Burda Style For people who sew

When I think about skiing, I think about Claudine Longet. It’s too bad that I do; if things had worked out better for the gamine Parisienne, if all she’d done was marry Andy Williams and croon basically anodyne love songs, I might never think of her at all. But apparently Longet meant what she said when she titled her best-known album “Love is Blue,” and after three kids and a few passable hits, she left Williams and took up with Olympic skier “Spider” Sabich. Then, one night in Aspen, she shot him.

Like pretty much everyone else on earth, I watched the Academy Awards last month. I watched the show, and I watched the red carpet pre-show, and the after-party post-shows, and frankly I found the experience exhausting. It’s not so much that the year’s marquee nominees were kind of meh, or that the ceremony itself was so typically boring. No, it’s the clothes that did me in.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

TREND REVENGE OF THE NERDS

I really wanted glasses when I was a kid. Some character in a book I loved probably had specs; maybe Harriet, in “Harriet the Spy.” Around the same time I made my mind up that I wanted glasses, I also decided to change my name to Clarissa, indeed, would answer to nothing else all of first grade. My judgment as a child was dubious.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

PLAYLIST SAO PAULO

London should be nervous. Milan, too, for that matter. One city or the other is likely to topple as a fashion capital in the next decade or so, London because the new talent keeps leaving, Milan because they can’t seem to find any new talent at all. The fashion week that will emerge in place of one or the other, or possibly both, is Sao Paulo’s. Latin America is desperately seeking a style hub,

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

FASHION THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

In a season of grown-up clothes, it’s only fitting that several young designers would do some growing up, too. Fall 2007 vaulted no newcomers to celebrity status?there were no Zac Posens or Proenza Schoulers or Thakoons out dazzling the crowd, but this season was adamantly not about dazzle. Instead, several winning young designers set about soberly finding themselves, translating the individual idioms of their respective styles into collections that were focused and mature.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

BEAUTY EITHER/OR

Whereas the clothes for Fall were a polyglot bunch, runway beauty you could whittle down to two major themes: Maximal and minimal. In keeping with the show’s homage to the 1940s, Pat McGrath at Gucci gave the models a polished look: Porcelain face, immaculate brow, a wide almond eye with a feline stroke of liner across the top and, most prominent, a scarlet lip. The red lip was a highlight at Proenza, too?though makeup artist Gucci Westman’s interpretation was a glossy maraschino cherry, created for the show and available for a limited time through Lancome. Westman alternated the red lipstick with another that matched the models’ nearly naked eyes and face, and Tom Pecheux at Derek Lam echoed the nude theme, adding only a bit more smoke along the lids.

Choosing this week’s icon wasn’t easy. Along with their panoply of runway looks, designers named a multitude of inspirations: Daryl Kerrigan reverenced Klute, “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale was the guiding spirit behind Philip Lim’s show, Behnaz Serafpour name-checked Vanessa Redgrave, in Camelot. Relative newbies Jason Wu, Bruno Pieters and Jose Ramon Reyes cited Jane Birkin, Tina Chow and heretofore unacknowledged fashion icon Elle Macpherson, respectively; new Anne Klein designer Isabel Toledo cited, well, Anne Klein. And I haven’t even the scratched the surface of influence.

My little brother came to visit last week. “Little,” because even though he’s got six inches and easily 50 lbs. on me, he’s also eight years younger. Our age gap includes a generation gap: I’m last gasp Gen X, my brother squarely Gen Y, and though you’d think having the same parents would erase some of the differences, well, it does and it doesn’t.

In Germany we say that the eye always eats along. Meaning, your food should look as delicious as it tastes. We believe that the secret of a successful dinner invitation lies in your stylish table accessories. And that’s where we come in: We teach you how to sew pretty cool napkins, place mats, and a table cloth, so you can host fashionable dinner parties.

Check out our new table set How To!

Her mother starred in an orgy in Blow Up. Her father was famously lewd. Together, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg memorably recorded an orgasm for “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus” and debuted their daughter on the song “Lemon Incest.” If she were born and raised in America, Charlotte Gainsbourg would have been in and out of rehab and a few marriages by now, with maybe a tawdry tell-all, a stint on a reality show and, let’s say, a handbag line to her name.

Paris is home to so many of the world’s most resourceful brands and best designers that it seems churlish to demand more. Yet people do ask for more, and constantly, and they ask because in Paris, there is always more. The city is a magnet for minds of invention, ones that dream of better-yet jeans, or baubles luminous and strange, or couture like an orgy of organza and feathers. Many of the brightest minds become famous, justly so; some of them are famous by the time they arrive, and then become legendary. The really famous ones are too big to be Parisian; they and their designs are citizens of the world. But there are designers who belong to Paris, still. Here are a few.

The first perfume I ever purchased for myself was L’Air du Temps, by Nina Ricci. I was thirteen; I liked the winged, froufy bottle and the notes of musk and gardenia redolent of my grandparents. I bought it with Bat Mitzvah money. My mother, who hates perfume, smelled it once and tossed it out, along with the Jane’s Addiction CD that had been my other indulgence at the mall that day.

ICON BELLE DE JOUR

The summer before my junior year of college, I moved to New York City with my then-ex-boyfriend. I had come to the city to be a lousy waitress and for an internship that never actually panned out; among the other things that didn’t pan out that summer were our break-up, and then eventually our relationship. He was taking classes at NYU, which gave him access to NYU housing, but in an act of what I now recognize as generosity, maybe even love, he threw his lot in with me and together we sublet the world’s tiniest studio in Alphabet City. It was a sixth floor walk-up; coming home one night, I saw someone shoot up for the first time, right there on our stoop. I loved it. My then-ex hated it. Further details: I vaguely recall a schedule of days when he got the bed, and I got the sofa, and vice versabut soon his plan worked and I relented and we were a couple again, sharing the twin mattress.

Jean Luc Godard once said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Not true: You need a camera. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Godard’s bon mot as I’ve been thinking about Paris, and about fashion, and I’ve decided that the girl + gun equation is really primary when it comes to understanding the City of Lights.