Observer » Sienna Miller

The Observer Goes to a Guns N’ Roses Show, and Fashion Week is Over

Ted Gushue — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:50:44 -0400

Handlebar and all, Axl Rose preaches the rock gospel. (Paul Bruinooge/ PatrickMcMullan)

In celebration of the long desired end of Fashion Week, DeLeon Tequila and Nur Khan hosted what would be the last of their fabled Electric Sessions last night at the Hiro Ballroom (which, for the record, is still open) with Guns n’ Roses.

The Observer plays the waiting game.

Doors at 9 p.m., we pop in around 10:30 hoping to dodge most of the wait for what was rumored to be an 11 p.m. start time. Seems like a decent idea, right?
11:15 hits and we bump into a few friends who had just left the temporary palatial penthouse home of Axl Rose at The SoHo Grand Hotel: “Yeah man, we were just over there and literally 10 minutes ago they ordered a ton of room service.” This did not bode well for a packed house hungry for high school rock.
We spot a glowing Sienna Miller holding court with boyfriend and baby daddy Tom Sturridge, and can’t help but think that dude should lock it down.
Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis host an impeccably attractive table in the slightly grungy Hiro.
Even Jared Leto seemed a bit confused as to where the rock band was hiding.
Checking in with Tyler Winklevoss. We both immediately realize how bratty we feel when we grumble about waiting around for a free GnR show.
Wanting to get the real school, we shoot Nur a text, who is quick to inform The Observer that Axl is in fact slated to go on at 12:15, and relief washes over us like an awesome wave.

Damon and a homeless dude people were freaking out about. (Paul Bruinooge/ PatrickMcMullan)

A bit more mulling about, and we see Nur take the stage.

“Yo, shit, that’s Nur dude! They’re totally about to come on!” remarks a hyper observant party-goer.
In the corner of our eye we spot Justin Timberlake and Matt Damon stopping to strike a pose in front of the camera. Both card-carrying members of the way-more-famous-than-you club.
Ok, wait. Something’s happening – the lights are dimming, cigarettes ritualistically lighting up, the slow rolling “unnnghhhhhhhhhh” of a bass guitar being flicked on.
There he is. Axl Rose himself. Handlebar moustache in full effect: “How are you tonight, fucktards!?!” he asks politely before launching into his first song, ‘You’re Crazy.’
We notice a tweet from a colleague a few hordes of people away: “Holy shit, Axl Rose still has it.” And he did, in fact, still have it.
Warm up out of the way, Axl takes the microphone to his lips, stares deep into each and everyone’s soul, and posits the question: “Do you know where you are?” We were in the jungle, baby.

Rupert Murdoch’s Phone-Hacking Scandal Gets a Celebrity Spin

Steve Huff — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 22:33:30 -0400

Rupert Murdoch just can't catch a break. While his aging back is ready to give under the weight of his billions and his massive influence over American political discourse, he must also shoulder the burdens of being subject to phone-hacking scandal-related legal action by no less than Sienna Miller. The Telegraph with the low-down:

Lawyers for the actor, whose private life has long been a tabloid staple, said she was ready to join the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and others in asking the courts for a judicial review of the police's conduct of the case.

News of the World allegedly listened to Miller's voicemail. Murdoch's paper was, according to the Telegraph, targeting Miller 4 years ago. Since then Sienna Miller has won at least one go-round with the paper, receiving damages and basically admitting they were wrong for poking about in her private affairs.

In this case Rupert Murdoch is in good company--no less than Scotland Yard is in Miller's doghouse too. The police force had evidence that Murdoch's paper was eavesdropping on Miller in 2006 but chose to inform the actress 3 years later. Her lawyer told the Telegraph they are waiting for 'an explanation' as to why she was not warned earlier.

[Telegraph]

Best of the Met

Irina Aleksander — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:15:22 -0400

It’s that time of year again when we get to marvel at the many things worn at Anna Wintour’s party the Costume Institute gala at the Met. This year's theme, "The American Woman," was perhaps a little bit easier for sartorially challenged celebrities to understand and therefore please their red carpet audiences.

After all, the themes of years past--“Superheroes” in 2008 and “The Model as Muse” in 2009--resulted in numerous disasters, including lamé turbons (Kate Moss), strange lighting strike patterns (Lake Bell), thigh high boots (Madonna) and inappropriate cleavage and leggage (Blake Lively). Judging from this year’s looks, the famous ladies have wised up and classed it up. Truthfully, the disasters were far fewer than we’ve seen in the past.

Stay tuned for a full red carpet report from Chloe Malle, but for now enjoy a slideshow of our favorite looks from last night.

O That Simonian Rag

Jesse Oxfeld — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:52:52 -0400

I am, despite a weakness for toe-tapping song-and-dance numbers, a cynic, and the preopening ad campaign for the new revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, all ’80s quotations and ’80s typography, gave plenty of ammunition for cynicism. (If The Times offered the option of printing in sepia, no doubt the producers would have jumped at it.) And when the stage lights came up at the Nederlander Theatre, where the first installment of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy opened Sunday night (Broadway Bound, the third, will play in repertory alongside Brighton Beach starting in December), things didn’t seem much better.

