blendnewyork…Fashion.Art.Style.Inspiration.Love

Oh, hello. Back for the Swarovski young designer awards.

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CFDA: ‘One Outfit at a Time’ (zzzzz)

For accessories: Proenza Schouler. The first Popular Vote Award: Ralph Lauren (in tuxedo jacket and jeans). Men’s wear designer: Scott Sternberg and Italo Zucchelli, a tie

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And the Winners Are…

Marc Jacobs and his business partner Robert Duffy are sitting in the row in front of me, with folks from Vogue in front of them. Tracey Ullman has just come on the stage, saluting Diane Von Furstenberg and Michelle Obama.

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At the CFDA Awards

Suddenly round sunglasses are the look of the summer…

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Why Round Sunglasses? A Style Investigation

Many Goodwill stores are courting the shoppers who scour high-end resale shops and department store sales racks for bargains.

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Look Who’s Shopping Goodwill

In Washington, the same week Barack Obama took office, a young staff member for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice enlisted Paperless Post, a new online stationery service, to help put together a going-away party for her boss.

The interactive correspondence “was all anybody wanted to talk about,” said Sarah Lenti, who went on to work for Mitt Romney — the way the hyperreal envelope with the invitee’s name appears on the computer, how it reverses to the sender’s on the back, and then the pièce de résistance invitation pops out, so detailed you can see the paper’s grain. How intuitive it was to click on the RSVP and fill out the reply card. Zac Posen had used it for a benefit, as had some Diane Von Furstenberg folks, and the Young Friends of the Elie Wiesel Foundation were about to try it.

Paperless Post, which is in New York, is a venture of Alexa Hirschfeld, 25, and her brother James, 23. It enables users to design, send and track e-vites and other social summonses on the Web while maintaining easy correctness and a life’s-a-party air reminiscent of old-fashioned mailings. The siblings have handled 60,000 invitations since January, and 150,000 since their membership-based operations began last fall.

“The Internet has been a kind of vacuum in terms of aesthetics,” Ms. Hirschfeld said. “We wanted to leverage functionality with design.” So many people, she added, had gotten bored with such easy-virtue social tools as Facebook or Evite. The recession-related closing of Madison Avenue stationer Mrs. John L. Strong last month further suggests to the Hirschfelds that their customer base will expand.

The economic climate “definitely put the wind in our sails,” Mr. Hirschfeld said. “People say they would rather save $2,000 by not getting printed invitations, and invite four more friends to their wedding.” The fee structure for Paperless Post works on a sliding scale with the purchase of virtual stamps bearing the company’s carrier-pigeon logo, starting at $5 for 60 e-mailings.

The Hirschfelds are operating in a clutch of pods surrounded by lipstick samplers in space subleased from the French cosmetics company Bourjois, on Fifth Avenue near 17th Street. A business plan and a financial model outlining the dent they believe they can make in the $11 billion made-to-order stationery market provided them with their first round of financing (almost $1 million) from a group that includes Mousse Partners, an investment firm. Ms. Hirschfeld had been working at CBS News for Katie Couric but quit, “because I was interested in this more powerful platform,” she said.

They decided against on-site advertising, which would be like “getting a flyer inside a wedding invitation,” Mr. Hirschfeld said.

Still, Pamela Fiori, the editor in chief of Town & Country, does not approve. “In a world increasingly uncivilized,” she said, “it’s important that we have some ties to tradition. And I honestly think that what we’re losing with e-mail are our memories.”

Some older users print their Paperless Post missives, Ms. Hirschfeld said, but “for most it’s about the beauty, not holding a piece of paper in your hand.”

The practically size-zero carbon footprint is an added attraction. “It’s completely green,” said Celine Kaplan, spokeswoman for Eres, who has orchestrated fashion debuts with Paperless Post.

