Love & Peace

Natasha Poly (is she the new Verushka?) by Mario Sorrenti.

Beyond 10 for Vulgarity

Anna Dello Russo's fragrance Beyond is just the tip of the Christmas tree. Unleashed online in December, it comes in a gold shoe-shaped bottle.
“For 20 years no one noticed me," the 47-year-old stylist says. "I worked like Cinderella at the bottom of the pile. Finally, I’ve been invited to the ball. I was born online and want to stay online." (A line of T-shirts featuring his image sold out in three hours on the retailer’s site.) ADR has received a flurry of commercial offers, but he says: “I want to do a record next. Everyone expects me to do a clothes line. It’s too obvious. I want to do the opposite.”
But he's nothing if not obvious. Here he is, on the cover of 10, feeling like he's the bee's knees. The men's 10 is much more interesting looking.

Gucci Bamboo Retrospective Exhibition

In conjunction with the opening of their Marina Bay Sands store on 29 October, Gucci is holding a Bamboo Retrospective, a travelling exhibition dedicated to the iconic Gucci Bamboo Bag. Tracing the unique history of this 64 year old design, the exhibition will feature vintage products from Gucci's archives, together with archive photography of personalities, including Ingrid Bergman and Vanessa Redgrave, carrying the Bamboo throughout the years.
Additional historical images include the production and advertising images of this special handbag. This unique exhibition allows one the opportunity to learn the story of the iconic item and its place in fashion history.The exhibition will start at Marina Bay Sands from 30 Oct until 4 Nov (11am to 9pm) then it moves to Gucci Paragon, from 12 Nov until 21 Nov.

Benoni/ Velazquez

Model Benoni Loos (Belgian, born 1987) is like a living, breathing Diego Velazquez (1599 – 1660) painting, is he not? The full lower lip, the troubled, heavy eyes, the hanging nose, and the neck that's just begging to wear a ruff!

Leopard Preen

...Steve Tyler is that choo?

Arena Homme +

By Nick Knight

He Said She Said

"The real question is: would a real celebrity sell more copies of Vogue? In general it doesn't change much. When we tried with Madonna or Eva Mendes the numbers didn't change a lot. Today the tendency is more concentrated on stars because they create more curiosity and there are some who are very pretty and talented. Models nowadays are less recognizable and less star material. The few that are out there are already on the pages of Vogue and this makes the difference. The quality of the person is what makes the difference. For Vogue that is essential, the person has to be outstanding. The possibilities get automatically cut down and it gets difficult to make choices. The model of the moment is herself a star and is appealing to the reader." - Franca Sozzani
Actually, I have to confess that I think this is gibberish.

Lady D.I.'s Photoshop Campaign

I know it is Lady Dior's London campaign but they've made Marion Cotillard look like the young Liz Hurley? Marion, is that choo??? And that studded strap just looks just a bit suspicious, doesn't it?

ADR

Some people (ST, for instance) actually like ADR. I think it's quite worrying. Here she is, looking very much like Ian Thorpe in drag, in Hercules.
...And once again, don't show to ADR cos she also want!

He Said She Said

"Technology has left me behind. I do the same things every day. I work. I write. I read every night, which is one of the great pleasures of my life. I like my days of being by myself. I don;t see people, except on weekends. That's the way I live." - Philip Roth"Why write off all the wisdom of thousands of years? People imagine technology will solve all the problems, which it won't." - HRH Prince Charles

Io Sono L'Amore/ I Am Love

I Am Love, is a meticulously directed movie by Luca Guadagnino, stylish, and surgingly beautiful in every detail. Even the insistent music by John Adams aids the lush visual style. The performances are all outstanding, down to the last supporting roles, and none more so than the movie's star, Tilda Swinton's. As Emma Recchi, a Russian who married into the wealthy Milanese Recchi family, she's transparent and opaque all at once, and through the movie shape-shifts majestically through the gamut of emotional phases of the human condition. And yet.Though thought-provoking, the movie is thus because it is confusing - how can so much accomplishment result in such a simplistic movie? I Am Love provokes a glittering itch that it doesn't scratch and thought it teases and promises for two hours, fails to do so in the end. It's based on an age old theme (this accounts for its rather literary feel, doesn't it? It's like you read it in a book?) of the contrasts of society and nature (this is at least as old as Shakspeare and as J mentioned, both D H Lawrence and E M Forster covered this theme extensively). It doesn't offer new insights, nor new solutions. It's weirdly inconclusive. Mrs Recchi runs away from the theatre and rituals of her privileged prison; She frees herself - to do what exactly? It's not clear at all. Can she live on love (if indeed it is love - her affair with the chef doesn't ever feel that central to her motivation) and sunshine alone? The last frame shows her entwined with her lover in a dank cave, suggesting a return to the bowels of nature but also of death - and it's sort of weird too. Should we all down our tools, abandon our family, and run off to the nearest sylvan glade? Is that to be a solution to society's ills? Can one be truly free in such a situation, or rather exchanging one sort of prison for another?
And yet. It's still a gorgeous, passionate movie and just to look at Tilda Swinton's miraculous performance (not to mention striding about in those Jil Sander outfits and Hermes bags) is worth the time.
It's certainly much more of a movie than Tsui Hark's Detective Dee And The Mystery of the Phantom Flame in every way. While it looks like a crowd pleaser, there's hardly any plot to speak of, and one just looks forward to the next special effects scene with spontaneous human combustion (I like this very much), talking deer and Carina Lau's brow-rising makeup (literally). Andy Lau in the title role is adequate; Tony Leung makes a convincingly creepy villian; Li Bingbing is very, very pretty and Ms Lau, as China's only female Emperor, Wu Tse Tian shows us what wealth and power can achieve. She's not about to run off to the nearest bamboo forest and commune with chefs, let me tell you.
And if you spiral quite a ways downwards, you'll hit rock bottom with the John Woo co-directed (with Su Chao-pin) Reign of Assassins. A decade after Ang Lee's influential Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which ushered in a new era of the wuxia genre all the top Chinese directors (and Datin Michelle Yeoh) are still trying to recreate Crouching Tiger. What they fail to see is that it wasn't a 'genre' film at all, just a very good one. Reign of Assassins is convoluted, confused and cheap. Every scene feels like a dead end and there is not one iota of chemistry between Datin Yeoh and the leading man Jeong Woo-seong (who could have saved the picture, but gave up, I suspect). It's painful to watch Michelle Yeoh try to reprise her Crouching Tiger role yet again, and if anyone should run and hide in the nearest pine forest for the next 50 years, she should.This is how Datin Yeoh will look like in the year 2032 when she is doing her 153rd recreation of Crouching Tiger. By that time, she will be a special effect.