It’s a memory play about growing up in a poor Brooklyn Jewish family in the years just before World War II, and, like any memory play about growing up in Brooklyn, it’s got its youthful protagonist—Eugene Morris Jerome, Mr. Simon’s stand-in—imagining himself pitching for the Yankees, tossing a ball in the street, wearing knickers and pining for girls. Equally de rigueur, there’s an elevated-subway track overhead and the sound of a passing El as the curtain goes up after the prologue.

The Simonian shtick at first seems dated and clichéd, too: One of Eugene’s early monologues revolves around the Jewish-grandparent habit of whispering when mentioning the names of deadly diseases—his Uncle Dave died of (shhh!) cancer—and I’m sure I’ve seen any number of curly-haired, flannel-clad slackers do the bit in front of various brick walls on Comedy Central. Even Eugene himself—played with enthusiasm, energy and charisma by a fresh-faced Noah Robbins, a newcomer who has deferred his Columbia acceptance for a year—is overburdened with his waving arms and one-liners, a 15-year-old Woody Allen.

But then, about midway through the first act, you settle into Mr. Simon’s world, and it all starts to work.

That early whispered-disease joke may now be a staple, but the play debuted in 1983—quite likely, Mr. Simon invented that bit. Eugene may be borscht-belty, but he’s a young Mr. Simon—how could he not be?

As the play progresses, director David Cromer brings out not just Brighton Beach’s broad comedy but also its emotion, the tenuousness and sadness of its characters’ lives. It becomes a sensitive portrait of a very different New York existence, only a few generations removed. (When Jack Jerome, the hardworking paterfamilias, says that he never got past the eighth grade, “and that’s why I spend half my life on the subway and the other half trying to make a few extra dollars to keep this family from being out on the street,” I was suddenly reminded that my grandfather didn’t, either.) The cynic’s wariness melts; his heart, he is a little embarrassed to say, is even warmed.

The superb cast is led by Laurie Metcalf, the Roseanne star who last year gave a credible portrayal of a less-than-credible character in David Mamet’s mediocre November. As Kate Jerome, she expertly plays Mr. Simon’s perhaps overwrought Jewish-mother comedy (“A roller skate? On my kitchen floor? Do you want me dead, is that what you want?”) while also effectively conveying that the weight of the world—or at least the weight of running a seven-person household on little money in hard times—is, in fact, on her shoulders. (The towering set—sliced-open two story house, street in front, yard alongside—is by Jon Lee Beatty and connoted to me more middle-class respectability than impoverished resignation.)

And Santino Fontana, as big brother Stanley, maintains a movingly affectionate brotherly rapport with Mr. Robbins’ Eugene. When Stanley, ashamed to have lost his week’s wages in a poker game, decides to leave the family and says goodbye to his brother, the cynic’s eyes might even moisten a bit, too.

With his minimalist, modern-dress Our Town, which opened last winter at the tiny Barrow Street Theatre, Mr. Cromer gave what can be a hackneyed period piece a fresh look and a bracing currency. At the Nederlander, his reinterpretation is far less radical (of course, Neil Simon is a famously demanding author; Thornton Wilder has the decency to be dead) but also less successful: Our Town became universal; Brighton Beach’s charms, while manifest, I suspect will remain limited to those who whisper disease names (and those of us descended from them).

But that’s all right: They’re the people who buy Neil Simon tickets.

“THEY LOVE US over there,” the chauffeur John says to the mistress of his English country estate, Miss Julie, as the two are fantasizing post-coitally about the nightclub they’ll open in New York. “They die for the accent.”

Well, maybe. But After Miss Julie, which opened in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre last week, is asking a lot in exchange for some received pronunciation.

Miss Julie is August Strindberg’s 1888 drama about a Swedish aristocrat into kinky sex who has a class-defying one-night stand with her father’s manservant and then kills herself out of some mix of shame, desperation, regret and simple psychosis. It was scandalous in its time—and was apparently banned in many places—because of its frank treatment of sex.

After Miss Julie is Miss Julie as adapted by the English playwright Patrick Marber, who modernizes the story—well, “modernizes” the story—to England in 1945, on the night of Labor’s landslide electoral victory.

In other words, instead of being a story about century-old Swedish class mores and no-longer-particularly taboo sex, it is a story about half-century-old English class mores and no-longer-particularly taboo sex. No wonder it was rapturously received in London when it was presented at the Donmar Warehouse in 2003. Brits, after all, care about British class issues.

New Yorkers, however, mostly do not, and that makes for a sometimes wearying 90 minutes.

Miss Julie and her father’s chauffeur, John, dance together (scandalously, for its time and place) and dance around each other, alternatingly seducing and condemning each other, alternatingly confessing love for each other and reveling in power over the other. They plot to run off together; they plot to abandon each other. Not unlike in the current revival of Oleanna, a key point of tension doesn’t exist for the audience—there, campus gender politics, here British class issues—and we’re left instead with a study in manipulation, a question of who is using whom.

