For Lacoste's 75th Anniversary they've collaborated with Visionaire to produce brightly-hued Lacoste polos. There are 12 different designs in all, and each design was created by a different artist, ranging from the one and only Karl Lagerfeld to acclaimed director Pedro Almodovar. Some other artists to create designs for the collection are David Byrne, Michael Stipe, and painter Richard Phillips.

The polos will be available in Visionaire issue 54 SPORT, which will be their first wearable publication. They used the most advanced printing technology to produce the full color/coverage photography printed on the lacoste polos. SPORT is produced as four different sets, each containing three printed Lacoste polo shirts embedded within its pages: one large, one medium, and one small, as well as a book featuring all twelve images. The sets will set you back a pretty penny but then again doesn't everything ?

Also check out the Collette online store to purchase the Lacoste limited-edition line of sports shoes and shirts with Alife Rivington Club New York (A.R.C).
And speaking of Collette..

As if you already didn't need more reason to go to Fashion Week in NYC. Paris fashion mecca Collette will be doing a one week limited-edition collaboration with the Gap. Talk about day and night--whatever they come up with should be pretty intresting considering the diversity between the two stores. The clothes will only be available for one week starting on Sept 5th.

--Mikey.

Priestess NYC is the work of financial-analyst-turn-fashion-designer Cody Ross, whose been enjoying a remarkable buzz as of late. His super-sexy and futuristic pieces have recently been picked up by Collette and Lane Crawford, and they currently sell at such NYC boutiques Sucre and TG-170 along with Clothes Minded (VA) and a number of other shops internationally. Fans of his designs include Leigh Lezark of Misshapes fame, Juliette Lewis and probably you if you don't shy away from bright colors, strong shapes and textures with oomph.

Here's an interview with the seriously sweet Cody Ross:

Q. What is the concept behind Priestess NYC?

A. I like to think of it as 'a contemporary take on the spirit of vintage-punk combined with futurist influences.' . .It's really about elegant street mix and nuanced styling that flows from Judy and Jane Jetson dresses, lots of late-80's Vivienne Westwood references and bombastic Futurist themes. Hence, lots of metallic finishes and sheen representing speed, energy and modernism that will definitely carry-over into forthcoming collections!

Q. You grew up in Dallas, lived in Asia, and now you're living in NYC. How does this affect your design?

A. Living in lots of Cities has definitely given me a more global perspective that I try to integrate into the looks. Dallas is kinda commercial but with a great spirit, and people there are increasingly willing to embrace new things. Shanghai (and China) is changing at break-neck speed and the transition-dynamics are super-cool, fast and there's lots of competitive tension there! And NYC is exuberant and swelling with

cool ideas. NYC = raw-material for the mind and is the perfect laboratory for a designer! So I just try to embody those perspectives into themes and styles.

Q. What were your inspirations this season--I love that gold metallic top and noticed you used a lot of metallics. Tell us about why metallics are playing such a big role in your design this season?

A. I've tried to incorporate some 'Futurist' themes. Hence, lots of metallic finishes and sheen representing speed, acute energy and modernism . I know metallics are a bit played-out but they still captivate me and I'm really keen on shiny textures and materials!

Q. If you could get your clothes on one famous person who would it be?

A. Hmmmm, besides designer/model Greta Cavazzoni, I think M.I.A. is really cool. Natalie Portman is cool, too, because she is the quintessential smart/elegant/independent girl!

Q. What does the future hold for Priestess NYC?

A. Hopefully lots more FAST-FASHION FUN and lots of creative output!

Priestess NYC

West 4th and West 11th
New York City
By Appointment Only.

Check out the Priestess NYC website.

