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According to WWD, there was a rumor going around that Patrizio Bertelli, Prada’s CEO, wasn’t so keen on Miuccia Prada’s bananas  spring collection. Sources told the newspaper that Prada had canceled appointments in Milan with American retailers because they planned to bring an “enhanced offering” of the collection to New York in a month.

Prada’s spring collection was plenty enhanced as it was for our tastes. Most other critics seemed to agree that the collection was a smashing success. And now Prada is “firmly” denying the rumors that Bertelli didn’t like it, or that the collection was being altered for NYC appointments.

Denial aside, it’s curious that the rumor ever even existed. Does this mean that despite the influx of neon that followed Prada’s showing, there is some concern that Americans won’t warm up to it? Would you wear Prada’s SS2011 collection?

Marfa is home to modern art, the Marfa lights phenomenon and a Prada store. Yes, a Prada store is located off U.S. Route 90 in the middle of almost nowhere in Texas. Surprising, is it not?

This store, known as Prada Marfa, is a permanently affixed sculpture created by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, known collectively as Elmgreen & Dragset. Although this piece of minimalist art was inaugurated on Oct. 1, 2005, Elmgreen and Dragset installed signs with the words, “Prada, Coming Soon” on the windows of a Chelsea Gallery years before. Little did everyone know that Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, owners of the nonprofit organization Art Production Fund, with aid from Ballroom Marfa, would be funding this project.

Built on a desolate strip of U.S. Route 90 in West Texas, the piece is made strictly from adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass panes, aluminum frame, medium-density fiberboard and carpet. It is made to resemble an actual Prada store, but this sculpture will not be maintained while it is present in this rural area of Texas. The artists are aware that the biodegradable adobe will eventually melt into the land and that there may also be vandals who may ruin the property. The artists hope to show the growth of luxury brands, while promoting the temporal relevance of fashion.

“If someone spray-paints graffiti or a cowboy decides to use it as target practice or maybe a mouse or a muskrat makes a home in it, 50 years from now, it will be a ruin that is a reflection of the time it was made,” Villareal said.

This sculpture store features an array of handbags and shoes from Prada’s fall/winter 2005 collection. It is said that these pieces were handpicked by designer Miuccia Prada.

Unfortunately, it took only three days for the sculpture to experience vandalism when the building was broken in to. Six handbags and 14 right-footed shoes were stolen, while the building was spray-painted with the words “Dumb” and “Dum Dum.”

Despite the goal of no maintenance to this building, the art was quickly repaired and replaced with new Prada handbags and shoes. This time around, the handbags did not have bottoms and were placed on an alarm system so that authorities would be immediately informed in the event of another theft.

This $80,000 building is a sincere project by its artists and by art foundations to promote fashion even in areas where fashion may seem like a thing of the future. Even though Texas does not have a flagship Prada store, it has made the home of Prada Marfa attract many minimalist artists and tourists from all over the nation.

Celebrated British artist Sam Taylor-Wood on her “Crying Men,” her Lennon biopic, and having a baby with her much-younger star.

(Photo: Francesco Carrozzini. Hair by Ayumi Yamamoto for Barex Italiana/Defacto; Makeup by Kateri Giehl/Ford Artists.)

I might have to breast-feed in the middle of this. Is that okay?” asks British artist and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood, arriving for lunch. In tow are her fiancé, actor Aaron Johnson (star of last spring’s Kick-Ass), and their 10-week-old daughter, Wylda Rae. After a brief discussion, it’s decided that father and child will go window-shopping while we talk. “It’s been challenging,” says Taylor-Wood, waving them off. “Newborn baby, jet lag, breast-feeding, raging hormones, and press conferences. I sleep on average every other hour and try not to burst into tears in the day.”

The couple met when Johnson auditioned for the title role in Nowhere Boy, Taylor-Wood’s feature directorial debut about the teenage years of John Lennon, when the soon-to-be Beatle yo-yoed between his purse-lipped Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), who essentially raised him, and his mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), a flame-haired siren who died in a car accident when he was 17, thereafter ascending to the status of ghostly unattainable love object, like Dante’s Beatrice or Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” We are, in other words, at Lennon’s personal ground zero: dead center in the hurt zone.

