AP – After a week of shows dominated by the rail-thin teens who are ubiquitous on today’s catwalks, Paris fall-winter ready-to-wear 2010-11 displays concluded Wednesday with a sensual celebration of women in all their curvaceous glory at Louis Vuitton.

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Louis Vuitton’s womanhood celebration closes Paris
(AP)

Fashion Wire Daily – It was all very 1950s heroine chic at Louis Vuitton Wednesday, March 10, in Paris, when the label’s designer Marc Jacobs sent out a series of proper, feminine looks onto a runway that circled a huge water fountain in a courtyard of the Louvre Museum.

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Louis Vuitton’s Silver Screen Femininity
(Fashion Wire Daily)

As we enter a new decade, the fashion business, like the rest of the world, is encountering significant economic and technological change. In this new series, Style.com’s editor in chief, Dirk Standen, talks to a number of leading industry figures about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Olivier Zahm’s love of women is well documented, not least by Zahm himself on his Web site, www.purple-diary.com. But the French editor and founder of the twice-yearly independent publication Purple Fashion has many other passions: art, fashion, his daily uniform of white or gray jeans and black Yves Saint Laurent leather jacket, parties, freedom. There may be an element of self-promotion behind some of this, but in an increasingly conformist world, Zahm offers an original, entertaining, and astute voice. During our conversation, conducted by phone last month between New York and Paris and somewhat condensed here, he discussed his conviction that magazines will exist as long as fashion exists, his suspicion that the financial crisis was just a pretext to scare people, and his fervent wish that the world in general—and Lindsay Lohan in particular—would stop spending so much money on clothes.

What was the original impulse behind Purple Diary?
[It happened] in a way by accident, because the Purple Diary was just a section of a bigger project I had, and because I started to take pictures every day of parties or pictures of my life, I needed an interesting way to use these pictures and not to let them go into digital archives and disappear. Because now everything disappears. It’s digital, but if you don’t copy your hard drive, pictures disappear after one or two years…So then I had this idea of having a personal diary, an intimate diary, mixing intimacy or privacy with my public life and creating a sort of contrast between what’s really intimate, like sex and love, and what’s really public, a party, a fashion show, an exhibition. What’s meant to be public and what’s meant to be private and make them, like, coexist. It was suddenly exciting because it was, in a way, breaking the barriers of something, which is actually what the medium itself, the Internet itself, does. For celebrities it’s a nightmare, but for me it’s a pleasure. It’s a decision. I would love to go further into intimacy, but my girlfriend and my lovers are sometimes a bit reluctant.

Have any of the reactions to the blog surprised you?
What surprised me is the number of people coming, because I print 60,000 copies of Purple [a season] and I have 100,000 [weekly Web site visitors], more visitors a week on the blog than I have readers in one season with the magazine…I can tell from the discussions I have that people know that I’ve been there, I’ve done this, I’ve seen that exhibition or this film, and then it comes into the discussion and it’s changing my life in a way and my interaction with the girls, with the friends. It hasn’t changed my interaction with the advertisers yet. [Laughs.]

Well, let’s talk about that.
I haven’t found the right way to make a little money off it because I don’t want regular advertising. I think it would be really bad. So I don’t want advertising [of that kind]. I’m looking for a way to involve brands, but I haven’t found it yet and it’s not my priority.

You say you’d like to go further into intimacy?
It’s always delicate because I respect the girls around me. They’re real people and I respect their privacy, so I can’t really go too far, but sometimes it’s really playful and they’re OK. But when they’re more emotionally involved, it can be a bit difficult, and I totally understand. To me love and sex is the most beautiful thing on earth, you know. It’s more beautiful than a landscape, so I love to keep pictures of the girls in these private moments because they are giving you the most beautiful side of themselves. It’s like a gift from God. It’s beautiful. I’m not New Age, I’m not mystical, I just really love it, and it’s so beautiful to capture with a camera that I really want to share that, you know…And also, Purple is a lifestyle. With my magazine, what I want to do is personally to be more free, and I want people to be more free, to open their possibility of contact, of sex, of love. I want that. This is important to me. I consider that Purple is a free lifestyle. Not in a stupid way, not in a childish or immature way, in a mature way now because I’m 45, 46. So the blog is also this vocation to see what constructs a lifestyle, to see what could be. If my life would be perfect, it would look like the Purple Diary. You see what I mean? It’s an illusion, too. I’m constructing a character.

