My Trip to 12

So here's the back story of that photo below: Last week, I cold emailed Filipa Fino, accessories editor of Vogue, asking if I could have the honor of presenting my bag line to her (well, that's almost how I said it) and got a response from one of her assistants immediately. Yes, I could come to Vogue, at 4 Times Square, and show my collection.

So, on Thursday of last week, I woke up my first morning in New York and put together - out of a hastily packed suitcase - an outfit worthy of Vogue. Miu Miu coat, vintage leather skirt, black tights, Miu Miu boots and a lovely silk, Gucci scarf.

When I arrive on the hallowed 12th floor of Condé Nast,

I'm instructed by said assistant to lay my wares out in the lobby. Yes, lobby. So I do. And they look beautiful. They ended up keeping white things from my line for a story they were doing. That is to say, a couple white clutches and a white iPad case made especially for them that day in Los Angeles and FedExed for the following morning. By my account, it was a pretty good initial meeting with Vogue. As I leave the building dragging my suitcase full o bags, I notice my reflection in a window at Times Square and think it's pretty cute with my giant Alpaca hat purchased at one of the only non-chain stores at the Mall of America, I think actually called the Alpaca Store, at Christmas time, so I snapped a picture. I love how you can see the black messenger bag on my arm, too.



After Vogue, I have a few other meetings around town. When I'm finished, I'm back out on the Manhattan streets with my suitcase promptly at rush hour. Something you learn very quickly while trying to hail a taxi in NYC with a large roller suitcase: cabbies don't stop for you because they think you're going to the airport and they only want to go to the airport at very certain times of the day. Not rush hour. So I'm freezing, extremely uncomfortable in my very high Miu Miu heels, when I discover that not only I've been walking in the wrong direction(!) but that I'm now on the corner of 5th avenue and Saks Fifth Avenue and I am about to cut my legs off at my feet if I don't purchase another pair of shoes immediately.

So I drag my big ol' suitcase through the very lovely aisles of SFA. Here I am waiting for the elevator. Observation: Hard to be classy with a black roller suitcase any place other than the airport. When I got to shoe department I tried on many sensible pairs of shoes.

But I settled on these. Sensible? No. More sensible than Miu Miu 4" heels? Yes. Thank you. I'll wear them out of the store. And, no I do not need the box, thank you.

With the new "sensible heels" on my feet, I stride back out onto 5th Ave with my mega suitcase in tow, and still no taxis stop. So when the 25th gypsy cab stops for me, instead of shoeing them off like the rest, I say yes, thank you very much, jump into my 80's stretch limo gypsy cab and arrive chez Simone many dollars lighter but very happy to be home away from home.

These are the types of flowers Simone keeps chez elle.
Ahhh, pour me a glassa!

I'm in NY

More here when I return,

more here for now.

Magic Hour

We have a magic hour most days in Los Angeles around 4 or 5 o'clock. It is the most beautiful time to be at the beach, at Soho House for cocktail, hiking Runyon Canyon, or if none of those are options, on my front porch. Last week was extremely busy for us over here - we shipped big orders to Steven Alan and Theory - and deftly kept multiple other balls in the air, but we always have time for a little photo break at magic hour.

And even the pros got to see our golden time last week: I was interviewed and photographed for Swedish Elle! Cool, right!? The editor-in-chief, Hermine Coyet Ohlen, herself came to interview me. And local (rockstar) Swedish ex-pat photographer Sarah St. Clair Renard came to shoot it. That's us above.

Jocelyn got her spring on with a fix of a new red CV foldover clutch.

Matilde scored a pair of never-been-worn vintage pumps from my closet (still in box!)

She's so in love with them, I don't think she's taken them off since I gave them to her, except to pack up Theory. :)

Also, pop over to see what I did tonight - it was another type of magic. :) xoxo

Red Lipstick Break

It is Sunday, Jan 30, 2011. Which means that tomorrow is Jan 31, 2011 and tax day for me. It was a rainy day, so I at least didn't feel sad about not being outside if I was to be at my computer all day crunching numbers to get to one big, fat, dollar-amount-owed at the end. But when ennui and dread were felt down to my bones I decided: I needed lipstick.

Last night, I went to the pre-opening reception of All Of This And Nothing at the Hammer Museum, and being that I had approximately 10 min to get ready in order to be there on time, I managed a pretty fierce outfit which involved black VEDA leggings with leather panels, a black leather quilted jacket, and towering black sandals (with socks.) But when I got to my friend's house to pick her up, I realized to my horror that I'd left the house without a stitch of make-up. I don't wear a lot of make up, but a lil mascara, a lil eyeliner, a lil blush, a lil SOMETHING at least. Luckily my friend came through with the full-proof savior in this situation, RED LIPSTICK. No make-up? Red Lipstick will make it look intentional. So today, in my tax purgatory, I figured a good break would be to buy some new red lipstick.