The Hirschfelds have added letterhead templates alongside the more personal alternatives, and have steadily accumulated concept categories, fonts, motifs, border patterns, paper colors, sizes, stock and textures. They browse notions emporiums in the garment district for decorations. They work with a designer, a stylist and a photographer to create their prototypes, and work with their technology brainiacs on the Web site, which also provides hosts with a RSVP tracking system and the ability to sell and buy tickets to events.

“We basically digested Crane’s Blue Book of Etiquette and Emily Post,” Ms. Hirschfeld said, for the application that generates wording choices. Mr. Hirschfeld’s first design, dark red with a border of zebras, was inspired by the wallpaper at the restaurant Gino on the Upper East Side.

Vanessa Bain, a vice president at an equity fund in New York, is using Paperless Post for her Bermuda wedding, and she said the beach motif the Web site produced will resurface on the paper invitations to the ceremony itself. “The ordering took an hour online rather than having to meet in a store, and then wait two and a half weeks for printed invitations,” she said, “and I have friends and relatives in places like Brazil, who will get what I e-mail almost the instant I send it.”

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Your Invitation Is Not in the Mail

MILAN — The Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace named Gian Giacomo Ferraris as chief executive on Tuesday. He will succeed Giancarlo Di Risio, who is stepping down over differences about the company’s direction.

Mr. Ferraris, who has worked in the luxury sector for 20 years, has been chief executive since 2004 of the Jil Sander Group and was previously managing director of the RTW division of the Gucci Group, Versace said in a statement.

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Versace Names Ferraris as Chief Executive

The magazine TIWIMUTA (This Is What It Made Us Think About) feels strangely of the moment.

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Not Another Fashion Magazine, Seriously

A few nights ago the Times played host to the 6th annual Citi Women & Co. event, and I was asked to speak about fashion and the economy, with a look back at previous recession and a look forward to some of the challenges facing the industry. About 200 people attended the cocktail-hour event, and the questions afterward were diverse and interesting. A number of guests, including Francoise Olivas, a young designer here in the city, mentioned the growing difficulty of getting clothes produced in New York. Although some designers are finding that many factories are more eager than in the past to do small runs—in order to keep their workers busy—the economic pressure on factories and suppliers in New York is obviously a concern to small companies that can’t afford to produce in China and other countries. Several people asked for a copy of the speech, so I’m including a somewhat trimmed version below.

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The Bigger Picture

There are many reasons why New York City commuters have been hesitant to bicycle to work in greater numbers: personal safety, the scarce availability of bike racks and the weather, among them. A perhaps more superficial, though still important, consideration is figuring out something to wear that will be both functional and professional looking. Or, at the least, something that will not show grease stains.

“We have to make bicycling fun and elegant, which it is not yet in New York,” said Renaud Dutreil, the chairman of the North American arm of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, who rides a bike to his office on East 57th Street almost every day. On Tuesday, Mr. Dutreil, with the designer Donna Karan and department of transportation officials, introduced a project intended to encourage more professionals to follow suit, even when wearing a suit. This spring, the group sponsored a competition among students at the Fashion Institute of Technology to design a poncho, a jacket and a travel bag for bicycling with both safety and style in mind. The winning designs, by Jessica Velasquez, 21, from Queens, will be made into prototypes by DKNY.

Ms. Velasquez’s designs were indeed innovative, like a poncho with reflective piping details and bungee cords sewn into the sides so that the length and fit can be adjusted so they won’t drag into the bicycle wheels. She also designed a clever backpack that opens like an envelope and is still big enough to hold a garment bag, folded in half, inside.

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On the Runway: Project Bike Lane

The French couturier whose artistic and exuberant pouf dresses propelled him to fame in the 1980s has become the latest victim of the global financial crisis.

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Lacroix Files for Bankruptcy Protection

The stylist Derek Warburton applies his skills to making over job-seeking women at Bottomless Closet.

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To Dress for Success, You Must Trust His Eye

PARIS — The red carpet marathon known as the Cannes Film Festival is now in full swing. More than halfway though the 12-day competition on the Côte d’Azur, style-watchers have seen screen beauties from around the world taking to the famous steps of the Palais des Festivals. The longtime mix of serious movie business and international glamour have made this much-photographed city the last bastion of creative red-carpet dressing.