Even Jefferson Hack joked to me that he lives vicariously through your blog, and Jefferson’s not exactly the kind of guy who stays home with his slippers and pipe.
It’s interesting. I’m discovering the possibilities of this medium, the Internet and the blog, and there’s a lot of possibilities. It’s also a way for me to train myself as a photographer, because now it’s my new obsession. I want to become a photographer, not just an editor. I want to be a photographer. I was a bit shy before and now I’m convinced I can do as good as the people I’m generally working with, except for five of them. [Laughs.]

I think you said somewhere, though, that the Internet is not a creative medium.
It’s not a creative medium for fashion, you know. For fashion, I think a magazine is the place for creativity, because for fashion photography, you don’t only show the last collection and the clothes, you show the way they should be worn, you show or you try to capture a spirit, a certain moment in time, and this is creativity in fashion. It’s a way to incarnate and interpret fashion. On the Internet, I don’t see [it], but maybe I’m wrong. I think this is what a magazine is made for. It’s the perfect medium for fashion. Television is not a medium for fashion at all. I don’t know what television is the medium for, actually. It’s a medium to control the population and to make them more stupid. Definitely, the Internet is a medium for interaction. It’s a medium for contact. Not for creativity.

So you don’t think the Internet will replace magazines?
The commercial magazines may be replaced, because the Internet is a better place for commerce and immediate information. The Internet is a chance for magazines because it forces the magazines to be more creative and to really explore what they are, what is the essence of a magazine and what a magazine is meant for. And it’s not meant for commerce…Magazines are also made for instruction, for energy, for voyeurism, for sexiness, for pleasure, for a lot of things. Not only a place to sell products. This is why you don’t have any good magazines now in Japan. It’s a disaster because they just consider magazines like an extension of advertising…This kind of magazine, strictly commercial, will certainly disappear because you have more information, more contact, more possibility of buying on the Internet. But a true creative fashion magazine can’t be replaced by a true creative fashion site because it doesn’t exist and it won’t exist. You don’t want to look at a fashion shoot on your screen, do you?

Well, no one’s done a good job of it yet.
It’s really difficult. Maybe some creative people will find a way to make it really fun and entertaining and surprising. Maybe we’ll see soon some interesting fashion and art site that will change [things]. But do they need the format of television then, of a small TV program, something moving?…I don’t know, it’s complicated. But to me the future of magazines is actually the future of fashion. If fashion disappears, magazines will disappear. But as long as fashion has something to say and as long as fashion is a dream or as long as fashion is a creative domain made by a few crazy people that we love, from John Galliano to Sonia Rykiel, then we’ll do magazines. We’ll do the best magazines we can, because we are there to celebrate their minds, in a way. The designers are the true inspiration for fashion magazines, or the artists, architects, filmmakers, whatever. As long as art and fashion are exciting domains, the magazines will be good.

Are fashion shows, the live experience, still important? How big a leap is it to go from Nick Knight filming the Alexander McQueen show to a virtual show without an audience?
To me, the Internet is just an extension of reality. It can’t replace reality. A show is a ceremony. It’s a religious ceremony with the people that really believe. You don’t go to a Comme des Gar

