*Valentino, The Last Emperor

Director: Matt Tyrnauer
Website: www.valentinomovie.com

Shown around the world to wide acclaim, Valentino, The Last Emperor is a feature film that has captured the hearts and imaginations of audiences. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the world of fashion, featuring unprecedented access to the high temples of Haute Couture. The legendary Valentino is the star of the film, along with his longtime business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti.

Valentino, The Last Emperor follows them for the final two years of their careers, and shows the struggles the two men face as they confront the final act of a nearly 50-year career at the top of the world's most glamorous and competitive game. The struggle of art against commerce is at the center of the film. In the end, however, the story proves to be not one about money or expensive clothes, but about love.

~ Stella's Love for Sequin

Stella McCartney Resort 2010 collection made its debut at a soiree the designer hosted in absentia at her L.A. store on Friday night in honor of World Environment Day.

In the first camp, a look that hewed to the saucier side of the designer's sexy/sportif approach: Savile Row-sharp tuxedos and a guipure lace jumpsuit (McCartney herself wore that number to the Met gala).

Next, come along a pair of floral dresses, one in acid-bright sequins and the other in a naive scribble print. Nautically inspired striped sweater dresses, slouchy drawstring-waist jackets,and a romper or two represented the sportier side of things.

Proving that the designer practices what she preaches, 15 percent of the line is partially or 100 percent organic.

Pictures via Style/Vogue.com

A Memory Forever:

Hello again, it’s you and me. Kinda always like it used to be.
Sippin' wine, killing time, trying to solve life’s mysteries.
How’s your life, it’s been a while? God, it’s good to see you smile.
I see you reaching for your keys, looking for a reason not to leave.

If you don’t know if you should stay,
If you don’t say what’s on your mind,
Baby just, breathe there’s no where else tonight we should be.
You wanna make a memory.

I dug up this old photograph, look at all that hair we had.
It’s bittersweet to hear you laugh.
Your phone is ringing, I don’t wanna ask.

If you go now, I’ll understand. If you stay, hey, I got a plan.
You wanna make a memory. You wanna steal a piece of time.
You could sing a melody to me, and I could write a couple lines.
You wanna make a memory.

Song Title (You Want to) Make a Memory

Singer Bon Jovi

Songwriter Jon Bon Jovi, Richard S. Sambora, Desmond Child

Album Lost Highway

Prada Contemporary Store, Paris

Prada has announced the opening of a five-month temporary shop at Place Beauvau, in Paris, inspired by the French poet, Apollinaire.

Designed by the architect, Roberto Baciocchi, the front of the store evokes the image of the Mirabeau Bridge, immortalised in Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, and the first bridge in the city to be built from metal. The bridge silhouette is emphasised by a dramatic trajectory towards the staircase, where mannequins are grouped to recreate a Parisian street scene.

The motif is carried through more abstractly in ground floor areas, which are furnished with lilac carpeting and sofas, bronzed-metal and glass displays. The two-level shop space also incorporates Milanese history, with its black and white chequered marble floor, as seen in the original Prada store of 1913 in Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

Pictures via Design Scene

The Essence of Chloé

One beautiful scent, almost edible. A fragrance very light and floral. I keep smelling and taking it in. Chloé EDP.

The scent captures the creative, confident individuality of a free-spirited woman with an innate sense of chic and natural sexiness. Its fresh, green and airy notes subtly grows richer and more sensual, revealing the velvety heart of the rose.


The fragrance plays with notions of feminity, romaniticism, strength and elegance; taking he classic rose and mixing it with a modern flair, translating it into a vibrant, powdery floral eau de parfum that is warm and seductive.

Base notes of warm amber, honey and elegant cederwood create a smooth, comforting finish.

Chloé EDP with its fashion inspired flacon is available at the Chloé boutiques.

LV, RTW, F/09

This fall, Marc Jacobs began his own show in New York: with the eighties. Slices of the late eighties: ruffled, ruched, and poufed as it was—could be traced in the entire collection.

Fashion Muses

Jacobs said that he was thinking of "all those great French muses of the late eighties." Specifically, he cited Marie Seznec (who modeled for Lacroix), Victoire de Castellane (who worked for Chanel), and Inès de la Fressange (who was virtually French fashion mascot in chief at the time).

In the Collection

Looking back on those days of chichi fashion extremes brought out a lot of jeune Parisienne frivolity in the clothes. The chance of a close inspection revealed lots of puffy peplum jackets, tons of shirring and ruching (in print or leather), bubble skirts, bejeweled satin leggings, and a mini lace Marie Antoinette pannier dress with a saucy sheer balconette.

