Dov Charney Doesn't Want Your Help With American Apparel, Thank You
Latest- American Apparel is struggling along. But in addition to its other problems, it is facing a “cash crunch.” Dov Charney is reluctant to sell to more outside investors, however, because he wants to hold onto his 53% majority stake. [NYPost]
- This way for all your Lanvin for H&M news: Fashionologie has the complete lookbook, all 70 images of it. Garance Dumont is the name of that plus-size model we noticed in the video released yesterday. Otherwise, our affection for this collection has cooled considerably given that the prices are steep: Dresses are a whopping $149-$249, women’s shoes are $99, the necklaces start at $29.95, and on the men’s side, blazers and the trench coat are $149, shoes are $79.95, and even the shirts start at $49.95. Racked has detail shots of both collections. [Fashionologie, Racked, Racked]
- Lanvin for H&M in fact “has the highest number of high-priced items of any previous launch,” reports Women’s Wear Daily. H&M will open its U.S. stores two hours early, at 8 a.m., on November 20th, to deal with the anticipated demand. “Madonna and J.Lo have asked for pieces from the collection, but we’re not lending out clothes until the runway show on Nov. 18,” said a company spokesperson. [WWD]
- With cotton prices at record highs, expect cotton garments to cost more. [NYTimes]
- Which is perhaps why these cotton adult-sized onesies cost £80-£120. Sadie Frost thinks they’re all the rage, you guys! This is totes the new Snuggie. [Daily Mail]
- Here is a morning message from Kanye West, who gave this speech when he accepted the Stylemaker of the Year award from the Accessories Council: “I thank Marc Jacobs so much for giving me the opportunity to design a shoe for Louis Vuitton, but the thing that broke my heart most was when they said, ‘You’re finished. The shoe’s finished.’ When it was ready it was like the dream of putting together the fabric and having the energy that I knew of being a street kid, of being a boy out of Chicago, and enjoying every day and the way I can connect with this. It’s like, you can’t play the video game anymore.” Kanye really, really took his sneaker collection for Louis Vuitton seriously, you see. “What compromises do we have to make? How many compromises do we have to make every day in this field just to keep things going? Just to be able to sell a product? Fashion breaks my heart. You know, when they do a magazine of number one New Yorkers or something like that and I’m blatantly left out I feel like…it hurts me. And I just appreciate the people in this room that are open minded enough to remember when they were a five-year-old. To remember when they could color outside the lines, to remember when they could give their opinion, honesty without affecting their job, without it affecting their well being.” [The Cut]
- Fellow celebrity with a shoe line Maria Sharapova is designing her own wedding shoes. [People]
- French regulators are looking into Bernard Arnault‘s stealth purchase of some 17% of Hermès, which is family-owned and defiantly proud of its independence. Through a variety of creatively named intermediaries and shell companies, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy was able to snap up nearly 20% of Hermès without announcing its intentions publicly. In fact, Arnault only phoned the head of Hermès hours before making his public announcement of the purchases. Hermès finds LVMH’s attentions distressing, despite Arnault’s claim that he is not mounting a hostile takeover. (Hermès may feel it has reason to be concerned: Arnault built LVMH’s luxury portfolio in the 1980s, when it was a construction and engineering company, largely via hostile takeovers and other financial cunning/skullduggery.) [WWD]
- Meanwhile, the Hermès family says hat if Bernard Arnault wants to be “friendly,” he should sell the stake immediately and withdraw. Like that’ll happen, but hey, it’s worth a shot. [Le Figaro]
- Ralph Lauren: “I started with neckties, delivering them in a bomber jacket and jeans. I was so excited about what I was doing. When I got a cab instead of walking, I thought I was hitting the big time.” [WWD]
- Heidi Klum takes Halloween as seriously as her costumes would lead one to expect. Days later, she pointed to her back and said, “If you feel back here, I still have glue. Taking it off was worse than getting it on. The contact lenses took me 45 minutes to get in. The whole outfit took three hours to get ready, although I’d been planning it for months..” [P6]
- Julian MacDonald says being on Karl Lagerfeld‘s design team could be a harrowing experience. “He used to carry around an old fashioned black fan and when you were being difficult he’d hit you with it,” says the Welsh designer. “He’d taunt you then hit you with it — it was all done in a joking way and never done very hard, but I do remember it quite clearly. It was his alternative to a stick I suppose. Now Karl’s signature is his silver jewellery but then it was these specially crafted fans. I’m quite glad I had to deal with the fans and not the jewellery. You’d get knocked out if he jokingly hit you with any of those.” [Vogue UK]
- Here’s a first look at Thom Browne‘s highly anticipated foray into women’s wear. We are gonna start
