Fragrances Boutique

Several fashion magazine spreads have recently replicated the fashions of the 1950s.

Fashion designers have been somewhat slow to embrace the more commercial elements of modern technology, like selling their clothes online or on mobile devices, perhaps hesitant about sullying their brands. Social media, however, they seem to have caught on to right away.

Several new journals, and a recent visit to a great little magazine shop in Berlin, again make us think we are entering a different age of print.

As I think more about the fall collections, and read some of the comments on the blog, a few points stand out.

A thick mob of people, mostly young and nearly all clutching cameras, stood in the blazing 6 p.m. sun outside the entrance to the Valentino show in the Place Vendôme.

Dita Von Teese, the burlesque performer, is often in the front row at fashion shows.

Before Jean Paul Gaultier’s show this afternoon, I popped backstage to say hello and absorb a little madness – I mean, direction.

I loved Willy Vanderperre’s somber group portrait of models in Riccardo Tisci’s fall couture collection for Givenchy.

Daphne Guinness leaves the Chanel show on a motorcycle.

Chanel’s red satin dress. Other looks include embroidered dresses in an amazing range of tapestry patterns.

View of the lion in the center of the Chanel couture – which is about to start in the Grand Palais. Big enough?

Armani focuses on day clothes in his fall couture collection.

John Galliano’s new haute couture collection for Dior is both faithful to the house and as fresh as a daisy.

I suppose I should thank the Chambre Syndicale, the organizing body for French fashion, for creating a break between the men’s shows and haute couture. It gave me a good excuse to go to Berlin

High fashion at the Communist Party headquarters in Paris.

Mr. Simons’s show celebrated 15 years of a career that has pursued the idea that fashion can communicate thoughts and emotions.

John Galliano drew from the movies tonight-scenes from Chaplin, Keaton and Visconti’s “Death in Venice.”

Is men’s fashion keeping up with our imaginations?

Full beards on men make us think of Karl Marx and Santa Claus. At least that’s my bipolar reference. But full beards on men in fashion shows just make us giggle.

Thirty-two designers are participating in a public art exhibition that opened on Broadway in Manhattan’s garment district on Thursday, which, in essence, is the fashion version of those cow statues that plastered New York a decade ago.

Though it was dusk and apparently damp when the Jil Sander men’s show started in Florence – I watched the Web stream – the colors cleared the head.

A former digital consultant to luxury brands is launching a site devoted to emerging fashion designers.

My appreciation for Lady Gaga’s act is simple: I like her insistent awkwardness.

A spirit of collaboration marked the annual Council of Fashion Designers of America awards show.

If the 2010 awards show of the Council of Fashion Designers of America had been a little shorter, it would have been a winner.