Yes, it’s more Marc Jacobs news! The Jacobs show, aka the most-anticipated show of NY Fashion week due to the designer’s ability to turn on a dime season after season, has just emailed all of us fashion types to announce they are moving the show from Monday, the usual slot, to Thursday at 8pm due to “weather and production problems”.
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Briefly in Milan for the furniture fair, I was chatting at a Poltrona Frau dinner to Luca di Montezemolo, whose private equity firm Charme owns Frau, when he announced happily that this weekend he and Diego Della Valle, chairman of Tod’s (along with Gianni Punzo, Bank Intesa Sanpaolo, Generali and the French rail company SNCF), will become the proud parents of yet another luxury item: Europe’s first fully privately-owned high speed luxury train
The new NTV high-speed Italo train. Image by Getty
You’ve heard of eco-tourism, and experience tourism? Well, in a new report entitled “Around the world,” HSBC has identified yet another sub-niche in the industry: accessories tourism, or the tendency of the emerging consumer to plan their trips according to where the handbags are cheapest.
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Harvey Weinstein is accessorising his production slate.
The Project Runway kingpin realised before everyone that fashion was both visual enough and competitive enough to make great reality employment TV. Now, according to Nikki Finke’s Deadline, he has created a spin-off series along the lines of Project Handbag (and shoes, and jewellery, and… hats?) that will feature accessory designers, and has sold it to Lifetime.
Harvey Weinstein watches Heidi Klum at the Project Runway Finalists Fashion Show in 2008 — Getty Images
I can’t quite decide if what is officially, and super-creatively, titled Project Runway: Accessories, will work.
Certainly, no one can argue with the success of the parent show.
On the upside, accessories are famously easier to sell than ready-to-wear: they’re priced more accessibly; independent of sizing and thus simpler to manufacture and more broadly appealing; and widely touted, these days, as recession-friendly, the way to change an outfit without breaking your budget by buying, say, a whole new coat. Accessories are having a moment, and TV might as well exploit that. Read more
The expansion of Jimmy Choo continues apace as its owner, the private equity firm TowerBrook (which bought the company 3.5 years ago), mulls over the options for recapitalisation with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Whether they decide an on IPO, a sale to another private equity firm, or to keep their investment for another 3-5 years, all options on the table according to an insider, is to be decided, but in the meantime the product side of the business under Chief Creative Officer Tamara Mellon has sprouted another extension: travel bags.
Here they are: Read more
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Vanessa has been the FT’s fashion editor since 2003, and is based in New York, though she lived in London for 12 years.
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