Over the past few years in the United States, the pressure to look picture perfect during awards season has largely resulted in women wearing gorgeous gowns that quickly fade from memory for their lack of creativity. The industry built up around event dressing, with stylists and publicists clothing actresses and celebrities in beautiful but boring ensembles, has also reduced the personal connection many stars once had with fashion designers. And the weight of the “one-night-only” Oscars has tipped the sartorial scales toward the safe.

Not so at Cannes.

Nothing like a trip abroad to broaden fashion horizons. And nowhere is forward fashion thinking more favorably looked upon, and sometimes forgiven, than in France. “Here in Cannes,” said the Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, “it’s all more open and lively: it’s more like actresses take real control of their own style, and building up their own character. For me, this is very inspiring, because there is nothing that I love more than a woman with a strong personality.”

Mr. Cavalli, along with Giorgio Armani, has dominated much of the Cannes costume scene. Mr. Armani dressed the jury president, Isabelle Huppert, and the jury member Asia Argento in two of his couture “Privé” designs for the festival’s opening while Mr. Cavalli clothed the young Taiwanese juror Shu Qi and the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai.

“There is an air of fun at Cannes — it is the Mediterranean spirit,” said Mr. Armani. “This is after all a place forever associated with starlets on the Croisette and the youthful Brigitte Bardot on the beach.”

There is no better example of the eclectic styles that Cannes brings together than the jury this year. Its large contingent of accomplished women of all ages and nationalities, with years of experience in the film business, have shown themselves to be independent thinkers.

From the traditionally dressed Sharmila Tagore in colorful saris to the American actress Robin Wright Penn, whose preference for working in independent films translated into a shimmering silver lamé Elie Saab dress for the opening and a sporty body-hugging black gown for the screening of the movie “Vengeance,” these are women who know who they are and what looks good on them. Not many people would have guessed from seeing them standing next to each other on the red carpet that Ms. Huppert and Ms. Argento took their opening-night looks from the same Armani couture collection, so strikingly different were the outfits.

The choice by many of the celebrities to wear one-of-a-kind ensembles throughout the festival shows that the movies are still a sort of dream factory and the stars still symbols of that dream.

For the designer Haider Ackermann, his first outfit worn at Cannes, by Tilda Swinton, was an opportunity for worldwide exposure that he feels would be difficult to get elsewhere. “I am not sure they would understand it in America,” he said. “At Cannes you are more free to choose what you want. There is more fantasy.”

The gowns at the festival generally steered towards the strapless or asymmetrical shoulder, with red being the color of choice for many. Millefeuille skirts frothing into trains have been a nice change from the draping goddess dresses that have become ubiquitous event ensembles. And a surprising number of shimmering gowns have sparkled in front of the cameras this year.

“Sparkling gowns really bring back the glitz and glamour that we need right now,” said the designer Andrew Gn, who created the midnight-blue ensemble that the American actress Elizabeth Banks wore to the screening of the film “Chun Feng Chen Zui De Ye Wan” (Spring Fever). “They lift you up!”

If the clothing continues to be custom-made, there is still an easy-breezy feel in the way it is all put together. Hair is loose or in updos that give relaxed elegance to the complete look. And given the temperamental weather on the Croisette this year, casual coifs have been the smart move. Chopard jewelry has been much in evidence, which is no surprise as the brand is a sponsor and has its own awards ceremony during the festival. The stars seem to have no desire to tone down their jewelry in reaction to the global recession, with many going for statement necklaces paired with discreet earrings hidden from view under those loose locks.

But the best thing about celebrity- watching here is that it still remains a bit of a free-for-all. Twelve days of opportunity for actresses to try something different. Twelve days for stars from outside Hollywood to get exposure they would find nowhere else. And 12 days for those wonderful unknowns who find their way onto the carpet hoping for their 15 minutes of fame.

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The Fashion That Is Uniquely Cannes