>> The CFDA has more than member designers' mushroom truffle spaghetti recipes to share. Come Sept. 7, American Fashion Designers at Home compiles peeks into the homes of a number of the CFDA's 115 members — including Tory Burch, Francisco Costa, Oscar de la Renta, Johnson Hartig, and Donna Karan, whose homes are all previewed in the gallery below. “This is the ultimate voyeuristic journey,” says the book’s author, Rima Suqi. Most of the images have been published before, but some of the art is brand new, including one of Band of Outsiders designer Scott Sternberg’s trademark Polaroids — this time featuring stacks of books and Troll dolls in his living room.
First Look: Pierre Cardin: 60 Years of Innovation

The fashion house of Pierre Cardin is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year with a retrospective tome published by Assouline. Having worked for Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior in Paris, Cardin opened his namesake couture house in 1950 producing architecturally inspired futuristic fashions. This October the house of Cardin will receive the Fashion Group International's Board of Director's Legend Award for extraoridary innovation in the world of couture, fashion, and perfume. Pierre Cardin: 60 Years of Innovation is now available online from Assouline. Enjoy a sneak peek of images from the book in the gallery below.
Fab Read: Fashion Game Book, Fashion History of the 20th Century
The next time you and your girls are gathered, add fashion to the mix by bringing along this Fashion Game book: Fashion History of the 20th Century ($35) by Florence Muller. It's a fun little book filled with questions and answers, quizzes, and matching games. Test your, and your friends' knowledge on designers like Marc Jacobs and Zac Posen, and clothing from jeans to heels. If you have friends that think they know more about fashion than you, this is the perfect way to prove them wrong. Or right. Bring it on.
Veruschka to Fashion Week!
»Veruschka will attend a Assouline launch party for a book about her during New York Fashion Week [FWD]
»Lisa Levine is shuttering her jewelry line "for other pursuits" [The Pipeline]
»Cathy Horyn is back to blogging after a month-long break [On the Runway]
»The namesake of the Chloe Bay bag [FabSugar UK]
»Comptoir des Cotonniers is opening its first stateside store in the next two days [Racked]
»Kate Schelter: Now a Huffington Post contributor [The Transom]
»A flip through Nanette Lepore's Victorian West Village townhouse [CasaSugar]
If Money Weren't an Issue . . .
Luxury publisher Assouline has teamed up with French trunkmaker Goyard to release a trunk custom-made to store 100 of Assouline's chic photo-biographies on art, fashion, design, and architecture. You can get your Goyard Trunk for the measly price of $20,000. Gotham magazine says, "You're guaranteed a great read as well as a chic tote." Well . . . I'd hope so for 20k. Tell me, if you had the dough, would you like one for yourself?
Fab Read: The Fashion Questionnaire

There are so many questions I'd love to ask designers: "Beyond fashion, what are your other sources of inspiration?" and "What is your favorite decade in terms of fashion?" Because a face-to-face Q&A session is unlikely to happen in this lifetime, Michael Specter's The Fashion Questionnaire ($35) will come in quite handy.
Specter interviews 21 designers like Alber Elbaz (who has a self-portrait at the introduction of his section), Olivier Theyskens, and Diane von Furstenberg. The industry greats dish about their fashion motto, style icons, favorite color, and so on. It's like seeing into their world, minus the intimidating encounter.

