You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

LAST week I was trying to find gifts for newborn twins adopted by an architect friend and his graphic designer husband who live in Los Angeles. They are two new additions to the many, many children I know now. In a giant wave of childbearing and adoption in the last few years, I have become Crazy Uncle Mike to no less than 12 toddlers and infants.

Donna Alberico for The New York Times

These twins in particular are nearly impossible to shop for because their cultured, styled parents are impossible to shop for. The usual baby gift won’t do — you can bet the little creatures already own sophisticated pacifiers and “Goodnight Moon.” These are the kind of children whose first word could actually be “Koolhaas.”

Luckily there is Mini Jake in Williamsburg, a place for childless uncles to select presents for the savvy munchkins of today. Its high-design offerings make it a prime location for the sharpest — and sometimes most perverse — children’s products.

Mini Jake was started by David Jacobs and his wife, Inga Rogers, as an offshoot of Two Jakes, the office furniture store that Mr. Jacobs owns with his brother. In 2005, he put out a couple of cribs in the shop, and after witnessing the rabid response, opened Mini Jake, which is dedicated to children’s furniture. Mini Jake soon outgrew the space like training pants, and moved into this 3,000-square-foot warehouse in June.

“Everyone who was buying Dwell and Eames chairs suddenly had kids,” Mr. Jacobs said. “There was a void to fill.”

With 20-foot ceilings and two skylights, the light-drenched space is divided into sections that include toys, books, bags, buggies, bedding, newborn essentials and, in the center, a grid of cribs, dressers, rockers and bassinets, all as shiny and presentable as new cars. The store is dustless, colorful and clean-lined — sort of how I imagine a day care center in Copenhagen to look.

And, actually, as I walked around the store, I began to notice a predominance of Nordic names: Flensted Mobiles, Svan Bouncer, a loom from the Swedish toy company Brio. In the front of the store were pieces of layered foam carved into fish, pig, giraffe and elephant shapes, made by the Danish company bObles ($39 each). Just now being introduced in the United States, they seem like cooler, chic Nerf balls. A box showed a child standing on one of them, with blunt-cut bangs and a fulfilled Danish smile.

I hovered over the Haba Kugelbahn ($84.95), a set of troughs and chutes for marbles, which I wanted to tear open and play with on the chalkboard-topped Fundy play table ($399.95). Then I spent a long time marveling over the Antquarium ($24.99), an ant farm filled with a clear gel so you can fully see your pet insects at work. Everything was so spotless and clever, it made all the detritus I grew up with — plastic highchairs, Legos, Fisher-Price toys, awkward potty seats — look like clunky artifacts from a primitive culture.

IT was surprisingly quiet when I was there. Two fashionable mothers sauntered around, their children comatose in strollers. One woman was in a trendy lime-green sack dress with her long hair loosely bunched up in the back. She roamed around the diaper bags with the same focus she had probably given to a pair of Jimmy Choo slingbacks 10 years earlier.

One contraption that caught my eye was the Stokke Xplory stroller, which has an elevated seat and a horizontal bed for a baby. Intended tor lift your children away from the street and place them closer to you, the stroller looks like an overdesigned lunch cart. According to the Mini Jake Web site, the design is also meant to “stimulate the all important social interaction between parent and child,” thus promoting bonding.

The complete stroller, which includes an attachable bassinet, costs $999. It is the most expensive stroller in the store, even more expensive than the notorious Bugaboo Frog, which at $759 transformed the industry when it appeared on the market in 1999, rejiggering the price point for the simple stroller much like Starbucks normalized the $2 coffee.