“What we focused on was the journey from youthful innocence to the man who’s gone through such pain and anger and anguish, who’s more recognizable as the Lennon that we know,” says Taylor-Wood. “So by the time you get to the end, you’re completely convinced of his Lennonism.” The film was praised by critics upon its release in the U.K. (it opens here October but got squashed by Avatar at the box office, while the Oedipal longings onscreen were overshadowed by the tabloid screech over Taylor-Wood’s relationship with Johnson: He was 18 at the time of shooting, making him 23 years her junior.
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Large Copper Poem Dress by Lesley Dill at the "Fashion and Finance" exhibit (photo by Julie Tong)

Both “fashion” and “finance” each have enough meat under their belts to stir endless commentary and criticism; to be made into films centering around these lone subjects as shown in “The Devil Wears Prada” or “Wall Street.”  But what would happen if you fused the two together into an art exhibit inspired by consumerism and focused on our culture’s obsession with money, fame, and glamour?

This is the topic explored in an exhibit titled, “Fashion and Finance” at Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. There are two floors filled with a wide range of pieces mostly from the 20 and 21st centuries. This isn’t your typical art exhibit stocked with a few oil-on-canvases, but presents compositions that have taken the inherent creative quality found in fashion and translated it into something very special.

Among the works are a dress made entirely out of horse hairs, vans coated in bronze, and a man’s suit made from cloth and thread “literally riddled with text from [Emily Dickinson].” Artist, Lesley Dill states, “I think of words, and especially the poems of Emily Dickinson…as a kind of spiritual armor, an intervening skin between ourselves and the world.”
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The Milan collections delivered radiant colour, clean lines and, of course, just a touch of the full-on glamour for which the city is famous. Carola Long highlights the key trends, quirkiest accessories and snappiest dressers

Pattern and print: At Versace, the Greek-key pattern which forms part of the brand's logo was reinvented as a colourful repeat print

Pattern and print

Miuccia Prada offered the quirkiest designs. She showed deliberately garish prints featuring black and yellow bananas, and monkeys clambering among baroque curlicues.

Stripes, too, were a major motif in this collection, and they also appeared in two-tone navy or purple with white at Jil Sander, and in multicolours at Versace. Etro and Marni are known for pattern, and this season was no different as Etro delivered paisley scarf prints and Seventies florals, and Marni offered wallpaper and psychedelic florals, spots and stripes. At Versace, the Greek-key pattern which forms part of the brand’s logo was reinvented as a colourful repeat print.
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Ciska Weber opened Cafe Gelato in 2006. She said that a key to her biusiness plan is, “to keep it simple.”

If you want to sample some economic hope in Winston-Salem, grab a chair and try a scoop of gelato at Caffe Prada or Cafe Gelato on a Saturday afternoon.

“I have never seen my sales go down,” said Ciska Weber, who opened Cafe Gelato at 845 Reynolda Road in 2006. “The community has been really good to me.”

Cafe Gelato and Caffe Prada are two homegrown local businesses that have not only survived the recession, but also thrived. Families may have trimmed their dining-out budgets, but both Weber and Alex Prada, a co-owner of Caffe Prada, say they believe that gelato fills a niche in the changing economy because people still want little luxuries.

“A family of four can come here, the dad can have a beer, the mom can have a glass of wine and the kids can have gelato and they spend 20 bucks,” Prada said, who opened his cafe on Broad Street in 2008. “It’s a really affordable outing.”
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RETAILERS are thrilled, reporters are raving and designers are breathing a sigh of relief.

“Hey, Milan is back on track again,” said Dan Katen of Dsquared2 after it took him more than half an hour in traffic to get to a benefit event last Monday, the closing day of the womenswear fashion week for spring/summer 2011.

After several grouchy seasons, when, feeling the effect of the economic crisis, designers seemed devoid of ideas and the fashion pack lost its love of Milan – “too dull and too expensive” went the refrain – the good vibes have returned.

Everybody liked the new schedule – top-billed shows spread out over six days – and the new venues – fancy downtown “palazzi” rather than the sterile fair grounds.

Skimpy two-piece with matching bag and footwear from Giorgio Armani.

