Last week we showed you Bella Hadid's latest cover for the Spanish fashion magazine S Moda, and now the full spread is here. Shot for the December issue by photographer David Roemer, Hadid is decked out in the most luxurious lace and embellished pieces by designers like Balmain and Valentino. It's holiday dressing at its most aspirational, and we're feeling very inspired.
Scroll down to see the full spread!
Three days before this year's American Music Awards, held in Los Angeles on Nov. 22, the hairstylist Bryce Scarlett received a text from the model Gigi Hadid: "What do you think about wigs?"
He replied: "I love them. Tell me more." The two set out to create a style that would dupe the Internet.
The resultant faux bob looked so real, social media immediately began buzzing. Had Gigi cut her famously long, thick hair?
The fervor was fueled by more than collective celebrity obsession. In Ms. Hadid, the public saw themselves. She was a young woman who had faced a timeless dilemma: Should I go short? (The look, for a few minutes, even fooled the E! red carpet interviewer, Giuliana Rancic, who, when complimenting Ms. Hadid on her new short style, was greeted by a small smile and the suggestion that she "check back tomorrow to see if I still have short hair.")
Continue reading the main story Slide Show Bobs Are BackCreditPeter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency
Ms. Hadid's mother, Yolanda Foster, the former model turned Real Housewife, clarified on Instagram that the style was a #JustOneNightBob. It was then that observers realized that Ms. Hadid, like many, couldn't quite commit to a cut.
Happily, Mr. Scarlett devised a wholly believable way to fake a bob.
First, he separated and pinned away the front two inches of Ms. Hadid's hair. He saturated the remaining hair with water and Matrix Style Link Super Fixer Strong Hold Gel, $18, and wrapped it tightly around her head in a circular pattern. (Picture the result looking like a cinnamon roll.)
"The hair must be as flat as possible to the scalp so there are no lumps," Mr. Scarlett said. He cut the front few inches off a color-matched wig and glued it the scalp. He then covered the wig with the free front section of Ms. Hadid's hair.
"To pull this off, the only thing you really need is face-framing layers," he said. "You have to have enough short hair to hide the wig. If you have long one-length hair like Cher, you can't do this." It took two hours just to get the wig in place, and there was still some additional styling to be done.
"But Gigi was really committed to the idea," Mr. Scarlett said. "Her dress had s o much going on and a high neckline, so she wanted hair that was easy-looking."
Bobs tend to proliferate during fall and winter. During a season when fashion encroaches upon the face — fluffy turtleneck sweaters and scarves envelop us — bobs make a sleek, unfussy pairing. Naomi Campbell arrived at the British Fashion Awards on Nov. 23 with cropped hair. Coincidentally, she, too, wore a rather involved dress (with a wide choker that gave the illusion of a high neckline).
The bob to wear right now is disheveled. It eschews blown-out-just-this-morning perfection. "The cut should be tapered and layered with not a lot of weight in the ends," Mr. Scarlett said. "That way, the hair didn't look wiggy."
In terms of daily maintenance, there's no better season to go short. Low-humidity air makes frizz, a concern for short hair, less likely. Mr. Scarlett suggests mousse for volume toward the roots and a serum to sharpen the ends. He dusted Matrix Style Link Height Riser (a volumizing powder, $18) along the hairline and worked it through with a boar-bristle brush.
"It makes it look like you just casually pushed your hair back, but it'll actually stay there," he said.
Mr. Scarlett's No. 1 styling tip: Do not be afraid of product. "There's a misconception that hair products aren't modern," he said. "Young girls are like, 'My mom uses hair spray.' But you've got to embrace it. It took so much product to make Gigi's hair look that effortless."
Keep scrolling to find out which stories had our readers (that's you!) buzzing this week.
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Killing it: We found 15 pieces from Forever 21 that look anything but budget.
The American Music Awards happened… But more importantly, we compiled a list of what everyone wore to the after-parties.
Thanks, Jenna Lyons: The J.Crew mastermind shared what she believes to be the most important rule of etiquette.
Time to act like a grown-up: These are the clothes you should toss after you land your first adult job.
How bloggers do holiday parties: These are the most stylish outfits to wear to holiday parties, according to some of our favorite bloggers.
Say what?! Gigi Hadid opened up about her shopping habits, and we're actually really surprised about what she confessed.
It was shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday and Cate Blanchett was 15 minutes late to breakfast.
"Oops," she said, wafting into the restaurant at the Crosby Street Hotel, giving a smile and a shrug as she explained that when her publicist hadn't stopped by her room earlier, she assumed the time had been changed and went back to bed.
Oh, well. Surely, one could excuse Ms. Blanchett for being a little sleepy.
After flying in Sunday night from Los Angeles, she hit the ground running with a Monday appearance on "Good Morning America," promoting her new film, "Carol." From there, she went on to the film's press junket, changed into a black Antonio Marras dress with ruffled detailing a nd darted off to "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."
Then, she put on an olive green Lanvin gown and hoofed it to the film's premiere, where she worked through red carpet interviews and posed for shots that would be beamed across the globe.
Thirty minutes later, Ms. Blanchett's Escalade snaked through Manhattan toward the School of Visual Arts Theater on West 23rd Street for a Q. and A. with the film's director, Todd Haynes, and her co-star, Rooney Mara, before heading back uptown to an after-party dinner.
Continue reading the main story Slide Show Cate Blanchett's Oscars LooksCreditSteve Granitz Archive 1/WireImage
The following morning, there was "Live With Kelly and Michael." In the afternoon, a Q. and A. with the National Board of Review. In the evening, she changed into her black-beaded Chanel and headed to the week's starriest event: a huge tribute on her behalf at the Museum of Modern Art.
There, colleagues like Ralph Fiennes and Woody Allen feted Ms. Blanchett for her Houdini-like ability to morph into characters ranging from homeless to head of state. Friends testified to her unfailing kindness. Magazine editors waxed poetic about her impeccable sense of style.
So how did she look by Wednesday morning, having ended the previous evening well after midnight? Pretty great, actually.
She was dressed all in black: black Givenchy tuxedo jacket, black asymmetrical Stella McCartney sweater, pleated black trousers and black patent leather Tod's loafers.
The one dash of color came from a pair of bright pink aviators, which sat on her forehead in front of those famous blue-green eyes, and produced against her monochrome outfit an effect that was almost the ocular equivalent of a Dan Flavin lighting installation.
Ms. Blanchett professed to be a lit tle gobsmacked by all the people who had shown up the previous evening on her behalf.
Martin Scorsese, who directed her in "The Aviator," was a co-chair of the MoMA tribute, even though it was his birthday and what he really wanted to do was go to dinner with a few friends and family.
"Bless his socks," Ms. Blanchett said. "What a mensch. What a guy!"
Graydon Carter was another co-host, and just thinking about him brought a smile. "Hasn't he got wonderful hair?" she said.
