Joris Laarman's defining light for design, soulful and surreal
Laarman designed the "Nebula" chandelier, a cluster of blown glass replicas of old lampshades that he found browsing in local flea markets. It reflects a departure from the sleekness of the late 1990s and the romanticism of the early 2000s.

A new breed of fashion magazines comes into vogue
Below the radar of the mainstream, magazines like 032c are successfully exploiting the overlapping fields of art, architecture and music that fashion has become.

The 1970s fashion diva Zandra Rhodes is back
At 66, the doyenne of British haute punk is emerging as a commercial force, with several new projects in the works.

The rise of the modern roundabout
The modern roundabout's success in reducing congestion and accidents makes them not only remarkably efficient at managing traffic, but also unsung design stars.

Hip-Hop Cash Kings
Shawn Carter, better known to the p***t as master rapper Jay-Z, banked an estimated $34 million in 2006, earning him the top spot on Forbes' first-ever list of hip-hop Cash Kings.

Hong Kong designers come of age
Young local designers, with an emphasis on tailoring, low pricing and Asian accents, are helping to create styles that are unique and yet collectively Hong Kong.

The 20 most expensive celebrity weddings
In Forbes' first-ever search for the 20 most expensive celebrity weddings, A-list nuptials during the past 20 years are surveyed.

Tyler Brûlé: Avoiding summer meltdowns, dressing 'business cool'
In Tokyo, stifling heat and soaring humidity requires a new fashion strategy: "business cool."

Chairs sitting pretty as a design icon, but for how long?
If you want to trace changes in aesthetics, production technology, materials and social trends, you can spot them all in different chairs. Will the chair remain as important to design in the future? Probably not.

Fashion giants are venturing into virtual worlds
The industry has now set its sights on the virtual realms of online communities like The Sims 2 and Second Life, which have become the latest and possibly the most innovative playgrounds for budding fashion designers.

Elle gets a minor facelift
A fashion magazine in need of a makeover elbows aside its longtime creative team.

Jaime Hayon's whimsical world of playful creations
The Spaniard, who seems to have been sent by central casting to play the part of the wacky designer with bright blue specs and mad professor hair, is among the most visible of a new generation of designers who have rejected the modernist role of the designer as a problem-solver in favor of self-expression.

La Rinascente: Rebirth of a Milan department store
Milan's premier department store has finally been given the makeover it deserves.
- A splash of color for Ballantyne's wool collection

Alice Rawsthorn: The eclectic charm of Murray Moss
The design titan Murray Moss and his partner Franklin Getchell are planning to take their deluxe design store from New York's Greene Street to Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Moss's bravura, attention to detail, eclecticism and humor have made it one of the best design stores in the world.

Demand for Ferris wheels comes back around
Inspired by the success of the London Eye, cities across the world are building giant versions of the fair staple.

London exhibit charts a history of sailor chic
Seafaring fashion, from Coco Chanel to Jean Paul Gaultier, is the subject of "Sailor Chic — Fashion's Love Affair with the Sea," which opens on Wednesday at London's National Maritime Museum.

Controversy over changes at Hadspen Garden
Whether they are for - or against - the plan to bulldoze the old walled garden at Hadspen House in Somerset and to stage an open competition to design a new one, everyone in British gardening seems to have an opinion about it.

Vet hospitals compete for best in show
The Animal Medical Center has celebrity galas and a lot of history, but a new hospital wants its monied breed.

Dancing gala celebrates life of Gianni Versace
Milan pays tribute to the late fashion designer on the 10th anniversary of his death with a ballet "Grazi Gianni Con Amore" (Thank you Gianni with love) by Maurice Béjart.

Alice Rawsthorn: A graphic design firm for visuals - big time
The design firm Graphic Thought Facility doesn't have a stylistic signature. Its work is about identifying a visual idea to sum up each project, and experimenting with unusual production processes and materials to express it. The result is often unexpected.

Mayor of Medellín brings architecture to the people
Sergio Fajardo is pressing forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.

Paris Fashion: The jewelers of Place Vendôme get in on the act
A botanical jewelry theme sprouted as the jewelers of Place Vendôme opened their doors for the haute couture season.

Paris Fashion: Sneak previews
The idea of next season's pre-spring collection snapping at the heels of haute couture, dreamed up a year ago, is now an established fact.

Paris Fashion: Shimmering shades of gray gowns
The Elie Saab autumn/winter 2007 haute couture show was an homage to the ladies of the silver screen.

Paris Fashion: Tea dress, scarf or tunic?
Michèle and Olivier Chatenet built their new E2 collection on vintage silk scarves transformed into a series of imaginative shapes to wear and to tie as fashion clothing.

News from RM
Roland Mouret's first show under his new label, RM, is a change of fashion, with the multimedia magnate Simon Fuller backing the fashion brand.

The moon's pearls
The gaping holes for eyes and mouth look like a sculpted version of Edvard Munch's primal scream. But this necklace, with a dagger through its back and droplets of pearls hanging on its cord, is also a magical piece of jewelry.

Hash hits the pay dirt
Anne Valérie Hash has been slaving away for many seasons in the mines of the haute couture calendar, showing ready-to-wear among the masters of couture design. But with her decision to show a capsule collection of 14 truly couture looks, leaving the ready-to-wear for the spring shows, she hit pay dirt.

Lord of the rings
Imagine a fairy tale scenario where you are presented with a thousand rings sewn into a dress.

Obituary: Liz Claiborne, designer of clothes for professional women, 78
Claiborne became one of the most successful fashion designers in America by making career clothes for the women who began entering the work force en masse in the 1970s.

