Italian Fashion News

From jewelry to purses to gift items, Bottega Veneta gives you a total look.

However, while the jewelry journalist in me couldn’t help but notice the jewelry, I also noticed the jewelry affects added to different accessory items such as shoes and purses.

Jewelry is not just for the body any more. It offers a way to add that extra touch to other accessory items as well, and obviously Bottega Veneta has discovered this.

Here are a few pieces from the company’s web site that I noticed at that extra jewelry touch as well as a few jewelry items themselves.

Like…these braided bold chains…wow!

Giorgio Armani has joined the campaign to get curvier models on the catwalk – and calls on fellow designer to follow his example.

“I have never liked thin girls and never sent them down the catwalk,” Armani says.

“At my shows you will find girls in size 42 (US size 8), outfits. Sure, I choose very feminine women with little breast and straight hips,” the designer confesses.
“However, there are other designers out there who like to provoke, who like to make a show so they get talked about.”

Meanwhile, organizers of Rome Fashion Week that kicks off in January are demanding to see “good health” certificates from all the models who are being cast for the shows.

U2 lead singer Bono says he admires Italian designer Giorgio Armani because he is ‘in control of his destiny’.

According to contactmusic.com, Bono confesses that he likes expensive clothing, which includes Armani’s brand Rogan. Rogan also make jeans for Bono’s wife Ali Hewson’s ethical clothing range Edun.

He says: ‘Giorgio Armani is my favorite designer, and I like the fact he is not owned by anyone else. He’s a 70-year-old man in control of his own destiny. The other thing I can’t do without is Rogan jeans – they’re about 300 pounds a pair, but they’re David Beckham’s favorite.’

These days, Donatella Versace would rather throw a party than simply attend one, and that’s exactly what she did on a zip through Manhattan late last week. On Thursday, the ultimate vixen threw an intimate affair for Allure editor in chief Linda Wells at the Gramercy Park Hotel to celebrate Wells’ new book, “Allure: Confessions of a Beauty Editor.”

“I love Donatella, she is so dominatrix tonight,” a more demurely dressed Lucy Liu said of Versace’s sultry black ensemble. She was among a crowd that included Aerin Lauder, Alek Wek, Anna Sui, Gina Gershon, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Margherita Missoni, Narciso Rodriguez and Niki Taylor.

Though the starting bell rang for Tom Ford’s party for his new Black Orchid fragrance uptown, many guests were too busy double-fisting the many desserts to rush off immediately.

Even Ford couldn’t resist checking out his blurb on the back jacket of Wells’ tome, arriving fashionably late at Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center. As revelers rode up in the nearly pitch-black elevator, they were awed by the slick, sexy decor.

“It’s very Space Mountain,” boomed one attendee. “I was thinking more ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ but thanks anyway,” replied Ford dryly. The style arbiter had labored over every last detail of the party — even down to the black hand soap in the ladies’ room.

The lively crowd included Sophie Dahl, Becca Cason Thrash, Elizabeth Saltzman-Walker, Carmen Kass, Victoria Traina, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld (who’s featured in the ad campaign for the fragrance) and her mother, Carine.

That same night in London, a different crop of designers were being honored at the British Fashion Awards at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Winners included Giles Deacon for designer of the year, Kate Moss, who scooped model of the year — in absentia — and Vivienne Westwood, who won the red carpet designer award.

“So…I’m not Kate,” deadpanned Westwood, who picked up Moss’ award for her. “But I love her — she is a lovely, loyal, fantastic person.”

Giorgio Armani’s Area Manager Far East, Mr Fabio Piazza, was in Brunei to see what opportunities the country has to offer the renowned Italian fashion house.

Mr Piazza said Armani was expanding rapidly in China. There are a number of strategic outlets also in Singapore. He was surveying the market in Brunei, Bangkok and Jakarta.

“Asia is getting affluent and Armani is a brand that the people with taste and who can afford go for,” Mr Piazza said.

The Armani Group is one of the leading fashion and luxury goods groups in the world today with 4,600 direct employees and 13 factories.

It designs, manufactures, distributes and retails fashion and lifestyle products including apparel, accessories, eyewear, watches, jewellery, home interiors, fragrances and cosmetics under a range of brand names.

Hollywood actor Natalie Portman is auctioning off the 35-year-old Givenchy dress ? one she wore for the cover shoot of the November issue of style magazine ‘Harper’s Bazaar,’ in an effort to help India’s poor.

