ART : Russian and Rich: Art’s New Tastemaker

ONE day in December, Dasha Zhukova wandered into the Bakhmetevsky
Bus Garage, a giant red-brick Constructivist-era landmark near the
Olympic Stadium in Moscow. She was immediately entranced by the space,
a vast parallelogram spanning nearly 92,000 square feet and an unusual
array of vertical and circular windows. Designed in 1926 by Konstantin
Melnikov, the garage is much loved by architects.

“I thought Moscow should have a space like this for contemporary art,” Ms. Zhukova, 27, said in an interview, sipping a cappuccino in the top-floor cafe of the Tate Modern here. “There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.”
It was a serendipitous discovery for Ms. Zhukova. Thanks to her, the cavernous building will reopen next month as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, a nonprofit institution that brings art to Moscow and schools the public on what it’s about. Its first show will be a retrospective of the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
Overnight, Ms.Zhukova’s new center and her connections, including a billionaire, art-collecting boyfriend, have made her an art-world It Girl. Her sudden fame attests to the seismic effect that Russian money — and in some cases Ukrainian or Georgian money — is having.

When Ms. Zhukova first saw the building, she wasn’t searching for an art space or anything else in particular. The landmark structure, which is government-owned, had been leased to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia. Through perseverance she was able to take over the lease and then hire Jamie Fobert, a London architect, to transform
it.

It was a powerful reflection of her deep pockets. Ms. Zhukova is the daughter of an oligarch, Aleksandr Zhukov, a deputy prime minister who lives in Moscow and made his fortune financier Roman Abramovich, who has riveted the art world recently byne in oil. And there is help at the ready from her companion, the 41-year-old paying top dollar for Francis Bacon, Giacometti and others. (Forbes this year estimated his net worth at $23.5 billion.)
Little wonder, then, that in late spring, when word got out that Ms. Zhukova had decided to throw a June 12 dinner party in the bowels of the former bus garage, dealers and collectors around the globe began maneuvering
desperately for invitations.
Leaving the space bare except for a giant chandelier-style light installation by the artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, she invited some 300 people to what she called a “soft opening.” A caterer was flown in from London, and Amy Winehouse
was hired to sing. Among those milling about were young European aristocrats like Charlotte Casiraghi, daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco; New York collectors including the cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder and the hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen; powerful New York dealers like Larry Gagosian; and artists like Jeff Koons.
“It took chutzpah for Dasha to put on an event and attract so many people,” said Oliver Barker, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in London.“It shows how seriously they’re taking her.”

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, a former director of the Gagosian Gallery in London, who has been hired to help plan the Garage Center, said that she and Ms. Zhukova sought out artists as guests so they could “listen to their response.”

“Ultimately we want this to be a place where artists will want to show their work,” she said.

Ms.Zhukova herself is not yet a collectother for Russians collecting Western art. Peter the Great frequented , but her newfound love of art has influenced Mr. Abramovich’s collecting. There are long precedents salesrooms of Amsterdam, scooping up 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings; Catherine the Great’s tastes were voracious and included Titian, Poussin and French silver. Around the turn of the 20th century, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov collected some of the greatest Impressionist paintings directly from the artists’ studios and, later, assembled troves of Matisses and Picassos.

“It’s history repeating itself,” Mr. Barker said.

A few weeks before her visit to the Tate, Ms. Zhukova spent a few days in Switzerland at Art Basel, the annual contemporary art fair, with Mr. Abramovich. Their arrival caused an even bigger stir than appearances by Brad Pitt or Sofia Coppola.

While
there is a tabloid quality to the public’s interest — Mr. Abramovich
divorced his wife, Irina, after forging his relationship with Ms.
Zhukova — there is also considerable fascination with his penchant for
paying record prices for whatever strikes his fancy. In recent auctions
in London and New York, for example, he is said to have bought a Degas
pastel for $26.5 million, a 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon for $86.3
million and a painting by Lucian Freud for $33.6 million.

However
discreetly, he and other rich Russians who made their fortunes when
Soviet industries like oil, steel and gas were privatized are now
living large, with private planes, yachts and multiple houses. And like
many of these newly rich, Mr. Abramovich and Ms. Zhukova now make their
homes here in London.

