The most beautiful pictures of Hannah Montana

Have a look at this beautiful screenshots of the first episode of the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana. She looks great with her pink dress.

Victoria Beckham: From Celebrity to NY Couturier

Victoria Beckham goes old school during NY Fashion Week, presenting collection without fanfare

Victoria Beckham knows fashion, not just how to wear it or how to buy it but also how to make it — and that's pretty impressive.

Beckham could have staged one flashy New York Fashion Week show previewing her spring collection of dresses, which would surely be a hot ticket no matter what was on the runway. But the style star and wife of soccer player David Beckham chose to personally show her line about a dozen times Sunday to small groups of editors and retailers, explaining the construction of each piece and what she liked about it.

It was an old-fashioned couturier's presentation held in a spare art gallery, with only bowls of roses as decoration.

"This is my third collection, and I wanted to push myself, but I also wanted to be respectful of my customer," she said. "I want her to know she can rely on me."

Instead of switching gears each season to meet the trends, as many designers do, Beckham has focused on a few key silhouettes, some of which are new, and some tweaks of dresses that have already been successful.

Her signature fitted dress now has a lower neckline, stronger shoulders and capped sleeves; the fold-front dress has a shorter hemline just above the knee. There are corsets — sometimes fitted, sometimes not — built into the garments. Several dresses also feature banding, which is emerging as a trend during Fashion Week.

A flared-skirt dress, still with a very slim bodice, is something a little different, Beckham said, and she hopes it will be a permanent addition.

"The tight bodice holds you in, which is never a bad thing," she said.

Lace is new to the collection, but erase any images of anything too delicate.

"This is my way of doing lace," she declared, explaining that the spider web effect is a result of sewing together the pieces with very fine ribbon.

Although she called a black, textured gazar dress with a little sheen and a sexy zip front one of her favorites, she chose to wear a long-sleeve, strong-shoulder black dress with a peplum. She said, somewhat amazingly, that she second-guessed wearing the same outfit as a model because models have such slim figures — as if she didn't.

(In reality, you do have to look like a model — or Beckham — to wear any of these garments.)

Beckham will soon wear a rose-colored tower gown with black bands on the bodice to a big event.

"It will clash with the red carpet," she said with a laugh.

"I try on everything," she added. "I make the dresses for me."

JIMMY CHOO - MULTI COLOR STITCHED CLAUDIA SANDALS

Eco Chic: Eva Mendes

Eva Wants You!

After a string of sexy roles in movies for dudes, Eva Mendes is tapping her inner girl's girl.

Every time I mention the name Eva Mendes to another guy, he gets this stupid grin on his face while, no doubt, fantasizing: Eva Mendes mowing his lawn. Eva Mendes juicing kale in his kitchen. But when I mention Eva's name to a woman, the response is almost a nonresponse. "Oh," the woman will invariably say, "she's ... really pretty." Coming from a woman, this is not necessarily a compliment, which isn't to say it's not a fact. At 33, Eva Mendes is uniquely pretty, Revlon-commercial pretty, the-new-face-of-Calvin-Klein-underwear pretty — but, as a matter of conversational reflex, one woman calling another woman "really pretty," and only that, is also a way of outright dismissing her. What these women really mean when they remark on Eva's bone structure and skin tone is that she is not an intimate in the Sarah Jessica Parker/Jennifer Aniston sense. She is that suspect thing, a guy's girl — who stars in movies for dudes, about dudes (2 Fast 2 Furious, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Training Day, Ghost Rider), with all that implies. But if Eva has her way, this is about to change.

I meet Eva on the patio of a strip-mall Hollywood café beneath a tilted umbrella and six cypress trees doing slow-mo tai chi in the breeze. With her spine straight, her legs crossed in half-lotus, Eva looks just about ready to chant ommm in her chair. Her dress gives off an ashram-couture vibe, natural and chic. It's empire-waisted and long, white linen with brocaded burgundy arabesques and thick beaded shoulder straps. Her Missoni purse is nearly the size of a gym bag. Blocky tortoiseshell sunglasses protect her eyes from allergies, she says, and she plays with her hair almost constantly, brushing it behind her, teasing it forward and to the side, twisting until it looks like a rope. For the first of three times, Eva orders a coffee and dumps in a side of espresso. "Cubans don't drink regular coffee," she says. "We basically drink petroleum."




