Dec. 11: Paris goes into hyperdrive in the days leading up to Christmas. New boutiques battle construction delays to open before 2008 turns into 2009, while big stores like Prada and Nina Ricci invite les intimes to ogle fresh cruise and spring merch as they take in champagne and fois gras.    

Thursday presented such a traffic jam. Nina Ricci got the ball rolling in the afternoon at its recently revamped avenue Montaigne boudoir. A small selection of Cruise was on hand, but almost everyone had eyes for one piece in particular. The house calls it the Reese dress because Witherspoon has one in every color, but the news is Russian violin virtuosa Viktoria Mullova, who swept into Paris this week, picked the fairy confection in acid violet to wear on tour.  

Jewelry Sikh Waris Ahluwalia was in Paris to work out the details for the launch of his new collection, to be celebrated with a festive soiree at Colette during couture week in January. So as not to spoil the surprise all I can say is it has a Hitchcockian quality and should fly out of stores.  

Prada, too, celebrated Christmas at its avenue Montaigne shop, but it turned out to be all about spring. Manuela Pavesi, Miuccia's BFF and her display guru, came to Paris to have Prada's French team work all day dressing and redressing the mannequins until she was happy. And it was worth it. Miuccia Prada thinks it's time for color and so the store presented a fire-truck orange dress with an obi panel from spring to prove her point, as well as Prada's cruise blue and optic green floor-sweeping skirts worn with jewel-encrusted Maharajah baubles and T-shirts. On a more somber note, Prada has indefinitely postponed the opening of its first Greek shop in Athens due to the student riots there, which have caused about 200 million euros worth of damage and left almost forty shops completely gutted.

Limi Yamamoto, Yohji's 30-something designing daughter, capped the evening in Les Halles, where she rolled out the pink carpet to launch her ephemeral shop in a whitewashed gazebo hidden in a courtyard at 13 rue de Turbigo. She's been showing her Limi Feu line, a girlie take on menswear, in Paris for several seasons, but this is her first shop outside of Japan. The store will be open for customers most of the year, turning into a showroom during the collections.    

The crowd of beautiful art students, Limi's extended family—including her younger half-brother Oshi, the muse behind their dad's new children's collection—and hardcore French Yohji fanatics grew merry very quickly thanks to the Monaco, the classic French teen drink, a mix of grenadine, lemonade and beer. It tastes something like a Shirley Temple, but with a kick. After a few of those everyone posed for portraits, which were transferred onto Limi badges to give the fête a kind of fashion convention ambiance.  

Limi was all smiles and, as she speaks almost no English or French, talk was brief. When asked what kind of a boss her father is, she deadpanned, "He hardly looks at my collection at all," before bursting into giggles. Her next stop is Florence, where she will shop Italian fabrics for fall.

By Rebecca Voight...

Nov. 26: There’s nothing like a bit of T&A to get the ho, ho, ho going. At least that’s what Carine Roitfeld and naughty Terry Richardson cooked up with Louis Vuitton for French Vogue's 2009 calendar. A Christmas gift to readers plastic-bagged with the Dec/Jan issue (guest-edited by Stephanie de Monaco), the calendar is Richardson’s take on the Vargas pin-up, using Louis Vuitton accessories and not much else. Thirteen voluptuous babes are featured, from Jourdan Dunn as a nurse in a peek-a-boo baby doll dress to Lakshmi Menon riding an inflatable carrot, plus a French maid, cowgirl, sailorette and the all-American cheerleader, among other male fantasies. But the best pin-up is the cover: pussycat Eniko Mihalik lapping at a bowl of milk dressed in nothing but an erect tail and a pair of vertiginous Louis Vuitton sandals.

