There was once a time when the resort/cruise collections were made for the rarefied woman who could afford to escape the winter by heading to the tropics (she needed swimwear and a caftan, did she not?). Not anymore. While still a David to the Goliath fall and spring collections, resort is catching the attention of more and more people.

Like air travel and cell phones, is resort bound for the masses?

Collections are just now beginning to hit stores and, for a season that's ostensibly all about lounging around on the beach or the deck of a boat, there's a lot of fashion news to digest: optical motifs, exotic locales like Marrakesh, sheer, leathers for day, aquatic, scuba, old-world charm, draping and, of course, nautical.

The media is doing their part. Fashion magazines are pointing out 'It items' like the floral ribbon-laced sandal from Prada, a bright green croc tote from Roberto Cavalli and pretty much everything in Chanel's stunning parade of black and white caftans and graphics (above).

Fashion insiders have long contended resort/cruise is either an evolution of fall or a preview of spring. That's not necessarily the case today, says style and beauty expert Mary Alice Stephenson. Stephenson explained to me this week that fashion has become like fast food and designers are compelled to feed the hungry. In other words, a resort collection must stand on its own.

"People want whatever's new," she says. "And designers like to keep customers surprised with their unique point of view. Shoppers are putting more thought into their splurges. So designers have to seduce the buyer with making the pieces usable in every aspect of their lives."

Others tell me resort/cruise is the one time designers get to cut loose and get creative. Saleability is less of an issue for a season that lasts, at most, two months. Of course, some designers go overboard. Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa caught hell from my former employer Women's Wear Daily for his lineup of transparent dresses: "A long-standing argument against such [formal runway] presentations for resort is that inevitably some designers will crossover to the too-editorial side." Too-editorial means that those dress will have nothing whatsoever with how you and I dress in reality.

Still, as buyers we are demanding uniqueness, a slice of our favorite label. We want pieces to seamlessly integrate into our wardrobes. We want reality. And we want season-less items to wear far into next year.

We want it all, don't we?

Images speak louder than words for this collection of watches that Chanel hopes to not only capture the light, but also look as though it was cut from it. Going back to what made the French luxury brand famous, their wrist watch arm releases a new line of four watches in the "Light" collection of watches.

The pictured watch is the "Tweed," while the other watches are the Ribbon, First Watch, and First Jewelry Show watches. Each of the watches is in 18k white gold covered from top to bottom in diamonds. Each watch has from about 3-10 carats of jewel weight and between about 300 and 600 stones. The watches are feminine and luxurious, while also delicate in design. Serious haute joaillarie watches from the brand that helped make the concept famous.

Ariel Adams publishes the luxury watch review site aBlogtoRead.com

OPTYX by gruen, the newest expansion of grueneyes offering a high-end, carefully curated collection of designer eyewear, scored a hit with selections for its Hamptons locations this summer. Each season, OPTYX by gruen sends a team to travel from New York to Paris, Milan and Tokyo to seek out the latest fashion trends in sunglasses. For the Hamptons this summer, where OPTYX by gruen is one of the sponsors of the Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge, they selected several key styles for the area's jetset including a timeless, oversized frame from Chanel's Collection Perle calling to mind Jackie O; Oliver Peoples' Harlot Storm frames, bringing together an iconic silhouette with a bold, modern print; and the Cartier Santos Sport Platinum for men, a classic aviator shape with leather and wood detailing. Steven Spielberg scoped out the Hamptons offerings recently, joining the ranks of the boutique's other celeb clientele incouding Martin Scorsese, Kate Moss, Lauren Hutton, Dustin Hoffman, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, and Elton John at their locations in New York City and Greenwich, CT.

Earlier this year we wrote about the ultra-fashionable Chanel concept car. Now there's another Chanel vehicle on the road for real. A custom motorbike (above) was commissioned by the French fashion house for a photo shoot staged at Chanel's Rue Royale boutique in Paris by the label's kingpin Karl Lagerfeld and starring super-sexy model Lara Stone - check out her cover story in the August issue of W magazine. Based on the bike used by legendary actor Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the motorcycle was custom made in Toulouse, France. Sadly, there are no plans to put the bike into production.