Eva's latest project, The Women, is her first bona fide chick-flick, in which she plays a husband stealer who works the perfume counter at Saks. So, she's the bad guy in her first girl film — but it's a girl film nonetheless. Line crossed. "There's not a man in the film," says Eva, rather proudly, popping a blueberry-muffin morsel into her mouth. Instead, the cast features Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergen, Bette Midler. The kind of cast that'll drill Peggy Lee's feminist anthem, "I'm a woman. W-O-M-A-N!" into your head for days on end, even if you're a man.

"Usually I work with guys," Eva understates, breaking off more muffin, "and I go to rehearsal in a summer dress or jeans or whatever. But last year, while rehearsing the movie at [writer/director] Diane English's house on Martha's Vineyard, I found myself really aware of what I was wearing, really caring about my outfits. With guys it doesn't matter. But this was with women, women who are all put-together and cute with their little dresses and their perfect earrings. Every morning I got up and thought, I'm going to see Annette today, I need to make sure she thinks I look cute. Jada's gonna be cute. Meg's gonna be cute. I'd better be cute." She pops a muffin crumb between her wide, asymmetrical lips and drops a new shot of espresso into a fresh coffee. "I'm sure I sound like a ditz saying this, but it's a girl thing. A timeless, ageless, ethnicity-less girl thing."

It's also a thing that goes beyond wardrobe approval. This is Eva Mendes looking for positive womanly support, looking for the respect of her most lauded cohorts. This is Eva wanting them to like her and wanting, in fact, to be more like them. "I don't understand women who don't like being with the girls," she says. "They say they'd rather be with the guys all the time? That it's just so much easier? I'm calling bullshit on that."

In Bening, Eva's found a true role model. "Annette's got taste and class," she says. "She reminds me of one of those women back in the '40s and '50s. She's a broad, and I want to be a broad. I mean, she's like Ava Gardner or Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Those women were broads. They said it like it was. They weren't afraid to say fuck. They were in-your-face, but they were also ladies. That's a broad. Annette's like that, and I strive to be like that, too, to have femininity and a voice, to play the Hollywood game without getting pushed around."

Another thing she admires about Bening is her ability to keep her personal life, well, personal. Sure, Eva wants all of us to know the work of Eva Mendes, actress, but she deeply believes we don't need to know everything about where she lives and how long she's been with her boyfriend.




This is both her moral prerogative and, as she sees it, a shrewd professional move. "Think about what this whole culture of celebrity has done to movie stars," she says. "It's made them extinct. Actors used to carry films because people would have to actually go to the movies to see them. It was the only place. But now there's none of that mystique, and so there's less of a reason to buy a ticket."

But Eva is not a total enigma. The youngest of four children in what she calls "a big, old, loud, obnoxious Cuban family," she grew up in L.A.'s Silver Lake neighborhood before it became a hive for hipsters. Her working-class family was conservation-minded before its time: "I was raised by parents who didn't have much," she says. "We didn't use whole pieces of paper towel. We shared, or used rags. Mom didn't even want us flushing all the time."

While in college at Cal State Northridge, Eva landed her first movie role, in the fifth installment of the horror franchise Children of the Corn. The film didn't exactly resonate with Eva, but the process of acting struck a chord. "Going in, I had no plans to make a career of it," she says. "But I realized that I was a terrible actress, and it started to seem like the right kind of challenge for me to pursue. I thought I could really do something with it."

So, she enlisted esteemed acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, whom she still considers a mentor, and went from being a screamer in agrarian-themed schlock to playing opposite Denzel Washington in Training Day.