Sienna Miller, the intriguing indie film star making her Broadway debut, is well cast in the role, lovely, radiant and blindingly blond, an upper-crust femme fatale with perfect posture and better diction. She’s histrionic in the play’s second half, but, then, so is the character. She never really seems out of control, however; never seems to be actually mad. Instead, she seems like a confident girl in over her head, a manipulator who’s been out-manipulated.

Jonny Lee Miller, also in his first Broadway appearance, is her lover and antagonist, dark, handsome, brooding and magnetic. He acquits himself better, cleanly moving from a servant’s deference to a charmer’s seduction to a resentful servant’s sadistic pleasure in power. Marin Ireland—who dominated in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty last season—is impressive as Christine, the house’s cook and John’s long-suffering common-law fiancée. She manages to hold the audience’s attention through a meticulously choreographed lengthy silent scene in which she cleans up her kitchen after having been left behind by John and Miss Julie, dutifully folding clothes, then primping herself, then growing bored and eventually falling asleep.

Elsewhere in Mark Brokaw’s direction, though, the pacing can seem off—the first half of the short play seems to drag on interminably. Allen Moyer’s detailed set of a country-house kitchen—complete with running water and working stove—puts a ceiling on the room, effectively dropping the proscenium height by nearly half and creating out of the otherwise sprawling kitchen more of a pressure cooker. Mark McCullough’s lighting is remarkably detailed, shifting the world outside the kitchen from night to day and bathing the crazed lovers in their own glow, even when the set around them is shadowy and menacing.

As the play ends, Miss Julie walks out of the kitchen, into that blazing morning sun, implicitly to slit her own throat. She’s been humiliated by a servant, which in mid-century England might have been horrifying. But in new-century New York, posh accent or not, it’s hard to care.

AVENUE Q WAS already in a low-rent neighborhood—its protagonist, the recent-college-grad puppet Princeton, armed with only a B.A. in English and an ambition to find a purpose, tells his new neighbors that he’d started his apartment hunt on Avenue A and kept going till he found a place he could afford—but the economic downturn has thrown it, like many others, out of its home and into a cheaper one. After six years and change on Broadway, it closed last month at the Golden Theatre and then reopened last week Off Broadway at New World Stages.

The new production feels lower-rent, too. Maybe because of the size of the venue, or the size of the orchestra, or just the several-replacements-later nature of the cast, it lacks some of the excitement of the original. But—and here’s the Sesame Street–suitable happy ending—it’s still utterly delightful.

Even six years later, the show is still gleefully subversive—you never quite get used to Muppet-style puppets fucking—and still hilarious. (It should be noted, however, that Anika Larsen, who plays Princeton’s two love interests, the winsome Kate Monster and the vampish Lucy and is a veteran of the final Broadway cast, could belt to the back row of the biggest Broadway house.) The songs (by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, with book by Jeff Whitty) are, if anything, better: not just tuneful melodies with witty lyrics, but, in a few cases, now genuine members of the show-tunes canon. (At least, so says any weekend at Marie’s Crisis.)

Best of all—and rare in the Theater District this season, with its 1920s revivals and 1980s revivals and updates to 1945—it still speaks to life in this city today, remains an honest and wistful look at being a New Yorker in your 20s. It’s still hard to find an apartment, and a purpose; there’s still a fine, fine line between a lover and a friend; and—as Eugene Jerome would no doubt be thrilled to know—the Internet is still for porn.

editorial@observer.com

See You In September Issue! Subjects of Fashion Doc Flock to Premiere

Irina Aleksander — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:22:03 -0400

Members of the press are well aware that if an invitation to a New York film premiere indicates that celebrity arrivals begin at 7 p.m., it usually means that the lead stars of this film will likely arrive at 7:55 p.m. At the Wednesday night premiere of The September Issue at the Museum of Modern Art, the R. J. Cutler documentary about how a September issue of Vogue comes together, the director and the film's main characters began arriving at 6:45.

Editor Anna Wintour, the movie's simultaneous heroine and villain, led the procession with actress Sienna Miller, who appears on the titular (2007) issue whose production the movie covers. This, everyone agreed was strange, considering the way Ms. Wintour and her editors brutally critique Ms. Miller's hair, teeth fillings and neck in the film. (During the cover photo shoot a wig is suggested as a remedy for Ms. Miller's stringy hair, but is quickly dismissed in favor of a tight bun on top of her head.) But all seemed to be forgotten. Ms. Wintour wore a colorful orange frock; Ms. Miller, a strapless, light blue mini.

Designer Zac Posen shared with reporters a time when Ms. Wintour suggested he take a sleeve off a dress. He resisted, but did it anyway and soon the garment was photographed on actress Debra Messing.

"As a young designer at first and even later there is a great deal of dialogue," said Mr. Posen. "She has been incredibly integral to my career. It’s important to have a great deal of bravery with her. I think with a good critic or a good editor it’s not about vetoing, it’s about editing."

But vetoing, of course, sometimes happens. "No more war horses," Mr. Posen recalled her once saying to him.

The stars of the film seemed to walk the carpet in predetermined pairs. After Ms. Wintour and Ms. Miller came two fiery redheads, creative director Grace Coddington and Mr. Cutler.

