Paris is a place with many destinations: food, fashion, glamour, hotels, places, restaurants and so on.
My memories from Paris will always be not from a place but from a state of mind.
French start very young to learn how to enjoy all the best in life – specially food.
You not been in Paris if you didn’t stop at Rue Cler.
There you can taste and buy everything to turn your lunch or dinner in a banquet.
Buy a ticket, go to Paris and tell me later…..
Will Fashion’s Biggest Names Kiss the Runway Goodbye?
Soon you may not have to be an A-list celeb, department-store buyer or magazine editor to get a front-row seat at a fashion show. As the luxury and fashion industries continue to struggle with sagging retail sales and consumers’ diminishing interest in $2,000 It bags, designers are looking for alternative ways to show their wares. And more and more of them are turning to the Internet for a bigger audience and to shrink their overhead.
“The cost of a fashion show has become prohibitive,” says David Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren’s marketing chief. “And because of the economy, fewer members of the press and buyers are making the trip to New York to see the show.” The result is that many designer-initiated brands — including the less-expensive lines, like Donna Karan’s DKNY, that are presented during New York Fashion Week — are rethinking the traditional fashion show. This fall the British designer Alexander McQueen made a splash by live-streaming his Paris show on his website. The season before, Louis Vuitton live-streamed its show on Facebook. And Lauren is the mastermind behind a new initiative to present his company’s brands in virtual fashion shows as opposed to have-to-be-there runway extravaganzas.
On Dec. 11, Rugby, Ralph Lauren’s collegiate brand, will show its holiday collection in an online fashion show that Lauren calls a mix between Harry Potter and Rock Band. Instead of walking down a real runway, the models will be walking on a treadmill in an office with a green screen behind them. Once the clip is produced, a virtual backdrop will be superimposed so that it will look as though the models are walking through New York City or a college campus, or jumping off flying books. The idea, says Lauren, is to bring a cinematic feeling to the brand’s advertising images. And instead of the company’s spending $1.5 million on an audience of approximately 700 members of the fashion press and department-store buyers, the virtual show will cost less than $50,000 to produce and is expected to attract more than 40 million page views.
One advantage to replacing the traditional biannual runway show — which features clothing that won’t be available in stores for another six months — is that designers can close the six-month gap between the show and the products’ availability. Ideally, consumers who watch a show online would then be able to click on a product they see and buy it immediately. “Now we can serve the industry and our customer simultaneously,” says Lauren, “which is critical to the survival of this industry.”
Historically, high-end fashion brands have not fared well when they’ve relied solely on virtual fashion shows. In 1998, Helmut Lang made a statement when he replaced one season’s runway showing with a video recording of a show that went up on his website and was distributed to editors on discs. But the reaction was lukewarm, and the following season Lang returned to the runway. More recently, brands like Viktor & Rolf and Yves Saint Laurent have experimented with online shows.
Next spring Polo Ralph Lauren is planning virtual shows for its less-expensive Lauren line as well as its children’s line. But the company isn’t ready to present its most prestigious line, the Ralph Lauren collection, online. “It’s certainly up for debate,” says Lauren. “It’s making us think differently about how we show our product and how we can show the Ralph Lauren collection.”
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1946717,00.html
During the Spring 2010 season, Loic Prigent, director of documentariesMarc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, Signe Chanel, and The Day Before, and French TV personality Mademoiselle Agnes teamed up to film Habillees, chronicling the search for the next French design talent. The Sundance Channel uploaded the sixHabillees webisodes this week, and the hour’s worth of content features everyone from John Galliano taking his runway bow to Karl Lagerfeld waltzing to Nicholas Ghesquiere saying of his work: “Wearing Balenciaga is a choice. These clothes aren’t easy to wear. They’re not meant to be easy to wear.”
When Pierre Berge, former partner of Yves Saint Laurent and president of ANDAM, which annually bestows 160,000 euros to designers under 40 seeking to expand their businesses in France — most recently awarded were Giles Deacon for 2009 and Gareth Pugh for 2008 — was asked by Mademoiselle Agnes who the next big French talent is, he replied: “No one.”