She even had a chance to bond again with the artist Cindy Sherman, although that encounter had been a little bit petrifying to her, truth be told.
"Drooling fan! Stalker!" she said, describing herself and the fit of nerves she nearly collapsed into upon realizing the art world's best known chameleon was amid this dazzling crowd of admirers. "I just thought, 'Where's my anorak?'"
So Ms. Blanchett is human. She can still get star-struck all these years later, even after she has won two Oscars, one for "The Aviator" and another for "Blue Jasmine."
Never mind the interminably long awards-season dinners and mini-wardrobe malfunctions and two-cheek kisses with people harvesting newly named superbugs that only seem to strike at the heart of Oscar season.
Never mind the reporters with their inane questions and rumpled suits that appear to have been bought before the start of the first Bush presidency.
Even now, Ms. Blanchett still manages to evoke, in spite of all that, a sense that she has not seen it all.
This Friday, she hit theaters again in "Carol," the latest film from Mr. Haynes, in which she plays a housewife falling in love with another woman in the Fifties. It received terrific reviews for itself as well as its leading lady, and the Oscar buzz has been building again.
"It's been great," she said of the last year, which also included a six-week run at the Sydney Theater Company, starring in "The Present," an adaptation of Chekhov's "Platonov," and turns in the Disney update of "Cinderella," as well as "Truth," on the saga at CBS News.
Ms. Blanchett is aware that being this busy at age 46 is to have a series of problems most actresses only dream of. "But I literally thought I need to bring a sleeping bag to MoMA.!"
Now, she was hungry and in need of a little caffeine.
Photo Cate Blanchett wore a black-beaded Chanel at a tribute on her behalf at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday. Credit Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesThankfully, a waiter approached to take her order: a bagel with smoked salmon, along with some avocado, a little hot water with lemon juice, and some caffeine.
"Would it be possible to get a double espresso with hot milk?" she said.
For the next hour, she dined on all of that in the corner of this half-empty restaurant, talking animatedly about every cultural subject under the sun, from art to theater to movies to fashion to feminism.
She was lovely, she was nice, she was forthcoming.
She also turned out to be the sort of person who peppers conversations with so many erudite cultural references, it was sometimes hard to keep up.
Had a reporter been to the new Whitney?
Yes, he had. Transformed the entire neighborhood. Pass.
Had the reporter seen the well-reviewed new production of "A View From the Bridge" that opened on Broadway last week?
No, he had not. Fail.
There was nothing arrogant or haute about the way she discussed this or any of the artists, writers, designers, directors and playwrights she loves, among them Willem de Kooning, Spike Lee, Raf Simons, John Galliano, Gerhard Richter and Anton Chekhov.
Nor was she anodyne, certainly not as she voiced misgivings about the new Harper Lee novel ("I don't know that I want to read that book. If she wanted to publish it, would she have published it earlier?") and lamented the recent departures from Dior by Raf Simons (voluntary) and from Lanvin by Alber Elbaz (definitely not).
"I just knew that it had happened and it was like a little death," she said, speaking of the firing of Mr. Elbaz, a friend whose dress she wore Monday night. "That's gone. To what end?"
Still, Ms. Blanchett retains in person a queenly, almost ethereal quality that is unusual in this current era of fame.
She hates selfies. She doesn't do Twitter. When the food arrived, she did not so much eat it as nibble upon it. Even on the occasion that a four-letter word came from her mouth, Ms. Blanchett seemed constitutionally incapable of being vulgar or bitter.
One could see why directors constantly offer her period dramas. Her modern sense of style is complemented by a tinge of formality that is almost anachronistic.
In "Carol," Ms. Blanchett plays the title character, a housewife with nails manicured just so, nary a hair on her head ever out of place. Her billowing fur coat gets so much screen time, it could easily have had its own credit.
For Ms. Blanchett, the costumes were a vital tool to finding the character, a form of anthropology, from the outside in.
"The process of developing the costumes, it sounds like 'O.K., what shoes does my character wear?'" Ms. Blanchet t said. "It seems very Stanislavsky. It's not. It's more organic than that. It's like 'How does this make me move?' 'If I move that way, what does it mean?'"
Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, where her mother was a teacher and her father worked in advertising (he died when she was a girl), Ms. Blanchett played dress-up games with her sister, from which they would create fantastical characters with wildly elaborate narratives.
Photo Ms. Blanchett on a panel Monday with Todd Haynes, director of her new film "Carol," and her co-star Rooney Mara. Credit Robin Marchant/Getty Images for Academy of Moti"I would inhabit the clothes she put me in, and then she would name the person that came out," Ms. Blanchett said. "Our favorite was a guy named Piggy Trucker, this little dude who drove a pig truck to the abattoirs and was really conflicted because it made him stop wanting to eat meat."
When she moved into doing movies and theater after finishing drama school in 1992, she put that proclivity toward self-transformation to bigger and better use.
In 1999, she hit the carpet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for her first nomination — for playing Queen Elizabeth I in "Elizabeth" — wearing a dark John Galliano gown with butterflies on the back.
Five years later, she won her first Oscar for "The Aviator" (playing Katharine Hepburn), decked out in a yellow one-shoulder Valentino with a wine-colored belt and pink floral brooch.
In 2007, she moved back to Sydney from Britain and took over the Sydney Theater Company with her husband, the writer and director Andrew Upton.
There, her status as a fashion icon came in handy as Giorgio Armani provided millions of dollars in donations, and became its lead patron.
In an email, Mr. Armani called Ms. Blanchett "one of the m ost talented actresses of our time," a person whose appeal is being simultaneously "fragile and strong, icy and sensual."
The marriage between the Sydney Theater Company and Mr. Armani also turned out to be a harbinger of a new economic reality in the entertainment business. As movie salaries shrunk and executives turned up their noses at making big, ambitious movies about women, the fashion industry was becoming increasingly dependent on Hollywood celebrities to sell magazines, clothes, jewelry and makeup. And so a small coterie of big-ticket actresses began to earn some of the difference back by taking on edgier, more experimental film and theater work while forging relationships with luxury brands, which compensated their muses in myriad ways for the affiliation.
In 2014, Ms. Blanchett won her second Oscar for "Blue Jasmine" and accepted the award in an Armani Privé gown that was reported to have cost $100,000 to produce, which was mere pennies compared with the value of the jewelry she was decked out in: $18 million worth of Chopard.
There, she gave a speech that was statesmanlike toward her colleagues and pointed toward Hollywood's studio heads, whom she put on notice for failing to realize that movies about women are not just necessary, but profitable, too. "The world is round, people," she memorably shouted.
A nd she was there as a presenter the following year as well, looking resplendent in a silk velvet sheath from John Galliano for Maison Martin Margiela, her neck adorned in a turquoise Tiffany creation that was designed by Francesca Amfitheatrof and inspired knockoffs the world over.
The fact that the Good Witch of Oz never once seemed to land in a supermarket tabloid before or after that only added to her authority and bankability.