The advantages here for wealthy Russians
are considerable. It is close enough to Moscow (a three-hour trip by
private plane), it has excellent schools, and it allows them to live
fairly anonymously in grand houses. There are tax advantages, too:
people who live and work in Britain but are foreign-born typically pay
no taxes on income generated outside the country.

Fiercely
private for the most part, these Russians generally do not support
British cultural institutions and seldom attend gallery openings or
auction house parties.

Ms. Zhukova is different. She has agreed to co-host the Serpentine
Gallery’s big fund-raiser next month, and she is keenly interested in
meeting artists. Last month she visited Damien Hirst’s
studios in Gloucestershire, where he gave her a preview of the work he
will be selling at Sotheby’s in London in September. “There were
definitely pieces I liked,” she said cautiously. “But not everything.”

The Russian embrace of Western contemporary art has long been
coming. With the birth of private Russian fortunes some 20 years ago,
“Russians started buying Russian art in their own country, even though
non-Russians still remained the biggest consumer of Russian art,” said
Joachim Pissarro, a great-grandson of Camille Pissarro and an adjunct
curator at the Museum of Modern Art. (He was among those who flocked to
the dinner at the Garage, which he called “amazing.”)

And until
recently, market experts say, they were primarily interested in the
decorative arts. In 2004, for instance, the Russian billionaire Victor
Vekselberg spent about $100 million for the entire Forbes family
Fabergé collection, a purchase that included 9 imperial Easter eggs and
some 180 other pieces. Then about five years ago, some of those Russian
collectors widened their sights to mostly Russian-born artists, like
Chagall. “They skipped over everything else,” Mr. Pissarro said.

Since
then, he said, the tide has turned. They “started to collect
Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art at a speed that is
absolutely astonishing,” he said. “Now they’re going outside of Russia,
buying artists like Jeff Koons. The pendulum has swung 180 degrees,
with Russians becoming one of the most powerful forces in the market.”

The
tastes of rich collectors from the former Soviet republics tend to be
unpredictable. The goal seems to be to snap up whatever is perceived at
the moment to be the best, from a much-admired Picasso painting to a work by the hot Scottish-born artist Peter Doig.

“The whim factory is something quite amazing,” Mr. Pissarro said. “They can change directions at the speed of lightning.”

Two years ago the art world was gripped by the drama surrounding Picasso’s “Dora Maar
With Cat,” a 1941 portrait that sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a
staggering $95.2 million. The man seemed inexperienced and sat in the
rear of the salesroom, unusual for a well-connected bidder.

When
the hammer went down, he ducked out of the room, but not before news
photographers captured his face. Within minutes that image was
ricocheting through cyberspace as dealers and collectors tried to
identify him. It finally emerged that he was bidding for a Georgian
oligarch, not a Russian one: Boris Ivanishvili, a mining magnate.

In
the same New York auction season, rubles appeared for the first time on
the currency boards at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. A year later Sotheby’s
opened its first office in Moscow; Christie’s is about to do the same
as a way of catering to big collectors and cultivating new ones.

Ms.
Zhukova herself acknowledges being a relative art neophyte. “I didn’t
study art history and don’t remember names of artists,” she said, her
perfect English tinged faintly by a Russian accent. “But if I like an
image, I remember it.”

Petite and striking, with long brown
hair and big eyes, she cultivates a purposely understated appearance;
blue jeans, T-shirts and ballet slippers are her uniform. Yet she is
poised and self-assured as she describes trying to navigate the often
treacherous waters of the art world.

Born in Moscow in 1981,
Ms. Zhukova is an only child. Her parents divorced when she was young,
and when her mother, a molecular biologist, took a job at the
University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1990s, they moved
there. Ms. Zhukova spoke not a word of English.

But she quickly
adjusted, she said, attending schools in Los Angeles and then the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where she took premed courses
and studied homeopathic medicine.

A year ago few people in the
art world had heard of her. She has a bit of recognition in fashion
circles because she and a friend, Christina Tang, introduced a clothing
line last year called Kova & T, simple basics like blue jeans,
leggings and T-shirts that are now sold at stores including Saks,
Intermix and Fred Segal.