--Valentina

L'hanno beccata a fare la questua (a chiedere una colletta, che dir si voglia) ai fotografi e ai fan che stazionavano fuori dalla porta del suo appartamento londinese, Amy Winehouse: pare sia riuscita a rimediare una quarantina di sterline. E proprio in queste ore il suo nuovo portavoce ha smentito la notizia della sua imminente partenza per una nota casa di cura in Israele. Ci ha provato diverse volte a disintossicarsi, la cantante inglese. 25 anni, e la vita rovinata da abuso di alcol, droghe e disturbi alimentari che l'hanno portata a perdere ben 4 taglie in due anni. Entra ed esce dal carcere, come il suo maritino, e fa un po' impressione alla vista. Però, ragazzi, una voce incredibile. [audio http://www.francesconardi.it/astridnausicaa/black.mp3] Back to black - Amy Winehouse (Back to black, 2006)

GIGI is a perfect respite. The story moves quickly, regardless of the French drawing room setting, and it is both funny and biting. Each conversation between fifteen-(and a half)-year-old Gilberte and her socially-minded, ladylike aunts is so liberally salted with such critiques on Gilberte's form and mannerisms that it makes me grateful to live in such a blatantly unladylike time period. "Don't gesture," Aunt Alicia reprimands, "it makes you look common." "Don't eat too many almonds; they add weight to the breasts," and so on. They barrage Gilberte relentlessly with lessons in decorum and class, and somehow Gilberte manages to resist, in an innocent, childlike way, their social bullying.

This was my first encounter with Colette, and I enjoyed the book, very much. GIGI is a light read that packs a punch, and now I'm antsy to get back to Accordian Crimes and to the bookstore to purchase another of Colette's books.

RATING: 3

Artist: Collette
Album: Sushi 4000 the Return of Spectacular Japanese Clubpop

Tracks :

1. Samba de Sunny Side Up

The work of the Californian sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, under their label Rodarte, captures in brush and blood red the wild, dark romance behind this summer's arty outfits. The duo have turned the idea of dip-dyeing and painterly layers, on nests of mohair as much as silken fabrics, into an art form.

  Beautiful indeed! Now the duo are receiving an international recognition. During the upcoming haute couture collections, Rodarte will fill the windows of Colette, the Paris store which has supported the label from the start

From the moment in 2006 that the sisters came to New York for the first time with 10 dresses - having been picked out in the international Ecco Domani designer contest - they found themselves on the cover of Women's Wear Daily and then taken up by Vogue.

Maybe Hollywood will wave its magic Disney wand and the sisters will be handed the studio of a Paris couture house.  (iht)

The Walkmen_Old Forgotten Soldier.mp3

The subletter is this recent LA transplant would-be theater actor (all right, so he got gazillions of points from me for loving the theater. He managed to cash them all in pretty fast.) His name is Greg, and he kept asking me when I'd blog about him.

I don't know, I said, should I write about that insane chick who showed up here the other night and sat in the kitchen until you got home?

No, he said, not about that!

I told him to wait until he did something, and then I'd write about it. Dude's general M.O. is not doing things; he does not do things like, for example, taking out the trash, buying toilet paper, washing the dishes, or refraining from eating all of our Wheat Thins. Then, last night, he did something!

Greg's room had flooded weeks ago, because the radiator broke. He had already used my bike towel to sop it up, and when he left to go to rehearsal he said Emma, can you keep an eye on my room for me? I said yes, and then when the flooding got much worse, I used Spencer's sheets, too, because we had no other towels left.

The Walkmen_Many Rivers To Cross.mp3

When he got home he thanked me, and I said, But these are Spencer's, so can you just take them to the laundromat? He said sure. Once the flooding stopped he put all of the wet sheets and towels into plastic bags in the corner of the kitchen. After about a week, they started smelling; also, it's an extremely small kitchen.

Finally, when I was bringing my clothing to the laundry the other morning, Collette said I don't think Greg's ever going to do anything with those wet towels. I said she was probably right, even though I didn't want to admit it, and I lugged the whole smelly mess to a laundromat on Rivington, instead of my usual laundromat on Stanton, because I was so embarrassed by the grossness. Greg never asked where the towels went.

The Walkmen_Don't Forget Me.mp3

Tonight when he came home I said Greg, can you give me some money for those towels? I brought them to the laundry.

He said, Uh, I don't think that was my fault.

I said it happened in your room. How about eight dollars, that's what it usually is, I haven't gotten them yet because I haven't been home from work in time. If you think eight dollars is too much, give me less.

He said But do you think it was my fault?

Greg, it happened in your room! If it had happened in my room I would have dealt with it.

He said but you put those towels in there while I was gone.

I said you asked me to. It was what anyone would have done, what about the people downstairs? And they were Spencer's sheets! Which you said you'd get cleaned.