"She makes you miss her," said Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, who dressed Ms. Blanchett for numerous appearances, including one at the Oscars back in 2011. "You crave on-screen time with her, and then she comes with this crazy major movie and it's mind-blowing. Then, she's gone again. She is the antithesis of today's speed fame obsession."
Part of this has to do with Ms. Blanchett's desire to raise her four children, whose ages range from almost a year old to 13, in Sydney, an environment where fame is perhaps a somewhat less powerful commodity than it is in New York or London or Los Angeles. "I don't want them to be defined by it," she said. "There's a circus quality to what we do."
Still, she frets that she's damaging them, not doing enough for them, even living nearly 10,000 miles away from all these cameras and all this mayhem.
On her "Tonight Show" appearance, Ms. Blanchett had a blast. But she was still nervous the entire time that she was going to embarrass her oldest son, whom she said "bears the brunt somewhat at an all-boys school when his mother says or does something."
"When my son heard I was playing a lesbian, he went, 'ugh,'" she said. "There was no judgment on the creative decision. He could just see what Wednesday at school was going to be like."
Her time here was now running out. Ms. Blanchett had a baby waiting for her back upstairs, Edith, a little girl whom she and her husband adopted this year. Plus, there was another flight to catch. She was due in New Delhi on Friday, where she had a speaking engagement at Tina Brown's "Women in The World" summit in association with The New York Times.
But shortly before departing, she talked a little more about her complicated feelings about how women are treated in her industry and answered a question about how she has navigated an entire career without once taking her clothes off in a gratuitous sex scene.
This sentence stuck out beyond the others: "A career is built as much by what you say no to as what you say yes to."
Correction: November 29, 2015An article last Sunday about Cate Blanchett, considered a leading contender for a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in "Carol," misidentified the venue in Los Angeles where the 1999 Oscars ceremony was held. It was the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, not the Kodak Theater.
Elizabeth Olsen has made a name for herself as a rising actress, especially visible this week when she announced 2016's Independent Spirit Award nominations, Popsugar reports. She did this while wearing none other than The Row, the collection designed by her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley. Elizabeth wore a white suit with an elegant open collar and graceful wide-legged trousers from her siblings' line, accenting it with geometric gold jewelry and dark blue shoes. She gives winter white a stylish new meaning!
Scroll down to see Elizabeth Olsen's suit from The Row!
It was 61 degrees on a recent November evening, but the scaffolds outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue were trimmed with artificial fir, and Santa Claus himself was bopping with Liz Rodbell, the store's president, to Austin Mahone's "Mmm Yeah."
Mr. Mahone, a clean-scrubbed pop star, was crooning it live to a gathering of hundreds of teenage girls, who were crowded behind the metal barricades that surrounded the makeshift theater, chirping "mmm, mmm, yeah, yeah" in response.
The occasion was the unveiling of Lord & Taylor's holiday windows, an event that, like similar vernissages at competitors such as Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys New York, has increasingly become a big-budget spectacle. (Mr. Mahone's performance, which ended with "The Christm as Song," followed Nick Jonas's from last year.)
After hugs and thanks, the curtains covering the windows were pulled back: a conveyor belt of iced cakes revolved through one window; a Victorian gingerbread house was hoisted by a platoon of gingerbread men (and a digital video montage of more) in another.
These windows — assembled in a cavernous shop (Santa's Workshop meets "American Horror Story" set) located stories below Lord & Taylor's 1914 building and lifted into place on original truck-size hydraulic elevators — are the store's largest and most involved of the year. They have to be: For Lord & Taylor, as for most department stores, the holiday season is when the money gets made.
"The Christmas season is like the Super Bowl for us," Ms. Rodbell said.
In the two weeks before Thanksgiving, all of New York's major department stores would follow suit, revealing the holiday windows that have been, in some cases, more than a year in the making. It is a city tradition stretching back to the 19th century. R. H. Macy had Christmas-themed windows in his original store on 14th Street in the 1870s; this year, at Macy's Herald Square, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang are recreating key scenes from "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
None of this is news to the merchants who must plan and execute ever larger and more effective displays. The talk is jolly (these windows are a "gift to New York"), but the stakes are real. According to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks retail sales across all payment types, 24 percent of annual department-store sales are made in November and December.
Continue reading the main story Slide Show Where Mere Mannequins Fear to TreadCreditStefania Curto for The New York Times
This year, the season arrives on a tide of bad news: Many department-store stocks have tumbled in recent months, inventories are bloated and customer spending is down (3.3 percent since February for department stores, according to SpendingPulse).
But here come the windows. Day after day in the lead-up to Thanksgiving (and the all-important Black Friday, so named — at least according to widely accepted legend — because it is the day when stores' ledgers finally move from the red to the black), the New York department stores showed their long-in-the-works plans.
"I've actually never been to the actual unveiling of windows," said the actress Jane Krakowski, at the debut of Bloomingdale's Lexington Avenue windows, whose flowers and faceted sculptures, representing the five senses, had been designed in collaboration with her friend, the florist Jeff Leatham. A marching band had just finished playing. "As I drove up in the cab, I was like, 'Oh, this is a thing!'"
In investment and planning, competition and anxiety, pomp and circumstance, a thing is what it is.
"This is the largest visual investment of the year, every year," said Josh ua Schulman, the president of Bergdorf Goodman, declining to specify an amount. It is such that, as with many stores, partnerships with outside companies help Bergdorf to underwrite it.
This year, the store's window maestros Linda Fargo and David Hoey and their team worked with Swarovski to hand-set more than seven million crystals in its tableaus — about 70 times as many as bedazzled the most recent Oscars ceremony. The windows are Swarovski's biggest collaboration ever: fantastical scenes in which a monkey fortune teller gazes into a crystal ball and a faux-pearl-studded Poseidon presides over the sea. The store ran a contest on its Instagram account, awarding a gift card to the person who came closest to guessing the total number of crystals used.
The theme, "Brilliant Holiday," grew out of a need to promote its renovated jewelry salon, which will open in December. (The windows also celebrate Swarovski's 120th anniversary.)
The "Brilliant" theme also dominates Bergdorf's holiday catalog mailer and is expressed through limited-edition merchandise created for the store. Alice & Olivia designed a Swarovski-blinged jumpsuit ($898); Brett Heyman of Edie Parker, a selection of stone-crusted Atelier Swarovski clutches ($1,400 to $4,200); Badgley Mischka, an embroidered evening gown ($2,995).
The dresses created for the windows themselves, by Johnson Hartig of Libertine, Naeem Khan and CD Greene, are available for those flush enough to inquire. La st year, Ms. Fargo said, a client asked about a gown Dolce & Gabbana made for the window. (The high-five-figure price was ultimately too steep; it was donated to the Fashion Institute of Technology instead.)