"People who work with her said, 'Wow, you really got her, you really captured her,'" Mr. Cutler told a reporter. He especially enjoyed the part in his film when the editor instructs one of his cameramen to hit the gym. "He’s been at the gym every day since the film premiered Sunday," Mr. Cutler said.

How did Ms. Coddington, who spent much of the film fighting her editor and sometimes winning, think she came off in the film?

"I hate to say it, but true to life!" she said. "A very annoying person. But it’s not really bickering. It’s a process you have to go through for the job we do and it just makes everything stronger. Whatever gets through is then very valid and very strong. I think they focused on me in the movie because I’m a bit more outspoken and because I don’t care about the cameras, I’ll say whatever I want to say and I won’t hold back."

The carpet was getting crowded now. Editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley arrived in giant shades and peep-toe purple slippers. Designers Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta walked arm in arm. And Tom Florio, Vogue's publisher, scurried around the red carpet saying hellos and glancing at the reporters, seemingly hoping someone would ask him a question. No one seemed interested. When Bee Shaffer, Ms. Wintour's daughter, walked in a royal blue, belted dress and stood to the side, Mr. Florio put his arm around her.

"It was so embarrassing!" Ms. Shaffer said of her appearance in the film, in which she tells the camera that she has no plans of going into fashion despite the fact that her mother would probably like her to. "It’s funny because that was two years ago and I wanted to go to law school then and that’s basically all I’m talking about and now I don’t want to go to law school at all so …" So she's decided to join Vogue, then? "No. Still don’t want to work in fashion, that was never a possibility. Now I’d like to work in theater," she said.

Designer and former Vogue editor Vera Wang told the Transom that the film does not threaten the inherent mystique of the magazine and its editor.

"No one can understand the level of excellence that is demanded of someone who works there," said Ms. Wang. "Having been there for 17 years, I can’t imagine it’s changed that much."

By the time Ms. Wintour smiled and laughed her way down the red carpet to where the Transom was patiently waiting for her, she got distracted by an orange-clad Renée Zellweger and designer Marc Jacobs with boyfriend, Lorenzo Martone. Kisses were exchanged all around.

Mr. Jacobs, dressed in all black: dress shirt, skirt, and sparkly black Louis Vuitton shoes, recalled the first time he ran one of his designs up to the Vogue offices.

"I went to see Andre Leon Talley with my clothes and Isabella Blow was his assistant and I took them up there myself and showed him from a garment bag," he said. "It was exciting." A leggy model nearly twice Mr. Jacobs' height caught his attention. "Hiiiii!"

By 7:25 the MoMA lobby was nearly empty. Everyone knows how Ms. Wintour feels about tardiness, except for Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, who was just arriving. A reporter asked the mogul about Ms. Wintour's status as Queen of Fashion.

"I think Anna is also King!" he replied. Another reporter asked whether Mr. Combs thought he and the editor were somehow similar because they are both Scorpios. "Yes, definitely. We’re both crazy in a positive way. She was the first to take me to the shows in Paris, she’s the one who’s always treated me like a designer and reviewed my collections and told me what was right and what was wrong."

Mr. Combs looked around and realized that he was late, at which point the mogul sprinted across the lobby and disappeared. His fashionable entourage (two men, one women) ran after him.

More on Anna Wintour:

Vogue, Traveler Get Thorough Exams, Courtesy of McKinsey

The Gilded Age of Condé Nast Is Over

Here Come the Braids!

Meredith Bryan — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:43:55 -0400

"I've been sporting braids for years now,” said Allison Pottasch, 20, who—stopped in Union Square on Monday, May 25—was wearing a loose-fitting purple shirt, jean shorts and a silver nose ring, her thick brown hair parted down the center and arranged neatly into two of spring 2009’s ubiquitous Heidi-esque braids (the Swiss orphan, not the Hills dingbat). “I like it because I can braid it when my hair’s wet, and then when I undo the braids, it’s wavy and nice,” she said. “I wear them not every day, but maybe every other day.”

Ms. Pottasch, an art student who lives in Fort Greene, did not claim Heidi as a conscious inspiration. Nor did she cite Nicole Richie, Sienna Miller, Anne Hathaway, Mary-Kate Olsen, Scarlett Johansson or the countless other celebrities whose braids have been steadily proliferating all year. “I would say they’re Pippi Longstocking–style, but just not, like, up in the air,” said Ms. Pottasch, who fastened them atop her head when she was Frida Kahlo for Halloween. “I used to live in Spain and I’d wear them, and people would call me Pocahontas! They never even bothered to learn my actual name!”

Modern famous women are appropriating and experimenting with braids en masse this season, wearing the once-casual style to do errands in Hollywood, on the red carpet at the recent Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum and to parties downtown. “I’ve been doing a lot of braids lately,” said Louise O’Connor, a celebrity stylist who has worked with Beyoncé and Jessica Simpson and owns OC61, a salon on 61st Street. For the Met, she styled model Coco Rocha in four braids that criss-crossed at the back. “She had sent me a picture, she said it was Grecian, but the picture she actually sent me was, it seemed, more Renaissance, or like the Elizabethan times, a very romantic cross between curls and braids.”