But perhaps best of all are the scenes with Anna Wintour, who is shown exiting the Rochas show flanked by two bodyguards, one who brusquely nudges a woman out of the way. Just after, as Anna descends a set of stairs, the other bodyguard turns a flashlight on her feet so she can walk without fear of tripping in her heels. Later, Agnes catches up with Anna before the Balmain show to ask her how important she thinks it is to support young designers. Notice the subtle dig at Carine Roitfeld in Anna’s response:
I think it’s totally important for all of us in the American fashion industry to support the young designers, and I think that’s why New York’s become such a vibrant fashion center, because people go there not only to see the Donna Karans of the world but a whole new generation. I’m just so sorry that there isn’t something like that in Paris that’s similar. I think that they should look for the younger generation here [in Paris] as well. Not only New York but London really supports their young talent; Franca Sozzani at Italian Vogue supports the young Italian designers, and I think when France is so known for its fashion industry — for them not to be reaching out to help younger people today is really a shame. [Agnes: "And there's space in your pages for them."] There’s space in everybody’s pages.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/travel/20cultured.html?ref=travel
Works by the photographer Natacha Lesueur are featured in a suite at the Hôtel Particulier Montmartre.
AS a crisp fall evening settled over the hillsides of the Montmartre district, stylish groups made their way up Avenue Junot for the opening of a photography show called “Lost Highway.”
Antonella Di Pietro, a top executive in the Kenzo fashion house, popped in with a black-clad entourage and was greeted by the show’s organizer, the noted interior designer and art patron Morgane Rousseau. Sipping wine at an open bar, the novelist Basile Panurgias and a friend mused over grainy black-and-white shots of nocturnal Tokyo by the photographer Chantal Stoman. Upstairs, other visitors watched experimental videos — disembodied hands passing household objects — created by the artist Jean-Claude Ruggirello.
The scene was redolent of many of the openings that light up the Paris galleries each week. Only this wasn’t a gallery. It was Hôtel Particulier Montmartre, a two-year-old boutique hotel in a 19th-century town house. Somewhere in the five suites, presumably, there were guests performing activities unrelated to art — sprawling on beds, taking showers, watching television.
While Paris has long been celebrated for both its arts scene and its stylish places to stay, the two worlds have only occasionally rubbed shoulders. But the last two years have seen a remarkable cross-pollination of creativity and hospitality, leading to a host of new hotels that blur the line between exhibition space and crash pad.
Some, like the high-design Le Six, are using their lobbies to host rotating exhibitions. Others, like the majestic Beaux-Arts Hôtel Banke, are decorating their common areas with permanent displays. (Starting in 2010, the hotel plans to install an Indiana Jones-worthy collection of ancient art and antiquities from Egypt, pre-Columbian Latin America and other civilizations.) Still others have commissioned noted artists to create the décor for their rooms.
At Hôtel Particulier Montmartre, owned by Ms. Rousseau, you can scarcely open your suitcase without knocking over the work of a top-notch contemporary artist. Ring for the elevator in the lobby, and you’ll find yourself next to a wildly fragmented, color-soaked painting of a Medusa-like woman by Robert Combas. Slip into the suite called “Vitrine” (“Display Window”), and you’ll find an interactive conceit — a display case where guests leave personal objects on display as art — imagined by Philippe Mayaux, a past winner ofFrance’s highly prestigious Marcel Duchamp prize.
Even the lushly landscaped grounds are the work of a master: Louis Benech, who renovated the Tuileries gardens.
Many of the new art hotels are springing up in the Boulevard Montparnasse area on the Left Bank. During the 1920s, you might have found Picasso drinking at the Café Select, Ferdinand Leger painting in the La Ruche studio complex or Man Ray holing up at the Hôtel Istria. Today, the small lanes around Place Pablo Picasso — famous for Rodin’s statue of Balzac — hide newfangled art havens like the Hôtel des Académies et des Arts.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.
Bibliophiles, meanwhile, tend to head around the corner to the book-themed Apostrophe Hôtel, which has summoned artists to help it pay homage to Montparnasse’s rich past as a haven for writers like Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, explained the owner, Isabelle Lozano.
TO find it, look for the facade painted with shadowy black boughs and dark leaves. They’re the work of Catherine Feff, a French artist noted for covering Parisian monuments — the Church of the Madeleine, the Arc de Triomphe — with enormous sheets bearing expertly rendered trompe l’oeil scenes.
Within, the artist and photographer Sandrine Alouf (she prefers the term “atmospherist”) has lent a fun and kitsch touch to the hotel’s 16 rooms, each of which has unique décor that corresponds to its theme.
The “Urban Writing” room, for example, is a tribute to graffiti that contains a vast panel depicting spray-painted characters and subway-style tags — a transposition of a photo Ms. Alouf took in New York City. In the room called “Reading,” a photo of the pages of a rolled-up book has been enlarged into an abstract wall-size decoration that suggests the whorls of a seashell.
“We wanted to create something literary, but not too intellectual,” said Ms. Lozano. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to sleep here.” You might soon need a bestseller, however, to fit in. Authors like Gayle Forman and Erri de Luca have already passed through.