Many stores still do not put products, even special-edition products, in their holiday windows, but the move to integrate windows into the store's business and marketing is nearly universal. At Bloomingdale's, Mr. Leatham will have pop-up stores selling his book, his candles and his Waterford crystal designs in select stores, a first for a window collaborator.
Even Lord & Taylor, the most traditionally minded of the stores, will make the concession to contemporary commerce: It will sell holiday gingerbread and sweets, inspired by its gingerbread and patisserie windows.
Photo Fans of Austin Mahone lined up to see him perform outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue. Credit Stefania Curto for The New York Times"I think with each consecutive year what gets more important is that we've become more and more holistic and integrated in how we approach holiday with the store," Ms. Fargo said. "It's not just a window discussion. Everyone throws the word 'omni' around. It's kind of an omni world now."
At Saks Fifth Avenue, the store's new president, Marc Metrick, a veteran executive who took over in April, agreed.
"I've been at Saks for a long time," he said. "I've seen all the iterations of the windows from when it was — I hate to say this — just windows."
Saks spared no expense to make sure its holiday display dazzled. Its six central windows depict six icy wonders of the world (a frozen Taj Mahal, a cold Colosseum), with the seventh being the enormous Winter Palace erected in lights above them on the store's Fifth Avenue facade.
The wintry theme will be expressed in all Saks stores (even in locales as unchilly as Palm Beach, Fla.), store mailers and new products commissioned or selected for gifting — like entry-level lip balms and holiday teddy bears, and $250,000 jewelry.
"What we've got to do is convert," said Mark Briggs, the executive vice president of HBC Creative (the in-house pr omotional unit of Hudson's Bay Company, the owner of Saks), noting that, after last year's holiday event, foot traffic in the New York store increased. "What we don't want is, 'Oh, that's very nice,' come to the door, click, click, click, they do Instagram, and go. What we're doing is hopefully converting them to customers."
Window tourism is, after all, a time-honored New York holiday tradition. According to NYC & Company, the city's destination marketing organization, 30 percent of last year's total visitation took place in the fourth quarter of the year, more than in any other season; typically five million visitors come to the city between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve alone.
Photo Saks Fifth Avenue spared no expense to make sure its holiday display dazzled. Credit Stefania Curto for The New York TimesJon Harari, whose company, WindowsWear, offers guided tours of retail windows year-round, said that demand is two to three times greater during the holidays than the rest of the year, and he increases capacity of the tours that his company runs to 50 people, from 30. Mr. Harari added that the tours, which run five days a week for $34.99 a spot, were sold out until Dec. 5 even before Thanksgiving.
Windows alone will not carry stores from decline to success, but industry analysts believe that they can help.
"The department stores are facing Generation Z and the post-millenn ial," said Oliver Chen, a managing director at the financial services firm Cowen and Company. "They're thinking hard about bricks and clicks, the integration of on- and off-line. The reason for going to a store — the bar is higher. It's really up to the retailers to provide the right balance of theater and commercial."
Theater has long been one of the draws of the windows at Barneys. It was a hallmark of the windows under Simon Doonan, now the store's creative ambassador at large ("There's nothing I haven't put in a window," he said, including the writer David Rakoff, who saw "patients" behind glass as a costumed Sigmund Freud). Under Dennis Freedman, the current creative director, live performances have become standard.
Last year the holiday program, created in collaboration with the director Baz Luhrmann, featured ice skaters and a break-dancing elf; this year, sculptors in custom (and for-sale) Moncler puffer suits carve giant ice blocks in refrigerated windows. The theme is "Chillin' Out," and other windows feature a huge icicle sculpture by the glass artist Dale Chihuly and a slot-car track racing mini Lexuses (a sponsor) through the tundra.
"It is more ambitious than anything we've done," Mr. Freedman said. "We did not chill out. In fact, I think we had more all-nighters."
Nationwide, Barneys stores will have Chillin' Out hangtags and gift wrap, Chillin' Out holiday gift cards, Chillin' Out specials at store restaurants and Chillin' Out merchandising in print mailers and online. Chillin' Out marshmallows on sticks, covered in white chocolate and coconut, will be given to shoppers each weekend.
While it is important that the windows reach even larger audiences digitally through online extensions and social media courtship, bringing crowds to the actual store remains a priority. Creating a destination "is potentially more important than ever," said Mark Lee, the Barneys chief executive. "E-commerce and the digital world continues to boom, so to have a reason to visit the physical store, that is an important driver today."
Though many executives drew a line between the art of window display and the science of commerce, Mr. Freedman believes that the right window leads to sales. "I absolutely do, 100 percent," he said. "The reason you come in — you either go to our competition or you go here — is because it feels right. You walk in here and you relate to it."
None of the retailers interviewed would share specific holiday numbers, but the ends, they suggested, justified the means .
"There's a commercial element that makes it a viable way to spend our marketing dollars, for sure," said Mr. Metrick of Saks, calling the holiday season "the biggest opportunity of the year." A few days later, the company shut down a stretch of Fifth Avenue to inaugurate the first Winter Palace light show (it will continue every evening until Jan. 10) with fireworks and a 200-member chorus.
In the name of secrecy and the least possible traffic hindrance, the team tested the show in 4 a.m. run-throughs in the days before its start. A crowd of V.I.P.s, press and passers-by watched from across Fifth, sipping cocoa; a much larger group tuned in via an Internet live stream.
The night it was revealed, temperatures hovered in the 30s, and Mr. Metrick gave a short speech thanking his team and their partners, as the last major set of department-store windows after more than week of unveilings up and down the avenue were about to be seen.
Then he added the grace note: "I wouldn't be a retailer if I didn't remind everyone that after the show, the store is open."
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FashionTV is at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show 2015, bringing you all the hottest looks first. The Angels took to the runway wearing a range of exotic outfits for the show, including Boho Psychedelic, Exotic Butterflies, Portrait of an Angel, Ice Angels, and Fireworks inspired looks.
Content courtesy: VS Press
Just when you thought Zara couldn't get any better, we're sharing the brand's best finds under $20. From a simple black dress to the season's It accessory, we've combed the fast-fashion site to bring you best items you can buy with 20 bucks.
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My interview with Justin McLeod was winding down when I tossed out one last question: "Have you ever been in love?"
The baby-faced chief executive had designed Hinge, which was a new dating app. My question was an obvious throwaway.
Justin looked stricken. No one, he said, had ever asked him that in an interview. "Yes," he finally answered. "But I didn't realize it until it was too late." Then he asked me to stop recording. I hit Stop.
Off the record, he looked relieved to unburden himself. Her name was Kate. They were college sweethearts. He kept breaking her heart. (Tears now swelled in his eyes.) He wasn't the best version of himself back then. He had since made amends to everyone, including Kate. But she was now living abroad, engaged to someone else.
"Does she know you still love her?" I asked.
"No," he said. "She's been engaged for two years now."
"Two years?" I said. "Why?"
"I don't know."
