Deluxe, with fries.

Mandatory reading for all you label whores: "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost It's Luster" 

                                                                       by Dana Thomas.

This book is a true schooling on how little fashion houses sold their souls for a buck and sold you the ostrich satchel for twelve hundred bucks.
Dana Thomas, is a fashion writer for Newsweek.   She explores the evolution of luxury, beginning as something exclusive and elitist, and mutating to its current globalized state.  The basis of luxury lies in its rarity, less really is more.  So the fact that 40% of the Asian continent owns at least one piece of Louis Vuitton shoots rarity right in the ass.
Thomas argues more money is being made but mediocrity is at an all time high and prices are too.
She says, "Today the average handbag cost 10 to 12 times its production cost."
Commerce trumps art :-(

All Aboard!

In my daily perusal of Vogue.com, I ran across a making-of-video for Sean "Diddy" Combs's (aka Puffy), Vogue shoot. The shoot concept revolves around Puffy's upcoming album, 'The Last Train to Paris'. The idea is Puffy is on a train for 3 days and has a seductive (and I assume very naughty) encounter with a beautiful woman (model, Natalia Vodianova).  Of course the images produced are sexy and glamorous; very true to Puffy's aesthetic.
Shot by shutterbabe extraordinaire Annie Leibovitz, Puffy & Co. are old Hollywood meets ole Harlem, à la Casablanca noir. The whole Parisian noir aesthetic really seduces my imagination, it's clever and covertly sexy. Real sexiness happens between your ears...if I wore glasses they'd be totally fogging up right now.
I don't think the shoot is anything particularly revolutionary, but I do think it's a nice evolution from the first Puffy/Vogue collaboration a decade ago. Evolution is one of the essential elements to sustaining relevance, if you're not evolving what exactly are you doing?!

Swimming with sharks.

On February 1st Kelly Cutrone will be raising hell, I guess the devil really does wear Prada. Cutrone's new reality show, "Kell on Earth" is debuting next week on Bravo (kick rocks project runway!). From the look of the preview, she will be the next over-quoted reality-tv sensation. But like an actual real sensation, not like the sensationalism a la Jersey Shore. Kelly, although she looks like she hasn't slept since Jesus was a boy, is a true story.
"What the fashion world looks like and what the business is are two completely different things," say it again Kelly, say it again! This show will absolutely counteract all those nostalgic notions of fashion being "fabulous" and "glamorous"--Rachel Zoe deceived you.
Cutrone is whip smart, wickedly wry, and acutely insolent, this show is going to kick ass.