blendnewyork…Fashion.Art.Style.Inspiration.Love

The fragrance industry troubles go far deeper than a recessionary dip.

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Skin Deep: The Hunt for That Genie in a Bottle

The 1970s were not kind to macramé, but now designers have brought it back in a modern way this summer.

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Fine Points: A Sleight of Hand With a Bit of String

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

A mother witnesses the appreciation for sophisticated shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” turn into a neighborhood addiction.

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Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy: My Life Needs New Episodes

Designers are beginning to promote their resort collections aggressively with runway shows and meet-and-greets with the press.

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Front Row: Resort Wear Never Rests

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

LONDON — Comme des Garçons is marking its 40th anniversary by bringing out a guerrilla-style, temporary brand called “Black” that epitomizes the style, the inventiveness and the originality of its founder.

Rei Kawakubo created black as the color of fashion’s rebel yell. She might have pronounced later, in her enigmatic way, that “red is the new black” and made that vivid color — checkered or regal — part of her repertoire.

But the Japanese designer did not just put women in black like a flock of crows flying across the brash 1980s. More significantly she, in the words of the innovative fashion retailer Carla Sozzani, “interpreted a change of mind in women and opened up a whole vision of femininity.”

Ms. Kawakubo, 66, is one of the great fashion forces from the last decades of the 20th century to now. Integral to her success is that she is too original to be pigeonholed — although others may see her as a symbol of feminism, judging her by the chic severity of an unvarnished face under a straight fringe, complex but plain clothes and flat shoes.

In fact, the guiding force of a fashion life that stretches way beyond clothes is an urge to think forward, encapsulated in new projects this month — from the “Black” stores to a collaboration with Vogue Nippon and an exhibition at the Paris store Colette.

Speaking in Japanese, which was translated by her husband and fellow fashion soul Adrian Joffe, Ms. Kawakubo talked about her early years in Tokyo, as she moved from studying ethics and literature to textile advertising to starting her own label — Comme des Garçons, or “like the boys” — in 1969.

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Positive Energy: Comme at 40

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

As anyone who works in the world of men’s style can tell you, men have become a lot more like women.

Now hold your horses. This is not about skirts or Adam Lambert or tinted moisturizer. It is about how men have cast off old habits and taken to shopping practices long the province of women. They have chased down suddenly-must-have items (see boat shoe, suit vest, stingy brim, scarf). They have joined the cult of the designer brand (see Dior, Margiela, Thom Browne), squeezed into slim silhouettes (see Atkins, South Beach) and inched up their hemlines (viz, a flash of ankle for trousers, a flash of thigh for shorts).

“It’s getting kind of ridiculous,” Michael Bastian said, sitting in his small Greenwich Village apartment. “Every time you turn a corner, there’s a guy wearing skinny jeans, an ironic cap, a low V-neck tee, vintagey high-tops and a scarf. It’s the equivalent of the ‘Sex and the City’ look that was such a thing for women a few years ago.”

As can be seen from the gentlemanly elegance of his quarters, Mr. Bastian is old-school. In his world, men are still from Mars. Or at least Dartmouth. And it seems he has a point. How else to explain his dark-horse rise as a men’s wear designer? In the four years since he left his job as the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman Men to start his own label, Mr. Bastian has found surprising success with an agenda so modest it almost seems radical: to give men slimmed-down, spiffed-up versions of the all-American clothes they have long loved. Military shirts, khakis, wool tweed trousers, rugby shirts, ski sweaters, two-button suits, polos, Western shirts, swim trunks. A lot of designers toss around the phrase “classics with a twist,” but Mr. Bastian delivers: the right classics and the right twist.

His semiannual shows are not wildly produced fantasies of tomorrowland or yesteryear that send the fashion press into raptures. At his informal runway presentations, the clothes just look … good. You don’t think: Yes, it really is all about the 19th-century samurai right now. You think: I want those pants.