This is not to say that I don't own oh, I don't know, 5 or 6 red lipsticks already, which run the gamut from Revlon to Nars, but still I'm searching for the perfect red. Why is it sooo illusive? My dream is to have a magic make-up artist say, "THIS is your perfect color for you wear it and don't ever change." I'm not sure it's right, but I love orangey reds on me, so today I got Julie Hewitt's Belle Noir. Can't say if it'll be the perfect one yet, but it certainly brought me out of my tax-depression for a while.

30 Of A Kind - sold out. BOOM.

I had the good fortune of being featured on a relatively new site called Of A Kind yesterday. OAK, the brainchild of former magazine girls Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, is a site that asks designers to make a special, limited edition product or introduce a new product and sell it only on their website until it sells out. They do lovely stories about the designer leading up to the sale which goes live every Wednesday. Essentially it's a way to introduce somewhat new designers to another audience and provide the customer with something special. So we designed an elegant envelope wallet called La Pochette and it SOLD OUT in a matter of hours (or as OAK's tweet said at sell out time: "our @seevivier wallet is sold-out. BOOM.") Yay!

La Pochette is dreamy:

And we will sell a few versions of it on our website soon - probably when we launch our new website. (Which is finally nearing completion. F*&^%! heck! Websites are a lot of work. :) ) Anyhoozles, I thought I'd repost those stories, as they did a bang up job with them and I know it wasn't easy to get me on the phone to do the interviews. Merci Erica and Claire. If you haven't already, I recommend you signup for their updates because they've got some good people lined up to design unique pieces for their site. xoc

14k Niceness

While touring Vuitton a while back, I learned that they coat all their hardware with 14k. So I thought: I want to do that. I can dream, right? Well, I may not be able to coat all our hardware yet, but I was able to swath our name tags in the lovely metal. Our first shipment arrived on Friday and they will start gracing our bags starting Monday.

Heather took this pic the other day of the orchid on my mantle in the red Heath vase she'd given me for Christmas. I love the fuchsia and red together.

Then I realized it fits right in with the pics from Jil Sander I was just pouring over on Style.com for Springtime color fix.

Coral anyone? We made wonderful Spring/Summer sample clutches for stores with brights - including a few beautiful reddy-orangey-pinky. Like this one:

And this pompom:

ALL the Jil Sander brights make me happy and excited for the coming months.

We are very excited to announce Clare Vivier at Jenni Kayne boutique in West Hollywood. What a lovely store! I'm very honored to be in it.

(Jil Sander pics from style.com)

Elite is not a bad word*

I had the amazing privilege of a private tour of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA today by none other than the new MOCA director himself, Jeffrey Deitch.

True story. Okay, stay with me while I geek out for a minute:

This morning I was reading my book, Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, which is all about art and specifically about the art world and the key participants (like Deitch) when my phone rings and it's a friend I hadn't heard from in a while calling me with a last minute invitation: Would I like to join her and a couple other people on a small, Deitch-led tour. Yes, I did want to join her. The tour group turned out to include celebrities, art world darlings, daughters-of-very-famous people, and me (!?).

One of my favorite parts of the visit today was the "Latin American Artists in the Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space." Here's me in the blue strings part of the installation. Suffice it to say, I felt honored to be invited on this tour today, it was an extremely illuminating experience to have with the enthusiatistic and intelligent Mr. D. I'll leave writing about art to those people who actually can, like Mr. Martin and the people who write for MOCA's website:

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, is the first museum exhibition to situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space. The exhibition presents Latin America as the source of new ideas about the nature and function of art through the re-creation of important large scale installations by five highly regarded and influential artists: Carlos Cruz Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida, and Jesús Rafael Soto. From: here.

And, maybe because of my metier, I also adored Amanda Ross-Ho's giant "My Bag (Cigarette Burn)" piece.

(Here is some perspective on how is how big the bag is above.)

I love the Six Degrees theory and I'm always looking for it, usually I find that it's less than 6 with everyone. So no, this picture of Elton, Diana and Cher wasn't at the museum today. But Ross's beautiful and funny daughter (with whom she was reportedly pregnant in this picture) was on the tour with us. (And Matilde saw Elton the other night at the Plan B concert at the Troubador.) And Cher, well Cher just looks so hot in this picture! But I love to make connections with everything life, or at least I love to have that sensation of bringing it around - to make stories come full circle.

To that end, I found this picture of Diana Ross and Steve Martin next to one another at the Kennedy Center Honors. They were honored the same year, 2007. There you have it. I woke up reading Martin's book on the art world elite having no idea that I would spend the day with Ross's daughter on a very cool art tour with art world elite. Full circle, in a way. :) Gosh, I'm sorry, was that crazy? I'm tired. Bonne nuit. xo

*Paraphrasing Aaron Sorkin's acceptance speech at the Golden Globes tonight.

"Elite is not a bad word", he said to his daughter,

referring to all the

smart talented women in the room.