Eva has had the same boyfriend for a long, long time (by Hollywood standards, she's impossibly loyal). She owns a 70-pound Belgian Malinois named Hugo, who was born in Belgium and therefore only responds to commands in French, which she finds both adorable and pretentious. She calls George Clooney "Mr. Clooney," says we, as a society, "need him, as a filmmaker and as a person," and dreams of one day being in a movie with him. She reads Philip Roth — but she also has a self-help book by her bed at all times. Self-critical and bent on self-improvement, she thinks her eyes are too small and her mouth is too big, and being "overly emotional" is her greatest weakness, and she sees a therapist about it all once a week. Eva meditates but won't share her mantra. She prefers the term "creator" to "higher power" or "God." She says she's on a quest.

Yet when I ask whether part of this quest involved a stint at a high-altitude drug and alcohol rehab facility last winter, she politely closes off and looks at me as if I've just run over a bunny, then punched her mother in the face. "I'm not going to confirm it or deny it." So I attempt another tack, noting that recent reports have claimed she made the trip to Utah's Cirque Lodge not to start her own path to recovery, but to learn firsthand about addiction for an upcoming role in Queen of the South. "Not going there either," she says. "My mom always tells me, 'Keep 'em guessing, kid.' I love that."

Then Eva asks me whether I want to go with her to buy dog toys.

On the other side of the mall, at Tailwaggers, she gets Hugo an amorphous yellow blob that squeaks, a spiky barbell, and a bag of Greenies for his dental health. Prior to walking out the door, Eva drops to her knees to greet a miniature she-terrier. She coos and calls the happy pooch "delicious" before fishing her keys out of her purse. Both the doggy and its mommy take to Eva like magnets.

On Eva's key chain, I spot 10 or so credit-card-size things in bright colors. They look like larger versions of the discount passes big-box stores give out. Eva won't tell me where her cards are from, but I can tell they're not from Walgreens or Sam's Club. After some good-natured begging on my part, she cops to the fact that each one holds some aphorism, something to provide focus and balance for her daily quest — the kinds of affirmations that toe the line between recovery literature and the change-your-life-now chart-busters found in every airport bookstore in the country.

Gamely, Eva agrees to read one aloud.

"You're embarrassing me," she notes, turning her back and memorizing before facing me again, her giant sunglasses propped up, turned toward the sky like solar panels.

The line comes out like a confession. "How can I choose to have a good day today?" she says, and half-shrugs.

"I guess I'm just a total dork like that," she says.

Then she tells me I'm awesome as a way of forgiving my invasiveness, reaches out for a hug, and drives off before I even have a chance to tell her something — that I think she's on her way to becoming exactly the kind of headlining, badass broad she admires most.





Find this article at: http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity-lifestyle/celebrities/interviews/eva-mendes-interview

Gap’s Piperlime Site Adds Designer Clothes to Shoe Racks

More women are browsing the Web for clothes and shoes the way they used to browse the windows of high-end boutiques, and e-commerce companies want to make sure they get some of these shoppers’ dollars.

On Tuesday, Piperlime, the online-only shoe site started by Gap, began selling high-end, trendy women’s clothing from brands like Marc by Marc Jacobs (a $498 magenta trench coat) and Theory ($245 wool trousers).

This could set the stage for fierce competition between Gap and Amazon.com for these coveted shoppers. Amazon vastly expanded its shoe selection in July, when it bought Zappos.com, the big online shoe retailer. Amazon also owns Shopbop.com, which sells high-end women’s clothing, including many of the same brands now sold by Piperlime. Both Zappos and Shopbop operate as independent Web sites.

Zappos and Piperlime have been competing with one another since Gap started Piperlime in November 2006, after Zappos’s success made it clear that women were eager to buy shoes online. Piperlime started selling handbags last year. Meanwhile, Zappos has also expanded into handbags and some apparel.

Piperlime and Zappos “address different needs that the customer has,” said Jennifer Gosselin, vice president and general manager of Piperlime. Zappos suits customers searching for a particular item, she said, while Piperlime wants to resemble “a beautiful boutique” as well as a magazine with fashion features.

For example, the celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe gives fashion advice on Piperlime’s site, and the company partnered with InStyle magazine on a feature about wedding shoes.