[via LuxuryLaunches]

Jinyoung Jo, a talented car designer at Hong-ik University in South Korea, has created the Chanel Fiole concept car, branded with the name of the famed French luxury goods firm. The design is "centered on simplicity of lines" and a classic black and white color scheme in the best tradition of Coco Chanel and her tailored suits. The ultra-aerodynamic coupe features Chanel's famed interlocking C's on the front grille and has three seats. It's not an altogether far-fetched idea given that Chanel kingpin Karl Lagerfeld is something of a car nut (he has three Hummers) and recently designed a Chanel version of the Segway.

At his Paris fashion show on Sunday, the ever-entertaining Karl Lagerfeld debuted a new line of luxurious mink-covered scooter helmets with built-in iPod capability. The over-the-top accessories were created in collaboration with French luxury helmet maker Les Ateliers Ruby and Apple. They're road legal and feature full carbon fiber shells and ultra-soft burgundy nappa lambskin linings. The iPod hookup lets you pipe music directly to the earpieces.

Lagerfeld, who also heads up Chanel and Fendi, showed matching mink vests and other garments in the futuristic fashion show for his eponymous label. Apparently the haute helmets are Lagerfeld's comment on the recessed economy. "Now everyone is on scooters, even chic women, so we had to do the helmet," he explained. No word yet on when the helmets might be made available for sale or what their price would be, but safe to say they'll be extremely expensive.

Provocative British pop star Lily Allen is so flat broke she's had to sell her BMW - and the banks won't lend her any more money. Despite having sold millions of records, the star is in such dire financial straits she decided to get rid of her 3-series convertible. "I've been hit big time by the credit crunch," she tells the London Daily Mirror. "Actually, I just had to sell my car because I'm so broke. I bought the car last year and that was probably my biggest extravagance. Clothes too, I'm always buying clothes."

Chanel and YSL are her favorite labels, and Allen is often spotted in the front row of fashion shows, palling around with the likes of Kate Moss, Kanye West and Karl Lagerfeld. "I'm completely skint," Allen says. "I can't even spend on credit cards. I mean, I won't be, as I'm waiting until I get the royalties from the album and all the radio plays but that takes about a year. The banks will usually front your money in that kind of situation but they are not lending at the moment so it's a tricky time."

Karl Lagerfeld, creative director for Chanel, may choose to ride about town in a trio of larger-than-life HUMMER H1s, the largest of all the mil-spec SUVs, but the design house is apparently thinking a bit smaller on behalf of its customers with a new take on the controversial Segway Personal Transporter. The pairing may actually make some sense considering that Dean Kamen's Segway has taken on iconic status since its inception back in 2001, though perhaps not quite to the point of the classic Chanel 2.55 handbag that adorns the handlebars of this self-balancing machine. Other tidbits unique to this model are quilted handgrips and mudflaps in matching black leather and Chanel badging on the wheels, steering head and handlebars. Top speed is listed at 12 miles per hour and range stands pat at the same 12 mph as the rest of the Segway line.

[Source: Yatzer]

Tuesday brought another round of dazzling shows in Paris. Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel show was black and white and true to the heart of Chanel. Against a backdrop of white paper flowers including Chanel's signature camellias, models paraded by in silhouettes that were blocky but ornate with details like sequins and passementerie and topped by giant flowered confections serving as hats. The entire collection was a showcase of the intricate detail that defines haute couture. One could look at the pieces and imagine the hours of painstakingly detailed work.

Of course no Chanel experience is complete without a Karl quote. Reuters delivers another one of Lagerfeld's pronouncements on the recession. Lagerfeld's latest words reiterate the statements that he made earlier on the healing qualities of the recession. He likens the recession to "having an upset stomach from eating too many good things." His bright white and cream wardrobe of baroque simplicity is meant to be an antidote to the age of excess.

Chanel may have just pulled the plug (as we reported last month) on its Zaha Hadid-designed Mobile Art Pavilion, but Prada is going ahead with plans for an even more ambitious project. Despite the economy, the luxury Italian fashion house just began construction on the Prada Transformer, a tetrahedron-shaped "transformative building" designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas (rendering above), on the grounds of Gyeonghui Palace in Seoul, Korea. Koolhaas, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2000 and also designed the Prada flagship store in Manhattan, describes the building as a "dynamic and living organism'' because it transforms itself into different structures to suit various events. The location of the project, the single largest communications platform for the Prada group worldwide in 2009, speaks to the importance of the Asian market in a depressed luxury goods environment.