An even more extravagant commission came to Ms. Alouf from Five Hôtel, which last year decided to build a luxury suite devoted to a particularly intimate form of art — the art of love.
“We asked her: ‘Create the Seventh Heaven,’ ” said Karine Tournois, the hotel director. “A room about sensations, escapades, adventures, that’s even a bit erotic.”
The result was “One by the Five,” a roughly 500-square-foot apartment in a building just across the quiet street from the main hotel in the Fifth Arrondissement. Its marquee feature is the bedroom — naturally. Somewhere between stunning and kitsch, the entire ceiling and carpet of the large room are embossed with images of blue sky and wispy clouds. Between them, the massive white bed appears to float.
The romantic ambience can be heightened by using the room’s preprogrammed iPod, which comes stocked with songs by Edith Piaf among others, and dials that control the color and intensity of tiny star-like lights implanted in the ceiling and floor. The room also features a flat-screen TV. Entertainment comes courtesy of a small Webcam just above it.
“In other hotels you can admire yourself in the mirrors when you make love,” explained Ms. Tournois. “Here you can watch yourself on the big screen.”
To judge by the gushing comments in the guest book, Ms. Alouf has succeeded in her creative tribute to eros.
“Wow! The perfect honeymoon room!” wrote a couple identified as Michael and Mikaela. “We’ve slept in Heaven and partied in Hell!”
IF YOU GO
Hôtel Particulier Montmartre, 23, avenue Junot, 75018; (33-1) 5341-8140;www.hotel-particulier-montmartre.com; doubles in December from 390 euros, or about $565 at $1.45 to the euro.
Le Six, 14, rue Stanislas, 75006; (33-1) 4222-0075; www.hotel-le-six.com; doubles from 300 euros.
Hôtel Banke, 20, rue La Fayette, 75009; (33-1) 5533-2222; www.derbyhotels.com; doubles from 225 euros.
Hôtel des Académies et des Arts, 15, rue de la Grande Chaumiere, 75006; (33-1) 4326-6644; www.hotel-des-academies.com; doubles from 189 euros.
Apostrophe Hôtel, 3, rue de Chevreuse, 75006; (33-1) 5654-3131; www.apostrophe-hotel.com; doubles from 162 euros.
Five Hôtel, 3, Rue Flatters, 75005; (33-1) 4331-7421; www.thefivehotel.com; doubles from 129 euros. The “One by the Five” suite (www.onebythefive.com) is 960 euros.
In the usually staid world of Paris’s palace hotels, the threshold for news can be pretty low — another Michelin star or some new spa rooms will do the trick. But the Hôtel Le Bristol, which happens to have added both those things recently, now has something that few, if any, grande dame hotels will brag about anytime soon: an entirely new wing.
Fashioned from five apartments in an adjacent building at the intersection of Avenue Matignon and Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the new wing is spread over seven stories and is the culmination of years of planning, development, wrangling and lawsuits. Twenty-six individually decorated rooms and suites are done up with silk and cotton fabrics, faux stucco walls and a handful of antique reproductions and paintings in an old-masters style. The overall look and feel is sort of streamlined traditional — not ornate or overembellished but comfortable and perhaps a bit spartan, considering the price tag. (Hotel officials will only admit to “tens of millions of euros.”)
The spine of the new wing is a circular marble staircase lit by a dramatically modern chandelier where an old elevator used to be. The heart of the place, however, is 114 Faubourg, a stylish bi-level restaurant with an open kitchen and walls covered in brightly colored depictions of dahlias. It’s a look that, in the words of the hotel’s longtime general manager, Pierre Ferchaud, was conceived “not to promote the whims of the designer but to please the diner.” That task will be left up to the chef Eric Desbordes, who’s taken a simple, causal approach to French cooking — one that no doubt will suit the type of guests who seem to be flocking to the new wing. When I was there, so was Scarlett Johansson.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/now-booking-hotel-le-bristols-new-wing/
The recession has made one American staple an export hit: le comfort food. New York restaurants have long been pushing dishes like truffled mac and cheese, and now Paris is woofing down grub Américain. At Hand (39, rue de Richelieu), so called for Have a Nice Day, the owner, Benjamin Tremoulet, a ruggedly handsome dude who always has a bottle of Budweiser in his hand, has brought the spoils of California to the City of Light: “Surfing got me hooked on the culture of great burgers and beers,” he says. With its D.I.Y interior — hanging light bulbs, vintage school chairs and bright red floors — Hand is only a French fry’s throw from the Carrousel du Louvre, so the fashion flock can easily scarf down a snack between runway shows. The editors from Citizen K and Elle, as well as gals like Mademoiselle Agnès, a French television personality, are already fans of Hand’s carrot cake, pecan pie and 10 different kinds of burgers. Our favorite is — bien sûr— the triple cheeseburger with Roquefort, Cheddar and Emmental.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/a-hamburger-in-paris/?ref=travel
For last year‘s Chanel Pre-Fall “Paris-Moscow” collection, Karl Lagerfelddirected a ten minute silent film, with Edita Vilkeviciute starring as a young Coco Chanel. This year’s Chanel Pre-Fall collection, which was dubbed “Paris-Shanghai,” debuted in the latter city today; Karl directed a new short film for the occasion, with Edita back as young Coco in a more expansive 22-minute set, this time with dialogue. Heidi Mount, Freja Beha Erichsen, and of course, Baptiste Giabiconi, join her in the tableau, which was projected against the Shanghai cityscape as part of the presentation.