I was by then a year into a separation from a two-decade marriage. I had been doing a lot of thinking about the nature of love, its rarity. The reason I was interviewing Justin, in fact, was that his app had help ed facilitate a post-separation blind date, my first ever, with an artist for whom I had fallen at first sight.
That had never happened to me, the at-first-sight part. He was also the first man to pop up on my screen after I downloaded Justin's app.
For those keeping score at home, those are a lot of firsts: first dating app, first man on my screen, first blind date, first love at first sight. I was interested in understanding the app's algorithm, how it had come about, how it had guessed, by virtue of our shared Facebook friends, that this particular man, a sculptor with a focus on the nexus between libidinal imagery and blossoms, would take root in my heart.
"You have to tell her," I said to Justin. "Listen —— " and I told him the story of the boy I had loved just before meeting my husband.
He was a senior in college, studying Shakespeare abroad. I was a 22-year-old war photographer based in Paris. We had met on a beach in the Caribbean, then I visited him in London, shell-shocked, after having covered the end of the Soviet-Afghan war.
I thought of him every day I was covering that war. When I was sleeping in caves, so sick from dysentery and an infected shrapnel wound on my hand that I had to be transported out of the Hindu Kush by Doctors Without Borders, my love for him is what kept me going.
But a few weeks after my trip to London, he stood me up. He said he would visit me at my apartment in Paris one weekend and never showed. Or so I thought.
Two decades later, I learned that he actually had flown to Paris that weekend but had lost the piece of paper with my address and phone number. I was unlisted. He had no answering machine. We had no friends in common. He wound up staying in a hostel, and I wound up marrying and having three children with the next man I dated. And so life goes.
By the time Google was invented, the first photo of me to appear on his screen was of my children and me from an article someone had written about my first book, a memoir of my years as a war photographer. Soon after, he married and had three children with the next woman he dated. And so life goes.
I found him by accident, doing research on theater companies for my last novel. There he was above his too-common name. I composed the email: "Are you the same man who stood me up in Paris?"
That's how I learned what had happened that weekend and began to digest the full impact of our missed connection.
His work brought him to New York a few months later, and we met for a springtime lunch on a bench in Central Park. I was so flummoxed, I kicked over my lemonade and dropped my egg salad sandwich: Our long-lost love was still there.
In fact, the closure provided by our reunion and the shock of recognition of a still-extant love that had been deprived of sun and water would thereafter affect both of our marriages, albeit in different ways. He realized how much he needed to work on tending to his marriage. I realized I had given mine all the nutrients and care I could — 23 years of tilling that soil — but the field was fallow.
Hearing of Justin's love for Kate while seated on another New York City bench four years later, I felt a fresh urgency. "If you still love her," I told him, "and she's not yet married, you have to tell her. Now. You don't want to wake up in 20 years and regret your silence. But you can't do it by email or Facebook. You actually have to show up in person and be willing to have the door slammed in your face."
He laughed wistfully: "I can't do that. It's too late."
Three months later, he emailed an invitation to lunch. The article I wrote about him and his company, in which he had allowed me to mention Kate (whom I had called his "Rosebud"), had generated interest in his app, and he wanted to thank me.
On the appointed day, I showed up at the restaurant and found the hostess. "Justin McLeod, table for two," I said.
"No," he said, suddenly behind me. "For three."
"Three? Who's joining us?"
"She is," he said, pointing to a wisp of a woman rushing past the restaurant's window, a blur of pink coat, her strawberry blond hair trailing behind her.
"What the —— ? Is that Rosebud?"
"Yes."
Kate burst in and embraced me in a hug. Up close she resembled another Kate — Hepburn, who had a ppeared in the comedies of remarriage I had studied in college with Stanley Cavell.
These films, precursors to today's rom-coms, were made in America in the 1930s and '40s, when showing adultery or illicit sex wasn't allowed. To pass the censors, the plots were the same: A married couple divorced, flirted with others, then remarried. The lesson? Sometimes you have to lose love to refind it, and a return to the green world is the key to reblossoming.
"This is all because of you," Kate said, crying. "Thank you."
Now Justin and I were tearing up, too, to the point where the other diners were staring at us, confused.
After we sat down, they told me the story of their reunion, finishing each other's sentences as if they had been married for years. One day, after a chance run-in with a friend of Kate's, Justin texted Kate to arrange a phone conversation, then booked a trans-Atlantic flight to see her without warning. He called her from his hotel room, asked if he could stop by. She was to be married in a month, but three days later, she moved out of the apartment she had been sharing with her fiancé.
I felt a pang of guilt. The poor man!
It was O.K., she said. Their relationship had been troubled for years. She had been trying to figure out a way to postpone or cancel the wedding, but the invitations had already been sent, the hall and caterer booked, and she didn't know how to resolve her ambivalence without disappointing everyone.
Justin had arrived at her door at nearly the last moment he could have spoken up or forever held his peace. By the time of our lunch, the two were already living together.
Soon afte rward, I had them over for dinner to introduce them to the blossom-obsessed artist who bore half of the responsibility for their reunion. He and I hadn't worked out as a couple, much to my pain and chagrin, but we had found our way back into a close friendship and even an artistic collaboration after he texted me a doodle he'd been drawing.
In fact, we had just signed a contract to produce three books together: "The ABC's of Adulthood," "The ABC's of Parenthood" and — oh, the irony — "The ABC's of Love."
"What was the doodle?" Kate asked.
I showed her the drawing on my iPhone.
"Are those ovaries?" she asked, smiling.
"Or seeds," I said. "Or flower buds, depending on how you look at it."
All perfectly reasonable interpretations of love begetting love begetting love, which is why we were all gathered around my table that night, weren't we? Because real love, once blossomed, never disappears. It may get lost with a piece of paper, or transform into art, books or children, or trigger another couple's union while failing to cement your own.
But it's always there, lying in wait for a ray of sun, pushing through thawing soil, insisting upon its rig htful existence in our hearts and on earth.
As someone who lives in Brooklyn, I find it unsurprising that the New York borough receives so much attention. Everything's just a little more laid back, a little less showy, and, well, infinitely cooler as a result. I'm constantly inspired by the stylish denizens who call the area home, so it's always surprised me that there aren't many fashion bloggers hailing from Brooklyn.
It turns out I just had to dig a little deeper, and what I stumbled upon—a blog called Stylish Gambino—was quite the gem. Run by blond beauty Jessi Frederick since 2012, the site is totally worth a deep dive. "I'm not a blogger; I just post a lot," Frederick jokes, riffing on that Big Pun song, a Brooklyn reference if we've ever heard one. And she does indeed, showcasing her impeccable minimalist style, sprinkled with edgier items like the perfect leather jacket or boyish sneakers. It's safe to say I've found my ultimate Brooklyn girl crush.
Scroll down to check out my favorite looks from Stylish Gambino!
