>>  Carine Roitfeld is really giving the Balmain Fall 2008 collection a workout.  After wearing a long leopard gown from the label last Thursday,  she went back to her favorite black Balmain dress on Friday for the Dolce & Gabbana party.  Talk about an endorsement.

*images: source

>>  We heard what Marc Jacobs had to say earlier today, and now it's Roberto Cavalli's turn.  For a man who first rose to popularity back in the '60s with his hippiefied patchwork jeans, Cavalli still has some strong stylistic opinions to air out . . .

On vulgar dressing: "There is a real vulgarity in the way women dress at the moment.  They show off too much and try too hard. They don't understand where the line is between sexy and vulgar. I know where that line is." [Ed: Gotta love the irony . . . ]

On undesirables wearing his clothes: "It happens a lot with women of a certain nationality - I'm sure you can imagine which - and you just want to say 'Give it back!'? . . . The English - oh my God.  I shouldn't say this because I live part of the time in London, but they are on a par with the Swiss stylistically."

On how much he loves Kate Moss' Topshop line: "Kate Moss's collection was badly made, stupid and bland; you see things like that everywhere. You can't just buy things for the label - it's ridiculous."

That last comment is especially weird, considering that Kate has been his go-to campaign girl for a few seasons now (including Fall 2008).

*image: wireimage

>> We've gotten a lot from the mouth of Marc Jacobs lately, and he'll be the first to admit that he's "not shy when it comes to talking."  But I have to give it to him, he does have a knack for keeping things interesting. 

In the article that accompanies his Warholian  Interview cover shot and Louis Vuitton drag editorial, Marc reveals how Serge Gainsbourg kickstarted all of his highly successful artist collaborations at Louis Vuitton:

I was looking to rent an apartment when I first got here. Charlotte Gainsbourg had just had a baby and she was sitting in the bedroom breastfeeding, and I was looking at her apartment, and, in the corner, she had a trunk, a Louis Vuitton trunk that had been painted black. But a lot of the black had come off. It was her dad’s—that being Serge—and he had painted it black. And for some reason, that triggered me thinking about my favorite work of art ever, which is L.H.O.O.Q. by [Marcel] Duchamp.  And I thought, This Vuitton monogram is sort of the Mona Lisa of this company.

And what I wanted to do, in the same way Serge had done, was deface it. The same way that Duchamp had done with L.H.O.O.Q., by putting this moustache on [the Mona Lisa] and making it something hipper, a little bit anarchic, and just cooler. And by defacing something, making it new again. And so I had this idea of asking Stephen [Sprouse] to come here and do graffiti on top of it.

The Stephen Sprouse graffiti collaboration from the Spring 2001 collection (above) ended up making Louis Vuitton over $300 million, but more recently, Marc had some other money in mind that never came into fruition:

I wanted to do money. Last season, because of all the recession talk, I wanted to do a $9 bill print. They sent the print down to our legal department, who told me that I couldn’t reproduce U.S. tender if it was the actual size, and I had to make it noticeably larger or smaller.

Maybe next time.  For more snippets from Marc's mad imagination, and plenty of art speak, the full article is up here.

*image: source