Piperlime decided to add apparel after observing, with some surprise, that its shoppers kept spending money on fashionable and expensive brands during the sharp downturn in consumer spending. Even last fall and winter, when e-commerce sales shriveled, “we still saw that very strong response to higher-end brands,” Ms. Gosselin said. The typical customer “is much more fashion-involved than we had even anticipated.”

Though Ms. Gosselin would not disclose Piperlime’s sales, she said that sales outpaced e-commerce sales of clothing overall and of Gap’s other brands, which include The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. Overall e-commerce sales of clothing and accessories were $8.8 billion in the first half of this year, according to comScore. That is down from $8.9 billion in the same period last year but up from $8.1 billion in the first half of 2007.

Another potential Piperlime competitor: The Gap itself. The Gap is in the middle of a big marketing campaign advertising its premium jeans, which sell for under $70. Jeans from other brands now for sale on Piperlime start around $125. Ms. Gosselin said that The Gap and Piperlime aim to offer a range of prices.

“Do we expect every Old Navy customer to shop Piperlime apparel? No. Do we expect some of them? Yes,” Ms. Gosselin said. For example, she expects that mothers who buy clothes for their kids at Old Navy might buy jeans made by 7 For All Mankind on Piperlime for themselves.

Story: New York Times

Ungaro, Looking for a Jolt, Hires Lindsay Lohan

Early this summer, Esteban Cortazar, the fashion prodigy and, for three seasons, the designer of the Paris fashion house Ungaro, balked when his bosses presented a plan to hire the actress Lindsay Lohan as his collaborator. According to a retail executive who is friendly with Mr. Cortazar, but who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want to jeopardize her store’s relationship with the house, he was asked an ultimate indignity: to take a bow at the end of his runway show while holding Ms. Lohan’s hand. Mr. Cortazar quit in July.

On Wednesday, Ungaro announced that Ms. Lohan, whose public flameout was the talk of Hollywood in 2007, has indeed become its artistic adviser, working with a new chief designer, Estrella Archs. The move immediately raised eyebrows in the fashion world, because Ms. Lohan, who is not always known for her facility for keeping her clothes on, would become part of the artistic legacy of a 43-year-old label whose namesake, Emanuel Ungaro, was once a protégé of Cristobal Balenciaga, described in the Who’s Who of Fashion as “possibly the greatest couturier of all time.”

Mounir Moufarrige, the chief executive of the company, acknowledged in an interview that the move would likely create waves among French fashion purists, possibly even charges of bad taste, but he argued that the times called for a maneuver he likened to “electric shock treatment.”

Sales of the high-end Ungaro collection have dropped substantially since Mr. Ungaro sold his business in 1996, and none of the designers hired to replace him since his retirement five years ago have managed to draw much attention to the label. Mr. Moufarrige, who joined the label in 2006 and has previously turned around the fortunes of French luxury labels like Goyard and Chloé (with the controversial appointment of Stella McCartney as its designer in 1997), said it was unlikely that a single fashion designer who fits the traditional mold could rebuild Ungaro during the recession. The label, which has global sales of about $200 million, mostly from cheaper products sold in Japan and scarcely from the high-end runway collection, has been losing money for several years. Mr. Moufarrige would not say how much, only that, as a minority shareholder, he was not in the habit of throwing it away.

“A designer alone is not enough to get us back where we were, unless I had Tom Ford or Phoebe Philo,” he said. “But there are not many of those, and they are taken.”

Mr. Cortazar, who started his own label in Miami as a teenager, was also a controversial choice to design the collection, which is largely seen as a vehicle for marketing more than a profit maker for the company. Despite encouraging reviews, his work was not garnering sales or international press as the company was expanding in China and Japan. He was not available to comment on his replacements. Typically, it takes a designer, even a hot one, years to build a strong reputation, and Ungaro has been faulted for changing its creative head every couple of seasons, damaging its reputation among editors and retailers. Mr. Moufarrige said he was not afraid of shaking things up once again.

“We could spend two or three years with a designer and get a great collection again,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean people will buy it. Everybody’s got a nice collection.”

But a celebrity, that’s another story, and one who draws the spotlight just for selling a line of leggings couldn’t do worse.

