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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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Today, the CFDA Incubator welcomes its newest group of initiates: Antonio Azzuolo, Arielle Shapiro of Ari Dein, Doug and Ben Burkman of Burkman Bros, Christian Cota, Emanuela Duca, Rick Hendry and Marc Daniels of Isaora, Luis Fernandez of Number: Lab, Reece Solomon of Reece Hudson, Timo Weiland and Alan Eckstein of Timo Weiland, and Maayan Zilberman and Nikki Dekker of The Lake & Stars. The selection committee of industry leaders, including Style.com’s executive editor, Nicole Phelps, carefully picked this group of ten young designers to follow in the footsteps of the inaugural dozen designers who kicked off the program in February 2010. We have watched the careers of current all-stars in the Incubator, like Prabal Gurung and Bibhu Mohapatra, flourish during their short time in the “fashion frat,” and here, we check in with the newest pledge “class II” before they move into 209 West 38th Street.

Macy’s is upping its high-fashion game of late. Karl Lagerfeld’s line for the retailer hits stores at the end of the month, and last week, the department store announced Anna Dello Russo (she of Vogue Nippon and umpteen street-style blogs) as the guest editor at large of its in-house INC line. Dello Russo styled the new campaign and stars in it alongside Karolina Kurkova (above); for Fashion’s Night Out, she and the Czech supe will greet guests at Macy’s Herald Square flagship, too. She wasn’t on hand last night—this being August and she being Italian she was, of course, on vacation—but her new project was fêted in New York all the same, and a host of downtown girls showed up to celebrate. Sky Ferreira worked the DJ booth while guests sipped bubbly and models paraded around in the collection, and Harley Viera-Newton, Chelsea Leyland, and Becka Diamond all came for a look. Solange Knowles arrived with 7-year-old son Juelz in tow, who was looking a little displeased. Was it the flashbulbs? “He’s definitely used to it,” she laughed. “He’s just upset because my iPhone ran out of batteries.”
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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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For Salvor Projects’ Ross Menuez, if it can’t be made nearby, he won’t make it. When the industrial designer-turned-fashion designer opened his Lower East Side shop earlier this year, he stocked it exclusively with pieces made at his nearby studio.
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Valentino’s creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, have been showing their men’s collection quietly, in the label’s Place Vendome showroom. (Fanfare or not, their Spring ‘12 collection, left, was one of the best of the menswear season.) For Fall, they’ll take their act to a bigger stage: It was announced today that the duo will be the guest designers at Pitti Uomo 81 in Florence this January. “Their work combines a dynamic, contemporary spirit with the sartorial savoir-faire of a house that wrote a huge chapter in the history of fashion,” Pitti Immagine CEO Raffaello Napoleone said in a statement today. “Their visionary yet pragmatic approach combines tradition and innovation without interruptions.” The show will be presented Wednesday, January 11, 2012.

It’s a Versace moment. Donatella’s new collection for H&M, set to hit stores November 19, has sent the blogosphere into a near-unprecedented tizzy, and her Spring ‘12 collections (for women and men) were standouts of the season. In the first issue of Style.com/Print, Tim Blanks sits down with the designer to find out what’s behind the dramatic resurgence of the label and how she’s harnessed the Versace history for a new age. Spoiler alert: A new crew of young British collaborators (including Christopher Kane) and fans (like Lady Gaga) who revere the Versace classics of the eighties and nineties both play parts. With her fast-fashion collection, Donatella set out to revive those classics. “All these people reacting to what was in the archives—Gaga, the people in London, the young kids in the office—they’re 25 years old, they’re obsessed,” Versace told Blanks. “They don’t know. So we did a best of Versace for H&M, a greatest hits, from the beginning until now.”
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