18vipblog.com

Chris Benz.Photo: Getty Images

MAKEUP
• Lancôme signed Chris Benz to collaborate on a new lip color for the Pout-à-Porter series, which will debut at his spring 2010 fashion show in September. As a bonus, you have the chance to name the new hue by offering suggestions on Benz’s Facebook fan page.

• Sephora introduced a service called Beauty Studio this summer, which offers free tutorials led by company aestheticians.

• Jessica Stam’s new Dior campaign just came out.

HAIR
• Hairstylist Orlando Pita did the hair at the Christian Dior couture show yesterday, while Pat McGrath did the makeup.

SKIN
• Model Julie Henderson: "It’s okay to actually invest in, like, your skin and your face because that’s what you look at, that’s what people look at, that’s who you are, basically."

Photo: Melissa Hom

Simply stated, Piazza Sempione makes the world’s best pants. Italian tailoring at its finest, this company founded in 1991 has been making clean, chic styles that are a must in every wardrobe. Here are five reasons we can’t live without them:

1. The fit is superb.
2. They easily go from day to night — you can go anywhere, anytime in these.
3. You can count on finding your favorite style season after season.
4. Beautiful fabrics add to their comfort and longevity.
5. They’re well priced for the great quality you get.

The "Audrey" pant in navy velvet and charcoal cotton, $365 to $600; available at Saks, Bergdorf Goodman, and Barneys.

Watch the slideshow

Edgarista sneakers, $140.Photo: Melissa Hom

Lower East Side native Alexandra Catalan was creating her own screen-printed T-shirts and taking far-flung trips across Europe and Asia when she decided to combine her dual loves of travel and design into a store on her home turf. The 21-year-old opened Nor.Folks earlier this summer, a vibrant mash-up of clothing, shoes, jewelry, vintage bags, art, photography, and housewares from New York and around the world. Mongolian masks line the walls alongside paintings from Guatemala, and Spanish espadrilles are propped beside Converses painted with the Manhattan skyline. The stock stresses all things handmade, shaped by both the downtown art scene and Catalan’s own wanderlust: hand-painted hats, Frida Kahlo–inspired jewelry from Mexico, lightweight yoga bags from Japan, and neon printed dresses. Click ahead to scope out the selection.

Giancarlo di Risio.Photo: Getty Images

Versace CEO Giancarlo di Risio plans to resign at a board meeting this Friday, reports the New York Times. Speculation that Di Risio would step down surfaced a couple of weeks ago, despite the Versace family’s somewhat odd attempts to quiet media reports. Though he is credited with putting the label on sound financial footing since he joined in 2004 (before Versace he was CEO of Fendi), Di Risio has reportedly been clashing with creative director Donatella Versace over her lavish expenditures, such as Mario Testino’s $140,000-per-day fee for shooting ad campaigns. Meanwhile the label is struggling in the recession. Last month Versace reported that first-quarter revenue was down 13 percent from a year earlier. The label has also refused to lower prices, so as not to look cheap, while customers flock to stores with sales all around them. This year, the company also brought on an outside consulting firm to help them figure out how to make money again. Di Risio is said to have had no involvement in drafting up those plans. Versace will presumably search for a replacement. But Di Risio has options. Roberto Cavalli is also searching for a CEO.

Versace Chief to Resign
Related: Trouble Brews As Profits Fall at the House of Versace

A look from the "Paparazzi" video: an archive Dolce
& Gabbana corset.

If Lady Gaga called us up and asked us to style her, we’d fall on our face in hysterics and then reply with an enthusiastic yet collected "OMG, YES." But when she offered stylist B. Åkerlund the job, she said no. Åkerlund was taking some time off to have twins in Sweden and chose her babies over Gaga. But Gaga persisted, calling Åkerlund for every video she did. Åkerlund continued choosing babies. Finally, Gaga contacted Åkerlund’s husband, Jonas, about directing the epic "Paparazzi" video. He asked his wife, “Should we do Gaga?” And by that time, she was ready. Åkerlund tells Anthem that it’s unclear how Gaga knew about her.

I have no idea. She just said she knew. I asked her, “How do you know that we’re so perfect for each other?” and she said, “I just know.” She’s like a sister that I never had.

Åkerlund is Gaga’s first official stylist. Before she came on, Gaga worked with a creative director named Matthew Williams. They collaborated on the apparel (for lack of a better term) she’s made for herself, under the label she calls "Haus of Gaga." Sometimes she still makes her own pieces. Åkerlund explains:

She’s definitely a very strongly opinionated artist. She knows exactly what she wants and sometimes she’ll go ahead and make stuff on her own. I think she just needs me for more specific jobs, you know? I mean, she’s very busy and she’ll never do anything twice. On her promo tour around the world, she has about a million things going on all the time so I try to help out whenever I can.

Goodness she needs this woman. She’s gone out without pants about 2,048,672,394,872,943,862,351 times, and we’re not into math, but we know that’s more than twice. And how is she going to top the zipper eye patch? The solar-system hat? Those pink lace-up thigh-high boot–pant-leg hybrids? She needs new tricks and she’s too busy and important being — contrary to what our dear friends at Vulture think — a musical artiste to come up with them herself all the time now. And Åkerlund is perfectly suited to that task. She says:

I feel like I have a lot of input because I come from the world of fashion. I don’t like to pull fashion; I like to make fashion. I feel like Gaga and I are alike in that respect. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about the new hot designers; it’s whatever we feel like doing at the moment. If that means pulling from old resources of designers we like or archives of things or whatever it is. It doesn’t matter as long as it feels right.

She did not go on to explain why pants feel so wrong.