Roman Holiday

What part of Valentino’s extraordinary 45th anniversary party will people talk about most? Dante Ferretti’s recreation of the Temple of Venus and Rome, with the Colosseum right in front of you? The feeling that you were seeing 30 years of W magazine come alive? The fact that everything was glamorous and extremely classy yet relaxed? The exhibition at the Museum of Ara Pacis? The moment at the museum when Valentino took Karl Lagerfeld’s hand and walked him around to some of the displays? The Chinese-themed tent near the Villa Borghese that was built just for Saturday’s black-tie dinner, and will be torn down tomorrow? The $10 million-plus price-tag for the weekend?
I couldn’t say. It was all pretty amazing. Each experience offered something different. But for me, the highlight of Valentino’s 45th was his fall haute couture show. It was far and away the best Valentino show I’ve seen, and really a standout among couture collections. It was held in two long, adjoining halls. Down the entire length of both walls, hanging three deep, were black-and-white photographs of Valentino’s fashion. The runway was done in a glossy, black-and-white tile pattern. The suits that opened the show were pure Valentino, as if he knew this was a strength and wanted now to refine and modernize it. The suits were small and trim-fitting, the Valentino ideal, but with details like chinchilla pockets or a black wool jacket with a bouillonne of black tulle at the waist. It’s easy to talk about the new wealth that is ostensibly available to haute couture, but where is the informed sensibility that serves as much as a guide as a counterweight?
Another design by Valentino Garavani. (Victor Sokolowicz/Bloomberg News)
The cocktail and evening clothes were fantastic. Toward the end of the dinner last night, they ran a clip from the documentary that Matt Tynauer, a Vanity Fair editor, has been working on for a couple of years and will finish this fall. It showed Valentino preparing a collection with his atelier, and the level of care. Well, you saw that in the show. My favorite dresses were a pewter lame gown with sheer, embroidered straps and a swag of lame over each shoulder; one in black satin with a tiny bolero of embroidered smoky tulle, and another that was embroidered entirely in emerald-green ostrich feathers and worn with a matching duchess satin coat.
Lagerfeld stayed for both days. That seemed to surprise a lot of people. He and Valentino first met, 52 years ago, when they were young assistants in Paris. At the fashion show, Lagerfeld sat next to Princess Caroline. I was sitting across from Diane Von Furstenberg, Zac Posen, Manolo Blahnik, Tom Ford, Donatella Versace, Giorgio Armani and Carolina Herrera. When Valentino came down the runway, he stopped in front of the other designers and did a little bow. When he came back up the runway, he had tears in his eyes. I don’t know if this collection summed up 45 years, but I do know that I had witnessed something special.

Fashion

The term fashion usually applies to a prevailing mode of expression, but quite often applies to a personal mode of expression that may or may not adhere to prevailing ideals. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole. The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads, trends, and materialism.Fashions are social psychology phenomena common to many fields of human activity and thinking. The rises and falls of fashions have been especially documented and examined in the following fields:Architecture, interior design, and landscape designArts and craftsBody type, clothing or costume, cosmetics, grooming, and personal adornmentCuisineDance and musicForms of address, slang, and other forms of speechEconomics and spending choices, as studied in behavioral financeEntertainment, games, hobbies, sports, and other pastimesEtiquetteManagement, management styles and ways of organizingPolitics and media, especially the topics of conversation encouraged by the mediaPhilosophy and spirituality (One might argue that religion is prone to fashions, although official religions tend to change so slowly that the term cultural shift is perhaps more appropriate than "fashion")Technology, such as the choice of programming techniquesOf these fields, costume especially has become so linked in the public eye with the term "fashion". The more general term "costume" has been relegated by many to only mean fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" means clothing generally, and the study of it. This linguistic switch is due to the so-called fashion plates which were produced during the Industrial Revolution, showing novel ways to use new textiles. For a broad cross-cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the entries for clothing and costume. The remainder of this article deals with clothing fashions in the industrialized world.

Fashion and variation

The European idea of fashion as a personal statement rather than a cultural expression begins in the 16th century: ten portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats. But the local culture still set the bounds, as Albrecht Dürer recorded in his actual or composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). Fashions among upper-class Europeans began to move in synchronicity in the 18th century; though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year, (Thornton), the cut of a gentleman's coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady's dress was cut changed more slowly. Men's fashions derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette are galvanized in theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had opportunities to make notes of foreign styles: an example is the "Steinkirk" cravat (a necktie) (see Cravat).The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike: local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the conservative peasant (James Laver; Fernand Braudel).Fashion in clothes has allowed wearers to express emotion or solidarity with other people for millennia. Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes. What a person chooses to wear can reflect that person's personality or likes. When people who have cultural status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect them may start to wear clothes of a similar style.Fashions may vary significantly within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation and geography as well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. The term "fashion victim" refers to someone who slavishly follows the current fashions (implementations of fashion).One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland Barthes.)Thornton, Peter. Baroque and Rococo Silks.This is an example list of some of the fads and trends of the 21st century: Capri pants, handbags, sport suits and sports jackets, ripped jeans, designer jeans, blazer jackets, and high-heeled shoes.