http://www.fashionologie.com/
Carine Roitfeld went sans pants at Nicolas Pol’s “The Martus Maw” opening, presented by her son Vladimir Restoin Roitfield and RVCA last night.
If Carine goes without pants, does that make it okay?
Read more: Carine Embraces the No-Pants Trend — The Cut http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2009/11/carine_embraces_the_no_pants_t.html#ixzz0WWWmpd70
Tom Ford Tells All
“The gay aspect of A Single Man certainly wasn’t what drew me to make a film of the Christopher Isherwood book. It was its human aspect, that unifying quality,” he continues, segueing into a discussion of his remarkable directorial debut. The film, which was nominated for the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice film festival, and for which Ford won Venice’s Queer Lion prize and Colin Firth the best actor award, opens in limited release December 11.
“If you said name 10 things that define me, being gay wouldn’t make the list. I think Isherwood was like that too. There are many gay characters in his works because his work is so autobiographical, but their gayness isn’t the focus. The one thing I liked about Isherwood’s work—especially when I was younger and grappling with my sexuality—is that there was no issue about it in his writing. That was quite a modern concept back during the time when he was writing. Quite honestly, I just don’t think about my sexuality. But maybe this has to do with being a part of the first generation to benefit from all the struggles of the gay men and lesbians that came before us.”
Ford is lounging on a plush sofa in the upstairs inner sanctum of his eponymous store on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue. The sofa is a shade of gray that matches the lighter gray of his shirt and the darker gray of his trousers. His closely cropped hair is not gray—a decision that seems more his than his hair’s. I have known Ford for close to 30 years, since we were both slightly more than boys making our way in New York City. He was one of the city’s great beauties back then—much more beautiful than any of the bartenders at Studio 54, where we first learned to lounge on plush sofas together—and he is still, at 48, remarkably handsome. His forehead is also remarkably unlined. Does he use Botox?
“Of course I do,” he readily admits, a brash honesty having always been one of his most endearing traits. “Usually I’m not even able to frown, but my last injections are wearing off a bit and I am able to frown right now. I’d never get a full face-lift, though. Face-lifts on men are a disaster. But I’m a firm believer in Botox and Restylane. Absolutely. Why not?”
Shortly after the Falics purchased Lacroix from LVMH in 2005, they tried to run the house on a budget. Yet at the same time, they wanted the label to be among the highest-end on the market. They quickly canned Lacroix’s lower-priced Bazar and Jeans lines. Lacroix was delighted not to have to bother with cheaper lines anymore. But it wasn’t long before suppliers failed to receive checks, new suppliers had to be found, and Lacroix was back to the cheap stuff. He was supposed to produce, as he says, “the ‘It’ bag in cheap leather.”
Although his fall 2009 collection was heralded and Barneys placed a large order for it, that line won’t be produced. Neither will his cruise collection. Which means Lacroix boutiques will have to close in September. The label has hardly been able to fill orders for the couture collection presented in January, even though some devoted clients paid up front for the pieces so that the label could buy the supplies needed to produce them. “I struggled to make the dresses for the [Marielle] Safra wedding,” Lacroix says.
So that’s how a celebrated, revered label goes to pieces. Lacroix says the Falics didn’t want him to stage a couture show this week (he did anyway because he wanted his employees to have work). Maybe they foresaw the flood of publicity their mistakes would receive.
Lacroix has until the end of the month to find a buyer. His banker friend David de Rothschild is helping him locate new investments from people who know what they’re doing. Lacroix says he’s met with “some important people” and will only see those “ready to support couture.” But whoever wants to invest will have to cough up about 40 to 60 million euros over the next few years. Although speculation has surfaced that LVMH might scoop up Lacroix again, no one at the company has said anything to indicate it actually will.
Lacroix thinks the Falics would rather just see the house go under. Sadly for them, the entire fashion industry holds out hope the label will survive.
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