alresale

The runway music for Prabal Gurung’s Fall ‘11 collection: “Addicted to Love”—as interpreted by Florence + the Machine. It was a deliberate choice. For his Fall offering, Gurung channeled one of amour’s great addicts, the lovelorn Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations. “It’s a book that I was given when I was probably 6 or 7 years old,” the designer explains. “At that time I was kind of unclear about who she was—she’s a crazy old lady, that’s what I thought. As I got older and kept going back to it, [I found that] there’s something extremely, extremely sad, but all of us can somehow relate to her. There’s something beautifully melancholic and romantic about giving everything up for love, giving so much.” The result: a catwalk full of runway girls imagined as young, still hopeful but already fraying Havishams.
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Footwear designer Manolo Blahnik has been in the business since the early seventies. Over the decades, there have been ups and downs, of course, but through it all, the man and the brand have achieved the status of a modern classic. The return of the pointy-toed pump for Fall has arbiters—Footwear News among them —calling it a Manolo moment. Blahnik himself demurs. “I have never had a perception about whether it’s my time or someone else’s time,” he told the paper. “I don’t think I have a time.”
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