A wet night in November and Steve Mass — a compact figure in baseball cap and stubble — was strolling through a jostling nightclub in TriBeCa. Voices were rising, drinks were beginning to slosh and serious déjà vu was setting in: More than three decades after closing the anarchic Mudd Club, he was presiding over a roiling reunion.
In the downstairs lobby at the Roxy Hotel, the singer Kate Pierson (late of the B-52s) was a burst of goofy glam, with neon-red hair flowing over a screaming-pomegranate top. A Zen-calm Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith's guitarist, with his endless legs and gray mane, paced through the crowd looking like an elegant heron. Near the staircase, cameras closed in on Deborah Harry, the New Wave's Catherine Deneuve. Deadpan and apparently ageless, she was Blondie-chic in a rubber jacket with a jaunty WTF splashed across the bodice.
As it happened, the festivities at the Roxy (until recently the TriBeCa Grand) were inspired by the Mudd Club, once tucked into a converted warehouse two blocks away. (A plaque marks the spo t, at 77 White Street, though a condo has replaced the building.)
Mr. Mass, an intellectual provocateur who ran a private-ambulance service, had opened the dingy hideaway with two partners in October 1978, when New York night life was defined by the hard-edge glamour of Studio 54.
Their outpost (named in honor of Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated John Wilkes Booth) drew adventurers to the wilds of TriBeCa for real-time updates on the avant-garde. "It was a dance hall, drug den, bar and pickup joint," said Richard Boch, an artist who made live-or-die decisions as its alpha doorman. "And within that, it was an incredible incubator for talent."
Photo Steve Mass, an owner of the Mudd Club in TriBeCa, in its Jayne Mansfield Room in 1981. Credit Kate SimonWilliam Burroughs performed at the Mudd Club; so did the Talking Heads and the proto hip-hopper Fab 5 Freddy. On a given night, the crowd included creatives coming into their own (Cindy Sherman, Anna Sui and Kathryn Bigelow) as well as fast-trackers who succumbed to the era's scourges: Jean-Michel Basquiat overdosed on heroin in 1988, and Keith Haring died of AIDS in 1990.
The club closed its doors in 1983, but on Nov. 19 a portrait of Mr. Haring surveyed the exuberant crowd of writers, artists, fashion addicts and sundry downtown dwellers who paid $100 and more to revisit it all. And, happily, to take bits of it home.
Organized as a rummage sale to benefit the Bowery Mission Women's Centers, the event was rich in artifacts donated by notable Muddgoers. Priced from $20 to $2,500, the concatenation of fashion, jewelry, photographs, artwork and stage props (new as well as vintage) was charmingly random: Tables in Django, the hotel's nightclub, were arrayed with treasures including the cowbell and Mickey Mouse toy piano played by the B-52s' Fred Schneider (a bargain at $155 for the pair); black rubber bracelets like the ones that the stylist and photographer Maripol designed for Madonna, and a black leather tote from Marc Jacobs.
Photo A portrait of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by William Coupon. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York Times Continue reading the main storyAn Odinesque mannequin designed by Kenny Scharf towered by the checkout desk; originally $2,000, it was marked down to $750 (and eventually hauled up the staircase by a bargain hunter). The tallying continues, but by last count the event had raised more than $50,000.
It was Mr. Mass, known to acolytes as Dr. Mudd, who developed the idea of a club-themed fete. An expatriate who moved to Berlin in 1990, he began to consider the possibilities last summer as his 75th birthday approached. Eager to reunite with his family and in need of minor medical care, he flew to New York last month and settled at the Roxy.
"In the back of my mind," he said, "I thought, 'Maybe there's some way to do an event.'" Not content with a simple birthday party, he asked the hotel's event staff to suggest a suitable cause; they introduced him to the Bowery Mission Women's Center nearby.
On the evenin g before the sale, Mr. Mass was settled on a stool in Django, looking slightly weary. Partnering with an agency serving women on the Lower East Side, he said, was particularly gratifying: "I thought about the girls at the Mudd Club, the minority who fell between the cracks. Some of them were very vulnerable. They came to New York wrapped in fantasy and didn't realize the kind of trouble you could get into. They didn't think twice about doing heroin or taking a job as an escort."
Old friends including Maripol and the style arbiter Glenn O'Brien helped reach alums who could pitch in. Though the Mudd Club he opened in Berlin in 2001 flourished until he shuttered it in 2011, Mr. Mass had dropped out of the mainstream; these days, he spends much of his time golfing.
Clothing racked under the color-block ceiling in the lobby vividly evoked the over-the-top Mudd scene: Here was a leopard-print jumpsuit from Ms. Harry (grab-it cheap at $120); there, a sequined shift from Ms. Pierson. Edgier treasures beckoned, too: a black leather vest stenciled by the fashion muse Edwige Belmore (who died in September) for $130, and a burgundy cummerbund embellished with safety pins ($75) by the designer Victoria Bartlett.
Not everyone searching the racks was driven by nostalgie de la boue. Looking like Mia Farrow as an eighth-grader, the fashion writer and actress Tavi Gevinson (in fact, an adorably self-possessed 19) approached the offerings like a connoisseur. "I knew there would be really good vintage here," she said. "And you can see and touch things, unlike on eBay."
Photo Tavi Gevinson. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York TimesIn a red vinyl jacket and long denim dress, Ms. Gevinson (who discovered a simple black Haring-print frock amid the rock-chick finery) looked more au courant than anyone at the event.
But it was Legendary Damon, a party planner and "curator of culture," who made the biggest statement. Mr. Damon, a Detroit native "obsessed with New York in the early '80s," strode into Django in a vintage Donna Karan coat draped with a yellow rabbit-fur stole and accessorized with a rap-style grille, gilded rings crafted in Africa and a club-standard porkpie hat. Though he belongs to the post-Mudd generation, he said, "people tell me I'm helping keep the era alive."
Talking with friends in a corner of the club, Ms. Harry was vague about her own outfit, which included wide black trousers and a necklace of hammered-metal owls. Her own porkpie hat, she said, was "in honor of 'Breaking Bad,'" while her jacket came from the London designers Vin and Omi. "I liked it because it's nasty," she said. Beyond that, Ms. Harry said, "I just like to look odd."
As she spoke, guests were flowing into the darkened nightclub. Mr. Kaye had performed earlier; Ms. Pierson was about to cap the evening.
Photo From left, the Mudd Club owner Steve Mass (in cap), Debbie Harry, Kate Pierson and Richard Boch, the Mudd Club's longtime doorman. Credit Christian Hansen for The New York TimesDuring her high-energy set, it was impossible for anyone who had not crowded the stage (or mounted a chair) to see Ms. Pierson. Instead, in a scene that would have been impossible to imagine at the Mudd Club, one could glimpse her in miniature over the heads of almost everyone in the crowd, on screen-after-glowing-cellphone screen. Raw, it was not.
Afterward, the lights came back up, Chic's seductive "I Want Your Love" brought revelers back to the dance floor and Mr. Mass prepared to scramble.
