ecommerce

All we are saying is give peace, erm, fashion a chance says bridal fashion show Bridal Asia in New Delhi India which featured Pakistani models in an effort to promote cross cultural understanding through every little girl's dream. Literally we are imagning, arranged marriages are still huge.

The country lifestyle has gone far beyond Barbour jackets and duck boots when it comes to strange inspirations for fashion. It turns out shooting is the next big fashion inspiration. Beretta, the firearms manufacturer, has a clothing line called 1526. The line focuses on the shooting lifestyle that countryside sports represents. Made in Italy from luxury materials we are willing to bet this is going to show up at Freeman's in a month or so. Other gun manufacturers seeing a boom in clothing demand include James Purdey & Sons and Holland and Holland. Who knew?

Fashion critic and illustrator Michael Roberts has a new book called "Fashion Victims" features 26 poems with accompanying illustrations based on the letters of the alphabet, ranging from Auctions to Zips.

The solution the Wall Street collapse? Brazil, Russia, India and China - the BRIC economies, have a growing middle class that is developing an appetite for luxury.

Boucheron has launched an ecommerce site proving once again that Gucci Group is consistently the most innovative of the luxury conglomerates when it comes to online retailing and luxury technology use.

"Fashion shouldn't be about absoluteness, otherwise it would be a church," says Lang, whose first art exhibition, Alles Gleich Schwer, at the  Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Germany, is currently attracting him plenty of renewed attention.

L'Oreal is sponsoring Dubai Fashion Week which runs October 5th through the 9th. Way to hop on that trend guys!

Last night was opening night for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and star Renée Fleming wore Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano. The She even has a fragrance, handed out to concert goers, called La Voce by Renée Fleming which benefits the Met. Populism and opera may be a concept we can get behind.

Alice Temperely has given birth to a son Fox London Temperley von Bennigsen Mackiewicz just five days after her Spring 2009 show. Fox, the first child for Temperley and her husband Lars von Bennigsen, was born in London at 9am on Saturday, September 20.

Louis Vuitton seems to have quite the sense of humour with their "core values" campaign. First it was former Mikhail Gorbachev Russian president now its men who pretend to spy on the Russians. Sean Connery may have just sat for Annie Leibovitz. We suppose Ian Fleming's version of James Bond would be very into nice luggage as an idea. In other strange combinations news Sonic Youth's bassist Kim Gordon is making a line for hip moms. May be kindly suggest they check out Kirna Zabete newly launched ecommerce site? They are the only store to sell Lanvin online!

Coach Inc.’s president and executive creative director Reed Krakoff outearned his boss Lew Frankfort by a two to one margin. Let's here it for well paid creatives. Perry Ellis and C&C California are adding swimwear. Times are tough for weavers, textile manufacturers at Milano Unicaare concerned about the weak dollar.Gap has purchased Athlete for $150 million

Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas. A gloomy one.

Macy's is getting behind Rwanda's basket weavers with a partnership to help sell their products with a program called "Path to Peace Baskets". Paul Kagame, the first democratically elected president of Rwanada, in town for UN General Assembly Meetings attended a reception to celebrate the event on Monday.

While much of our coverage privileges runway during show season, we are not entirely inured to the allure of the fashion party, thus with the help of eLuxury, we decided to treat our readers on a behind the scenes look at the fundamentals of throwing a fashion week bash.

eLuxury, under the new leadership of David Asher, threw its hat into the Fashion Week fray this season with a party at 60 Thompson on the evening of September 11th. Taking over the rooftop of the hotel (hauntingly lit by the glow of the lights emanating from Ground Zero) as well the a VIP section of Thom Bar, the party was an opportunity for the New York fashion community to meet the new CEO and become more familiar with the San Francisco based, LVMH owned, luxury ecommerce retailer.

And meet and greet we did, as your editors bumped into the new CEO right off the bat in the elevator, where the bare-chested Galliano-esque creative gamely discussed his activities for the evening. Clearly it was to be a rockstar agenda with fun as the main activity, though closely followed it would seem by inebriation. In fact, when we asked David on our way out, only jokingly, about the ROI of the gift bags, he told us "You are too mathematical. It's not about the ROI! It's about the FOI. Fun on investment."

That sentiment, while perhaps not deeply reassuring to shareholders given our extremely precarious financial times, is certainly part and parcel of the fashion party experience. To mix a few telling historical references, in an age and industry of Babylonian excess, why not fiddle while Rome burns? Here Sarah Logan, Director of Merchandising for eLuxury, fields our questions on just what makes a fashion party tick and how to make it fun.

Coutorture: What is the purpose of throwing a party at fashion week?

Sarah Logan:To bring people together to discuss ideas, inspirations, and experiences. Fashion week is the ideal time to capture that energy.

C: How do you judge if an event was a success?

S: If there are a lot of laughs, smiles, and animated conversation.  The more of all of the three things mentioned; the better the party.

C: How do you craft a guest list. Who do you hope to attract? Whom do you hope to avoid?
S: You hope that every guest will come away with a new friend, a new notion, or a new intention.  It is always best to avoid the dramatic.

What goes into planning the event?
S: Commitment, belief, and purpose.  Most importantly, providing guests with a few hours of pure revelry.

C: What are some of the critical decisions?
S: Location is key.  Guests need to feel welcome and comfortable enough to linger and mingle.  Dom Perignon always helps.

C: How do you choose a menu?

S: Cocktail menus need to be party attire friendly, and need to consider a range of eating habits.  It is always best to plan for more food and drink than you think is needed.

C: What about drink sponsors?

S: We have the luxury of being affiliated with LVMH, so our offering included Dom Perignon, Chopin, and Ruinart Rose Champagne.  And since we are based in San Francisco, we felt it appropriate to fly in a resident Bar Chef to mix an exclusive eLUXURY.com cocktail- the "eLUXIR."