Figures released by the Italian Fashion Chamber at the end of the week showed that Milan Fashion Week is alive and well. Fifteen thousand buyers from 40 countries attended the event, which included 178 collections, 78 shows and more than 100 presentations. The many fashionistas walking about town with big name shopping bags confirmed the upward move.

“Fashion is renewal, and it was time for us to renew ourselves,” said Beppe Modenese, founder of the Milan fashion event more than 30 years ago. Above all else, the upbeat mood was reflected in the ultra-colourful, cheerful styles, which drew inspiration from the fashion heydays of the 1970s.
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“We’ll just drop her round at 8am, OK? And be back around seven…” Sound familiar? The deceptively casual arrangement that sees grandparents acting as unpaid nannies for their children’s children is endemic in this country, with one in three working mothers depending on their parents for childcare, and we’re not the only ones. In Spain, almost half of all grandparents provide (free) help with the kids, but, in a development that will be greeted by parents across the EU like a nappy explosion on a cream-coloured sofa, they are being encouraged by a general workers’ union in Andalucia to go on strike.

Picture it: legions of militants in wide-fitting slip-ons and comfortable windcheaters chanting: “What do we want? A fair wage. When do we want it? When we’ve had a nice cup of tea and a sit-down.” But because it would be a very cold-hearted relative indeed that abandoned the little ones for a day on the picket line, the strike is unlikely to get any traction.

Grandparents agree to help because they want to support their harassed offspring and bond with their grandchildren. Parents are thankful that they don’t need to trawl Gumtree for a nanny, and set up a TeddyCam to make sure Chloe or Archie isn’t coming to any harm.

But it’s a complex, very tenuously calibrated arrangement. Who decides the hours, and are they stuck to? Do the GPs get any payment, or is the promise of a family holiday (for which read busman’s holiday) all that’s on offer?
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Lauren Weisberger and her husband, Mike, were cruising for a burger recently in New York, where they live, when they passed a theatre near Gramercy Park with The Devil Wears Prada on the marquee.

“I almost had a heart attack. I said, ‘Stop the car! Are they replaying this? I want to see this again on the big screen. We’re going, we’re going.’ ”

Turns out it wasn’t a revue cinema, but the venue for a heavy-metal gospel band from Dayton, Ohio, that had adopted the title of Weisberger’s iconic novel. They didn’t attend the concert. “Christian rock is not my thing,” she says, laughing.

The Devil Wears Prada, based on her experience working with Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, spelled success for Weisberger in the chick-lit industry, especially after the release of the movie, starring Meryl Streep as Wintour and Anne Hathaway as the Weisberger surrogate.

Her subsequent books, Everyone Worth Knowing and Chasing Harry Winston (which has been optioned for a screenplay), are also about young women with successful careers and enviable social lives in Manhattan.

But no, she insists, those last two don’t reflect her life as the first one did. She, like her readers, lives vicariously through her characters.

On this afternoon, however, she is far from Manhattan, sipping tea at the chic Counter restaurant in the new Thompson Hotel in Toronto, looking relaxed in a put-together way: boyfriend blazer, glossed lips, shiny blond highlights.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont concerns the toll fame takes on a New York couple, both bent on making a mark in their careers, when the rock-star husband becomes an overnight success and finds himself mingling with the beautiful people in Los Angeles. Fame, needless to say, puts pressures on the marriage. At its heart, the novel is about work-life balance, writ large.

“I don’t think there’s a woman on the planet who can’t relate to this,” Weisberger says. “There’s the irony that you spend so long working for something that you want so badly, then you get it and it’s maybe not quite what it’s cracked up to be, and the disappointment and how to handle that.”
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Trousers aren’t welcome in Donatella Versace’s vision of summer.

prada

Designers chasing the vision of modernity have offered up many solutions this season. Alexander Wang chose pure white, Prada chose bold colour and Christopher Kane chose neon. Knowing the close and inspirational friendship between Kane and Donatella Versace, fluoro was a much touted bet for Versace too. Donatella wasn’t so bold, but perhaps that’s no bad thing.

Red and turquoise boxy jackets and matching thigh-split skirts provided more wearable shades. A jigsaw graphic print was tracked in Perspex along swing dresses and fitted tops and an irregular multi-colour stripe brought simple shapes to life. The finale sequence of floorlength dresses with flowing sections of tassels were the strongest moment of the show.
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