Sometime in the early Aughts, when I was a wet-behind-the-ears WWD
business reporter, a colleague replied to some silly thing I'd said by
looking aghast and asking, "Don't you know? Fashion is all about the
shoes and the bag."
The shoes and the bag.
I didn't know then how right she was, in both sartorial and business terms.
Every once in a great while the fashion industry hits a sleepy patch and a week passes when nobody says much of anything -- at least in a public forum that we can scrutinize.
After two months listening to a small army of lawyers bicker back and forth over the sale of Martha Stewart-designed goods, it's safe to say that presiding Judge Jeffrey Oing has made up his mind on how he will rule.
I am a complete and absolute sucker for Thin Mints.
Patricia Volk's new book, "Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli and Me" (Alfred A. Knopf), is a memoir about what she considers two of her biggest influences, her mother, Audrey Morgen Volk, and designer Elsa Schiaparelli, whose fragrance, Shocking de Schiaparelli, her mother wore.
I was waiting at a restaurant recently and following the up-to-the-second fashion week news on Twitter when my incoming tweets slowed to a crawl and then stopped.
Just before William Ackman squared off with Carl Icahn on CNBC last week -- in which the two activist investors engaged in a surprisingly personal round of verbal fisticuffs, ostensibly over direct merchant Herbalife -- Ackman hinted at things to come at one of his biggest investments, J.C. Penney Co. Inc.