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Ferragamo Celebrates Release of New Fragrance

SPRING came early to the West Village on Tuesday night. Unseasonably warm weather and sprays of pink peonies and roses greeted guests as they made their way to the Palazzo Chupi, the pink wedding cake of a condominium built by Julian Schnabel.

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Salvatore Ferragamo Celebrates Release of New Fragrance

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The occasion, aptly enough, was a new scent. Salvatore Ferragamo held a party for Signorina, its new women’s fragrance. The night began on the art-filled second floor with Italian wine flown in from the Ferragamo vineyards in Italy. In one corner, a pianist played a grand piano built by Tom Sachs.

After a month of runway shows, the globe-trotting fashion set, including a flight of pretty international things dressed head-to-toe in Ferragamo, was noticeably more relaxed.

Alexandra Richards wore a fox stole, which she tied to her sleeve, rather than drape around her shoulders. “I’ve never worn one of these before, so I just did my own thing,” she said. “But it’s so hot tonight, I’ll probably end up taking it off.”

The opulent setting had its own warming effect. Dinner guests, including Emma Roberts and a late-arriving Kate Mara, chatted at the buffet table, waiting for their serving of osso buco, sliced seared tuna and kale salad.

The actress Piper Perabo, with a Tippi Hedren updo, knew her way around a menu; she is a partner in a new NoLIta restaurant called Jack’s Wife Freda. “It totally puts acting in perspective,” she said. “Like, yesterday, we ran out of arugula.”

While dinner guests lingered upstairs, a crush of after-party guests jammed into the lofty space on the ground floor. Music blared, elbows rubbed and raspberry macarons circulated.

The crowd was less fashion-centric, but no less fashionable. Avery Johnson, the New Jersey Nets coach, was in a corner banquette with his wife, Cassandra Merricks Johnson. He is now dressed by Ferragamo and wears its suits for all games. “Not bad, right?” he said, showing the detailed lining of his black blazer.

The Johnsons ducked out before Coco Sumner, the 21-year-old daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler, took to the stage for her first United States performance with her band, “I Blame Coco.” If there was any pressure, she didn’t show it. And by then there were plenty to cheer her on; the dinner guests had finally made their way down.

Ms. Sumner, with a hefty bass slung across her slim shoulders, was captivating in an androgynous white button-down, black pants cropped just above the ankle and shiny oxfords. It was one part Katharine Hepburn, another part Jil Sander male model. “How you feeling?” she cooed into the mic.

Moving Through Grief, Chair by Chair – Modern Love

A MISCONCEPTION among some people is that I wrote the novel “Kramer vs. Kramer” based on my own divorce and custody battle. “How is she doing with his son?” a woman once asked a friend of ours about my wife. Our friend answered, “They have two sons and they’re both hers.”

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I was never divorced. My wife, Judy, and I were married 37 years, my only marriage and her only marriage. In our early years, like many would-be writers, I tried to cobble together an income. So after the success of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” when a reporter interviewing me brought up my marital status, I said: “My wife and I never would have gotten a divorce. We never would have been able to figure out who would get custody of the anxiety.”

Judy died in 2004. She was a brilliant public relations strategist who in her last job, at Scholastic, masterminded the publicity for the introduction and publication of the Harry Potter books. Everything you first read and heard in the media about Harry Potter came through her. She was also incomparable at finding things — for our apartment in Manhattan, for our vacation home in Water Mill, N.Y., for friends’ homes. People loved to go antiquing with her.

Between her early career in public relations before our sons were born and her later career, Judy gathered up her good taste and opened a store in Bridgehampton, N.Y., where she sold wicker furniture, quilts and handmade pillows. While shopping for the store, she made sure to look out for things she might buy for our Water Mill house.

I had little to do with her choices except to nod in the way of certain men who don’t have the taste of their wives and offer up “very nice” and “I like it.” In matters of décor, we are The Men Who Nod.

Over the years, Judy was continually adding and subtracting in the house, the piece in the corner of a dealer’s booth that someone else might overlook, the finds she found. I did carve out a modest area for myself in my upstairs office, where I cultivated a look of budget Americana: the original sheet music for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” vintage baseball catcher’s masks. But as I recall, even the first of those masks was something Judy bought as a gift for me.

Her taste was widely respected. When she had the store in Bridgehampton, she sometimes would pull wicker furniture out of the store and place it in our living room if needed for an evening. The price tags might still be inadvertently hanging from the bottom, and on more than one occasion a dinner guest bought the chair he was sitting on.

