Hawaiians are demanding a little respect
The easy bonhomie that was Hawaiian surfing's public face has been supplanted by something more ugly and fierce, with surfers competing not just for prize money but for territorial rights to an increasingly crowded sea.

Suzy Menkes on fantastical, funky shoes
The big brands that have made a killing with designer handbags have switched their attention to feet, where nothing is too fancy, frivolous, froufrou or fetishistic to fit with fashion.

Health-conscious Japanese women are running in style
Among the increasing number of young women acquiring a sports/health consciousness are those who have embraced the latest Tokyo fad: running. And fashion houses are benefitting.

Superhero fashion soars in New York exhibition
Fantasy, irony and imagination make the show, "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until Sept. 1, a spectacle not to be missed.

A 'Superhero' gala and a bash for Clooney
George Clooney celebrated his 47th birthday as the opening of the "Superheroes" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was feted with superheroic celebrity scale.

Top jewelers turn to their heritage to sell on the global stage
Napoleon sells for Chaumet, India for Cartier. Jewelery houses are dusting off history and putting a contemporary spin on centuries-old stories to counter a challenge from luxury fashion brands.
- Fulco di Verdura: The elegant beguiler of stars
- Padua's goldsmiths: modern masters of form
- Titanium is winning place among favored materials of avant-garde jewelery
- Delfina Delettrez Fendi makes jewelry for women with a sense of humor
- Will diamonds lose their sparkle?
- An engineer turned jeweler, Hervé Van der Straeten blurs traditional boundaries

Delfina Delettrez Fendi makes jewelry for women with a sense of humor
The daughter of Silvia Venturini Fendi and the French jeweler Bernard Delettrez delights in jeweled skull necklaces, frog rings and bracelets set with eyes of Murano glass.

Modern American architectural gems set for auction
The Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, California, designed by Richard Neutra, and the Margaret Esherick House in Philadelphia, designed by Louis Kahn, will go on the block in New York and Chicago, respectively.

Greener pastures for Miguel Adrover
The Spanish designer Adrover has teamed up with Hess Natur, the German mail order brand, to create a collection of environmentally friendly clothes.

London exhibit probes parallels between architecture and fashion
"Skin + Bones, Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture" (at the new Embankment Galleries in London's Somerset House until Aug. 10) is a fascinating study of how the two crafts have run separately but on similar lines over the last 25 years.

Totting up the World's top-earning runway beauties
In fashion, one day you're in and the next you're out. Some beauties moved up, some down, some off, a few on.

The stars are now keeping 'bumps' under cover
Celebrities, and the designers who dress them, are moving away from the form-fitting clothes that used to announce their pregnancies to the world. Discretion and loose-fitting tops are now the style.

Daphne Guinness strips down
Daphne Guinness, the socialite and couture collector, finds out that spring cleaning is harder than it may seem.

Spring cleaning: Big fashion brands revitalize their Paris boutiques
Some of the most iconic names - Yves Saint-Laurent, Givenchy, Fendi, Just Cavalli and Sonia Rykiel - have decided that a new designer or a fresh direction should be followed by a new look at their stores.

Men in plaid do mix
As men's wear gets more adventurous, men are themselves getting more adventurous about that onetime cardinal sin: clashing.

Trading places: U.S. designers shift store loyalties
Over the next year, an unusually large group of famous clothing designers, motivated by lucrative new deals, plan to shift their retail allegiances, in many cases abandoning stores and customers who have supported them for years.

Checking the racks around Europe
Whose designs fly off the racks in Liverpool, Mykonos or The Hague? A few of the fashion-forward boutiques around Europe disclose their top sellers

Shanghai: The allure of individualism
Amid the clutter of Shanghai's retail scene, a number of youthful and energetic designers are making their mark by celebrating a personal kind of style.

The platinum queen, Agyness Deyn
Boy-short, peroxide-blonde heads of hair are appearing all over fashionable London, replacing the long and shaggy locks that were the dominant look of the last few years.

Online fashion shopping finally comes of age
According to a recent survey, fashion is second only to books when it comes to shopping online around the world.

Gucci sales decline seen as first signal of luxury goods slowdown
The results sent the first signals that a slowdown in consumer spending was hitting luxury goods.

