Van Vleck for Fred T. Ley and Company and erected in 1916, this magnificent and finely detailed building is one of the stateliest, and most expensive, apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue.  It was converted to a cooperative in 1949. BOTTOM LINE Residents in this limestone-clad apartment palace have formidable wealth and impeccable social status, which entitles them to elevator attendants, lovely hanging light sconces flanking the entrance, Japanese Cherry trees and proximity to the Central Park Zoo. Because of Central Park views, its small number of units, its palatial apartments and its location close to midtown and on a quiet sidestreet, this is one of the supreme residential addresses in the world. DESCRIPTION The façades are broken into five sections by four prominent st...

This 14-story structure at 990 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner at 80 th  Street is one of the most exclusive and elegant buildings on the avenue because of both its limestone façade and fine detailing and the fact that it has only five duplex apartments and one triplex unit.  Exquisitely designed in Italian-Renaissance-palazzo-style by Rosario Candela and the firm of Warren & Wetmore, this building has a sidestreet, canopied entrance and attractive landscaping.  It was built in 1927, two years after the equally handsome building directly across 80th Street was completed to designs by J. E. R. Carpenter, Candela's predecessor as the preeminent designer of luxury apartment buildings on the Upper East Side.  This building was developed by Fred T. Ley & Company and was converted to a cooperative in 1952. BOTTOM LINE Across the avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of art, this building’s location is along the avenue’s “Museum Mile.” It is also only a block awa...

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The Azure debuted in March 1995 at the  Geneva Motor Show  on the platform of the Continental R  model, which had been originally launched in 1991. Production only crept to a start, with a mere nine examples finished in the first year - in 1996, after full production had started, no less than 251 Azures were finished. [2]   Pininfarina assisted in the two-year process of turning the Continental R into a full four-seater convertible, and also built the shell and soft-top at their factory in Italy, largely from parts sourced in the UK. Final assembly was then carried out at Crewe. A roll-bar was never considered, which necessitated extensive reinforcing of the chassis. [3]  At 210 in (5,340 mm) in length and 5,750 pounds (2,610 kg) in weight, the Azure often surprised onlookers with its size and bulk, intended to both convey a sense of "presence" and allow for comfortable seating of four adult passengers. Power came from the company's stalwart 6.75 ...