savingpraying for that mermaid-print suit now. [Jak & Jil] - Alexander McQueen, Zappos, and Saks Fifth Avenue have settled with the Hells Angels. The motorcycle club sued the fashion companies for selling what it said were clothes and accessories emblazoned with its skull-and-wings logo; some of the McQueen items were even called, rather unhelpfully, things like “Hells Skulls Jacquard Box Dress,” and “Hells Ring.” According to the terms of the settlement, the companies must destroy all unsold merchandise, as well as attempt to recall all of the sold merchandise, and destroy it. And also presumably pay a cash settlement. [WWD]
- Um. Someone made Carla Bruni into a cartoon superhero. [Vogue UK]
- Kira Plastinina, everybody’s least favorite Russian orange juice oligarch’s daughter-with-a-clothing-line, is back! Bankruptcy in the U.S. couldn’t keep her down; she’s now wholesaling a line called Lublu, which apparently means, “I think you should pay for overpriced pink clothes designed by an unimaginably wealthy teenager,” in Russian. [WWD]
- Alexa Chung: “Modelling taught me how important your brain and personality are to being happy. I was happier the minute I started doing TV work instead of modelling because I suddenly had an outlet for my opinions. I’d rather be told I was funny or clever than I looked nice.” [Vogue UK]
- Gisele Bündchen: “I will never retire.” [Fashionologie]
- We will definitely be reading Veruschka‘s memoir, Double Life, when it comes out next year. [Daily Mail]
- Natalia Vodianova wore that gold sparkly Balmain dress eighteen thousand magazines have put on their covers this fall to the Harper’s Bazaar Woman of the Year party, which makes sense in a way since Natalia Vodianova wore that gold sparkly Balmain dress when it was the gold sparkly Balmain dress’s turn to grace the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. However, a member of the news media came to believe over the course of the evening in question that Natalia Vodianova may not have shaved her legs during the previous twenty-four hours, and thankfully, that person has helpfully provided an Xtreme close-up view of Natalia Vodianova’s legs, so you can Judge For Yourself. [NYDN]
- Crystal Renn re-iterated her very logical suggestion to make fashion sample sizes bigger. “I think that the solution would be to make the sample size an 8 or a 10. It’s currently a 2, or a 4 if you’re very lucky. If you made it an 8 or a 10, then bigger girls — even 12s and 14s — could somehow get into the clothes, and also the 8s and 6s and 4s and 2s could have the clothes pinned on…Because right now, we’re all talking all the time about how we want to see fuller-figured women in fashion, but that’s really impossible unless we have the clothes.” Also, she reads your blog comments. Take it away down there, ladies and germs! [The Cut]
- Agyness Deyn has co-founded a website called Naag with Fiona Byrne, the point of which seems unclear. They say: “NAAG IS FIONA AND AGGY AND OUR FRIENDS, TALKING ABOUT THINGS WE LIKE AND DO AND SEE AND FEEL. WE LIVE IN NEW YORK AND WE LIKE TO HANG OUT.” Sample articles: “Chanel Flats Are A Bargain When You
Are An International SupermodelWork Out Cost Per Wear.” [Naag] - Yesterday, Fashionista wrote that it had heard that head of Condé Nast Digital Jamie Pallot would be leaving the company. (Condé has been delivering its many online portals over to their individual magazine editors/publishers for editorial and advertising sales control, leaving Condé Nast Digital with such properties as Reddit and Epicurious in its bailiwick.) But Pallot says he is not leaving his position, and several Condé spokespeople also say the item is not true. [WWD]
- Google‘s Marisa Mayer wishes fashion websites would use less Flash animation, which adds to load times and is hard to search, and wouldn’t paginate so much. “I almost always go to this page and click ‘view all,’ ” she says. “Because the truth is, there’s only about 100 items, and people can scan them and scan them quickly…Why not just get rid of pagination on these sites entirely?” [WWD]
- YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has left the company to work on a clothing company he co-founded called Hlaska. (The name is a contraction of “Hawaii” and “Alaska,” two states that are hot and cold, small and large, “and represent the last of America’s expansion,” says Hurley.) “While a menswear company can’t ‘go viral’ in the Dancing Baby sense, you must ask yourself what makes something spread so fast. It’s people’s experiences,” says Hurley. “We make stuff we want to use. We make wallets, bags and shirts we’d want to see sold in stores. In that sense it’s exactly like YouTube. We wanted something that wasn’t available, so we built it ourselves.” [Forbes]
- In other fashion/technology news, Twitter co-founder Dick Costolo says that Twitter feeds that are more personal work better for brands than dry company accounts. He favorably contrasted Stefano Gabbana‘s against the official D&G Twitter. Gabbana‘s feed is where the designer memorably admitted he had no idea who Stella McCartney was. [WWD]
- An enormous Anthropologie store has opened in Chicago. [Racked]
- Hugo Boss‘s net income during the third quarter rose some 79% over last year’s results, to $118.3 million. [WWD]
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