Designer update March 29, 2011 4:17 pm Two girls walk into a party wearing the same outfit: striped men’s T-shirts from the hard-to-find label Robert P. Miller. “Nancy and I had both come across one of the men’s tees separately and showed up at her house in Fire Island wearing the same shirt,” explains Jennifer Murray. “We were like, ‘Where’d you get that?’ ‘Where’d you get that?’ “ Fair question. The Miller shirts are produced in a rural Pennsylvania factory that’s been making them since 1906, but in recent years they’d been sold mainly by (and to) Americana obsessives in Japan. For some girls, the doubling-up might’ve led to a fight or a fuss. But Murray and partner Nancy Gibson sensed opportunity. They contacted the factory’s fifth- and sixth-generation family owners—via that very 1906 technology, the telephone—and a little convincing later, they’d sold them on the idea: a sister label to Robert P. Miller, christened Edith A. Miller, after a popular girl’s name of the era. Like the men’s line, Edith is 100 percent American-made, from the cotton (grown in North and South Carolina) to the construction. But it is the mill’s first venture into women’s. “It was kind of a challenge sewing with them,” Murray admits. “We’d ask them to make leggings and they’d come back with a 12″ rise—like, above your stomach. And all the colors at the mill [were chosen] by the whole team taking a trip to Home Depot; everyone picked a paint chip.” With the guiding influence of Murray (a fashion-world veteran who worked in sales) and Gibson (who left a career in the financial sector to pursue arts and design), it all came together. (The rises, suffice it to say, came down.) For Spring, the debut collection—short and long-sleeve tees, minidresses, and a maxi dress—was picked up by Steven Alan, which recently hosted an Edith A. Miller pop-up shop, and Creatures of Comfort. For Fall, it hits the racks at Barneys, too. Collaborations are now in the offing, as are new categories like made-in-New York knits. But easy striped tees are and remain the label’s cheery heart. “We chose Edith because we felt this warm, American feeling from it,” Murray says of the name, and that warm feeling extends all the way to its products. “If you don’t know what to wear,” she adds, “you can always put on a striped T-shirt and feel fine.” tags: Edith A. Miller, Jennifer Murray, Nancy Gibson Style File

March 25, 2011 4:12 pm Hollywood legend Edith Head holds the distinction of the most Academy Award nominations ever: 35, for her work designing costumes for some of the great pictures and stars of cinema’s golden age. (She won eight, and you can see her work in Sabrina, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, The Ten Commandments, All About Eve, and Funny Face, which she co-designed with no less than Hubert de Givenchy.) And even with all of that, she found time in the late sixties to pen a how-to guide to style. Next week, How to Dress for Success gets the full reissue treatment ($ 19.95, abramsbooks.com). Some of Head’s wisdom may seem a little retrograde to the reader of the aughts, but her salty wit and curlicue prose hold up quite nicely. (Not to mention her original black-and-white line drawings, complete with helpful suggestions: “Too big! Too much! Too heavy!”) Here’s Head on “How to Dress to Get a Man…And Keep Him”: “The contents of this chapter may be a shock to the woman who feels that the less she wears in pursuit of a man the better. To her we can only say that while the boys ogle and applaud the charms of Venus Unadorned in art galleries, night clubs, and between the covers of some magazines, it’s the covered girls rather than the Cover Girls they invariably marry.” It’s what you might expect the typing pool at the Mad Men office to tell one another—although Edith, unlike them, goes into more detail concerning each specific type of man you might hope to land, from the football fan (”dress warmly! There’s nothing more revolting to the rugged gridiron enthusiast than a shivering, complaining female whose only comment about the game is ‘I’m freezing!’ “) to the far-out intellectual (”What would be the shy man’s chloroform is this man’s meat”). And, despite the occasional feminist-riling bit of man-trapping, there are also plenty of celebrations of all women, great and small (and charts for how to dress either, and everyone in between). “One of the few fallacious quotations ever attributed to our beloved and revered forefather Benjamin Franklin was, ‘With a pillow over their heads all women look alike,’ ” begins the chapter on “How to Analyze Your Figure.” “Knowing women’s figures as I do, I would have to tell dear old Ben to go fly his kite. If he were alive today, I’d take him into my designing room where stand hundreds of white cotton and fabric torsos which are replicas of the figures of famous movie stars whose wardrobes I create. There’s no such thing as a standard size movie star, or woman for that matter.” She should know—she dressed them all.   tags: Edith Head   Cheap Replica Belt By lvyeabc on 03/26/11 at 3:13 am   ‹ Meet Me—And The Best Of Balenciaga—In San Francisco | main Style File