Today, she shuttles from Moscow to
London to Los Angeles and points beyond, and she appears to shun
publicity and purposely remains low key.

On that summer
afternoon at the Tate, Ms. Zhukova had just returned from New York,
where she made a pilgrimage to Dia:Beacon on the Hudson, a museum known
for devoting rooms to artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Ryman.

“I loved the spirit and the philosophy there,” she said. “I’m trying to see as much as I can.”

In Basel she similarly made a point of visiting the bucolic Beyeler Foundation building, designed by Renzo Piano.
While she found both institutions interesting, she said, she isn’t
modeling the Garage after any specific museum. “I’m taking different
aspects of different institutions that are inspiring influences,” she
said.

In addition to galleries, the Garage Center will have
educational spaces, a theater, a bookstore and a cafe. Ms. Zhukova
declined to estimate how much it would cost to renovate and operate the
art center, saying it was too early to say. Besides aid from Mr.
Abramovich, financing is also coming from other private sources and
corporate sponsorship. “We’ve also been approached by some luxury
brands,” she said.

Admission will be free, which Ms. Zhukova
said is important. Eventually, she said, she plans to hire a director,
probably a Russian who will be in touch with the interests of local
visitors.

After the Kabakov exhibition that opens next month,
the Garage Center plans to exhibit works from the collection of
Christie’s owner, the luxury goods magnate François Pinault,
whose foundation is based in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. And Ms.
Dent-Brocklehurst said she was considering commissioning artists to
create site-specific works for the space, analogous to installations in
the vast Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Asked if the Garage would have its own collection, Ms. Zhukova said that would be many years down the road, if ever.

“For now I’m trying to learn as much as I can to make up for my lack of
art history,” she said. “The more I read, the more I realize what I
don’t know.”

Patti Smith, Land 250 march 28, 2008 - june 22, 2008

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films.

Cartier Fondation pour l'Art Modern

The Fondation Cartier expresses Cartier´s commitment to the arts as a corporate patron. A pioneer in the field, Cartier invests on an unrivalled scale to promote the art of its time. From its inception in 1984, it has established a long-term commitment to artists of all nationalities. For Cartier, patronage is not just a one-time deal based on current trends and movements, but an enduring choice that is constantly reaffirmed. Cartier has developed a different kind of patronage through its exhibitions, its collection, and its production of artwork. Its keen interest in the arts is especially visible in its commissions policy: a key feature of patronage, commissions reflect a total commitment to artistic production, from the moment of conception to the finished work. The Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain enables Cartier to maintain its image as a company attuned to the latest creative innovations, providing a forum where freedom and originality can thrive.

Cinema Perfume Yves Saint Laurent - A Tribute

Lo stilista Yves Saint Laurent si è spento domenica 10 giugno,

la bellezza è là dove non si attende

all’età di 71 anni. Nato in Algeria nel 1936, Yves Saint Laurent è considerato, insieme a Gabrielle Chanel e a Christian Dior, come uno dei grandi maestri della moda del XX secolo. La sua carriera inizia molto presto : a 19 anni, Christian Dior lo assume come assistente. Nel 1957, la morte di Christian Dior proietta Yves Saint Laurent, a soli 21 anni, alla direzione della creazione della maison Dior. Di fronte al successo, decide, agli inizi degli anni ’60, di creare la propria casa di moda, in collaborazione con il suo mentore e compagno Pierre Bergé. Colui che rivoluzionò l’universo della moda (ricordiamo in particolare lo smoking per donna) lancerà anche svariati profumi. Il suo 1o profumo femminile, il cipriato Y, esce nel 1964, seguito da un primo maschile ‘Pour Homme’ nel 1971, per il quale lo stilista posò nudo. Un’idea che riprese il profumo M7, 31 anni dopo. Tra i suo più grandi successi olfattivi, Opium (1977, orientale speziato) e Paris (1983, bouquet fiorito rosa) sono i 2 best-sellers della profumeria. Yves Saint Laurent fece il suo addio alle scene dell’Alta Moda nel 2002. Il designer Tom Ford assunze la direzione della creazione nel 2004, oggi invece passata nelle mani di Stefano Pilati. Tra le ultime creazioni profumate della marca Yves Saint Laurent : Cinéma, L’Homme e Elle.