His friend Paul Sevigny, it seemed, was hosting an after-party at his private club upstairs, and the night was just beginning. Though his birthda y benefit had rocked the house, Mr. Mass pronounced it "a little … tame," adding, "I'm not leaving without a wild party."
We couldn't be more pleased that Adele is back and better than ever—especially since it means we get to witness her impeccable style on a daily basis. Case in point: this striking look she was snapped in recently. Clad in a red fringed coat, a black dress, and oversize sunnies, she's the picture of glamour. Thanks, Adele, now we're officially convinced that our holiday-season wardrobes are not complete without a statement red coat.
Scroll down to see her full look and shop red coats for yourself!
LONDON — Does the world need another award ceremony?
If he were being entirely honest, Karl Lagerfeld — who won the Outstanding Achievement trophy at the 2015 British Fashion Awards at the London Coliseum on Monday night — might say no.
"I don't like the word 'honored,' " he said in 2010, when the Fashion Institute of Technology did just that — honor him, that is. "I did a job all my life, and I'm happy they like it."
Still, speaking to him in Paris just days before the recent occasion, he did concede that "alth ough I'm not crazy about that, Anna is a friend, and it's flattering." He referred to Anna Wintour, the American Vogue editor, who presented the award.
He continued: "The British Fashion Awards are creative. And Miss Massenet, I know her quite well, too. She invented something." He was talking, of course, about the designer fashion e-tailer Net-a-Porter, which Natalie Massenet founded in 2000 and from which she recently departed. She is also chairwoman of the British Fashion Council, the industry's governing body in Britain responsible for the awards. (Most of the winners are chosen by the council's panel of around 800 judges.)
"Karl represents the soul of fashion," Ms. Wintour, dressed as she often is in Chanel couture, said Monday night. His image "is as iconic as the outline of a Chanel suit."
He is "a linguist, a photographer, an interior decorator, a philanthropist," she continued. "He reads the way most of us breathe."
Photo Karl Lagerfeld was presented with the Outstanding Achievement award by Anna Wintour. Credit Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesTo describe Mr. Lagerfeld's contribution as outstanding, then, would be something of an understatement. He designs eight collections a year for Chanel, is creative director of women's wear at Fendi, shoots advertising and promotional films as well as campaigns for both houses, and contributes to many fashion glossies. Over the past half-century, he has raised the bar for every other fashion creative.
It was not a surprise that Alessandro Michele, creative director at Gucci, picked up the award for International Designer. Not since Tom Ford's heyday at that label in the late 1990s has it attracted so much attention, and Mr. Michele has been the man of the moment. The young designer's aesthetic is, well, younger than that of his predecessor Frida Giannini, tapping into his apparently indefatigable interest in vintage clothing — suffice it to say Mr. Michele's take on the theme is not even remotely dusty — and what seems to be a prescient questioning of conventional gender codes.
True, putting boys in pussy-bow blouses and girls in trouser suits is not radical, but Mr. Michele does it well and, over the past 12 months, Gucci has again become one of the industry's most coveted and copied names. In his acceptance speech, the designer thanked his employers at Kering, which owns Gucci, for appointing "an unknown guy to one of the world's most famous fashion houses." (Mr. Michele had worked behind the scenes there for many years before taking the reins.)
So far, so global. But what of the British side of the equation?
Continue reading the main story Slide Show British Fashion Awards Red CarpetCredit
The photographer Nick Knight won the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator. Mr. Knight is that rare thing — an idealist — and from his early days in the 1980s shooting groundbreaking catalogs for Yohji Yamamoto to his current editorial work for mainstream and esoteric publications as well as campaigns for the likes of Dior, Lancôme and Swarovski, he has consistently pushed the boundaries of conventional preconceptions of beauty. His self-funded website ShowStudio.com pioneered film as a medium to showcase fashion, and it continues to both nurture young talent just as it provides a platform for established names to experiment and innovate.
Jennifer Saunders and J oanna Lumley, as the "Absolutely Fabulous" characters Edina and Patsy, presented Stella McCartney with the Brand of the Year Award. And Lady Gaga accepted the Red Carpet Award on Tom Ford's behalf, resplendent in a (Tom Ford) red gown and soignée blonde updo.
In an unprecedented result, the Irish-born Jonathan Anderson, who designs his J. W. Anderson label as well as Loewe, both owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, received the prizes for Menswear and Womenswear Designer of the Year. The first was presented to him by Orlando Bloom, the second by Noomi Rapace.
"I'm kind of embarrassed and don't know what to say," Mr. Anders on said. "I started off designing men's wear, and then did women's wear to make sense of it."
"I am honored to be on the same stage as Karl Lagerfeld," he said. "He is my greatest hero."
Kendall Jenner loves her new Ugg boots. She recently picked up the newest style in New York City, and it looks like she's kicking back in the pair at home in L.A. too
Over the weekend, Kendall posted this adorable snap of her wearing Uggs at home with the caption "UGG love." Such a cute shot—curled up in shorts and a tank.
Keep scrolling to scope how Kendall styles her Ugg boots at home, and go a bit further to shop the boots for yourself.
The best-selling novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford had 40 pieces from her jewelry collection auctioned in 2013.
"People who don't know me think I've sold all my jewelry, but I haven't," she said in a telephone interview from her New York apartment. "I only sold about a third; I still had more than 80 pieces. That's enough for anybody. And it's grown since."
Later, Ms. Taylor Bradford produced a list of 103 pieces. They tell the story of her 52-year marriage to the American film producer Robert Bradford, who gave his wife most of this glittering cornucopia.
There are haute pieces from Tiffany, Cartier and Harry Winston, as well as from David Morris in London, Verdura, Claire Richter and Tambe tti designed by Dvora. More dazzling creations were discovered in Rio de Janeiro, Capri and Istanbul.
"Bob loves jewelry," Ms. Taylor Bradford said. "When he buys something for me, he has to love it, then I have to love it. I always do. He's got very good taste and a very good eye, because he's been a movie producer all his life."
One favorite anecdote recounts a vacation in Capri when Mr. Bradford went out to buy a newspaper and came back with some "flowers" — multicolored sapphires in a necklace.
Gifts appear on birthdays and wedding anniversaries, to celebrate her finishing a book or his making a movie (he has filmed 10 of her novels, some for television) or just because something catches his eye.
A pair of emerald earrings with aquamarine drops from Verdura appeared on May 10, her birthday. "They were a total surprise," she said. "We just loved the extraordinary combination of green and blue. Englishwomen do love sapphires and aquamarines." Her husband does, too.
Another favorite gem is her blue sapphire and diamond engagement ring from Ms. Richter's Fifth Avenue boutique in New York, which specialized in estate jewelry.
"It looks identical to the ring Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, wears now that belonged to Princess Diana," she said. "But Bob bought mine almost 40 years ago, because I had another one he thought was too small."
