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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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COLUMBUS, GA (WTVM) -  A woman is busted by undercover Columbus Police officers who say she was prostituting herself at her home in midtown.

Police say they found 23-year-old Brittany Parda’s contact information on an online classifieds web site, texted her Saturday afternoon and she agreed to have sex for money at her house.

According to officers, she directed them to her duplex on 12th Street and accepted $150 for a half hour of sexual activity with an undercover cop, at which point she was arrested and charged with prostitution and keeping a place of prostitution.

Officials say Parda told them she is from Vermont and claims to be working for Aflac in customer service as she completes law school online.

She is scheduled appear in court Monday afternoon on her charges.

Prada claims the new colourful territory for its spring/summer 2011 collection. Antonio Calanni / AP photo

There were pops of it in London at Christopher Kane and Giles, but it takes a designer of Miuccia Prada’s standing to confirm, as the Milan summer 2011 collections start, that vibrant colour is a hot trend for next season. Shocking pink, DayGlo orange and bright green, worked into bold graphic stripes and pictorial prints across loose, minimalist clothing, are summed up by Prada as “exaggerated simplicity”.

Such vivid jolts of colour are not a familiar part of her repertoire, which is why it seems all the more shocking when it appears. Miuccia Prada’s modus operandi is to find something unfamiliar and rework and refine it to make it her own, so now she is claiming new territory as a colourist. She kept her fashion shapes clean and simple, but used a flourish of baroque pattern with flora and fauna cotton prints (the banana patterns and monkeys swinging around on a baroque frame of greenery are a particularly playful touch), Carmen Miranda-embroidered figures and jaunty Mexican sombrero hats to convey her upbeat message.
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A Jil Sander creation in Milan last week

Designers mark next season’s change with clean lines and dazzling colour

Clean lines and block colour. That’s how the spring/summer collections from Jil Sander and MaxMara propose that we move on from the neutral hues and minimal tailoring that have struck such a chord this season. It’s a convincing progression; after all, camel trousers won’t seem so right when the sun comes out, and no matter how timeless “real clothes” are, beautiful alternatives will always make us crave something new.

The Jil Sander collection, designed by Raf Simons, was especially beautiful, featuring simple shapes and lines that offered the perfect canvas for shocking pink, purple, magenta, coral red, electric blue, grass green, yellow and orange. Dresses came as loose shifts and in a flared triangular shape which seems to be a burgeoning trend.
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Prada Bag

Manolo says, here is the Prada bag that the Manolo thinks is indeed most smart, with the many amusing grommets and the soft, semi-structured suede.

This it would be the perfect gift for the stylish woman to wear with the jeans and the boots on the weekend.