“I looked at several, and they all had the same ingredients,” Mr. Moufarrige said. “If you are a celebrity, you may be controversial and prone to a lot of problems, but you attract a lot of attention.”

Ms. Lohan has not had an easy time rehabilitating her reputation among movie makers, and her last film, “Labor Pains,” went straight to cable. But Mr. Moufarrige said her notoriety was a plus, and he pointed out that she has appeared on the cover of countless fashion magazines, like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar in the United States and international editions of Vogue.

“The girl is good-looking,” he said. “If I have bad taste, then the fashion editors have bad taste.”

Ms. Lohan, in a phone interview, said she was trying not to psyche herself out by considering how the French might respond to her new role at Ungaro, or comparing herself to the designer, but she was a little nervous.

“My fashion school has just been my experience with people in fashion, working on photo shoots and creating my own style,” she said. Asked how she felt about Mr. Cortazar’s departure from the house, given her impending arrival, she said: “I’m not coming in to take over and take away from anyone. I’m just bringing insight to things.”

She has wanted to work in fashion since she was a little girl, she said, and she follows the industry closely. She did, in fact, know that Mr. Ungaro once worked for Balenciaga.

“When I say I love fashion, I really do,” she said. “I live and breath fashion and clothing. There are so many designers I really admire and look up to. It’s such a rush for me. There’s this Balmain motorcycle jacket, and when I got one of the few they made without the shoulder pads, I literally screamed. Some people might look at me like I’m crazy or like I’m psychotic, but it makes me really happy.”

More to the point, Mr. Moufarrige’s strategy reflects a change in fashion that is being driven by the recession. It no longer makes sense, he said, to pay a star designer a $3 million salary. Though he would not say how much he is paying Ms. Lohan, he does expect a higher dividend, given the inevitable attention her involvement will generate.

“She’s a very clever person,” he said. “She’s not a designer. She’s an artistic adviser. She gives ideas on what she would wear. And I needed to bring down the average age group of Ungaro. The average age right now is 60.”

Source: New York Times

The dog's Body: Elle Macpherson's labradoodle is face of new fashion brand for canines

First it was the 'handbag dog' trend sparked by the likes of socialite Paris Hilton whose canine chum became her ultimate accessory.

Now, one celebrity's designer dog has been signed up to promote a new high-fashion label - for dogs.

Bella, a five-year-old labradoodle belonging to millionaire businesswoman and former model Elle Macpherson, is to star in a national advertising campaign as the face of Dogside.com, a dog fashion brand.



Bella, the labradoodle owned by former supermodel Elle Macpherson, is the star of an advertising campaign to promote a new high-fashion label for dogs

Macpherson, 46, who has her own lingerie and cosmetics ranges, has often been photographed out walking Bella near her Notting Hill home.

As Macpherson was known as The Body during her modelling days, Bella is, inevitably, being promoted as The Dog's Body.
Elle Macpherson

Branching out: Elle 'The Body' Macpherson

The brand boasts that Bella is ideal for showing off its leads, coats, scarves and bowls, for 'today's stylish urban dog'.

According to Dogside, Macpherson was apparently so keen on the idea of Bella finding fame in her own right that when they approached her, along with a number of other celebrity dog owners, she was the first to agree, ringing up in person to do so.

Macpherson is also, however, said to be receiving a substantial five-figure sum for her dog's time.

Celebrities owning labradoodles - a specially bred cross between a labrador retriever and a poodle that can cost more than £1,000 for a puppy - also include Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond and television presenter Graham Norton.

But Beverley Cuddy, editor of Dogs Today magazine, raised concerns about the move: 'When Paris Hilton took her chihuahua everywhere, there was a rush in sales of handbag dogs.

'Adopting a celebrity's hairstyle as they chop and change is fine but acquiring a dog for fashion to mirror a celebrity idol is disastrous. Lots of people chuck these dogs out after a few months.

'This also sounds like a lot of money for a dog that does not have any specific skills. Just like people who want to put their child on the stage, people may see this and imagine their dog can be a bit of an earner for them.

'But there is not much available modelling work out there.'

A spokeswoman for Macpherson refused to comment