While Americans were eating their weekend away for the Thanksgiving holiday, a group of young ladies descended upon Paris. This past Sunday marked the 19^th annual “Le Bal des Debutantes” at the tony Hotel Crillon in Paris. Each year, 25 debutantes – typically with some type of celebrity connection – debut in meters of haute couture for charity. The young women are escorted by male chaperones known as Cavaliers. The belle of the ball was Lady Kitty Spencer – the niece of the late Princess Diana of Wales and the daughter of Viscount Spencer. The other debutantes included a fashion designer, an Indian princess, an actor’s daughter, and a student among others. The Crillon Ball is a fairy tale in reality while in the United States we eat & watch sports to make merry.

One of the most recognizable family names in fashion is Gucci. The venerable label’s history goes back to 1906 when Guccio Gucci opened his Florentine saddelry shop. Three generations later, great grandsons Allesandro & Guccio Gucci are launching their own line of handbags; entirely unaffiliated with the Gucci label. Of course, their name won’t hurt their projected sales revenue of $1M. The line is called To Be G with a timeless, European feel. The bags’ trademark is a lily motif available in leather to crocodile with prices starting at $820 to $9,000. Some would say that I can’t let go of the past, but I just want Tom Ford to come back.

I have never been a huge fan of Tommy Hilfiger. I consider him the common version of Ralph Lauren in American fashion. After unmanageable, rapid growth & waning global sales, Hilfiger sold his company to Apax Partners for $1.6 billion in 2006. He remains at the helm of the company with 950 stores worldwide. He recently announced to WWD plans for the opening of 100 additional stores. The bulk of the growth is due to their largest customer Macy’s department stores, who helped drive the $898 million sales of 2008.

At last, someone takes a stand! French shoe designer Christian Louboutin revealed that he was asked to do a line for H&M. He politely declined, thank goodness! I’m still reeling from Jimmy Choos at H&M or LiLo as creative director of Emanuel Ungaro. For a man who left school as a teenager, he certainly knows a smart business move like his trademark red soles, which originated by marking the soles with crimson nail polish in showrooms. Monsieur Louboutin recently forayed into men’s footwear debuting with a leopard print Chukka boot.

Who says publishing is dying, especially if Karl Lagerfeld is involved? Kaiser Karl has teamed up with Olivier Zahm of Purple to create 31 Rue Cambon. This is Chanel’s inaugural issues of their own magazine. The famed address is where Ms. Chanel worked & entertained. The apartment was divided into four floors with the store on the ground floor, couture dressing rooms on Two, private apartments on Three, and the workshop on Four.

 I am far from being a music writer, but there is one musician that has caught my eye…or rather ear. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, more succinctly known as Lady Gaga. While her songs are on repeat on my iPOD, I am more fascinated by her fashion. How long has it been since we’ve had a musician recognized and respected not only by music but also the fashion world? Madonna for Jean-Paul Gaultier in 1993? Lady Gaga’s wardrobe selection look like the notorious Vogue closet with Balenciaga dresses, a brown Fendi bustier, Hussein Chalayan, and Martin Margiela to name a few. A moment ago, the magazine US Weekly placed Lady Gaga on their worst dressed list. I have a feeling someone as independent and artistic as her could care less. Would you want to be in the ranks with Octomom, reality show rabble, or post puberty Disney stars? Just as the lyrics to her hit Paparazzi sing “Don’t stop for anyone. We’re plastic, but we still have fun.”

He’s coming back, and he’s all set, as always. The designer-turned-director fashion designer Tom Ford confirmed he will introduce a womenswear line to the Tom Ford name. To get an idea of why designer clothes cost so much, Ford needs $50 million in seed money. He is whispered to be seeking a financier. Once he has the cash, it will take something like two years to grow and formally launch the line. Any clever lender knows to invest in Ford; look what he did for Gucci, and anyone remember Henry Ford?

Come join for fun, food and drink at Defyance Clothing’s launch party held at Haberdashers at 310 N State st Suite 108 Lake Oswego, OR. on Wednesday 11/11/09
Event sponsored by Widmer Brewing co.
$25 gift certificate to Manzana restaurant for the first ten purchases!

Hope to see you there!

Canary Island native Manolo Blahnik has been in the fashion industry for over forty years. Originally, he wanted a career in clothing, but it was the late Vogue editor Diana Vreeland who suggested “just stick to footwear” after he presented his portfolio. The massive popularity of the show Sex & the City made Blahnik a household name to women who would otherwise not know (or afford) him. Manolo Blahnik has had it with the recognition & stated at his S/S 2010 presentation “I hate celebrities and all those pointless girls. I won’t name names, but you know who.” We do, too, but even Anna Wintour understands the power play of celebrities in fashion in this modern age. – Ashkan.

How could any man retire from dressing Kate Moss & other vixens in the sexiest lingerie? That’s precisely what Joe Corre – co-founder of Agent Provocateur – has done. Corre is also the son of rebel designer Vivienne Westwood. He left the label to devote time to his menswear line & shop called A Child of the Jago. He is pursuing the line with principal designer Simon “Barnzley” Armitage. The line is labeled as “terrorist” clothing & here is a missive from their site www.achildofthejago.com :

A Child of the Jago isn’t being raised to expect a warm welcome. It’s being brought up to cause trouble while it contrives to raise the bar. The zeal for agitation is a natural extension of the pair’s stylistic inspirations. The attitude reflects the sartorial excesses of the original dandy and the raw unpredictable razor’s edge of Rock & Roll stitched together with the excruciatingly rigorous standards of the Saville Row tailoring tradition. This all makes for a volatile cocktail of no-rules merchandising. Milkman jackets reminiscent of work wear’s golden age are presented alongside Scottish cashmere and fine shirting crafted in Jermyn Street factories. At the same time the tyranny of forced fashion “cycles” and industrially contrived “trends” receive a brutal Liverpool kiss-off, neutralized and dismissed as waste-creating crutches habitually brandished by brain-dead corporations well and truly only in it for the money. But neither Corre nor Armitage are interested in disposable rebellion or a shallow veneer of style. They don’t believe standards of quality have been lost so much as they have been stolen, kidnapped, hijacked and brutalized by the mainstream fashion system. And they clearly don’t care how much shoe leather is worn away in their efforts to free quality from its current confinement. They have wired together a clandestine alternative network that unifies select Saville Row tailors with irreverent young talents from Japan’s best fashion academies. They have identified hole-in-the-wall suppliers of ultra-premium dead stock menswear fabrics and implicated them deep within their plot. Maneuvers that combine with their abandonment of artificial fashion cycles and grant them access to the best pure wools, rich silks, sharp gabardines, rugged twills and a host of one-of-a-kind yard goods of unrivaled quality that can otherwise stack up in the dust left by built-in-obsolescence and an inefficient and cynical marketing system.