Sex is a luxury. Or so Coco de Mer, the purveyor of fine erotic objects, insists. As our society keeps loosening up about sex, erotic play becomes acceptable. No longer associated with perversion and thus banished into the sleaziness of the red light districts, sexual play is now a pastime. Like many leisurely activities, it allows room for luxury and good taste. After all, what girl wants to be satisfied with a cheap plastic vibrator bought in a seedy porn store? This is the line of thinking Sam and Justine Roddick, the co-founders of Coco de Mer, took. “One of the thoughts that came out of my involvement in a feminist rights movement,” Sam Roddick says, “was the idea that women deserve a space where they can feel comfortable and not ashamed of their sexuality. That is the type of store I wanted to create.”
     The first Coco de Mer New York store, opening today in Nolita, certainly reflects this manifesto. It is an inviting space with an intimate atmosphere, a boudoir and not a brothel, reflecting the implicit understanding that kinkiness arises out of feeling of comfort and that true pleasure only comes from the willingness to please. And there is no shortage of kinky, but sweet, touches, from the purple silk blindfold that reads, “Freedom is deciding whose slave you want to be,” to the improbably sexy lingerie.

Images courtesy of Guidi

It’s no secret that the landscape of fashion manufacturing is changing. More and more high-end designers are outsourcing production to China and other third world countries in order to increase profit margins. Guidi, one of the most prestigious leather tanneries, is also one of the few left in Europe. Located in a small Tuscan town of Pescia, where leather tanning is a tradition that goes back to the 14th Century, Guidi has been producing fine leather since 1896. Today, it supplies leather to many top fashion houses. Several years ago, Guidi’s owner decided to start producing leather goods under its own name. This meant traditional artisanal production in limited runs, using its own leather, ranging from supple cowhide to hard cordovan. The footwear and bags are hand-finished and their styles rarely change, bucking the traditional notion that fashion must be fast-paced. Instead, Guidi is focused on longevity.
     Insistence on permanence is not the only reason why Guidi stands out. The hard-core aesthetic of distressed, rugged-looking footwear and bags purposefully goes against the conventional image of polished Italian style.

Past Imperfect by Deborah Turbeville published by Steidl

Deborah Turbeville is an incorrigible romantic. Working since the early 70s as a fashion and art photographer, she developed an ethereal style, characterized by grainy, washed out, black and white images. Turbeville’s new book, Past Imperfect (Steidl, $59), is a careful study of her favorite subject: women in search. Laid out in fifteen vignettes on 190 pages, with locations ranging from coastal Rhode Island to the back alleys of Prague, the book depicts her heroines’ strife to transcend their banal existence, to seek whatever little grain of poetry can be found in their prosaic world. The photographs were taken between 1978 to 1997, some borrowed from her fashion shoots, others taken to complete her narrative of alienation.
     Turbeville has a deep affinity to literature, which is easily discernable in Past Imperfect.  It is no wonder that many of her models are Russian and French, the Anna Kareninas and the Madame Bovarys of her time. The book’s title refers to a quote from Proust’s article on Flaubert, which talks about the “mysterious sadness” of the past imperfect tense that insists on continuity of the past. This sense of lingering permeates Turbeville’s moody photography, in which time is not readily discernable; the photos could have been taken in 1890 or 1980. Turbeville writes about her women in the preface of the book: “I saw in them the ancient faces from a distant past… Anachronisms — walking through the streets of the present. They shared common bonds… Something of the endangered species told in their presence…”

At least politically speaking, 2009 has been a pretty surreal year: America’s first black President smokes cigarettes on the White House lawn, NASA found ice on the moon just a few days ago, and perpetually prepubescent Ashlee Simpson somehow gave birth. Perhaps it’s the ever-bizzaro cultural climate that’s causing fashion designers, like rising Chinese star Du Yang, to embrace their more eccentric talents.    
Unlike some of her peers, Du Yang, who graduated last year from Central Saint Martins, gets her potency as a surrealist designer from the cheerful, even comical, approach she brings to a design tradition dominated by the dark and gloomy. Fellow surrealists Junya Watanabe, Rei Kawakubo, Victor & Rolf, and Alexander McQueen tend to concoct ominous and often sinister visions. But Yang’s signature blend of cartoony outlandishness and trompe l’oeil abstraction is more likely to make a person wonder if they dozed off at the computer screen than question the nature of good versus evil. 
     Yang’s latest collection, It is a Dream in Colors, takes inspiration from the designer’s “spiritual journey to India,” which apparently included (if her chunky knit textiles are anything to go by) a surfeit of watermelons, strawberries, eyeglass-wearing gurus, bumblebees, and cornrows (the hairstyle — not the farming technique).

© Maison Martin Margiela by Maison Martin Margiela

Last year, the iconic Belgian designer Martin Margiela celebrated the twenty-year anniversary of his fashion house during his runway show in Paris. One person conspicuously absent from the celebration was Margiela himself. The designer is as notorious for his adamant refusal to be photographed and interviewed, as he is for his innovative work. One can hardly underestimate Margiela’s influence on fashion. From revealing tailoring techniques by deconstructing garments to his quirky shows, like the one held in a candle-lit abandoned Parisian metro station, he has consistently subverted fashion’s conventions. Margiela is a thinking person’s designer — his work is cerebral and methodical. Whether through the subtlety of carefully misplaced seams or the ostentation of blown-up proportions, he forces you to see the clothes in a new light. 
     Maison Martin Margiela (Rizolli, $100), chronicles the Belgian’s career in its 368 large format pages, full of rare images. The pure white linen cover of the book epitomizes Margiela’s approach to fashion — the garment should speak for itself and not be overshadowed by the designer’s ego. Several essays and letters from contributors such as Jean-Paul Gaultier (with whom Margiela got his first job), Susannah Frankel, and Vanessa Beecroft punctuate the lush photography. The photos depict every important aspect of Margiela’s carefully constructed world, from individual garments to his pointedly unglamorous boutiques.

Some fashion world crossovers are to be expected. These days, it seems a hot young singer or actor is required to announce the launch of an eponymous ready-to-wear collection within twenty-four hours of their first album or summer blockbuster. But in the case of 26-year-old Nebraska native Timo Weiland, resettlement in the fashion world meant packing up a desk at Deutsche Bank Securities and explaining to coworkers that theatrical neck ware — and not finance — was his true life calling.
     Weiland’s timely pre-crash Wall Street exodus was fortuitous in producing his first accessories collection, Timo, which featured the ultra-slim neckties and poufy Edwardian satin collars that remain the brand’s signature accents. Business partner Alan Eckstein, 24, supplied the marketing and retail wisdom that got Weiland’s hip frills wrapped around the necks of Chloe Sevigny and Josh Hartnett. Since then, the duo have enjoyed an enduring “downtown darling” status, filling necktie orders for high-profile club-goers and style icons, all the while working toward the launch of a comprehensive Timo Weiland collection for men and women.
     Their plans came to fruition this fall at New York Fashion Week, where Weiland and Eckstein unveiled a fully realized — and startlingly directional — Spring 2010 debut collection saturated in their characteristically androgynous Edwardian flair.