After Judy died, one of my sons articulated it for all of us: “So much of Mom’s spirit is in this house.” But when I considered putting the house up for a summer rental, a real estate broker advised me to rethink the décor. The broker had received feedback that men were unhappy with the amount of wicker and pillows in the house, that it was too feminine for them.

I suggested all they had to do was go upstairs to my office and see the catcher’s masks and the framed poster-size photo of Mookie Wilson suspended in air, avoiding the wild pitch in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. How’s that, guys?

The broker didn’t think that would do it, so I removed several wicker pieces from the living room and bedrooms and put them in the basement. The point here is that I didn’t get rid of them. I hadn’t discarded anything Judy had chosen for the house.

Now living alone, I moved into a smaller apartment in Manhattan. I took the painter’s color swatches from the previous apartment Judy and I had lived in and had the colors matched for the walls in the new place, and retained various pieces she had chosen. In Manhattan and in Water Mill, I was still living within her taste.

It took quite a while after Judy died before I entertained the thought of going out with women, and when I did and saw their apartments I realized that I, a guy and someone who seldom dressed up except to do something like go out on one of these dates, who considered his New York Giants cap one of his best articles of clothing, lived in far more tasteful surroundings than these women I was seeing.

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Avery Corman is the author of several novels.

Miuccia Prada Sends Out Glorious Graphics in Milan

MILAN — Miuccia Prada went back to her basics: geometric print, graphic, straight line cutting and embellishment — but the result was like seeing reruns of early ideas digitally enhanced to a Blade Runner-style futurism.

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Chris Moore/Karl Prouse

Prada, by Miuccia Prada, autumn/winter 2012, in Milan

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Chris Moore/Karl Prouse

Prada, by Miuccia Prada, autumn/winter 2012, in Milan.

The glorious graphics included not only the pipes of square neon lamps making 21st-century chandeliers, but also plasticized embroidery as huge, shining foils to the models’ simple, long, loose hair, tinged with color at the ends.

“I didn’t want to start from a theme. I wanted to concentrate on fashion, not on concepts — to really do my job,” said Ms. Prada backstage. Translation: to go on feeding the fashion world with her original ideas.

Although she took her much cheered bow wearing a tailored black dress, to fit with the runway she needed a pair of pants, for Prada
brought back to eager women that endangered species. Worn slim and tidy under long coats or even coats and dresses, as well as balanced on thick platform footwear, the pants made the story.

So did wide belts, high above the waist. And prints — the half-familiar Prada prints that once came in sour colors but were here enriched with orange and the same violet of the carpet with geometric squares.

But it was the embroidery in all its glassy glamour that brought an extra dimension to this powerful show.

Karl Lagerfeld sent out for Fendi
some of the funkiest and artistic furs he has done in a while — the pelts painted in bright colors or with semi-tribal splotches. More fur made sleeves for coats and tunics, while Silvia Venturini Fendi’s bold bags might have wisps of fur growing from them like feathers, in contrast to small, flat purses with studded sides.

“I wanted fur painted to look like feathers — in the unbelievable colors of wild orchids,” said Mr. Lagerfeld backstage, commenting also on his fascination with galucha, or fish skin, used on the runway, the backdrop and even as patterned hose.

What a pity that the collection could not have stopped with those inspirations. For there was a lot else going on, mostly a little weird, starting with the Heidi-at-the-hair-salon multiple braids. Then there were the pleats, disembodied, so that they appeared as graphic straight lines at the back of the skirt or on half the front. They tended to be set against rounded shoulders or bodices (Heidi, again!) as if in a geometry game.

The effect was of a naughty schoolgirl who had cut up pieces of her uniform and added deep corset belts squelching in the waist.

Was it only last season that Mr. Lagerfeld played with the graceful gentility of a back-in-the-day Roman holiday? This show was the polar opposite, sleek with pony skin coats, graphic with colorful squares and occasionally lovely in the simplicity of a perfectly tailored coat, shaped to the waist.

Yet the only stand-out pieces were the furs and the bags. As, perhaps, it should be, at Fendi.

All sorts of famous names were swirling about the Max Mara
collection: an inspiration from Fritz Lang’s 1927 “Metropolis” bringing a touch of mechanical straight lines and Bauhaus minimalism. Yet it was the appearance of the Chinese actress Gao Yuanyuan that caused a frenzy of excitement among the increasing number of Asian journalists and photographers.

Ever since Max Mara celebrated its 60th anniversary with a traveling exhibition of its coats that went to Beijing last year, the Italian house has been on the Chinese fashion radar.

