Hermes in print
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http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=f7473051-024a-4c00-98af-f41f2298b4c8
Haute Construction
You know you've arrived when a luxury label hands you a hard hat
Shinan Govani, National Post Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008
It takes serious pull to stop traffic. In Toronto. On Bloor. In the middle of an hour marked as rush.
So went the high fashion hijinks at the opening--at 6 p. m., promptly -- of the re-done Hermes on Canada's most indignant street. With a chic huddle gathered on the south side of the road, a citrusy cover was dropped to reveal the fine-boned new boutique. Trumpets played, notes of merriment rose, certain stalled cars let out anguished honks.
And then? The invitees, escorted across the street this fine Tuesday evening by male models done up as crossing guards, were handed honest-to-goodness Hermes hard hats. Limited edition, naturally.
Inside, the store gleamed like the finest French mademoiselle -- trim, subtle, wayward in the best way, showing all the little details of grooming. The party itself moved like a reel I'd seen before -- knots of people talking furtively, men and women trying to mind their one and/or two cheek-kisses, journalists keenly eyeing the scene at the door where gift bags later cropped up like fruit in a fertile patch.
"This is a modern store ? a store that Canada deserves." That was part of the short-and-sweet spiel care of Christian Blanckaert, an executive vice-president at Hermes. As he spoke, I stood beside a $41,000 Birkin bag, displaced Faberge egg-style inside a display case. Somewhere else in the store, I'm told, stirred a throw worth $39,000, made from the pelts of a special French rabbit.
Economic slowdown? What economic slowdown?
Fortune, of course, has shone on Hermes in many ways in the last few months. Take France's singin' new first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. She put the classic French retailer on the map, once gain, when she not only chose one of its designs for her nuptials to President Nicolas, but, similarly, donned a purple, on-shoulder number for her official dinner at the Elysee Palace. According to reports, she bought both dresses herself at the stalwart Hermes store on the Avenue George V.
Vraiment fantastique ? but does Carla have one of these fabulously logoed construction caps? I think not. Every party needs a talking piece, and these hard hats in Toronto more than fit the bill. Mary Symons, that haute publicist and patron of the arts, joked to me that she was going to put it on her next Christmas tree, "instead of a star." Fashion Television producer Christopher Sherman, arriving in fashion-forward walking shorts, confessed that he was trying to think of a way to turn it into "the must-have fall accessory," but for the moment was happy to have it on display at home "cradled between my wall-mounted antlers."
Leah Rumack, an editor at Fashion, was particularly pleased with her hard hat, although she did look just a little bogged down. She was the only one at the party, let's just say, who was carrying around both a hard hat and her omnipresent bicycle helmet. "I finally feel like I belong!" she exclaimed. Nathalie Atkinson, the Post's own fearless retail therapist, had a more practical plot in mind. "I'm in the middle of a major house renovation," she let on, "so in all likelihood, I'll actually be wearing it as it was intended while we excavate the basement."
MEANWHILE, I SEE, I HEAR:
That the Canadian who recently scored the biggest literary jackpot in the world confirms to me that he did, indeed, follow up his win with some Guinness.
When in Ireland, indeed.
Montreal's Rawi Hage -- fresh from picking up a prize of $158,000 when he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize last week -- looked giddy through the jet lag at a party held in his honour in these parts on Saturday. "Have you decided what you're going to do with the money?" I took the opportunity to ask the author of the phenom known as De Niro's Game. In response, he shrugged. No, not just any shrug, but one of those majestic, central-casting writers' shrugs.
This party, by the way, was held at the home of his publisher, Sarah MacLachlan, of Anansi Press. She is married to that non-illiterate Noah Richler, and together they kept the BBQ burning and the drinks coming. The celebratory beverage of choice this night, incidentally? No, not Guinness. A fizzy rhubarb Bellini. Nice!
De Niro's Game, which follows characters caught in the civil war in Beirut in the '80s, was called out by the jury of this latest prize as "the work of a major literary talent." Thankfully, and as his publisher's ear-to-ear grin betrays, Rawi's next novel is already done. It's called Cockroach, and it's out in September.
THIS, THAT:
-NHL bad boy/fashion victim Sean Avery just finished an internship at Vogue -- yes, really! -- and now he's getting ready to hit the beach. The Canadian hockey guy told People this week about his swimwear plans: "I'm bringing the European flavour back to America, and I'm rocking a straight Speedo all summer."