Julian Schnabel:the Genius of the art and the life

Julian Schnabel nasce a New York, USA, nel 1951. Si diploma alla University of Houston, Texas, nel 1973. Si specializza al Witney Museum of American Art nel 1973-74. Tiene la prima personale al Contemporary Arts Museum di Houston nel 1976. Espone il primo "plate painting" alla Mary Boone Gallery di New York nel 1979. Nel 1983 inizia a scolpire. Nel 1996 il film Basquiat, da lui diretto, viene presentato alla LIII Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia . Nel 2007 vince il premio alla regia al festival di Cannes con il film “Le Scafandre et le papillon”. Nel febbraio del 1979, racconta Mary Jane Jacob accadde qualcosa che sconvolse il mondo dell’arte contemporanea: un giovane pittore ventinovenne, Julian Schnabel, tenne la sua prima personale alla Galleria di Mary Boone a Soho, New York e fu un successo istantaneo. Tutti i dipinti, prezzati da 2500 a 3000 dollari, vennero venduti, alcuni ancor prima dell’inaugurazione. Da quel momento in poi, dice la Jacob, diventò possibile, per un giovane artista, passare dal più completo anonimato alle vette della celebrità, chiedere prezzi altissimi per le proprie opere ed ottenere retrospettive o grandi mostre personali entro pochi anni dalla sua comparsa sulla scena.Il tipo di opere che provocò questa svolta economica nell’arte era principalmente pittura, un bene particolarmente adatto ad essere collezionato e che proprio per questo motivo riprese il sopravvento dopo una decade in cui avevano predominato la cerebralità e l’algidità dei lavori dell’Arte Concettuale e Minimale.

Il risultato è che Schnabel è un genio, alla maniera rinascimentale, della bellezza.
Julian Schnabel fa quadri e film bellissimi! E’ interior design rivoluzionario sublimando la bellezza degli spazi, vedi: Gramercy Park Hotel, N.Y.

Julian Schnabel è, oggi, l’artista più famoso al mondo! La première di una sua mostra è ambita come una consacrazione mondana. E’ accaduto a Roma a Palazzo Venezia, come a Milano, con tutti gli stilisti in pompa magna quasi prostrati ai suoi piedi, come a Venezia al Gucci Awards 2007 o a Cannes, al festival del cinema, vincitore della Palma d’oro 2007 per la regia e il film “ lo Scafandre e il Papillon”
Julian Schnabel è, anche, vincitore di due Goold Goble, gennaio 2008, come migliore film e regia, sempre per “ lo Scafandre e il Papillon”

A Tribute Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel had the kind of body that we tend to stereotype as French (if only because of that annoying diet book French Women Don't Get Fat).

She was bone-thin, flat-chested, skinny-limbed, straight-backed, partly because she never ate much (she once said of the gourmandising Colette: 'She positively swaggers in gluttony!') and partly because she chain-smoked life-long. She was ahead of her time.

She came to womanhood at the height of the Belle Epoque, when fashionable beauties were Rubensesque and dressed to excess. This was the age of the deep-pillowed bosom, the swathed and bustled bottom, and What-The-Butler-Saw massive thighs. Only savage corseting restrained a woman's waist. Nothing restrained her finery: dresses were bedecked with plumes, flowers, feathers, furs, lace, ribbons, embroidery, flounces, trim.

Had they but known it, the fat French women of the Belle Epoque were eating and drinking in the last-chance saloon. Gabrielle Chanel, born in the 19th century as the half-orphan child of a peasant family in the Auvergne, would single-handedly force women's fashion into the 20th - and the house she founded is still recognisably hers (and richer than ever) in the 21st.

How on earth she did this was always a mystery to me, but in these extraordinary early pictures you can track her genius, her ambition, her bravery and - above all - her modernity. Naturally, she made all her own clothes (and hats), as every woman did except for the seriously rich. But her clothes were revolutionary.

At a time when fashion restricted, reshaped and exaggerated the femaleness of women, Chanel's clothes simply followed the natural shape of a woman's body. This is what men's clothes do. In a picture from 1906, you can see the very beginnings of Chanel's modernity. Her walking-suit in Prince of Wales check is narrow and skims the body. At a time when women's hats were the biggest in history, hers is no bigger than a man's panama.