Gap gives CEO Murphy $39.1 million compensation package
Gap's chairman, Glenn Murphy, received a compensation package valued $39.1 million last year - most of it in stock grants tied to the company's future performance - as he set out to end a stubborn sales slump that has plagued the clothing retailer through most of this decade.

Hermes 2007 net rises as maker of Birkin bags opens new stores
Hermes International's full-year net profit rose 7.3 percent as the maker of Birkin handbags and high-end scarves opened new stores, the company said Thursday.

H&M adds new house to its growing stable of labels
Hennes & Mauritz AB, Europe's second-largest clothing retailer, agreed to buy Swedish fashion company Fabric Scandinavien to gain brands including the Cheap Monday denim line sold at more than 1,000 stores globally.

Cavalli continues talking about fashion house's sale
The Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli wants more than €1.4 billion, or $2.1 billion, to sell his fashion label, the business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported, citing an interview with Cavalli.

PPR confident about 2008 luxury goods market
The French retailer, which owns Gucci Group, said its net profit rose 35% in 2007, helped by strong results at its luxury and African units as well as its acquisition of the sportswear group Puma.

Milan's fashion houses are moving into high-tech homes
It's "Ciao!" to the palazzo and "Hello!" to high tech for some of the biggest names in fashion.

The Birkin and Hermès
What would you do for a Birkin bag?

The clutch, in the light of day
Thanks to a whole slew of designers - from Yves Saint Laurent to Sonia Rykiel and Michael Teperson to Belen Echandia - the clutch purse is moving from an evening standard to seeing the light of day.

Jelly brand molds Brazil's footwear style
Cheap, cheerful and totally disposable, the plastic jelly shoe is about as ubiquitous as footwear gets. And in Brazil, it's Melissa that dominates the market.

David vs. "David": The battle below the belt in men's underwear
The David vs. "David" standoff marks the moment that underwear has come out of the drawers and off the shelves to become, to men's fashion, the female equivalent of the handbag. It is an accessory - and even a necessity - that can be turned into big bucks.

Fulco di Verdura: The elegant beguiler of stars
A friend of Cole Porter, discovered by Coco Chanel, the Palermo aristocrat Verdura was the favorite jeweler in a gilded circle that included Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn and the Duchess of Windsor.

Will diamonds lose their sparkle?
With the specter of recession haunting the global economy, is the market for luxury gemstones feeling the pinch?

Padua's goldsmiths: modern masters of form
Over six decades, a school of goldsmiths in northern Italy has created original and important pieces of jewelry works based on Renaissance principles of geometry.

An engineer turned jeweler, Hervé Van der Straeten blurs traditional boundaries
In his hands, a mirror mutates into an earring, a light fixture into a lipstick case. A jeweler since the age of 20, Van der Straeten designed the "Palazzo" perfume bottle for Fendi; a sandal for Bruno Frisoni and "KissKiss" make-up cases for Guerlain.

Titanium is winning place among favored materials of avant-garde jewelery
A metal that flouts every major tenet of luxury, titanium has an aptitude for coloration that draws jewelers in search of a challenge.

Boucheron's 150th: A modern take on Art Nouveau
The kitsch and irony of Jeff Koons seems a long stretch from voluptuous and sensual jewelry. And even if Damien Hirst recently embedded diamonds in a skull, you would hardly expect to see his work alongside a swooping diamond necklace.

All eyes on BarberOsgerby's Iris tables
Like most of this duo's designs, Iris is rooted in an engagingly simple idea - in this case, the pleasure of looking at a rainbow of colors.

Designers give recycling a creative twist at the Milan Furniture Fair
A few cleverly eco-friendly and historic pieces stand out among this year's offerings in Milan.

Confidence pervades Milan Furniture Fair
At the Milan Furniture Fair, opening Wednesday, hundreds of new products are to be launched, and lots of new ventures.

Brand Obama, a leader in the image war
When it comes to choosing the best visually designed U.S. presidential candidate, there's only one contender - Obama.

Navigating a badly informed world of information
For every shining example of good information design, there are many more bad ones. We're all familiar with them, often painfully so. Confusing maps. Misleading signs. Dysfunctional Web sites. Over-complicated forms.