Green is good - by customer demand
The white windmills in the forecourt at the Pitti Immagine Uomo fair send out a subliminal message: green, not greed, is good for the 21st century.

Diesel puts holograms into fashion perspective
Shoals of fish and tumbling sea urchins are not familiar accessories on a fashion runway. But by the time a snaking sea creature was made up of wrist watches, Diesel had made a statement with its dive into the deep.

An early look at the Capucci foundation collection
A mellow Florentine mansion, with a Renaissance loggia, lion's head fountain and a picture-postcard view over the apricot aura of the city is the new home of the Fondazione Roberto Capucci. The great artist/couturier who, at age 76, is still creating sculptural wonders in his Rome studio, has donated his entire archive of 400 pieces, 22,000 fashion sketches, 300 illustrations, photographs and film to the city of Florence, which gave him his fashion start in 1950.

Gathering wool -- Australia merino, that is
Karl Lagerfeld, Donatella Versace, Paul Smith, the Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani and Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein all are accepting apprentices, sponsored by the Australian Wool Innovation.

Roland Mouret's designs: Back in the fold
As Mouret demonstrated with a white napkin at Costes restaurant in Paris, his shapes and designs are draped and not drawn.

Naoki Takwizawa, designer, is honored
The Japanese designer has received "chevalier of arts and letters" from Stéphane Martin, president of the Quai Branly Museum, in a ceremony in Paris.

Marc Audibet to become design director at Vionnet
Audibet is coming back to his first design love, Vionnet, finding her fluid bias-cut dresses a perfect fit with his own aesthetic. He met Madeleine Vionnet at an exhibition when he was 14.

The designer Tom Ford goes global
Tom Ford, with the support of Domenico de Sole, has laid the foundation for a global luxury empire that may put him back on fashion's center stage.

At Chantilly races, a touch of India
At Sunday's Prix de Diane Hermès, the classy picnic, which is as much a focus as the venerable horse race for many visitors, the open-sided Taluka tents were redolent of Rajput festivities on the manicured lawns of colonial India.

Graduate Fashion Week in London
The college work in design and graphics displayed on stands in the Battersea Park tent drew international talent scouts and admirers.

Valentino at 45: Painting the town in red
At the Roman Colosseum, with three dancers in red floating like puppets on a string and a golden shower of fireworks, Valentino celebrated more than four decades of fashion history.

Valentino in Ara Pacis
Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda - the scenario's joint creators - have used the Richard Meier glass cube framing the Ara Pacis (peace altar) to show Valentino's dresses literally in a new light.

Armani, with attitude
It began with Giorgio Armani's "Rock Symphony" and ended at midnight Wednesday with a barefoot Courtney Love in a Givenchy couture gown belting out "Samantha" until even the wrought iron banisters of the august Paris fashion house were shaking.

Tailors on the prowl
A fashion king earned his crown on Wednesday as Jean Paul Gaultier gave his imagination a royal workout with princes as a theme. With the look of Ruritania or Rajasthan, the models strode the catwalk, crowned heads (and sometimes crown hairdos) held high, showing precise tailoring and artistic embellishment - often both at once.

Lacroix is sugar sweet
Christian Lacroix celebrated 20 years of couture with a collection that was charming, fresh and bonbon sweet. Yet the sugar came in calorie-controlled doses.

Lagerfeld again triumphs for Chanel
Karl Lagerfeld created a superb show for the Paris haute couture collections Tuesday.

Robert H. Frank's economic guidebook unlocks everyday design enigmas
The American economist, Robert H. Frank, has devoted a book, "The Economic Naturalist," to unraveling such mysteries as why women button their clothes from the left and men from the right, or why CD cases are smaller than DVD cases when the discs are the same size. His explanations for what he calls "everyday enigmas" are rooted in economic theory.

Design: Limited editions, without the usual limits
For Vitra Editions, the Swiss furniture company Vitra commissioned a collection of 15 limited edition objects from a gilded group of architects, including Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid; and designers, such as Jasper Morrison, Hella Jongerius, and the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.

Does the iPhone have 'It'? Early signs are good
Apple's new smart phone going on sale Friday shows signs of becoming one of the elite cadre of products that decades later are remembered as icons of their time.
- The iPhone matches most of its hype
- Apple leaves accessory makers in the dark
- A FAQ on what the iPhone has and what it lacks
- SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY: iPhone launch
- Customers line up for Apple's iPhone days before Friday's launch
- Apple iPhone expected to drive mobile phone industry toward fancier touch screens
- Without wireless downloads, iPhone may not rock music industry
- Who really makes the iPod?

The technical challenge of making space travel easy
Marc Newson is working on the interior design of a spacep***, a new leisure spacecraft that was unveiled in Paris last week by its manufacturer, Astrium, part of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company. It will take tourists into space starting in 2012.

Naoto Fukasawa: Intuiting function from form
The Japanese design guru believes that "you shouldn't need to use an instruction manual to learn how to use a product. It should be so intuitive that you work it out naturally."
- Design calender: Key design events of 2007-8

A Mediterranean moment for Armani menswear
Fendi and Calvin Klein also played with easy cuts and light fabrics, some of which bordered on the daringly sheer.
- Prada's pajamas lost in a maze
- Gucci: Bold and brash
- Hedge fund hotties! Targeting the golden boys
- Milan: The color conundrum

Millefeuille! A thousand ways with layers
There is only one way to cook up a fashion show this season and that is with different layers.