Chanel took what she wanted from men's clothes because she moved among fashionable men. At 19 or 20 she'd tried working as a nightclub dancer in Pau - it was here she became known as Coco - but was picked up by a young French gallant, Etienne Balsan, the first of her many, many loves.

Balsan bred the best horses in France and went to the races non-stop. With him, she lived in that curious place called the demi-monde, the Parisian half world between society on the one hand and the great unwashed on the other. Balsan introduced her to château life, to horses, to racing and to his friends. By 1910 she was watching the races in a mannish boater, a shirt and tie (filched from Balsan) and a tailored overcoat (off the back of his friend Baron Foy).

For a night of amateur theatrics she dressed as a village groom in clothes she bought from the boys' department at a Paris department store. Gabrielle's short jacket, the Peter Pan collar, the black bow, the Breton straw hat are pure Chanel. Underneath the hat is her thick, piled, ratted mass of (pretty glorious) hair.

When it wouldn't fit under the man's bowler hat she wore to ride Balsan's horses, she raked it back and tucked into a (shocking) pigtail. It took her until 1917 to shear it right off her head - and every fashionable woman followed her lead.

In 1913, when she was 29, she became the petite amie of Balsan's best friend, a charismatic Englishman called Boy Capel. He backed her with a shop at 21 rue Cambon in Paris, only a few doors down from the mirrored glory of number 31 (the townhouse where she moved her business in 1928 - and where it remains today).

From being a kept woman, she was now a femme d'affaires and, when the First World War began, she relocated to Deauville. Here, her genius for knowing what women wanted to wear exploded. As she had borrowed stable-lads' jodhpurs to copy for herself, now she borrowed sailors' jerseys. No one had ever used tricot for anything except underwear before - it was a poor, soft, working-man's fabric, but what she was after was 'chic on the edge of poverty'.

She made a pull-on tunic with deep patch pockets to wear over a slim jersey skirt, or pleats. She hated fake detailing ('Never a button without a buttonhole!') and if she made pockets, you could thrust your hands in them. By 1917 she had raised her skirts, designed a 'swimming-costume' (as opposed to a burka-like 'bathing-dress') and started baring her face to the sun.

She saw what was coming before anyone else: in the postwar future, women - even very rich and fashionable women - would not be gliding along the promenade, dressed as a wedding-cake and holding a parasol. They would be jumping on and off planes, into taxi-cabs, on to subway trains, and their clothes needed to move with them.

'Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets,' said Chanel. She ruthlessly stripped away all the built-in bling of the past century ('Make the dress first, not the embellishment'), aiming always for the straight line, and softening the jutting breasts and buttocks of the corseted era. Bling you could add later: 'It doesn't matter if it's real, so long as it looks like junk.'

Chanel democratised women's fashion, anticipating the mass market. Though each of her pieces was bespoke, she never minded being copied. Before Chanel, the most fashionable dress was a highly decorated number individually created for you by the most fashionable couturier, Paul Poiret - and woe betide him if you met a woman in something vaguely similar.

By 1926 Vogue's drawing of a scoop-necked, knee-length dress in black crêpe-de-chine, with long tight sleeves, was captioned, 'Here is a Ford, signed Chanel.' Any woman could buy a copy, and the universal little black dress was born.

She was now at the peak of her looks; she was making squillions out of Chanel No 5; she was the lover of the ludicrously wealthy Duke of Westminster and rode his horses and shot his game and sailed with him on Flying Cloud. She was coaxed to Hollywood by Cecil B deMille; she designed for a ballet by Cocteau.

Her war years were a bit iffy. When the Second World War was declared, Chanel closed her salon immediately, which was jolly patriotic, but she lived in the Ritz with a high-ranking Nazi, which was somewhat less so. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 she was arrested for collaboration.

This was at a time when suspect collabos were being tarred and feathered in the streets of Paris, but she was let go after a couple of hours and fled to Switzerland. It's always assumed that the Duke of Westminster asked Churchill to get her off, but there is no documentation.