The ‘Star Wars’ actress is hoping that the auction of the little black dress, which was once worn by Audrey Hepburn in cult film ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s, will gather enough funds for charity.

Proceeds of the auction to be held in December this year at the Christie’s Auction House in London will go to ‘City Of Joy Aid’ – a charity organisation that helps the downtrodden in India, reports Contactmusic.com.

The legendary dress is expected to fetch more than 94,000 dollars.

While talking about the dress, Portman had described her feelings, saying, “I really felt like Hepburn, so very graceful suddenly. I could never measure up to Audrey Hepburn; but her elegance while wearing this dress, there are no words.”

Irene Galitzine, Italy’s “fashion princess” whose gowns clothed Jacqueline Kennedy, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn, died on Friday, a spokesman for the national fashion association told Reuters. She was 90.

Galitzine, whose design house became one of the hot labels during Rome’s “Hollywood on the Tiber” fashion heyday in the 1960s, died at her home in Italy’s capital, Ansa news agency said.

The cause of death was not immediately known.

Descended from Russian nobility who fled after the 1917 revolution, the former fashion model set up shop in the 1940s. She vaulted to international attention in 1960 with her “palazzo pajamas,” a wide-legged jumpsuit made of soft silk.

Galitzine said she and other Italian designers had a knack for creating fashions for the young and carefree during the swinging 1960s.

“The French were more sophisticated, more complicated. The Italians were young and gay, they loved life, they were simpler,” she said in a 2000 interview with Women’s Wear Daily.

“It was a perfect way of dressing for our lives then. You could dance easily in them, and all you needed to wear with them was a pretty jewel.”

Her clients included jet setters, fashionistas and film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Babe Paley and Greece’s Niarchos women. Galitzine also designed the costumes for actress Claudia Cardinale in the 1963 movie “The Pink Panther.”

In February, Rome dedicated a show to her designs called “The Princess of Fashion.” Her gowns and other creations are often included in museum exhibits of fashion as art.

Hey,

I just launched a new Italian Fashion blog. I will be mostly bloging there, so Italian fashion News will be a little out of date.

Please visit the site and feel free to comment on whatever you like.
http://www.italian-fashion-watch.com

Bulgari SpA CEO Francesco Trapani reiterated that the company is not for sale, dismissing ongoing speculation that the family controlling the group could sell out.

He made the comments in an interview with the daily Il Corriere della Sera.

The luxury group is controlled by the Bulgari brothers Paolo, 69, and Nicola, 65, and Trapani, 48.

The two brothers have 23.63 pct each in the company and Trapani 4.43 pct. Their stakes are parked in a shareholder syndicate that is tacitly renewed every two years, according to the daily.

The next expiry date is July 2008, and any member has to give a 12-month notice to leave the syndicate, it added.

Trapani said the two brothers — who are also his uncles — do not want to pass for the Bulgaris that sold the company which ‘has been family property for 150 years.’

Trapani said the group is carrying out large investments to increase in size, especially in the retail business.

The group could also carry out acquisitions in the jewellery, watch and accessories sectors, he added.

The Chanel sunglasses of the fashion industry are turning to London as the New York circus closes today. And, this time, London fashion week promises much more than the rather downbeat affair it has become over the past decade after the huge drift of designers to Paris, Milan and New York.

With a little help from some famous friends, and high expectations surrounding many of the younger designers, there is a genuine excitement about the London leg of the fashion weeks.

Last season, London was effectively reinstated on the fashion map by Anna Wintour, the hugely influential editor of American Vogue, whose presence in the front row marked the end of London’s years in the wilderness.

The message was that if she took the London shows seriously, so must the rest of the fashion industry. While she won’t be attending this time, London is again playing host to more famous faces: designers Giorgio Armani and Tom Ford, who is in town to judge the Fashion Fringe competition for emerging design talent.

Armani, the uncrowned king of Italian fashion, is presenting his Emporio line outside Milan for the first time, and is launching his new Emporio Armani Red capsule collection, 40% of the profits of which will go towards the Global Fund, the agency fighting Aids in Africa.

As is fitting of a brand that has just announced its net profits are up to £154.8m, Armani is marking the occasion with a huge event on Thursday, including an appearance from Chelsea footballer Andriy Shevchenko, and performances from Beyoncé and Bono.

Armani has chosen to hold the event in London to coincide with the reopening of his label’s UK flagship Emporio store. “London is one of the most vibrant cities, a reference point for all the arts, and certainly for fashion,” he said. “I hope that my new stores will add further to the cosmopolitan culture.”