Whether the Chairman Mao/Red Army caps will endear Max Mara to its Asian clientele or not, the military and naval tailoring was perfectly done, with floor-sweeping sweeping khaki and camel coats — or briefer versions, perhaps with sheared fur as the coat’s bottom part.

Graphic black-and-white patterns added variety to the excellent outerwear. And if the martial overalls and jumpsuits seemed overwhelmingly military, they partnered well those famous coats that are Max Mara’s forte.

“I wanted it for a woman who knows herself and loves herself — but doesn’t want to show off — and nothing too sporty,” said Paola Toscano, the new creative director of the women’s line at Dirk Bikkembergs
.

This “strong, independent, energetic” woman, defined by a leather belt molding her hips, wore graphic tops and skirts, sportier leather jackets and long dresses as much for day as night.

Having focused in the 1990s on her own Yu London brand, inspired by dance and theater, Ms. Toscano has come by way of Prada and Emilio Pucci to create this new Bikkembergs collection.

Charlotte Gainsbourg Up Close

STANDING near her co-star Alexander Skarsgard, Charlotte Gainsbourg looked every bit the glamorous French star ready to seduce America. Her dark brown mane was sexily volumized, her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and she wore a simple black silk jersey, strappy high heels and pleated, silver-spangled trousers — all by Balenciaga, the French fashion house for which she is a muse.

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It was the New York Film Festival after-party for “Melancholia,” the new Lars von Trier film, which garnered raves for Ms. Gainsbourg at Cannes (and which opens Friday in New York and select cities). The paparazzi and film elite packed the Stone Rose Lounge on this blustery October night, ready perhaps to anoint a new French star.

But after Ms. Gainsbourg put in her obligatory 45 minutes on the red carpet, posing for photos and answering reporters, she turned to the film’s publicist and whispered, in her girlish voice, “May I go now? I want to get home with Joe,” her 3-month-old daughter.

Her gentle bit of indifference not only explains her allure in France but underscores why she isn’t straining for greater recognition in the United States. The daughter of the musician Serge Gainsbourg and the actress-singer Jane Birkin, Ms. Gainsbourg has twice won a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) as well as the best actress award at Cannes in 2009 for her role in Mr. von Trier’s horror film “Antichrist.” Indie music fans may also know her collaborations with Beck and the French electronic duo Air.

But Ms. Gainsbourg is perhaps just as well known for her fashion sense, which may end up charming America as thoroughly as it has France. Her clean-scrubbed, slouchy daytime look has almost single-handedly redefined everyday French style for a generation of young Parisian women. Her look, which she has cultivated since her late teens — wind-blown hair, unpainted lips holding a cigarette, jeans, trench coats, cowboy boots, half-buttoned men’s-tailored shirts, tank tops, chunky scarves — typifies an artfully rumpled yuppie-hipster hybrid that has taken hold in France: the bourgeois-bohemian, or le bobo.

“She’s the French equivalent of Sofia Coppola, someone from a famous family with a very cool style that all the young girls in Paris want to look like,” said Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue, who put Ms. Gainsbourg on the cover of the magazine’s holiday issue in 2007. “There is a way she walks, with her leather jacket and her hair in her face, that is half her mother and half her father but belongs completely to her.”

French women under 40 emulate her style in part because they feel they came of age with her. In 1986, at the age of 15, Ms. Gainsbourg accepted the most promising actress César for her role in “L’Effrontée,” a sweet movie about a sullen, lonely girl yearning for life beyond her drab village. After her father gave her a lengthy kiss on the mouth, Ms. Gainsbourg clambered onstage with her boyish hair in her face, and a navy blue blazer and trousers from Agnès B, sheepishly whispering “Merci” through tears.

“She was very, very tomboy then,” Ms. Roitfeld said. “Never a Lolita.”

Marie-Noëlle Demay, editor in chief of France’s Marie Claire, added that Ms. Gainsbourg had a very simple, natural elegance: “Girls want to look like her, because she’s not a sex bomb who’s going to steal your boyfriend.”

The image of the nonthreatening Everygirl carried her into her 30s, when she starred in a string of Paris-based romantic comedies. By then, her hair had grown into a full, loose style, and her no-fuss look had become something of an urban uniform.

“Tons of Paris girls were running around like her, with the jeans, the old boots, the very long coat, the bed-head hair,” said Adeline Rapon, 21, a fashion blogger from Paris. “Françoise Hardy had that look a bit in the ’60s and ’70s,” she added, referring to the French chanteuse. “But Charlotte really doesn’t care at all, and that’s what I like.”

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