"We do a calendar every year with a different photographer,” said Roitfeld at a small fête at Louis Vuitton's quai de la Megisserie headquarters in Paris. “Last year was Mario Sorrenti and the year before that was David Sims." But that's not all that has the editor-in-chief gushing. “February (French Vogue) is an entire issue with (model) Lara Stone and the cover line is Et Vogue Créa Lara." Taken from Roger Vadim’s 1956 classic Et Dieu Créa La Femme, starring Brigitte Bardot, the issue includes shoots by Inez van Lamsweerde, Peter Lindbergh, Hedi Slimane, Nan Goldin and Steven Klein. “Lara had almost stopped working so I decided I wanted to make her a star,” explained Roitfeld, who, meanwhile, plans to spend Christmas at a spa, deservedly. “I’ve had enough of high heels.”  

Singer Estelle breezed in and out looking extremely curvaceous in a second-skin black knit dress heavy on the crystals, along with Lee Radziwill, actor Vincent Perez and Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci. Just back from Moscow, where he attended Russian Vogue's 10th anniversary party and visited clients, Tisci said he can't get over the place. "I’m crazy about it, there’s so much darkness and romanticism there. I was shocked." For Christmas, Tisci usually goes to an ashram in India to meditate, but he said this year he's considering somewhere different like Puerto Rico. (And that was before we heard the terrible news from Mumbai.) Georgina Stojiljkovic, September’s sexy secretary, said she wasn't expecting to show much skin. “Nobody told me it was lingerie. But I was the last one for the day and there were three or four girls before me, so I did peek.”  

By Rebecca Voight...

Nov. 23: With her famous red mane, Sonia Rykiel purred out her life story at the entrance to "Sonia Rykiel, Exhibition," a large-scale retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The show caps a year of 40th-anniversary celebrations for the slinky Parisian sweater house, most notably the spring 09 collection and after-party in the Bois de Vincennes that featured thirty designers' takes on her quintessential style, from Jean-Paul Gaultier's knitting-needle dress to Martin Margiela's savage red-headed sheath. Rykiel, 78, talked and talked until you understood the clothes are really an extension of herself: "My sisters were beautiful. I was different. I was a redhead. I was violent, difficult. I had no limits. My mother called it 'having character.'" A trail of words inside, outside and all around the exhibition followed Sonia Rykiel from one fashion high to another, beginning with the brand's launch in 1968, when the Paris student revolts gave birth to a new kind of femme fatale, one who bypassed couture for modern prêt-à-porter.

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1987 campaign, photo Dominique Issermann

"For me her clothes are like Meccano toys," says Olivier Saillard, the museum's enigmatic program director who curated the show, "they can be combined in infinite ways." (Incidentally, he once told me he used to create fictional couture houses as a child, complete with imaginary staff and archives.)  

The show's fête brought out French editors Samuel Drira of Encens and Numéro's Babette Djian, as well as designers Martine Sitbon, Corinne Cobson and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, whose house was rescued from bankruptcy this week when it was bought by Sweden's Atlas Design Group. Liz Goldwyn, who wrote an introduction to the show catalog, held court in the museum's gift shop wearing a beret and a curvy black Swarovski-studded Sonia sweater dress.  

Dominique Issermann, who shot all the Rykiel campaigns from 1979 through 1993, remembered her first series for the house like it was yesterday. "Sonia asked me if I wanted to photograph eighteen pages for French Vogue. Who wouldn't? So I shot (17-year old model) Anne Rohart simply standing against the marble wall of Paris's Palais de Chaillot. "I wanted the marble floor to look sleek and I remember Franceline Prat, the stylist, getting down on her hands and knees in a pink Chanel suit to wet the floor with a sponge." Rohart became Rykiel's star model. "We didn't have a big budget back then," said Issermann, "everything was so much simpler and we had freedom. Sonia gave me carte blanche." Issermann's haunting black-and-whites showed Sonia's girls dancing hand-in-hand at the seashore or draped over the hoods of cars in a moody parking lot. "Sonia was always finding sponsoring deals, she was so practical. We're lucky she never got one with a refrigerator!"

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1976 collection  

Pamela Golbin talked about the museum's upcoming show on Madeleine Vionnet that she's curating: "It's unique because Vionnet left everything to the museum in 1952. So we have the exact pieces she wanted shown. It's almost like she curated the show herself," said Golbin, who's working with Andrée Putman on the scenography.