Risk-taking architect takes field's top prize
Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris and the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, has received the Pritzker Prize.

At Meta, furniture artisans of 18th century are reborn with panache
A Fig Leaf Wardrobe is one of seven beautifully crafted pieces which are to be launched by a new furniture company, Meta, at the Milan Furniture Fair next month.

Video game, the ultimate design fantasy
Video games create entirely artificial environments where everything is conceived and constructed by the development team, which not only determines how the characters, buildings, landscapes and props will look, but what they'll do, and how they'll do it.

China's new designers: Building on a rich heritage of innovation
An exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum in London looks at China's history of innovation, and the work of a new generation of designers trying to forge a distinctive style.

In the world of watches, the line between the sexes is blurring fast
Once upon a time, timepieces with complications were for men only, but the limited edition Diane from Harry Winston seeks to change that.

"Star Trek"-styled watches flash digitally coded time
Tokyoflash Japan creates watches that are meant to be watched, not just looked at. Started in 2000, the company says it is trying to make objects that revolutionize the way time is perceived.

Applying color with steely abandon
Taking inspiration from the traditional cloisonné technique of enameling used to decorate watch dials, watch designer Alain Silberstein has developed a unique method of coloring his steel watchcases, which are proving popular with Russian and Japanese collectors.

Richard Mille breaks fresh ground with new high-technology timepieces
Coinciding with the Salon International de Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, Mille is introducing a glittering homage to Boucheron, in honor of the Parisian jeweler's 150th anniversary, and a modern interpretation of a classic pocket watch.

Urwerk's 'most complicated' watch to be unveiled in Geneva
The youthful principals of Urwerk, Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei, will present their new watch, a combination of futuristic and artisanal features called the UR-202, on the fringes of the Geneva Watch salon next week.

Sprit of the '70s rides again, in works by young Swiss watchmakers
Swiss watch houses would mostly like to forget the 1970s, when a flood of low-priced, accurate Japanese quartz timers decimated the industry. Now, a new generation of watchmakers is taking inspiration from some of the feistier designs that emerged as the Swiss fought back.

Slimmer watches lure wealthy buyers
What constitutes a thick, thin or ultra-thin watch is a matter of some debate among specialists. However, it is clear that anything towering off the wrist at 17 millimeters in height, as some recent introductions have done, lies at the chunky end of the spectrum.

Watches: Starhill is a kaleidoscope for collectors
The brainchild of Francis Yeoh, chief executive of YTL, Starhill gallery covers 280,000 square feet, or 26,000 square meters in Kuala Lumpur with no less than 20,000 square feet devoted to watches.

Hello Kitty gets high fashion Vogue makeover
She may be cute, but the latest top model to make her debut in Vogue is also podgy with short legs and whiskers.

L.A. Fashion Week takes a celeb-as-designer turn

Just as L.A. Fashion Week took a step forward, the celeb-as-designer trend seems to have sent it two steps back.

Keith Richards the new face of Louis Vuitton luggage
Keith Richards is the new face of Louis Vuitton, the French maker of luxury handbags and luggage.

Survey shows Gucci tops global brand competition
The Gucci fashion label is the most coveted designer brand in the world, according to a survey by market research firm The Nielsen Company.

Madonna, Malawi and Gucci
Madonna, Gucci and a slew of celebs - from an all-smiling, gum-chewing Tom Cruise, through pretty-in-pink Gwyneth Paltrow to Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Lopez - set New York Fashion Week alight.

Never too young for that first pedicure
Cosmetic companies and retailers increasingly aim their sophisticated products and service packages squarely at 6- to 9-year-olds, who are being transformed into savvy beauty consumers before they're out of elementary school.

To shampoo -- or not?
Washing your hair used to be a daily effort but now many people are bypassing it -- and saying the neglect has been good for their hair.

Perfume fades in popularity among Americans
At a time when the number of perfumes on shelves has dramatically increased, consumption of fragrances is declining, industry analysts said.

Bringing a sense of soul back to Estée Lauder
Aerin Lauder brings family sensibility to the beauty company founded by her grandmother.