The currently flame-haired Ms. Rocha’s look took an hour and a half to achieve—“It was a very intricate hairstyle,” Ms. O’Connor said—and she wore it with sparkly gold Isaac Mizrahi, vamping on the red carpet with the designer himself, surrounded by other imaginatively braided heads belonging to Tyra Banks, Jessica Alba and this leggy model or that.

Ms. O’Connor argued that this is not a Swiss Miss movement. “When you mention braids to people, they’re like, ‘I don’t want to look like Heidi,’” she said firmly. “They want something a little more glamorous, goddess-type.” The assistants at her salon, she added, have been wearing small side braids at the front of their hair, like Jennifer Aniston did for this year’s Oscars
and Lauren Conrad has been doing on The Hills. “Angelina Jolie wore braids in some movie, also!” (The forthcoming Salt, which was recently filming in New York.) “And anybody that goes away to the islands, they come back with braids. Like that movie—is it 10? With Bo Derek?”

Dickey, a celebrity stylist who has worked with everyone from Michelle Obama to the singer Kelis and just styled a photo shoot involving braids for Self, cautioned wearers against the Bo look. “Not the most flattering,” he scoffed. “You don’t want your hairstyle to say, ‘Oh, she just came back from Club Med.’” (Still: Heidi Klum recently wore a full head of cornrows to renew her vows with Seal at a reportedly “white trash”–themed celebration. )

Done well, Dickey said, braids “have always been a fashion-forward way to wear your hair, particularly in New York”—perhaps because of the very incongruity of the rustic style on our concrete streets.

Teddi Cranford, a stylist at Bumble & Bumble downtown, agreed. She said she was seeing a lot of braids in New York several months ago, but that L.A. is just now catching on. “Hair kind of follows fashion,” she said, citing flowing, bohemian looks being sent down the runway by designers (many of whom have also featured braids, among them influential and decidedly non-bohemian Alexander Wang).

“There are a million different ways,” Ms. Cranford enthused of braids’ permutations. “When they get a cut, I’ll style them with a really natural blow-dry and then just do a cute little braid in the front, and it kind of spices things up a little bit. But I’ve seen women come in and they’ll get a big braid off to the side and then pin it back into a low chignon, a low bun, and then they’re going to put on their fancy dress and off they go!”

And for those of us who can no longer afford regular blowouts: “It lends itself to kind of being able to get out the door in a hurry and look formal and fabulous,” said Dickey.

Of course DIY Williamsburg lasses, glimpsed over the weekend throwing softballs in McCarren Park and whizzing by on bicycles with baskets, are totally bonkers for braids.

“My sisters take, like, 45 minutes to do their hair,” said Zita Thomas, 30, a comely brunet graphic designer cruising Berry Street on Memorial Day with two braids protruding from under a low-slung pageboy cap. “I could never do that. On a good day mine takes five minutes, and if my hair’s being an asshole, it takes close to seven.”

She called her look “a traditional plait” (pronounced correctly). “From when I was 14 to when I was 27, my hair was shorter than most boys’—in Williamsburg, at least,” she said. Three years ago, she started growing it out, and she planned eventually to donate it to Locks of Love, which provides hair to young chemo patients. Braids facilitated this process. “I don’t curl it, I don’t blow-dry, I can put it up in a bun, I can put it up Björk-style or I can plait it,” she said. “I don’t like my hair touching my ears.”

Ms. Thomas paused at length when asked to name what famous person might have inspired her style. She couldn’t actually think of one. (Didn’t Elliot on Scrubs have braids a few years ago, she wondered?) “To be honest, I am so far removed from the media,” she said with a sigh.

mbryan@observer.com

Will You Drop for Topshop?

Meredith Bryan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:01:00 -0400

Late last week, the comely blond British socialite and model Poppy Delevigne, 22, called from her Nolita apartment—several blocks from the new four-story, 40,000-square-foot Topshop behemoth lurking behind covered windows at Broadway and Broome—and described some of her favorite items from the British retail chain, like an “amazing” emerald-green, one-shouldered dress designed by the model Kate Moss. >

“They did it in red and I missed it in my size and I literally cried for days, and I wear that pretty much twice a month, especially when the sun comes out,” Ms. Delevigne said. “And then I have a leather jacket that I live in every day that I bought about two years ago. It looks so old and worn, no one believes that it’s Topshop!”

Ms. Delevigne said she’d probably wear the jacket to private events for the long-awaited opening of the New York store: intimate affairs for celebrities and “friends” of the brand, which include a dinner at Balthazar and a small party at Simon Hammerstein’s downtown club the Box on Thursday, April 2, the day that—barring unforeseen disaster—Topshop will finally fling open its doors stateside.

“We’ve been waiting with bated breath,” said TeenVogue fashion news director Jane Keltner, who conceived an entire feature on British style around the store’s original October opening date. “It’s just what the recession-weary New York City fashion girl wants and needs right now—great clothes at a good price.”

But isn’t the New York City fashion girl utterly glutted with cheap chic imports, from Zara to H&M? Is it possible that, like an elusive love partner, the special appeal of Topshop has resided in its inaccessibility?