-BlackBerry wizard Jim Balsillie was amongst the throng of cyclists who joined Lance Armstrong on a six-hour charity ride last weekend in parts around Waterloo, Ont. It raised $1.3-million for the Odette Cancer Centre at Sunnybrook, as well as the River Cancer Centre in Kitchener. And get this: At one point, reports the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Lance the BlackBerry addict was spotted riding with no hands, texting on his handheld.
THAT, THIS:
- Sid McCain, the daughter of the guy who's running for president of the United States -- the one who happens to live in Toronto-- was at the Puma Rockstar Hotel event last Saturday at the Gladstone when she was introduced to one Rainn Wilson! Both had a chuckle about the fact that John McCain, while on The Daily Show recently, told Jon Stewart that he's planning to pick Dwight Schrute as his "running mate." That's Rainn's TV character on The Office!
-The love-him-or-hate-him Mike Myers, onscreen right now in The Love Guru, is described this way by an unnamed exec in Entertainment Weekly: "I'd described Mike as impossibly smart -- in there is his brilliance and also his undoing." Also: "It's all brain. He's not able to intuit anything real or natural about human experience."
A NOTE FROM MY PAST
The French might know accessories, but the British? They know scandals -- and how to throw a party, as Shinan learned in October, 2003.
The Giorgio Armani party set against the Thames in London was marvellous. Thank you for asking.
Held to celebrate the launch of the Armani retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts --dresses are the new frescoes, after all -- the party was at a brand-spanking-new building on the river by Sir Norman Foster and served as a kind of unofficial reunion of American Gigolo. In other words, both Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton were there. Kirsten Dunst and Jake Gyllenhaal wandered in at one point, as did Minnie Driver, beautiful but alone. Robert De Niro, too, stopped in for a bit with his gorgeous wife, Grace Hightower, but slipped out soon after.
It was, I learned as the evening began to wear, a very sons-of-someone kind of night. "Do you know the playwright Tom Stoppard?" a merrymaker asked me at one point, after introducing me to another guy in a suit. "That's his son." "That's Pierce Brosnan's son,
Chris," the same merrymaker pointed out a little later.
The funniest son-of moment came when I was introduced to a guy who, except for the fact that he was considerably more blessed in the height department, looked a lot like me. He even told me he was a writer. "That's Oscar Humphries," someone filled me in later. " Barry Humphries' son. You know, Dame Edna."
I then knew exactly who he was. The 22-year-old boy toy who's said to be responsible for the high-society breakup of Tamara Mellon, CEO of Jimmy Choo, and Matthew Mellon, he of the famous banking family and one of America's richest clans. Oliver began a relationship with Tamara some time back and was "outed" when he wrote a too-thinly disguised article in The Daily Telegraph about being in a relationship with an older woman.
This kind of blueblood scandal is quintessentially British. We don't do scandal like this in Toronto -- scandal so delicious it's almost self-conscious. No, not us.
THE BOLDFACE INDEX
If you missed Shinan this week, then settle in for a condensed version of our man's daily dish.
-Spotted a couple of Fridays ago were Kate Hudson and Lance Armstrong, looking every bit like a BlackBerry-era Norman Rockwell scene. It was outside Toronto's Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville, and there were even kids in tow. His, hers, a whole motley crew!
- Sandra Oh, our Grey's Anatomy savant, got caught up a couple Thursdays ago with her old pal Don McKellar over dinner at Grace, the homey new hot spot on College. - Rihanna pulled out all the stops looks-wise at the MMVAs last Sunday, bravely showing up onstage in rubber fetish leggings, a Fendi top and a Marlon Brando butch-cap But in the pounding downpour that followed, her aptly titled single Umbrella she was nowhere to be heard.
- Brody Jenner, Whitney Port and Chace Crawford were all spotted piling into the same car last Sunday night after popping by the Ben Sherman-sponsored MuchMusic Video Awards after-bash.
- Ken Alexander, founder and editor of The Walrus, stepped down from his editorial perch last week.
[email protected]
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Haute Construction
You know you've arrived when a luxury label hands you a hard hat
Shinan Govani, National Post Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008
It takes serious pull to stop traffic. In Toronto. On Bloor. In the middle of an hour marked as rush.