B. Akerlund

Photo: Patrick McMullan

Kate Moss, Erin Wasson, Elle Macpherson, and, most recently, Amber Valletta have all added "slash designer" to their job titles. Taking clothes designed by models seriously is hard enough for us, and we can barely stitch a button on a sweater. After blogging about fashion for long enough, we’ve learned to accept and sometimes (ironically) embrace their work. But Hussein Chalayan doesn’t stare at fashion on the Internet all day, has created technologically magnificent dresses with LED laser lights, and once struggled for funding. So these model clothes don’t amuse him in quite the same way. WWD reports:

“If you have a really strong sense of style and people want to aspire to being like you, I can understand that,” he says. “But if you really are doing it just because you think of yourself as a brand and you haven’t had the training and you know nothing about clothes, it kind of demeans all the training that designers have had.”

Though Chalayan criticized Moss’s line in the Independent over a year and a half ago, he now accepts it, at least begrudgingly.

Still, her Topshop efforts haven’t passed muster. “I don’t think it represented her, and I didn’t think she worked hard enough. I even told her to her face.”

And?

“She said, ‘Oh, I’m just trying to do a light thing; I’m not trying to do anything serious,’” recalls Chalayan. “But I said, ‘That’s not the point.’”

It’s no secret that when Moss designs clothes all she does is pull designer pieces from her disgustingly large closet and have Topshop reproduce them — no real design expertise required on her part. But maybe Hussein should let go of these negative feelings toward Moss and her ilk. Model lines won’t go away anytime soon. It’s kind of like reality TV. We’ve put at least some effort over the course of our lives into being decent human beings, we’ve worked to earn money to feed ourselves, and here we have Real Housewives and people who live in The City on TV making gobs of money for behaving like vacuous aliens with no souls. But do we dwell? No. We accept the unfairness that is life and drink it off after work.

Chalayan’s New Channels

Photo: Courtesy of American Apparel

In response to the rumors that Dov Charney lays off employees who aren’t hot enough, American Apparel’s creative director, Marsha Brady, sent us this statement about their hiring process, which she oversees:

We do screen, but not for beauty. What we look for is personal style. We carry year round basics that are easy to understand and pretty much sell themselves as basics. But to really showcase the fashionability of our products, we have to rely on the way our in-store employees style themselves with our clothes. The line consists of a tremendous number of colors that are more like art supplies than fashion, so when we’re hiring, one of the things we look for is an ability to take our products, make them exciting, and show how cool they can look, which doesn’t have much to do with just being pretty. We see applicants who don’t have quite what we’re looking for in retail but are recommended for modeling all the time. Every new hire contributes to our brand perception and it’s very important to the success of the company to take it seriously. Not to say that we have the perfect retail workforce, but it’s something we’re giving priority to.

To think you could walk into an open call one day with simple aspirations to man a cash register or open boxes in the stockroom, and emerge a week later on a billboard lying supine in a see-through body suit on a clear plastic table thrusting your pelvis into the air for all the world to see! Fame: You never know where it will find you. It’s interesting they think of the clothes as art supplies. We’d call them pieces of slutty gym-bunny Halloween costumes, but that’s practically the same thing.

Meet Dania Ramirez.Photo: Getty Images

MAKEUP
• Actress Dania Ramirez from Heroes is the newest face for CoverGirl.

• Kristin Davis stepped down from being a representative for the human-rights organization Oxfam because she also endorses Ahava, an Israeli cosmetics line manufactured in the West Bank. Oxfam considers that area disputed territory.

FRAGRANCE
• Manufacturers of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely fragrance filed a lawsuit against Universal Perfumes and Cosmetics of Farmingdale for allegedly selling counterfeit and stolen perfume bottles.

SKIN
• There is such a thing as foot shame; spa employees report that clients apologize during treatments for their corns, ingrown toenails, and hairy toes.

HAIR
• Chris Rock made a documentary called Good Hair, which is about the billion-dollar black hair industry. It’s not out yet, but you can watch the trailer here.

Cintra Wilson wrote a profile of Agyness Deyn, née Laura Hollins, for today’s "Style" section in the Times. After asking her several questions like, "Do you have a collaborative creative process with designers and photographers with whom you work closely?" and getting answers like:

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I just like to experience different feelings, even if it’s, like, uncomfortable?”

Wilson concludes Deyn Hollins (dammit!) comes off as a bit "dim." But surely that means something. Hollins’s rise from punky unknown fish-and-chips shopgirl in Manchester to famous model signifies important things about not only Hollins, but the times in which we live.

[T]his dimness, I suspect, is strategic. I’ve seen this before; actresses sometimes evade answering questions by obfuscating them in colorful fogs of positive nonsense. It is understandable: actual information limits the ability to be all things to all people, so vagaries protect the brand.

Hollins won’t talk about future acting or music projects. (She’s been rumored to have a starring role in the BBC’s Dr. Who.) Her agent says she’ll model forever. But beneath Hollins’s very deep dimness, it sounds like she has different ideas about that:

“You know, even though I’m in fashion, I don’t, like, do fashion,” she said. “Fashion isn’t me, even though I work in it. It’s just materialistic stuff. I just want to do whatever makes me happy.”

So does that mean when she steps out of the house in studded high-top Converse, a mass of cowlicks on her head, a giant white T-shirt with the cover of an Elastica album on it, and jeggings she is not, in fact, trying? Good to know.

Of the Moment, and Thinking Ahead
 

Photo: Getty Images

The British designer wore a purple party dress — which bore a familiar face — to her twentieth-anniversary party in London.

Which cartoon character would you turn into a dress?