The store’s mobbed Oxford Circus flagship hawks acres of neon gummy bracelets, Batman T-shirts and shlocky accessories alongside J Brand for Topshop jeans and Ms. Moss’ exclusive three-year-old line. In New York, the brand has thus far enjoyed a more rarefied clientele: the kind of stylish New Yorker who travels often to London, or has friends who do.

Not that even the jet-setters among us won’t be happy to escape prohibitive exchange rates.

“I am living for the New York opening of Topshop!” emailed American maternity designer Liz Lange the other day from Anguilla, where she was vacationing with her blue paisley cotton racer-back Topshop beach cover-up (about $40 at the Oxford Circus store). “Everyone I know who likes to shop and likes fashion is counting the minutes.”

There have been a lot of minutes. The chain’s quotable head honcho, Sir Philip Green, told Women’s Wear Daily that the process has been “a logistical nightmare,” fingering the construction snafus and permit delays on the landmarked building for the thrice-delayed opening, and denying that the economy was at all a factor .

New York fans have been making do in the meantime with Topshop “capsule” collections at Barneys (2007) and Opening Ceremony (2004 until just recently), where the store’s inexpensive knock-off wares basked in the reflected glow of designer offerings by Proenza Schouler and Alexander Wang. In September, a U.S. Web site finally allowed New Yorkers to begin shopping online, and this week, guerilla street teams will blanket downtown with Topshop gift cards. Then, at 11 a.m. on April 2, Sir Philip himself will appear at the flagship, accompanied, Topshop execs hope but will not confirm, by Ms. Moss herself. “We’re making homemade British biscuits,” said Andrew Leahy, the genial London-based Topshop publicity director.

PALTROW’S PICK

To some, it seems like an awfully grand rollout.

“They’ve been acting like it’s the second coming!” exclaimed American Elle writer Maggie Bullock, a loyal Topshop customer since she studied fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins almost a decade ago. “I feel like it’s been announced that it’s coming 17 times. Topshop is fantastic, but it’s not going to solve every wardrobe problem in the world. I moved back to the States from England seven years ago, and there was nothing, there was no place that could substitute for Topshop, but now I feel like other places have come along and you do get some of that hit of fast fashion. H&M has gotten much better and is actually more of a competitor than it used to be.”

Julie Baumgardner, a 25-year-old fashion publicist who first shopped at Topshop in London at age 17, agreed. “It pitched itself as the British Barneys taste with Urban Outfitters wallet, but in reality, it’s more like Urban Outfitters taste with Barneys Co-op prices,” she said. “I’ve seen shoes costing up to $250!” (That said, “I really love my gray low-rise skinny jeans.”) Ms. Baumgardner ventured that the store has let their prices climb and their quality slack after accruing an almost cultlike celebrity fan base that includes Lindsay Lohan, Keira Knightley, Kate Bosworth, Mariah Carey and Gwyneth Paltrow (who recently featured a Topshop dress in her disturbingly addictive weekly lifestyle newsletter, Goop).

“I obviously am excited that it’s coming to the U.S. since it’s another relatively inexpensive outlet for cute, trendy clothes,” said Ms. Baumgardner. “But it’s frustrating to observe that the corruption of its identity is directly proportional to the hype it receives.”

But Topshop’s defenders swear that the store deserves the hype.

“It is very cool, it’s very edgy, it’s taking like an Ossie Clark–type inspiration, which is a cool dress as opposed to a preppy dress,” asserted Plum Sykes, the British socialite, novelist and Vogue correspondent, whose husband proclaimed an outfit involving a tailored white Topshop blazer his favorite outfit she’d ever worn.

“It’s very English in its treatment of dresses; it’s always dresses with the ripped fishnet tights and biker boots. Probably more what you would think of as the Lower East Side cool, but even beyond that, with the English eccentricity wrapped in. It isn’t like that sort of American Main Street brand, like a J. Crew or a Banana Republic, that is very much trying not to be too cool, do you know what I mean?”

“It is along the lines of Club Monaco, classic basics, but slightly more fun than that,” suggested Rebecca Guinness, another New York–based British gal about town.

“I think the American equivalent is when Target has the designers do things, like the McQueen collection,” said Poppy de Villeneuve, a New York–based British photographer (not to be confused with Ms. Delevigne) who often pairs Topshop T-shirts with skirts by her good friend Zac Posen. “It’s like H&M but it’s more … It’s very British. It’s kind of what the girls on the street wear in a very cool way. The way the British put things together, they’re kind of a bit more haphazard about it.”

Mr. Leahy revealed that the new store will feature a Kate Moss boutique for the model’s line, which is produced four times yearly and will soon include lingerie. There will also be new collections by insidery British designers like Jonathan Saunders and Preen and areas for costume jewelry, shoes, maternity, petites, talls, men, hats and bags—a veritable department store of cheap, aggressively cool stuff! “We know that in New York there are a lot of brands offering great basics,” he said. “So ours will be a little more fashion-heavy, more fashion specialties per square meter in a way. We don’t buy huge bulk of any one style, we don’t buy millions or even hundreds of thousands; we might buy 5,000 or we might buy 50.”