“It actually makes him very important,” said John Jones, one of the owners of George Greene, a tony Chicago men’s wear boutique that sells Mr. Bastian alongside high-concept lines like Yohji Yamamoto, Thom Browne and Dior Homme. “I have conversations with people, about a show they saw in Paris or Milan or read about online, and they want to talk about it — and then it comes back to Michael. They’re curious about the others, but no one wants to wear the clothes. Michael’s things — they like the shows, sure — but more important, they like to wear them.”

In the looking-glass world of high fashion, this old-fashioned, build-a-better-mousetrap logic can be taken for cynicism, lack of talent or both, this being a world where flattery may indeed get you nowhere. (Mr. Bastian has been nominated three times for a men’s wear award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and lost twice; the third will be announced June 15.) He himself has heard people describe him as “a merchant” more than a designer.

“Is that supposed to be a slap?” he wondered. “A compliment? The hardest thing is to take something familiar and make it better. The easiest thing is to create something no one has ever seen before. There’s a reason no one’s ever seen it — because someone tried it, and it didn’t work in the real world.”

Mr. Bastian, 43, comes to this point of view with the pragmatism of an outsider. As recently as 10 years ago, he was working in marketing at Sotheby’s. He grew up in Lyons, N.Y., with a dream of one day moving to the city and working in advertising (a result, as one suspected, of “Bewitched” reruns). A brief post-college job at Abraham & Straus convinced him that fashion was not his métier, and he landed at Sotheby’s, staying seven years. Then, after a stint at Tiffany & Company, he went to work at Ralph Lauren, where he met Robert Burke. Not long after Mr. Burke went to Bergdorf Goodman as fashion director, he called Mr. Bastian to take over the men’s store.

“I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about men’s wear,’ ” Mr. Bastian recalled. “He said: ‘Just try it. What’s the worst that can happen?’ ”

At Bergdorf, Mr. Bastian adopted the store’s practice of making lists of things he thought should be in the store. When he couldn’t find them at fashion shows, he had them made for the store’s private label. After working at Bergdorf for almost five years, he took a solo idea — a line of plain, nicely tapered khakis — to Mr. Burke, who encouraged him to go out on his own.

The backbone of the new venture was simple: that list of things he knew guys wanted. The soul came from his own adolescence in the late 1970s, when GQ and the photographer Bruce Weber were introducing a new kind of man who was handsome, fit and well (but casually) dressed.

He learned other things at Bergdorf — like, the fine art of exorbitance. The closest Mr. Bastian comes to a signature look is that apotheosis of laissez-faire wear: cut-off shorts. He has carried them every season, priced at roughly $600.

He is, at least, open about his prices. “It’s crazy,” he said. “I can’t even afford my clothes.” A dress shirt from his line can cost $425; pants, $550; a sport coat, $1,150.

From the start, his collection has been made by the luxury brand Brunello Cucinelli, which has afforded him some of the best craftsmanship and materials in Italy. But Mr. Bastian concedes that the arrangement may have to end if he is to cut his prices by 30 percent, as he wants.

“Right now, it hurts a little too much,” he said. “It should hurt a little, but it shouldn’t kill ’em. That’s the law of designer clothes.”

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Michael Bastian: That Thing He Does

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

I’ve been poring over the summer issue of Acne Paper, which is devoted to erotic themes. Acne Paper, under the editorship of Thomas Persson, is fast becoming one of the best little fashion magazines. And, actually, it’s not so little. The new issue is weighty, around 130 pages, and the large format feels luxurious: the envy of mainstream glossies. Daniel Jackson’s portfolio (“L’Amant”) includes provocative portraits (of a felt-hatted Iris) and nudes. There’s a good interview with Azzedine Alaïa (with photos by Sarah Moon), but my favorite piece is the interview with Amy Greene, the 75-year-old widow of the photographer Milton Greene. The illustrator Joe Eula used to tell me wonderful stories about working with Greene. Anyway, I was happy to see this kind of story. The appeal of Acne Paper is the unfettered blend of the new and the nostalgic, except it doesn’t feel like nostalgia in this context. Maybe it just feels free.

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Bikini Mowing

This week, answers to readers’ questions about unwanted e-mail messages from the boss, being insulted by invitation and other issues.

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Social Q’s: Dear Boss, Omit Me