Fashion and the process of change

Fashion, by definition, changes constantly. The changes may proceed more rapidly than in most other fields of human activity (language, thought, etc). For some, modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unnecessarily. Others, especially young people, enjoy the diversity that changing fashion can apparently provide, seeing the constant change as a way to satisfy their desire to experience "new" and "interesting" things. Note too that fashion can change to enforce uniformity, as in the case where so-called Mao suits became the national uniform of mainland China.At the same time there remains an equal or larger range designated (at least currently) 'out of fashion'. (These or similar fashions may cyclically come back 'into fashion' in due course, and remain 'in fashion' again for a while.)Practically every aspect of appearance that can be changed has been changed at some time, for example skirt lengths ranging from ankle to mini, etc. In the past, new discoveries and lesser-known parts of the world could provide an impetus to change fashions based on the exotic: Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for example, might favor things Turkish at one time, things Chinese at another, and things Japanese at a third. A modern version of exotic clothing includes club wear. Globalization has reduced the options of exotic novelty in more recent times, and has seen the introduction of non-Western wear into the Western world.Fashion houses and their associated fashion designers, as well as high-status consumers (including celebrities), appear to have some role in determining the rates and directions of fashion change.

Fashion and the media

An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, on television, fashion websites and in fashion blogs.At the beginning of the twentieth century, fashion magazines began to include photographs and became even more influential than in the past. In cities throughout the world these magazines were greatly sought-after and had a profound effect on public taste. Talented illustrators drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications which covered the most recent developments in fashion and beauty. Perhaps the most famous of these magazines was La Gazette du bon ton which was founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel and regularly published until 1925 (with the exception of the war years).High fashion did not become popular among the general population until it started getting featured on television; few designers were household names, models weren’t famous and fashion shows were not the celebrity driven extravaganzas of today. It began in the 1950s with small fashion how-tos during commercial breaks. In the 1960s and 1970s, fashion segments on various entertainment shows became more frequent, and by the 1980s, dedicated fashion shows like FashionTelevision started to appear.Fashion made its debut on the world wide web in January 1995 with the launch of Fashion Net by Stig Harder in Paris, France. In the mid 1990s, the Internet was still largely a research network populated by academics. But the strong appeal of this entirely new medium was made evident by the pioneering efforts of fashion's early entrants and soon both independent and established fashion publishers, designers and visual artists were online. As Nick Knight - possibly the very first fashion photographer to embrace the Internet - succinctly put it, it showed great potential over "yet another glossy picture in a magazine."

the exciting world of f.men

• FTV is the only 24/7 Fashion, beauty and style television station worldwide.• FTV is the biggest Fashion Medium in the world.• FTV was founded 1997 and has become a must carry program in many parts of the world.• FTV is present in 202 countries on 5 continents. confirmed reach: 300 million households worldwideFtv is ready more then ever to launch today a new men fashion channel:Men fashion is a growing dynamic business and becomes a form of expression.Men’s fashion has highly evolved during the last years due to the intense influence of sports, Sports brands become fashion brands and Sportsmen become fashion icons . Today’s generation of teenagers are highly influenced by men fashion omnipresenceFmen will be the first to show the men's world and male fashion

Alternative fashion

Alternative fashion is a term, while somewhat fluid in use, is generally used to describe fashion that is abherrant, apart from the mainstream "Those who dress creatively, individually & differently from the rest" (2). It is also often used to describe fashion associated with subcultures (ie gothic fashion, punk fashion, industrial, club culture), or fashion influenced by the music associated with these cultures, or alternative music in general (1). Additionally, alternative fashion events and designs may exhibit a fusion of fashion with art and music.There are a number of Alternative Fashion events, including the London Alternative Fashion week in London (running since 2003), the Toronto Alternative Fashion week (FAT) and the Circa Nocturna Melbourne Alternative Fashion parade. There is a also a bi monthly published magazine, Alt.Fashion published in London that caters to the Alternative Fashionista's needs.

List of grands couturiers

A grands couturier is a fashion designer who holds significant influence in the fashion industry. His or her designs and collections influence the fashion industry at all levels through the trickle-down effect.Grands couturiers usually are household names who have high profile clients. They come out with fashion collections every season in one or more of the five major fashion weeks-Milan, Paris, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York. Their designs are also often featured in popular fashion magazines like Vogue or Madame Figaro.It is difficult to decide who deserves the title grands couturier because numerous designers have had influence in the fashion industry. However the name was originally created for the head designers of the haute couture houses. There are 10 current official French couture fashion houses and 2 honorary Italian houses.