‘TROUSERS’ AND ‘JUMPERS’

Indeed, the store cycles in fresh inventory constantly, and is known for reincarnating favorite styles with small stylistic adjustments or fabric switch-ups rather than just ordering more of the same.

The Oxford Circus flagship has long been a testing area of sorts for more fashion-forward innovations, and it is hoped that the New York store, the brand’s first nonfranchised, fully owned international concern, will serve as a similar hub of creativity and experimentation, continuing to focus on cultivating British design talent (“Few people do,” said Mr. Leahy), but open to collaborating with Americans, too. (Though the U.S. Web site includes the charming terminology “trousers” and “jumpers.”)

Retail analysts are enthusiastic.

“It’s going to be incredible!” thundered Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting outfit headquartered in New York. “If you go back and look at the big stores in New York that are underwater, you have Macy’s down, and you have Bloomingdale’s, which is a division of Macy’s; you have Saks losing $100 million last quarter. …”

Topshop, he said, was at the forefront of the winning formula familiar to us from H&M and Zara. “We’re getting a new wave of imported stores from Europe, and honestly, they appear to be doing very well,” he said. “And a lot of our fashion retailers, like Abercrombie, which is in the shithouse; Gap, the largest apparel chain in the U.S., down six straight years—ours are all doing terrible. But theirs seem to be growing very rapidly, and suddenly they’re able to come here. I don’t think we’re able to go there!”

Until now, Topshop has been in the enviable position of being able to offer good prices (not as low as H&M’s, but, at $80 for the popular Baxter skinny jean and $125 for a neon leopard print “playsuit,” still more affordable than boutique shopping) with a elusive dose of jet-set cache.

But despite its astonishing inventory and cute, compelling British-ness, some Topshop devotees admit that “you’ve got to be really careful of if you’re trying to be a global brand like that, about actually cannibalizing your coolness by being successful,” as Ms. Sykes put it.

“Just in terms of being selfish about things I wear, when people are like, ‘Oh, that’s so cute, where can I get?’, I’m like, ‘You can’t!’” said Ms. Guinness, bemoaning the impending ubiquity of her favorite Topshop items.

Ms. Delevigne noted that she’d once shown up to a summer cocktail party in London wearing the exact same Kate Moss for Topshop tennis dress as two other attendees, a scene that she predicted would start taking place in New York, too.

Still, she pointed out: “It would be a real shame if you turned up at a party and someone else was in the same Balenciaga dress as you, but if you turn up and you’re in the same Topshop dress, it’s absolutely fine, because you know you didn’t pay that much for it and it kind of makes it more fun anyway.”

In London, swarms of international tourists and leggings-mad teenagers have done nothing to calm the rising tide of Topshop mania.

“To be honest, the one in London is so mobbed by 14-year-olds I cannot even tell you,” Ms. Sykes complained. “It’s like going to a rock concert. … I’m 38 years old, so I’ve got to be feeling really, really up for it if I’m going to shop there as opposed to shopping at, like, Alexander McQueen.”

And so New York women are bracing themselves for battle.

“All my American friends, they’re literally going mad about it,” Ms. Delevigne said. “There’s a lot of complaining. … I think the more it’s been delayed, the more anticipation there is.”

—Additional reporting
by Doree Shafrir

mbryan@observer.com

Morning Memo: Mary-Kate Olsen Not Pregnant; Sienna Miller and Balthazar Getty Still On; Donald Trump “Fuming” at Brother

Caroline Bankoff — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:30:28 -0400

Rumors of a Mary-Kate Olsen pregnancy, which started when her weight "shot up to 102 pounds" (!), are not true, according to the actress's rep. [Us Weekly]

According to a bunch of well-dressed people, the Lower East Side's Chloe 81 is becoming the "Biggie to [the] Beatrice's Tupac." [Grub Street]

Sienna Miller and Balthazar Getty are not back together because it turns out they never broke up in first place. [P6]

Beyonce and Adrien Brody seem to have enjoyed making out with each other on the set of Cadillac Records. [R&M]

Donald Trump is "fuming" at his brother Robert, who is currently in the middle of a divorce battle with wife Blaine, for failing to arrange a prenuptial agreement and for using ex-wife Ivana's old divorce lawyer, Robert Cohen. [P6]

In Tough Times, Try Tortoise: The Not-So-New Neutral

Meredith Bryan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:04:23 -0400

Call it the Year of the Tortoise: the year that New York women—speedy, combative, bargain-driven shoppers—finally slowed their credit card use to a crawl; and tortoiseshell, named for a lumbering, dwindling beast, bled downward from our sunglasses to color the rest of our wardrobes.

Late last week, the city’s beleaguered retail stores were awash in this mottled-honey hue. Designer Shoe Warehouse was selling tortoise ankle boots by Sergio Zelcer for $179.95. The popular boutique Poppy on Mott Street offered Nicole Romano tortoiseshell earrings for $182. Tory Burch had sold out of tortoiseshell clutches at $425. Fashion Web site Style.com was pushing a Sonya Rykiel leather belt with tortoiseshell bow ($217) as a holiday gift. And let’s not forget the $3,000 tortoise sequin jacket J. Crew presciently introduced this spring.