C: Why is eLuxury throwing their hat into the fashion week party fray?
S: Since we are based in San Francisco, we thought fashion week in New York would be the perfect venue for welcoming our friends on the opposite coast.

C: Is this a new marketing direction for eLuxury?

S: We always strive to offer our customers and audience with the best possible experience, so our marketing strategy remains true to that initial philosophy.  Increasing presence and exposure is a key factor in that vision.

C: How does a party translate into sales? Or does it?
S: Hopefully a guest will leave feeling pampered and exhilarated.  A happy shopper is a loyal shopper.

Jil Sander has been sold to Japanese fashion company Onward Holdings for $244 million dollars. The London based private equity firm Change Capital appears to have been good for the house, handing them over to an excellent new home.“I like to say that Jil Sander was in quarantine because thanks to Change Capital, we cleaned up our act and successfully went from a designer house to a brand,” said Gian Giacomo Ferraris, chief executive officer at Jil Sander, during an interview at the Milan headquarters with WWD. “But this was the right moment to sell and now we can accelerate our growth process, increase revenues and improve margins.” Creative director Raf Simons will stay on.

Vogue India is at the center of a controversy that would make even a 20th century colonialist blush. Vogue India’s August 16-page accessories story of handbags, clutches and designer umbrellas, were modeled by average Indian people. Some 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day making $200 Burberry umbrellas in huts a little offensive to more than a few people.

Halston is unlikely to hire a marquee name, instead focusing on an internal design team. Anyone curious about this spring collection should not that it was apparently conceived by Marco Zanini before the departure.

Diesel likes to party. A lot!

Coutorture favorite Oscar De La Renta has relaunched ecommerce. The site, designed by habitual enemies of usability and FLASH addicts Createthe Group, is similar in feel to the recently launched Calvin Klein ecommerce site (also a CreateThe project) giving us hope that perhaps a new era of selling products and showcasing information instead of pretending to recreate (and miserably) a store experience. But we trusted that CEO Alex Bolen wouldn't have it any other way. Heck, he even has Oscar guest blogging these days.

The twenty four hour news cycle is filled with constant and consistent regurgitation. Americans peep and peck at the beak of the all American newscaster, preferring to have information gathered and digested for them. We consume in tiny little bits at regular intervals like a baby bird being nurtured in the nest of international news without ever bothering to spread our wings. Just as with actual digestion, a little bit of bile is often the result of this process. One of our favorite by products of this process this summer? The constant obsession with the economy and/or the recession.

Now of course defining a recession is pretty cut and dried, but that doesn't leave much to fill the gaping maw of America's desires. Because if we can't consume things we must consume content. We often wonder that if in attempting to keep up appearances, as the beloved Simon Doonan points out in his piece on dressing during a recession, we as the fashion content industry has gone completely overboard in our efforts to sate the appetites of our constituency. We know you aren't buying as much, we aren't buying as much either.

Thus we continue to supply useful pieces on consuming no matter how large our debt to China grows. Instead of consuming products you consume ever more useful pieces of content on fashion. We show you how to shop online, or how to avoid sample sale madness. We are complicit in the ever growing obsession with constantly consuming, no matter what the product. And you know what? We are going to keep doing it.

In the rat race of online publishing we must constantly polish the rhetoric of consumption such that you are always wondering what new and digested manner of shopping we will provide to you next. In fact, we already have a new series in mind that makes use of the kitschy buzzwords of the recession content watch (we are going on staycation folks), but we just wanted to let you know that we are aware. Even our hyper vigilant efforts to remain aloof from the other yammering folks churning out content online (no boring ogling of persons of non-note for us) are not immune from the process of constant product. So we have to at least admit that we know we are doing it too.

Our Network Partner, Chic & Untroubled, clued us into a new feature on Shopbop. Handbag designer Rebecca Minkoff, whom we interviewed a few weeks back, has filmed a short video walking Shobop customers through her Fall collection. This, we think, is big news indeed. Right now we're seeing a cross-pollination of fashion editorial and shopping. Ecommerce is going editorial (see Net-a-Porter's magazine, Shop Bop's video look books) and editorial, is going ecommerce (see our Shopstyle spreads). Online shopping and online reading never meant to mimic the magazines and developments like these really drive that point home. What does it mean to read about fashion online? Well, to us, it means following the process from runway show to shopping bag and reveling in all the particulars along the way. Did that trend we talked about seeing on the runways ever make it to the street? Is that pair of sandals we saw editorialized sold out for the rest of the season? If we don't have the budget to buy those tights, can we make them ourselves? All of these details are aspects of what it means to be interested in fashion and, if you ask us, helps us to be educated consumers indeed.To make things really postmodern we've included a spread of our top five favorite Minkoff bags, all from Shopbop, below.

Loeffler Randall is on sale, ladies and gents (who know their girlfriends well). We happen to believe wholeheartedly in the power of ecommerce and think, in addition to breaking news, reviews, photo editorial, interviews, and fashion week coverage, our readers want to know what's happening online in relation to their wardrobe. After all, this is a participatory industry (our network partners are experts on this topic), one where your knowledge of what's going on can be portrayed in your sense of style just as assertively as your ability to discuss the industry. To that end, we thought you might want to know that Loeffler Randall is pretty seriously on sale in the ecommerce dimension. Clothing and handbags aside (and they are fantastic) for a few hundred dollars you can pick up shoes that will surely last you beyond this season. There's a classic quality to Loeffler Randall's designs that we think is just as important to endorse as a new pop-up store or collaboration project. It can all happen simultaneously, in other words, because shopping and editorial, if you think about it, really do go hand and hand.