Designer update April 15, 2011 1:03 pm Even at the surf shop, there’s no off season. “We surf when it’s 30 degrees in January,” Saturdays Surf co-founder Morgan Collett said with a laugh at yesterday’s preview of the shop’s expanding house label. Not everyone may be so bold (or so reckless), but the Fall collection he designed with partners Josh Rosen and Colin Tunstall—the first the brand has shown, debuting exclusively on Style.com—is inspired nevertheless by “surfing in the wintertime—but keeping your NYC lifestyle.” Board short-style swim trunks are available year-round, in other words (the best here in black-on-black or navy-on-navy tonal stripe the guys call “jailbird”), but for the first time, so are outerwear pieces like shearling-lined parkas, Harrington-style Goose jackets, and knit beanies. Flannel shirts join poplins and oxfords (all subtly embroidered on the placket with the Saturdays slash); French terry sweatshirts and cotton/wool knits are a larger part of the range; and a new series of Saturdays tees joins the existing options. “In southern California, surf shops don’t have their own labels, but every one has its own T-shirt,” Collett explained. (The Saturdays T-shirts are becoming a signature piece for the shop: They were recently picked up by J.Crew, which now offers them in its Spring catalog.) The pricing remains regular-guy friendly: Outerwear tops at $ 325, with shirts in the $ 100 range and tees starting at $ 35. Not bad for three guys less than three seasons into their own collection. The Saturdays store, bolstered by word of mouth, New York’s revived interest in surf culture, and one of the best coffee machines on Crosby Street (the bar at the front part of the shop pulls espressos daily until 7 p.m.), is more and more a destination on the retail map; and the in-house collection is now large enough to fill it completely, pushing most of the store’s outside merchandise (Levi’s denim, Lightning Bolt tees, and sportswear by the SoCal label Riviera Club) to online-only. (It’s TBD if they’ll eventually return to the bricks-and-mortar retail space.) And next week, a second Saturdays opens: as a pop-up at the Bio-Top space of the cult Japanese boutique Adam et Ropé in Tokyo. tags: Colin Tunstall, Josh Rosen, Morgan Collett, Saturdays Surf Style File

Designer update April 5, 2011 5:25 pm Margaret Maldonado, the industry agent-turned-designer behind L’Agence, has been expanding her offerings these past few seasons. The label (named for her other endeavor, which it grew out of), began as an L.A. casual line of ultra-soft tees and layering basics, the kind real women like herself want and, for a time, couldn’t find. Flash-forward to the present, and L’Agence includes outerwear, fur, separates, and more—one of these days, a full-scale presentation may even be in the works. But in the meantime, Maldonado is trying her hand at a Los Angeles staple second only to the perfect tee: the perfect pair of shades. To create her first specs, she turned to designer Sheila Vance of Sama Eyewear. “Partnering with Sheila was a no-brainer,” Maldonado told Style.com. “She is a legendary eyewear designer, who understands the L’Agence vision.” That vision—of inconspicuous luxury and everyday ease—comes through in styles like the Hideaway, an oversized, face-obscuring frame in Japanese zylonite ($ 489), and Tout Les Temps, a titanium aviator ($ 389). But the glasses, available at ILORI stores, don’t only look good—they do good, too. Ten percent of sales from the L’Agence by Sama go to the Sam Vance Foundation, founded by Sheila Vance after the death of her son, Sam, to help teens and young adults overcome drug dependency. “Sheila is a humanitarian who leverages her passion and talent to make a difference, encouraging others to do the same,” Maldonado explained. “This was an opportunity for us to do something creative and positive together.” “Though I take great pleasure in designing beautiful eyewear,” Vance added, “nothing comes close to the satisfaction one feels in helping save a young person’s life.” tags: L’Agence, Margaret Maldonado, Sama Eyewear, Style File

Social intelligence April 7, 2011  12:01 am The preparations are officially under way for Fashion’s Night Out 2011, which will encompass New York, cities around the globe, and, for the first time, online e-tailers this September 8. With it come not only the special events, deals, and parties but also the Fashion’s Night Out collection, which has expanded to include a baseball cap, tote, and both long- and short-sleeve tees. (Retailers hoping to carry it can sign up at Fashionsnightout.com.) A portion of the proceeds goes to benefit the New York City AIDS Fund in the Community Trust; above, model-of-the-moment Arizona Muse shows off one of the year’s new shirts, shot by Craig McDean. tags: Arizona Muse, Craig McDean, Fashion’s Night Out Style File