Ms. Taylor Bradford is 82, but her flawless skin, blondish coif and sparkling blue-green eyes belie her age. "I love my pieces and I enjoy wearing them," she said. "Since I like rather plain, tailored clothes, I like to dress up an outfit with a pin, some beads or pearls."
She also likes to mix pieces from different jewelers. To set off an evening ensemble of a pale green silk coat and pants, she wore the new Verdura earrings and two aquamarine and diamond pieces: a ring from Amsterdam Saurer in Rio de Janeiro that is part of a three-piece set, and a bracelet from Tina in Istanbul. The ensemble was finished with her Harry Winston diamond wedding eternity ring and a Patek Philippe white gold and diamond watch.
For another evening outfit of a white silk coat and black pants, the eye-catchers included a copy of the Theodora cream-colored enameled gold cuff with a Byzantine jeweled Maltese Cross, originally created for Coco Chanel. (She owns No. 65 of the 70 copies made by Verdura in 2009.) In addition to a matching brooch, she wore similarly toned multicolored sapphire earrings from David Morris, a large yellow diamond ring from Alberto e Lina in Capri, another gold Patek Philippe watch and her Harry Winston wedding ring.
Ms. Taylor Bradford's affection for jewelry goes back to her childhood in Yorkshire.
"When I was a little girl, Shirley Temple was very much in vogue, and I had a Shirley Temple rigid bracelet," she recalled. Then she was given a gold cross at her confirmation.
"When I was about 18, my father, Winston Taylor, gave me my first string of good pearls from a jeweler in Leeds, where I was growing up," she said. "Later he gave me an opal pinky ring. When I was about 21, he gave me some delicate earrings with a tiny diamond, a chain and a small pear-shaped opal."
Ms. Taylor Bradford, who went into journalism at — as she always specifies — 15 1/2, was by then working in Fleet Street. "Unfortunately, I had a robbery and they were all stolen," she said. "Since then I've been very careful with jewelry. I have safes and a bank vault. If I need something important, I get it from the bank.� ��
She also bought a few things for herself: "Silver bangles and some very pretty blue beads because I wear a lot of pale blue."
Soon Mr. Bradford stepped in. "The first thing Bob bought me was a string of pearls," she said, noting that men have always bought her jewelry — though there have been "only two, my father and Bob."
A birthday present from Mr. Bradford, a choker of 27 large matched white South Sea pearls with a diamond clasp and big South Sea pearl earrings surrounded by diamonds from David Morris in London, are things "I can wear both day and night," she said.
Her pearl jewelry includes a multistrand pearl and diamond bracelet from Capri, a pink pearl necklace with a rose kunzite clip-on pendant that matches a pearl and diamond ring, golden pearls and a Verdura Lily of the Valley brooch, which has articulated pearl blossoms that jiggle on an enamel green leaf.
"Pearls suit my skin," she said. "I have a very clear English pink and white face. Now, I often wear pearls because they have become my trademark. When I do an event like a book and author lunch or tea, I always wear a string of pearls Bob bought from Claire years ago. If I don't, the fans say, 'Where are the pearls?"'
Since "A Woman of Substance" in 1979, Ms. Taylor Bradford's books have so ld about 88 million copies worldwide. They are published in 40 languages and in 90 countries.
Inspired by a passage in her 1986 "Act of Will," when the heroine is advised to buy a parrot because "you don't have to walk it," her husband bought a cherished sapphire, diamond, ruby and gold parrot brooch. He gave it to her joking that it didn't have to be walked either.
"Bob has a wonderful sense of humor. He makes me laugh every day," she said. When he gave her a Tiffany blue enamel bracelet, she teased, "Thank you, I love it, Bob darling, but Jackie Kennedy always wore two. He laughed, and the next birthday, the yellow one showed up." (They are enamel on 18-karat gold.)
Equally fond of watches, the author has amassed a large collection, including multiple examples by Cartier, Tiffany and Patek Philippe. One favorite is the Cartier Tank with diamonds and a black satin strap that she bought for herself after her first novel became a best seller. Another is the all-gold Piaget with diamonds encircling the face, an anniversary present from her husband. "The queen has the same one," she said. "Every time I wear it, I smile, thinking of when she gave me my OBE at Buckingham Palace in 2007," she added, referring to the Order of the British Empire honor.
Ms. Taylor Bradford wore a cream jacket and pearls and carried a black handbag. So did the queen. "In the photos, we looked to be wearing identical clothing," she said with a laugh.
When she decided to auction some pieces, statement jewels that she no longer wore, at Bonhams in London, "they sold in 38 minutes," she said. "I made just under £1 million." (The proceeds, including buyers premiums, actually were £1,229,250, or $1,964,465 at the time.)
But temptation is always lurking, even when the Bradfords go into Verdura to drop off a repair, as they did recently. As she walked past a display case, Ms. Bradford sa w what she thought looked like the Duchess of Windsor's chalcedony beads and earrings.
They were. She recalled saying: "I bet they're a million dollars. Don't take them out of the case." Their salesperson meanwhile had zipped off and returned with a double strand of polished blue chalcedony beads with a double link diamond clasp.
"Bob said, 'I love them. Try them on."' And when she did, he said they should buy them. "When you have a generous husband who buys you jewelry over 50 years," she observed, "you end up with a lot."
Quite a few of these personal jewels turn up in her fiction. One sapphire bead and diamond bracelet in spired Lady Daphne's engagement present from Hugo in "Cavendon Hall." A similar ruby bead and diamond bracelet was stolen by Felicity, the countess in "Cavendon Women," Ms. Taylor Bradford's most recent book, where the family jewels, many inspired by her own, are major plot features.
Her diamond and topaz Bird on the Rock from Tiffany's, and an ebony and diamond butterfly brooch from Alberto e Lina, will appear in "Cavendon Luck," the third volume of the saga that she is now writing. "I've learned a lot about jewelry over the years," she said. "Women love to read about it — that and my love scenes."
"Jewelry is emotional. I think women love a piece because of who gave it to them, how long they have had it, the love and the memori es of somebody caring," she said. "The little Cartier watch, the blue sapphire ring, the pearls and my parrot — those are pieces I would never sell."
Proof of just how much some pieces mean to her came a few months ago when her "everyday" pearls from Ms. Richter's shop went missing. "I looked for days for those pearls, tore the apartment apart," she recalled. "I became very upset. I was really distraught.
"Bob said, 'I'll buy you another string.' 'It's not any pearls,' I told him. It's those pearls that I've had for years, an anniversary present. I love them. I can wear them every day. What have I done with them?"
More than a week passed before she took another look in her Hermès Kelly bag. "There is a zipped purse with credit cards, cash and door keys. I would never put them in there," she said. "But lying at the bottom of this silk bag was the string of pearls. The whole house was happy."
Correction: November 23, 2015An earlier version of this article misidentified the maker of Ms. Bradford's Maltese Cross cuff. It was the Verdura company, not Fulco di Verdura.