Aimee Mann is better known today as a composer of sad-eyed, symphonic chamber pop, whose dour songs won her an Oscar nod when Paul Thomas Anderson used them in Magnolia. But in the eighties, as part of the Boston-based new wave band ‘Til Tuesday, Mann was in full avant provocateur mode—with a wardrobe to match. When we read on Racked that Mann was selling a collection of her outfits through NYC vintage dealers Vagabondnyc, we contacted proprietors Andrea Perini and Naveed Hussain for a closer look. Mann had a great eye for high-eighties rule breakers. VagaBond has the Yohji Yamamoto asymmetrical sarong she wore to the ‘85 MTV Music Awards, as well as a covetable gray Yamamoto tunic dress (above right). Mann was an early jumpsuit proponent, too (her white Katharine Hamnett, above left). Other pieces are drawn from decades-old collections by Jean Paul Gaultier and Comme des Gar

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“Grown-up” clothes are the talk of the runways in these nose-to-the-grindstone times. They’re what’s next for Minnie Mortimer, too—though in the spirit of a good time, she’s not one to take maturation lying down. “I really think that the clothes reflect that my own life is changing,” the designer said at home in L.A. “I’m just straddling that time in my life when I’m still a young girl who wants to go out, and yet I’m being dragged into adulthood. My wardrobe has to keep up with that.” Girls just want to have fun, in other words. Well, there are still Mortimer’s preppy shirtdresses for that, but for Fall, she’s added more tailored daywear and a few elegant matte silk blouses with Victorian details to the mix. (Suiting separates shown with tiny bloomer shorts should dispel any fears that she’s getting gray before her time.) “I’m starting to develop some new fabrics, and I’ve been drawing new prints and colors that I am going to incorporate into my new designs,” she continued. “Just learning how to design and print my own fabrics has been such an amazing process for me. Playing with the different width of stripes, the sizes, and the separation between them.” Play and work—not a bad compromise.

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Minnie Mortimer Grows Up

On Tuesday, the troika behind the Webster in Miami—Laure Heriard Dubreuil, Frederic Dechnik, and Milan Vukmirovic—took over the private salons of the Maison Baccarat to introduce selected friends to the Louis XIII Rare Cask by R

The ink’s on the paper: Madonna has signed with Iconix to create a line of Material Girl fashions, starting with a juniors’ line at Macy’s. Personally, we’d have preferred a Like a Virgin-inspired bridal line. [WWD]

We’re not opposed to the idea of Mad Men Barbies. But if they’re going to be made, at least give them Christina Hendricks’ legendary curves. A hipless Joan Holloway? What a waste. [NYT]

Speaking of mini mannequins, one grumbler is claiming—rather publicly—that Givenchy axed five models the night before the show, after insisting on exclusivity for its girls. [Page Six]

And Love will live-cast the Miu Miu Fall ‘10 show on its site at 1 p.m. EST. [Love]

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Madge At Macy’s, Mad For Barbie, And More…

For two guys who started the crotch-baring, NSFW, gay—make that very gay—magazine BUTT, Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom are far more well mannered than you might expect. They’ve even gone so far as to call their new women’s magazine The Gentlewoman—paging Miss Prim! But even if their first and latest mags—a glossier, more fashion-oriented men’s title, Fantastic Man, came in the middle—aren’t exactly kissing cousins, a smart, chic sensibility unites them. No crotches were bared at the quintessentially Parisian launch party, held in a salon in the Saint-Germain last night, but the design and edit crowds gathered to sip Champagne and toast newly minted editor in chief Penny Martin (pictured, left, with Delfina Delettrez Fendi, Brian Phillips, and Jonkers) and cover girl Phoebe Philo, shot by David Sims with a proper Celine scarf knotted around her neck. (”She brought that with her,” Jonkers reports, “but it’s vintage. I imagine she took it out of the archives, or maybe she bought it on eBay.”) Philo is the gentlewoman to a tee, say the editors. “We’re already thinking of the next issue, and who would be good,” Jonkers went on. “But it’s true, a good gentlewoman is hard to find.” Van Bennekom, sadly, wasn’t feeling up to snuff at his opening; he had a cold and decided to duck out from the party early. On his way out, though, he was kind enough to refuse kisses and would only shake hands after a dose of disinfectant. “I don’t want to get anyone sick! That would not be very gentlemanly, or gentlewomanly, either.”

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Blasblog: Go Gentle Into That Good Night