September 2011

Letters to a Fellow Perfumer: Mandy Aftel & Dawn Spencer Hurwitz (ep. 3)

September 30, 2011

September 1st, 2011 / Berkeley, CA Dear Dawn, I’ve been all over the map creating floral chords based on the pairing of tuberose and osmanthus, and labeling each bottle “Dawn 1″ or “Dawn 2″ and so on. I’m now up to “Dawn 8”, if that tells you anything. I tried some variations with poplar buds, [...]

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Luxury & Fashion Biz News: September 23, 2011 (Second Hand Bags are Big Business, Middle Class Shoppers are a Game Changer, and Twitter Loves Burberry)

September 24, 2011

1.) Used Handbags in Hong Kong Means Big Business: “Byron Yiu once eked out a living by hawking sunglasses at a Hong Kong street stall, but has made his fortune by turning traditional shopping habits around and re-selling rich women’s luxury handbags . . . ‘It has become a culture in Hong Kong, the ladies [...]

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Luxury & Fashion Biz News: September 16th, 2011 (New York Fashion Week madness, Missoni for Target mania, and Designer Perfume rumors)

September 17, 2011

1.) New York Fashion Week wrapped itself up Thursday evening with the Marc Jacobs show (soon to be known as “The Head Designer for Dior” . . . ?), and now all the fashion press have packed up and headed off to London, to be followed by Milan, to be followed by Paris, to be [...]

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Visionaire 58: “Spirit” (A Tribute to Alexander McQueen)

September 15, 2011

Before Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February of 2010, he considered the idea of a collaborative art-fashion project with Visionaire, “a multi-format album of fashion and art produced in exclusive, numbered limited editions” — which sounds kind of awful and pretentious in cold hard print, but the reality of the Visionaire experience is a passionate [...]

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Koto Bolofo: La Maison

September 14, 2011

Koto Bolofo is a veteran photographer known for fashion spreads and product features for international publications like Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair, and global brands such as Hermès, Banana Republic, Kate Spade and Burberry, but his latest effort is an eleven-volume boxed set of pictorials chronicling the hard-working artisans behind the success of the House [...]

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I Was Out of Town (or, “Why there’s no Luxury Biz post this week”)

September 10, 2011

Every once in a while, I’m forced to unchain myself from my laptop and do real-world things, which screws up my schedule and puts me way behind on my research for the weekly Luxury/Fashion Biz report. Case in point, this past week, my partner and I traveled to Arrowtown to meet up with the architect [...]

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Luxury & Fashion Biz News: September 2nd, 2011 (High Fashion Goes Gangsta, Steuben Crystal Goes out of Business and the Economy Gets Stressful)

September 3, 2011

1.) “We’re Not Your Grandma’s Luxury Brand!” – High-Fashion Goes Gangsta: “Lanvin’s new campaign, which has its designer Alber Elbaz dance to the tunes of Pitbull, went viral this week, while female rapper Rye Rye got to debut Prabal Gurung’s resort collection in the music video to “New Thing.” Meanwhile, almost all of the tracks [...]

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Liz Zorn Perfumes: Soivohle Meerschaum, a New Pour Homme Line, and Turning Japanese

September 1, 2011

Even though the term “artisan” is in ever greater danger of crashing smack into the brick wall of mass-market misappropriation (see: Domino’s artisan pizza), it’s still a term that holds value, drawing a clear line between small brands that employ mass-market production methods and the skilled, individual craftspeople who roll up their sleeves and do [...]

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