So went the high fashion hijinks at the opening--at 6 p. m., promptly -- of the re-done Hermes on Canada's most indignant street. With a chic huddle gathered on the south side of the road, a citrusy cover was dropped to reveal the fine-boned new boutique. Trumpets played, notes of merriment rose, certain stalled cars let out anguished honks.
And then? The invitees, escorted across the street this fine Tuesday evening by male models done up as crossing guards, were handed honest-to-goodness Hermes hard hats. Limited edition, naturally.
Inside, the store gleamed like the finest French mademoiselle -- trim, subtle, wayward in the best way, showing all the little details of grooming. The party itself moved like a reel I'd seen before -- knots of people talking furtively, men and women trying to mind their one and/or two cheek-kisses, journalists keenly eyeing the scene at the door where gift bags later cropped up like fruit in a fertile patch.
"This is a modern store ? a store that Canada deserves." That was part of the short-and-sweet spiel care of Christian Blanckaert, an executive vice-president at Hermes. As he spoke, I stood beside a $41,000 Birkin bag, displaced Faberge egg-style inside a display case. Somewhere else in the store, I'm told, stirred a throw worth $39,000, made from the pelts of a special French rabbit.
Economic slowdown? What economic slowdown?
Fortune, of course, has shone on Hermes in many ways in the last few months. Take France's singin' new first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. She put the classic French retailer on the map, once gain, when she not only chose one of its designs for her nuptials to President Nicolas, but, similarly, donned a purple, on-shoulder number for her official dinner at the Elysee Palace. According to reports, she bought both dresses herself at the stalwart Hermes store on the Avenue George V.
Vraiment fantastique ? but does Carla have one of these fabulously logoed construction caps? I think not. Every party needs a talking piece, and these hard hats in Toronto more than fit the bill. Mary Symons, that haute publicist and patron of the arts, joked to me that she was going to put it on her next Christmas tree, "instead of a star." Fashion Television producer Christopher Sherman, arriving in fashion-forward walking shorts, confessed that he was trying to think of a way to turn it into "the must-have fall accessory," but for the moment was happy to have it on display at home "cradled between my wall-mounted antlers."
Leah Rumack, an editor at Fashion, was particularly pleased with her hard hat, although she did look just a little bogged down. She was the only one at the party, let's just say, who was carrying around both a hard hat and her omnipresent bicycle helmet. "I finally feel like I belong!" she exclaimed. Nathalie Atkinson, the Post's own fearless retail therapist, had a more practical plot in mind. "I'm in the middle of a major house renovation," she let on, "so in all likelihood, I'll actually be wearing it as it was intended while we excavate the basement."
MEANWHILE, I SEE, I HEAR:
That the Canadian who recently scored the biggest literary jackpot in the world confirms to me that he did, indeed, follow up his win with some Guinness.
When in Ireland, indeed.
Montreal's Rawi Hage -- fresh from picking up a prize of $158,000 when he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize last week -- looked giddy through the jet lag at a party held in his honour in these parts on Saturday. "Have you decided what you're going to do with the money?" I took the opportunity to ask the author of the phenom known as De Niro's Game. In response, he shrugged. No, not just any shrug, but one of those majestic, central-casting writers' shrugs.
This party, by the way, was held at the home of his publisher, Sarah MacLachlan, of Anansi Press. She is married to that non-illiterate Noah Richler, and together they kept the BBQ burning and the drinks coming. The celebratory beverage of choice this night, incidentally? No, not Guinness. A fizzy rhubarb Bellini. Nice!
De Niro's Game, which follows characters caught in the civil war in Beirut in the '80s, was called out by the jury of this latest prize as "the work of a major literary talent." Thankfully, and as his publisher's ear-to-ear grin betrays, Rawi's next novel is already done. It's called Cockroach, and it's out in September.
THIS, THAT:
-NHL bad boy/fashion victim Sean Avery just finished an internship at Vogue -- yes, really! -- and now he's getting ready to hit the beach. The Canadian hockey guy told People this week about his swimwear plans: "I'm bringing the European flavour back to America, and I'm rocking a straight Speedo all summer."
-BlackBerry wizard Jim Balsillie was amongst the throng of cyclists who joined Lance Armstrong on a six-hour charity ride last weekend in parts around Waterloo, Ont. It raised $1.3-million for the Odette Cancer Centre at Sunnybrook, as well as the River Cancer Centre in Kitchener. And get this: At one point, reports the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Lance the BlackBerry addict was spotted riding with no hands, texting on his handheld.