It was also a rich accessory fest for the leather goods company. Leather necklaces and belts came fashioned like paper chains, and thigh boots were topped with ruffles and balanced on pearl and glitter-covered heels. The all-important bags had also acquired eighties pie-crust frills and gilded monograms.

Behind the Scene

Jacobs put it this way regarding his source of inspiration: backstage, partly in preparation for the Model as Muse exhibition at the Met and his role as honorary chair of the opening gala; then blossoming into a fashion tour of Vuitton's collection.

This penultimate show of an often dour and cautious season read as a welcome interlude of cheerful, flirty confidence in a post-crash depression.

For complete runway photos, visit Style/Vogue.com

*The Time Traveler's Wife

What do you do when you meet the love of your life when you're six years old? And he's 36, but he's really only eight years older than you are? If you're Clare Abshire, you wait for each of his visits throughout the years until you meet him in real time.

Storyline
Henry DeTamble is a time traveler, although not by choice. A genetic mutation causes him to spontaneously travel through time, disappearing from view, leaving behind his clothes and possessions, and arriving naked in another time and another place. For the most part, this is a curse. Henry often has to turn to petty crime to feed and clothe himself when he travels, and must run from people, thugs, cops.

Eventually Henry returns to his present time, bringing only the bodily injuries he's suffered back with him. Sometimes he travels back in time and visits an earlier version of himself. One of the places to which he travels often is the meadow behind Clare's house, and throughout her younger years, Clare meets him there and falls in love with him.

Bottom-line,
At its heart, and a very big heart at that, The Time Traveler's Wife is a heart-warming love story between two ordinary people, built over a lifetime that courses deep through both of them. The rough stretches of their life, the lifelong fear of something terrible happening to Henry while time traveling, their anguish at the miscarriages when Clare wants a baby more than anything else, the moments where they'd just rather be alone, their love for each other is never questioned and their hope is never extinguished.

Henry summarized his love for Clare in a letter to her after they've been for married for many years:

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

Pictures via BANDELLE BLOG

August Rush

Stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed.
You must learn how to find the time and place for things...
Go through life with your eyes wide open.

If you keep your destiny in mind,
every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it...

Pictures via Anja Rubik

July's Recollection

It was yet night, but July nights are short.
Soon after midnight, dawn comes.
I had waked from the trance like dream;
called to resume the previous eventide musing:
A recollection of July's passing days...

My Dream seemed to have vanished,
as I stepped onto the brink of the month,
Some obstacles had intervened between me and it.
All was obscurity...
I put out my hand to feel: There was only darkness mass before me.

Clinging desperately to the fading Hope,
I felt sorely the urge to weep, yet restrained it to the top of my lungs.
My nature contravened, my faculties paralysed.
I'm contradicting myself, almost rave in my restlessness:
The guiding light must shine somewhere.
Eventually a silhoutte of hope must rise to view.

It is indeed hard work to control the workings of inclination
and turn the bent of nature;
But I was resolved it could be done.
I have the power to make my own fate,

When energies seem to demand a sustanance they cannot get,
When our will strains after a path we may not follow,
I need neither starve for inanition, nor stand in despair:
I have but to seek another nourishment for the mind,
And to hew out for the adventurous foot:
A road as direct and droad as the one Fortune has blocked up against me.
A road I had never traveled, but often noticed, and wonder where it led.

Mutinying against Fate, claiming my rights.
What was awaiting at the end of the road?

No reflections was to be allowed now:
Not one glance was to be cast back;
Not even one forward.

Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future.
The first was a page so heavenly sweet -so deadly sad at the same time,
that to read one line of it would dissolve one courage
and break down my energy.
The last was an awful blank:
Something like the world when the deluge was gone by.
Tither I bent my steps.

I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth.
But I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers.
And less withering dread of opressions.

The End, my recollection of July's passing days.

Picture via {this is glamorous}

Hugo Boss, Orange

Sienna Miller has been signed by Hugo Boss fragrances as the face of its latest release, Boss Orange, due to launch in July. Both TV and print advertising will feature Miller to promote the Boss Orange brand's first ever signature fragrance, which Miller describes as, "musky, sweet and sexy."

The new scent has been described as a perfect match with the casual, bohemian chic style shared by Sienna Miller and the Boss Orange line. "Sienna...truly embodies the spirit of the brand," said Thomas Burkhardt, GMD for Hugo fragrances, "She is a liberated soul - light-hearted, spontaneous and passionate - and she quite simply wears her heart on her sleeve."

The scent has notes of apple, orange blossom, jasmine, plum, white peach, vanilla, sandalwood and olive tree wood. Boss Orange is set to hit retailers this month.