The early bird catches the worm—that saying was certainly appropriate this morning when, before rush hour, a crowd of industry insiders flocked to the Museum of Arts and Design for breakfast to fête the winners of the 11th annual Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation awards. The birds? Designers Tim Coppens, Sunhee Moon’s Sunhee Huang, Titania Inglis, [...]

Now in its 11th year of awarding $25,000 grants to emerging fashion designers, including past recipients Proenza Schouler, Alexander Wang, Altuzarra, and Rodarte, winemaker Ecco Domani announced the latest round of winners this morning. A team of fashion industry insiders, including T’s Sally Singer, former Barneys fashion director Julie Gilhart, and Paper’s Kim Hastreiter, judged [...]

“Vegan. Vegan. Leather. Vegan. Leather. Leather.” That was Victoria Bartlett last night after dinner, playing show-and-tell over a small display of her Spring 2012 VPL shoes set up in the corner at Gemma’s Wine Room. However, it was the animal product-free portion of the collection that served as the reason for this happy and homey [...]

On Friday, the audience at the Sustainability and Philanthropy panel at the AFINGO Fashion Forum got to hear Julie Gilhart speak—her first public pronouncements since her departure from Barneys, where she’s been senior VP fashion director these past 18 years, and where every fashion-loving New Yorker fell in love with her.“I’m super-excited,” she said. “All [...]

The fashion community of New York has been swift in organizing benefits, special products, and donations to Japan in the weeks since the earthquake and Pacific tsunami devastated the country. But for some industry players, the disaster is closer to home. For those Japanese and Japanese-American designers, buyers, and executives, the event is even more [...]

“It has nothing to do with drugs or money,” insisted Argentina-born Tin Ojeda, the designer behind Drug Money Art, as he organized a rolling rack of his colorful, handmade T-shirts in a NYC studio. “I just spray painted ‘Drug Money Art’ on a surfboard for fun one day and then took it to the beach—people [...]

Araks lingerie already has plenty of famous fans, Sarah Jessica Parker and Scarlett Johansson (who wore Araks in Lost in Translation) among them. But for her latest look book, designer Araks Yeramyan enlisted a few famous collaborators, too. “The thought of shooting a look book with makeup and hair, that kind of irked me,” she [...]

A Sports Illustrated model turned swimsuit designer isn’t the first person you’d expect to be collaborating with Damien Hirst, but truth is stranger than fiction. Tori Praver snared the Y.B.A. for a still-unannounced project, but as for what, keep guessing. “That’s a secret!” Praver said. “I actually can’t talk about it.” What she could talk [...]

Just in case you didn’t notice, the temperatures are dropping. Richard Chai, for his part, did. His new temporary pop-up shop, at the west Chelsea space under the High Line that played host to Waris Ahluwalia’s recent installation, is designed to be a glacial, Styrofoam-carved ice cave. For his first standalone store—albeit a temporary one—Chai [...]

When Barneys New York founded its Co-Op levels and stores in 1985, they were, as Style.com editor in chief Dirk Standen put it to the store’s Julie Gilhart, “in the vanguard of the mix-and-match approach.” “We never thought of Co-Op as a place where you find secondary collections,” Gilhart demurred. “It’s a place where you [...]