Scheduled to open at the end of March, the Prada Transformer will stage a range of art, cinema, culture and fashion events though August. the 65-ft. high tetrahedron is composed of four different shapes, a hexagon, cross, rectangle and circle. "Once a month, cranes will lift and rotate the structure into a different facade and floor plate configuration," the Korea Times reports. "When rotated, each side will be the venue of a different cultural program." On the outside, the entire structure will be wrapped with an elastic translucent membrane. Prada partnered with LG Electronics (makers of the Prada cell phone) and the Hyundai Motor Company on the ambitious scheme, which if successful will probably travel to other cities as well.

Those of you who have been following the saga of Karl Lagerfeld's newest purchase, an 1800s Greek Revival house in Vermont, will recall that he staged a photo shoot there not long after taking possession. The results, and an inside peek at Lagerfeld's Lake Champlain digs, can be seen in the new Chanel Spring / Summer 2009 ad campaign starring leggy blonde German model Toni Garrn (above). The interior looks quite bare as Lagerfeld had not yet moved into the house at the time of the shoot in November. While far from the opulence one usually associates with the Kaiser, the house obviously has an appealingly pared down, classical aesthetic. Perhaps this is emblematic of the designer's somewhat scaled back lifestyle these days.

Chanel may have slashed 200 jobs and pulled the plug on its Mobile Art project, but the label's creative director Karl Lagerfeld says the recession is actually a good thing. "I see it like a cleaning up - it was too rotten anyway - so it had to be cleaned up," Lagerfeld tells the BBC. "I see it like a healthy thing - horrible but healthy, like some miracle treatment of the world."

As for the uselessness of designing luxury goods that many can no longer afford to buy, Lagerfeld insists the premise is faulty. "People have different kinds of dreams," he declares. "After all, people need a handbag, there are cheaper handbags. But if you can buy a beautiful one and if that's your dream to buy, why not?"

We're not sure Chanel's business can solely be sustained on dreams, but that doesn't faze the Kaiser. "I can be interested in a $20 million diamond I will never buy, without desiring the diamond," he notes. "If you want only things you can afford, it's boring too. It's great to see things you may not buy - because you don't have the money - but it is very ugly to think they shouldn't exist because you can not buy them."

As we reported last month, Lagerfeld himself has cut back somewhat these days, but still employs a full domestic staff and three chauffeur-driven Hummers.

A couple of days ago, my colleague Jared Paul Stern reported that Chanel was pulling the plug on their fancy world-traveling global art installation designed by Zaha Hadid. It seems that's not the only penny-pinching the French luxury brand had in mind. According to the Guardian, Chanel is also cutting 200 jobs. The staff cuts are a direct result of declining sales, part of the overall slide in luxury spending that was not alleviated by the recent holiday shopping season. Among the jobs are 16 posts at the brand's boutique on rue Cambon in Paris. The jobs represent almost 10% of the company's production workforce.

This past summer we reported on the burgeoning modeling career of 16-year-old Georgia May Jagger, Mick Jagger's daughter by Texan stunner Jerry Hall (above). Now her mom's doing a bit of modeling once again; she's been picked by Karl Lagerfeld to star in the new Chanel ad campaign. The campaign is based on Cheri, a novel by French author Colette about a woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with a much younger man. Hall will star alongside male model Baptiste Giabiconi, who will be portrayed seeking the uber-cougar's affections on a bed strewn with a quilt - and one of Chanel's iconic quilted handbags, WWD reports. We wonder if the campaign is the one shot at Karl's new spread in Vermont?

Chanel has decided to pull the plug on its avant-garde and attention-getting but extremely costly Mobile Art Pavilion exhibition due to the economic crisis. In October my colleague Tracy Chait reported on the Pavilion's installation in New York's Central Park. Designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid in collaboration with Chanel kingpin Karl Lagerfeld, the high-tech Pavilion (above) is full of self-serving if stylish art inspired by Chanel's iconic quilted handbag. For the Central Park installation alone Chanel paid $400,000 for the space plus a charitable donation. Originating in Hong Kong, it traveled to Tokyo before landing in NYC and was scheduled to continue on to London, Moscow and Paris. Chanel reps cited a "refocusing of investments" in deciding to bring the tour to a premature end.