Tortoiseshell eyeglass frames are classic, of course. Angelina Jolie and Sienna Miller were both spotted in the style recently (Ferragamo and Dolce & Gabbana, respectively); and Kanye West broke out tortoiseshell glasses during Fashion Week in September, rapping with Jay-Z at the Marc Jacobs after-party in a tweed suit. “Tortoise has always been a best-selling color for us,” said Robert Marc, who owns eight eponymous eyewear boutiques in Manhattan and currently sells tortoiseshell frames in 63 styles. “This year, we’ve seen even bigger sales in this color because of the popularization of preppy, geek chic, retro frames.”

But the sudden au courant of tortoiseshell goes beyond geek chic.

We are wearing it because it goes with everything. We are wearing it because it’s subtle, and glaring luxury labels are gauche in a recession. We are wearing tortoise because for most of us, hare and its ilk are too expensive and/or humanely unjustifiable. And maybe we wear it because we, like the tortoise of fable, seem not to be in a winning position right now (though remember that the tortoise is all about perseverance—it lives upward of 250 years, after all).

Sellers of the shade point out that it flatters anyone’s skin tone. “It’s an easy color to incorporate into any outfit,” Mr. Marc said. And: “It always refers to something luxurious,” said Sebastian Marzaro, U.S. president of Italian shoemaker Casadei, which sells tortoiseshell pumps and sandals in several Manhattan shoe boutiques. “Even if it’s not the real thing.”

It hasn’t been the real thing since 1973, when the practice of using actual tortoiseshell was banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Mr. Marzaro, whose company has manufactured tortoise styles for about 50 years, said he noticed a steep increase in the prevalence of tortoise products in general after the CITES signing, as synthetics became more widely produced, and another boom in the mid-’80s, roughly coinciding with the release of Out of Africa. “It goes in cycles,” he said. “It goes parallel to all different prints—exotic prints like leopard, cheetah, zebra.”

Indeed, there is currently an uncanny consensus on Fifth Avenue that predatory mammals and reptiles make excellent shoes and handbags. The gentle, seafaring tortoise has the vague exoticism of furs and alligator skins but is much, much cheaper. (Many retailers specify “faux” tortoise, but most don’t bother.)

At Gucci near 57th Street one recent afternoon, the brand-new “Cruise” collection featured an understated $970 brown shirt with a decorative tortoise ring affixed to the chest, and a $645 black pump with tortoise stiletto; in two weeks, the store will begin carrying the Hysteria Medium Hobo for $1,360 (a patent leather bag with tortoise print). A scruffy sales clerk in a black suit said the collection was “beach-inspired.”

Down the street at Versace, saleswoman Carla Verschuren said a tortoise print had been revived for the fall 2008 collection from the archive of the late Gianni Versace, where it had been in hibernation since 1992. The black and yellow “Turtle” print was adorning two dresses: one jersey ($2,090) and one sateen ($2,495), both with a plunging V-neck.

Nearby at Just Cavalli, a $645 canvas blazer had a green-tinged, unmistakably tortoise-ish vibe, but a salesgirl begged to differ. “We call it cheetah,” she said. “It’s our take on cheetah.”

At Michael Kors on Prince Street, meanwhile, where tortoiseshell sunglasses are standard-issue fare (in particular a high-contrast model called the Madison, said a salesgirl named Carly), we also found a tortoise acrylic bracelet watch for $195 (without crystals) or $225 (with crystals). And the brand Lee Angel has debuted tortoise bracelets with crystals for fall ($260) in New York boutiques like Intermix and Montmartre.

“It reminds me very much of France in the ’50s, where people used to use it for hair accessories all the time, before we stopped killing tortoises, thank God,” said Roxanne Assoulin, the bangles’ designer. “People want value now. Tortoise is going to be an important trend because it’s classic, it’s something you see in Hermès, it’s very upscale-looking. And it goes with everything.”

mbryan@observer.com

Sienna Miller Successfully Uses Human-Rights Law to Sue Paparazzi

Caroline Bankoff — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:18:38 -0400

Via Reuters, we've learned that Sienna Miller has gotten serious with her paparazzi hate, using a British human rights law to successfully sue Darryn Lyons and his Big Pictures photo agency for $80,000. In addition to the money, Mr. Lyons will pay Ms. Miller's court costs and cease to photograph her at home or "make any effort to pursue her for pictures."

Though the law was originally written to curtail the activities of those other celebrity pests--stalkers and animal rights protesters--Ms. Miller managed to use it by claiming the photographers had invaded her privacy and made her life "intolerable."

This is the second time Ms. Miller, who caught a lot of flak for her recent relationship with the sort-of-married Balthazar Getty, has won a battle with the tabloid press. Last week, News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The News of the World and The Sun, paid her £35,000 in atonement for printing photos which they admitted "breached her privacy."

No need to worry about a dearth of pictures, though. Ms. Miller's lawyer told the court that Ms. Miller does not object "in principle" to being photographed "outside bars, restaurants and nightclubs, on public footpaths or highways and at red carpet events."