I said that?

Yes!

Are you okay? You seem riled up.

I am not riled up, Greg, I am upset that you left twenty pounds of wet towels in our kitchen until they grew mold. I am not riled up. And, I'm pissed that you don't pull your weight as a roommate. But fine, it's almost over.

I don't, I don't pull my weight as a roommate?

You don't take out the trash, you don't do the dishes.

I've been trying to take out the trash, and look, I've been working a lot--

I work a lot too--

And I know Collette's left me notes about the dishes, but one of those times, there were, like two or three dishes in the sink that were mine. And I'm working during the day and she's here.

Like a housewife? Whatever. It's almost over. You're moving out. I just need you to pay me for the laundry.

Okay. But also, things have happened to me, too.

Things have happened to you?

Well, like, someone's been eating a lot of my food.

Oh. Sorry. I mean, sucks.

Like, last night. I had an apple here, that I bought because I was feeling sick, and I went to bed and it was there and when I woke up it wasn't.

Okay. I didn't eat your apple, Greg.

Really? Because Collette didn't sleep here last night, it was just you, and then it wasn't here. I bought an apple and an orange, and then the apple was gone.

Are you serious? I'd tell you if I ate your apple.

Okay.

Okay.

Are you all right? Everything's all right?

Everything is great. Just pay me for the laundry.

I went into my room and started typing. Furiously. Five minutes passed. He was sitting in the kitchen.

So, you really didn't eat it?

No!

Okay. It's just that, you know, I've lost a lot.

What are you talking about?

I mean, not lost a lot. But, you know, food. I hate to have to ask.

Oh god. I'm never even here. And I would tell you if I ate your apple. It's an apple.

[Buy more of The Walkmen here. Buy some Harry Nilsson here while you're at it; the above tracks are from the 2006 album "Pussy Cats," which is a complete cover of the 1974 Nilsson album of the same name. John Lennon produced it, and they originally wanted to call it "Cat Pussies" or something; a veritable embarrassment of riches and also our favorite things.]

Our other favorite thing is Hamilton writing songs about us:

The Walkmen_Emma Get Me A Lemon.mp3

I feel like I should post a Missed Connection just to tell the trim, middle-aged museum store cashier that I really like his round tortoiseshell spectacles and that I'm even willing to overlook how 1997 shiny his shirt was.

While he was counting my change, it occurred to me that my helper might be a seasonal employee. This discombobulated me. I felt homesick for him, for the places he'd been where he didn't need extra money in December.

What does he do the rest of the time? This is a question I would put in my Missed Connection. Does he live in Hell's Kitchen, or have his wealthier, aseasonal brethren priced him out? He takes yoga classes, right?

Does he wear those ties the museum store sells? I love them and I want to date someone with a frilly, farmy, neo-Band aesthetic sensibility so I can buy some for him. I will also be making this imaginary boyfriend wear suede vests. There is a reason he is imaginary.  I know that!

My high school boyfriend literally had a week's worth of vintage paisley print button-down shirts with bell-bottom sleeves. In my Missed Connection, I will tell the Museum Store clerk that he has helped me realize that I've spent the last six years trying to duplicate perfection.

On Saturday night my friends and I hailed a cab but oops! It was a very old limousine!

Squishing into a limousine is a surefire way to regress. Some people did the Wave.  It seemed like the right choice at the time.

I decided that it was absolutely essential that I take a picture of the plastic champagne flutes. Someone probably got her bra snapped.

Later, at the party, I was subject to a fabulously adroit pick-up line. Instead of wondering something about whether I'd like to go home with him later, this person leaned over and asked "would you like to have brunch tomorrow?"

I stammered, and laughed, and then we didn't have anything especially not brunch because I have no romantic tenacity.  In the middle, he asked "has this ever happened to you before?" and I felt like I was suffering from emotional erectile dysfunction.  I am glad for the syntactical inspiration, though. I could have used it with my museum clerk. I could have said "Would you like me to transcribe your life story as you tell it to me, or should I just tape record for now and we'll publish later?" Skipping steps is useful, and coy. Collette and I will put that in our dating manual, right after the section entitled "Why Do You Not Know You Are A Creep?"