THAT, THIS:
- Sid McCain, the daughter of the guy who's running for president of the United States -- the one who happens to live in Toronto-- was at the Puma Rockstar Hotel event last Saturday at the Gladstone when she was introduced to one Rainn Wilson! Both had a chuckle about the fact that John McCain, while on The Daily Show recently, told Jon Stewart that he's planning to pick Dwight Schrute as his "running mate." That's Rainn's TV character on The Office!
-The love-him-or-hate-him Mike Myers, onscreen right now in The Love Guru, is described this way by an unnamed exec in Entertainment Weekly: "I'd described Mike as impossibly smart -- in there is his brilliance and also his undoing." Also: "It's all brain. He's not able to intuit anything real or natural about human experience."
A NOTE FROM MY PAST
The French might know accessories, but the British? They know scandals -- and how to throw a party, as Shinan learned in October, 2003.
The Giorgio Armani party set against the Thames in London was marvellous. Thank you for asking.
Held to celebrate the launch of the Armani retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts --dresses are the new frescoes, after all -- the party was at a brand-spanking-new building on the river by Sir Norman Foster and served as a kind of unofficial reunion of American Gigolo. In other words, both Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton were there. Kirsten Dunst and Jake Gyllenhaal wandered in at one point, as did Minnie Driver, beautiful but alone. Robert De Niro, too, stopped in for a bit with his gorgeous wife, Grace Hightower, but slipped out soon after.
It was, I learned as the evening began to wear, a very sons-of-someone kind of night. "Do you know the playwright Tom Stoppard?" a merrymaker asked me at one point, after introducing me to another guy in a suit. "That's his son." "That's Pierce Brosnan's son,
Chris," the same merrymaker pointed out a little later.
The funniest son-of moment came when I was introduced to a guy who, except for the fact that he was considerably more blessed in the height department, looked a lot like me. He even told me he was a writer. "That's Oscar Humphries," someone filled me in later. " Barry Humphries' son. You know, Dame Edna."
I then knew exactly who he was. The 22-year-old boy toy who's said to be responsible for the high-society breakup of Tamara Mellon, CEO of Jimmy Choo, and Matthew Mellon, he of the famous banking family and one of America's richest clans. Oliver began a relationship with Tamara some time back and was "outed" when he wrote a too-thinly disguised article in The Daily Telegraph about being in a relationship with an older woman.
This kind of blueblood scandal is quintessentially British. We don't do scandal like this in Toronto -- scandal so delicious it's almost self-conscious. No, not us.
THE BOLDFACE INDEX
If you missed Shinan this week, then settle in for a condensed version of our man's daily dish.
-Spotted a couple of Fridays ago were Kate Hudson and Lance Armstrong, looking every bit like a BlackBerry-era Norman Rockwell scene. It was outside Toronto's Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville, and there were even kids in tow. His, hers, a whole motley crew!
- Sandra Oh, our Grey's Anatomy savant, got caught up a couple Thursdays ago with her old pal Don McKellar over dinner at Grace, the homey new hot spot on College. - Rihanna pulled out all the stops looks-wise at the MMVAs last Sunday, bravely showing up onstage in rubber fetish leggings, a Fendi top and a Marlon Brando butch-cap But in the pounding downpour that followed, her aptly titled single Umbrella she was nowhere to be heard.
- Brody Jenner, Whitney Port and Chace Crawford were all spotted piling into the same car last Sunday night after popping by the Ben Sherman-sponsored MuchMusic Video Awards after-bash.
- Ken Alexander, founder and editor of The Walrus, stepped down from his editorial perch last week.
[email protected]
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
SAC EN V IIGreat article & I'm drooling at these bags!!!!
May I ask, does these 2 kind of bags still available at Hermes? What is it called?
small and large 36 cm
ush:
US Elle August edition - a jipsy (?) (looks like chamonix vert olive with PH but I could be completely wrong) on page 130 and a rose gold and brown diamond bracelet on page 127.
rose gold and brown diamond bracelet on page 127.
^^^ Am I the only one who can't see these pics please? There's a blue ? where every picture should be and i doesn't open anything... Maybe some kind of extensions I can't see?