She was still in self-imposed exile in the bitter February of 1947 when Christian Dior unleashed his first couture collection on a postwar world that was weary unto death of nearly a decade of austerity and rationing and uniforms and land-army overalls. His clothes, he said, were femme-femme (womanly woman), his fabrics were fine and lavishly used (50 metres of cloth in a dress) and his silhouette was wasp-waisted, sloping-shouldered and belled to mid-calf.

The clothes were heavily structured and boned, lined, interlined, petticoated, padded and stuffed. (One of the models said, 'I can't walk, eat or even sit down.') They were a sensation. The American press hailed the New Look, and war-weary women hurled themselves into Dior's corsets and ultra-femininity.

When Chanel reopened in 1954 she was 70. It was the on-going success of Dior that brought her back - partly because his perfumes (Miss Dior and Diorissimo) were damaging sales of Chanel No 5 in America and partly because 1950s fashion was the Belle Epoque all over again.

She hated clothes that restricted women. 'Some women want to be gripped inside their clothes. Never! When you step inside my dress, you are free.' She showed collarless, cardigan-style jackets and slightly flared skirts falling from a gentle waistband in soft jersey fabrics. Everyone at the show was wearing a 'waspie' (a particularly vicious 1950s waist-cincher) and most balanced with difficulty on the little gilt chairs.

One English fashionista noticed Chanel herself, crouched on a step at the top of the showroom stairs. She was wearing one of her own suits, and looking 'completely comfortable, a feat she could not have achieved in any other fashionable clothing of the time'. The French press slated her comeback, calling it retrograde. (One newspaper headlined the report, 'At Chanel it's 'fouilly-les-oies' - meaning 'hicksville'.) Some English papers were quite snotty, too, which upset the anglophile Chanel.

It didn't take long. By the time of her next collection in the autumn, she was suddenly a cult among young, hip Parisiennes - maybe because they were more forgiving of Nazi boyfriends than their mammas were. And in America the first collection had sold wildly from the off, delighting the buyers while bemusing the fashion press.

When the Beatles made Please Please Me in l963, even I was wearing Chanel, in the slow-moving very far north of Lancashire. A simple little jersey suit in french blue, banded with sky blue, with bobble-buttons all down the front. Loved it. Didn't know it was a Chanel, of course. The label said Wallis.

'The World of Coco Chanel' (Thames & Hudson, £29.95) by Edmonde Charles-Roux, published on 7 April, is available from Telegraph Books Direct (0870 155 7222) at £25.95 plus £2.25

The Met's Chanel exhibit brings out the A-list from Style.com

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was awash in camellias and couture Monday night as the Costume Institute celebrated its latest exhibit, an homage to the house of Chanel.


Selma Blair and Vanessa Paradis at the premiere

And in Vogue magazine:


Coco Chanel, 1928
Above all, Chanel respected the body in her work. Here, in an original dress from the end of the decade, the linear silhouette of her classic twenties clothes succumbs to a swirling asymmetry that presages the glamour of Hollywood's sliver-screen sirens. In 1931, Chanel would be summoned to Tinseltown by Sam Goldwyn himself to dress stars like Gloria Swanson. Courtesy of Mark Walsh Leslie Chin Vintage.


Coco Chanel, 1964
"You have to breathe and move and sit without being conscious of what you have on," Chanel told Vogue's mid-century fashion editor Bettina Ballard. Case in point: her iconic braid-trimmed suit, which first materialized after her 1954 comeback and was originally inspired by the Tyrolean jacket of her friend and photographer Horst P. Horst. Chanel delighted in mixing faux jewels with her own princely hoard; here, the brilliant fakes of Goossens. Clothing courtesy of Chanel, Paris.

Chanel 2.55

Chanel's 2.55 handbag reaches it's 50th birthday this month.The bag has hung from the famous arms of kate Moss,Renee Zellwegger, Heidi Klum , Sophie Dahl and many others.Originally launched in 1955 by Gabrielle "coco" Chanel, fifty years later this limited edition is sold for £860 and the UK is only going to have 100 available.

A limited edition fire-engine red and coral tweed version has been created to commemorate its anniversary.

Guggenheim Vilnius Museum

The luxury of the beauty by ministero della bellezza