Because we have known for quite some time!

Amherst, 1985

The first person I saw sleeping on my kitchen floor wrapped up in the large white thing was Spencer; I came home early last Saturday morning and unlocked the front door to him, enveloped, and to Collette, smoking, and curled as usual on the bench behind the kitchen table, and to Kimmy leaning against the doorframe of James's room, and to James draped with the puddles along the counter next to the sink.

My first thought was that Spencer was on the run from the law. My second thought was that I was about to get hassled for sleeping around.

Spencer grinned.

Emma, where were you?

Jersey City, 1987

No one else seemed particularly interested and Spencer wasn't acting like an outlaw so I grinned back, said I had to get ready for work, and went to brush my teeth.

This weekend, I was the only one in the apartment on Saturday night, so when I woke up around 4am and thought my bedroom could not possibly be hotter, I surrendered to the kitchen floor.

Everything was a mess when I woke up. I felt awful, I felt awfully like I'd come on to the cab driver on the way home in addition to everyone else, and I felt like there was no possible way I'd be able to leave the house in time to clean up the eggs I'd made or do anything about the avalanche of dresses that periodically descend on my bedroom.

The kitchen rose before me, refrigerator and coffee maker castigatory in turn.

I was a terrible roommate. I wasn't going to clean up the egg pan, and only the grace of god would ensure that I didn't leave the burner on, too. Lily had needed to send me home from the party the night before, and I had grabbed the hand mixer from Fred when we were making dinner because I'd been feeling left out! I'd probably ruined the homemade mayonnaise. I was devoid of social skills, I'd hit on a cabbie, I'd Hit On A Cabbie, and instead of making Lily a gift of my old bike I'd left it locked outside in Williamsburg for so long it got stolen. I thought Petrarch was from Ancient Greece!

with Aunt Martha, Jersey City, 1988

I went, just as I did the Sunday morning before, to brush my teeth. I glared at myself in the mirror and then turned to look at the shelves to my left. Sitting in front of the Q-Tip container was a broken mug.The mug had my face on it; when I was in fourth grade my father's Uncle Dick (no, seriously, Uncle Dick) had given my family two mugs, on with a photograph of me, the other with a photograph of Hannah. Uncle Richard died three years later; this may have lent the mugs a certain gravitas, but they are no heirlooms. They were both little Kodak mail order deals; akin to my prized Pedro Martinez mouse pad but more faded. The best present Uncle Dick ever gave us was the time he bought a toupee and let Hannah and I try it on. Such delight is eternal.

La Jolla, 1989

In the mug picture I have buck teeth and I'm squinting. I am on the beach, and on my shoulders you can see the straps of the frayed, purple Gap bathing suit I wore until it was more of a wedgie than a bathing suit. My right arm is spindly, and it's holding my hair out of my face. My hair cut, and really the rest of me, too, carries a whiff of the Eleanor Roosevelt. My nose is highly freckled.

At a certain point in the evolution of my coyness, I realized that men might find my childhood self charming. This makes me a reprehensible narcissist, I think, especially because my childhood self was bookish, charmless, and obsessed with the early American colonies. I regularly wore bonnets and a long black dress my mother had sewn for my Pilgrim Girl Halloween costume. What whimsy.

Ocean City, 1994

Back before (in that storied era that ended three minutes ago) I understood how reprehensible this was , I used to give the mug to men.

I was in a horrendous, destructive, painful long distance relationship with a certain Dan from Los Angeles for some time, and I sent the mug to him in a package with a book of Frank O'Hara poems and some spice cookies. The next time I visited Los Feliz I tried to figure out if he'd been using it. He only really drank Emergen-C, so I was slightly relieved when it seemed like he hadn't.

I took the mug back when we broke up; he was living on the East Coast by then, which meant the mug had traveled with us in a box in his trunk the summer he'd moved.

Later, the mug and I lived with Kyle and Jeremy in Gowanus. Kyle liked it, and in retrospect I think she was the only one who ever understood how Charming it was. After dinner one night she took it out of the cabinet and said

I love using this mug!

Then we cleared the table. That was it.