Volume

I must say Super Mario (Maurer) is all grown up... into a bit of a chubby. Maybe that's the volume of the title?

Photoshop Awards: Guess Who?

This is supposed to be Renee Zellweger in the Nov issue of British Harper's Bazaar. On second thoughts - maybe it's plastic surgery. Shocking!

More Poor Linda/ Leopard Preens/ Scandal

Poor Linda.
Now age 45, she has split with billionaire Hard Rock founder Peter Morton, 64, in fall, after a series of disagreements. According to a family source Mr Morton is very settled in Malibu, while Linda liked to spend time in Canada and New York. She is high-maintenance and likes to be treated like a princess. "Some members of Peter's family were not too fond of her, and were dismayed when she appeared around last Thanksgiving with a large diamond ring on her finger. But the marriage never happened," the source reportedly said.
Linda, who started dating Morton in late 2006 when she was pregnant, denied reports that the father of her son, Augustin James, was Francois-Henri Pinault, Salma Hayek's husband.
Linda's agent, Didier Fernandez, said: "She has never said who the father is."
Sources confirm that billionaire Gucci owner Pinault is in fact the father, and this has caused rivalry between Linda and Hayek. And then there are the bizarre Talbot ads.Source: Page Six

Purrr-fect

Just in time for Christmas, Tod's launches their Gommini loafer in a special 'leopard' print, made from calf skin using pony fur processing. It's pretty perfect for now and looks like a classic... Although it looks to me more accurately a 'cheetah' preen then 'leopard' preen but there you go. I like...

Showtime

Beloved Baptiste now has an official website! http://www.baptiste-giabiconi.eu/

He Said She Said

"Whatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it." - Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980)

Poor Linda!

Linda doing Kate.

Weekend Reading List

It made for an especially delicious treat for me, because the days have become so oppressively hot, to dash into the library on Victoria Street for an hour or so last week. It's like drinking at an oasis to come off the dusty scorching road, snarled with traffic, to the calm white building sheltered by a shady garden. Through the breezy atrium, inside the glass doors: aircon.
I had a good haul this time. I finally found A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, and read it in one greedy sitting. It's a gossipy memoir and unites two of my favourite subjects - writing (the process, the practitioners) and Paris - I wonder how this book could have escaped me for so long. In it Hemingway described his louche days spent in the Saint Germain area of Paris in the 1920s (the young Hemingway was movie star handsome, click on the picture!), the days when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, recalling the pleasures of the city, and its colourful literary denizens. Many chapters of the book are devoted to Gertrude Stein and her 'wife' Alice B Toklas and their eccentric domestic arrangements (the literary muff-divers are pictured below). Scott Fitzgerald is not spared in a merciless portrait. It's nice to know that Big Daddy was not beyond retailing Truman Capote type gossip. This book makes me miss Paris all the more and the next time I'm there, I shall use it as a tour guide, for all the addresses, the cafes, bars, apartments, gardens and bookstores are still there, almost as it was.

A related book is Monique Truong's debut novel The Book of Salt. It's the story of Binh, the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Ms Toklas, who came to share their lives in the rue de Fleurus apartment in Paris. Quite a salty take on the Lost Generation I must say, and a good bookend to Feast.
I also swooped on a crackling volume of Jane Austen criticism by D A Miller Jane Austen: Or The Secret of Style. It's incisive, close and thought-provoking and makes you see some Austen items in a new light. For this I'm grateful.
For the fun of it, I also borrowed The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town The New Yorker (edited by Lillian Ross who also, incidentally, wrote the bio A Portrait of Hemingway). It's a collection of shortish essays to dip into, carelessly, like flipping through a stack of magazines when it's just too hot to get up to do anything else.PS/ I know some people will be delighted to know that there's a new definitive Herb Ritts book out called Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour: A Photographer's Life and His World by Charles Churchward published by Rizzoli.

He Said She Said

"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more... to dream all the time." - Marcel Proust