After Gowanus, I moved in, fleetingly, with someone. I'd considered telling him about the mug, saying something teeth-grating like

Look! It's me! Buck teeth!

while fluttering my eyelashes. I never did. He wasn't really the kind of man to be charmed by tchotchke.

South Orange, 1995

He diagnosed our relationship recently. He told me

we both hold each other's views on the world in contempt, and basically always did, and ignored it.

He was tired and angry when he said that, but I wouldn't have argued with him anyway. I am pretty sure, at least, that he would have been contemptuous of the picture mug.

I moved out of his house because I was sleeping with someone else; I moved out because we broke up, too, but the three events unfolded almost simultaneously and it remains difficult to distinguish cause from effect. It wasn't my intention to inspire any fawning with the mug this time, although, despite his hatred of metaphor, the new paramour was exactly the kind of man to be charmed by tchotchke.

Los Angeles, 1989

The mug moved to temporarily to his apartment with my books, and stayed for an even shorter amount of time. In recent months my roommate Collette and I have used it for coffee, but it has remained blessedly devoid of all other sentiment. I was startlingly relieved when I saw that it had been broken. I was freed.

When I gave the mug to men I wanted to make sure they knew how awkward and innocent I'd been. I once described my world-view as being informed by these two facts:

Everyone has a mother, and everyone was a child once.

My belief in the importance of these facts informed my meek mug-giving, too. Children get hurt. You should try to not hurt children. If the men I loved could adore that horrid mug, then they could adore me.

But I still look a little bit like Eleanor Roosevelt. The purple bathing suit is gone forever; sometimes I don't wash my egg pans and there was that one night when I hit on a cabbie.

Washington Heights, 1985

Spencer promised her he'd only order one porky dish, and then raised his eyebrows and looked out from beneath them the way he does when he's about to make a joke that probably left his eighth-grade classmates rolling in the aisles.

"During the Inquisition?" We looked at him. I don't hear too much about the Inquisition these days. "That was a way they'd test if you were Jewish, by making you eat pork."

I thought that was great news. "Spencer, you'd be saved!"

"I'd be fucked." Collette is too chic to be flapped by such historical trivialities.

We were silent until Lily said, "that seems like a particularly polite way of conducting the Inquisition."

She was right, and we rewrote history:

The Tejadas simply didn't want to have the Steins to dinner anymore because Frank always drank too much Ribera del Duero and made jokes like a donkey. Dealing with this social inconvenience had caused Roberto and Alicia Tejada considerable consternation.

One night, the couple was laying in bed when Roberto said, "Mi querida! I have the answer! We'll tell them we bought eighty pork loins. Because there is no refrigeration, we will need to eat them in order, every night, for about three months."

Alicia said, "Mi media naranja, what the heck is refrigeration?"

Roberto told her he'd explain in five hundred years. The next morning, Alicia saw Susan at the market and put on her most regretful face. Susan wondered why Alicia was sucking on a lemon.

Alicia explained the meat situation, and Susan said she totally understood. Later that afternoon, she called Devra Halperin.

"I don't want to say convert, Devra, but I think that if we want to have any social life at all, we should either hightail it to France or pretend to be Catolicos."

And thus was Spain Inquired.

Above is Molly Picon, who has a serious problem with her friend buying so much damn pig product. She also cannot even believe the inanity of my blog post. Molly was born on the Lower East Side, which is where Collette and Spencer and Lily and James and I were eating, a hundred and nine years later.

My neighborhood is changing, like Spain did, but also completely not how Spain did at all. We live on Essex Street. In the daytime, Essex Street is ruled by the same laundresses, storefront lawyers, bargain eyebrow threaders and dusty pharmacists who have presided for decades. James is pretty sure that he's heard the same Clinton Street music that Leonard Cohen did in Famous Blue Raincoat.

James told us about the music last night, though, as we were drinking chilled Garnacha and Collette and Spencer were eating tiny, beautiful, mainly ham-less things. We were the well-polished facade that descends over the Lower East Side everyday at dusk, the walls and bars and broad-shouldered drinkers who you can hear from fifth floor fire escapes.

Maybe if I lived on Ludlow I wouldn't notice the discrepancy. Maybe I will just meet you at the Psychic Vacuum installation on Delancey Street tomorrow afternoon at four. I will be the Catholic holding a BLT.