The explosion of prints over the past few months has infiltrated every area of the stylish woman’s wardrobe, from accessories to tops, shoes, and even—that last frontier—pants. Ask Suno’s Erin Beatty, whose African-inspired collections pile print on print, and the explanation’s obvious: It’s an antidote to all the dull stuff out there.

“I think that every time the economy goes sour, what people try to do is go back to basics,” Beatty told Style.com. “It’s because that’s safe and they know it’s going to sell and yada yada yada. But I don’t think that’s necessarily what people want, or how people truly want to express themselves, regardless of the economy. So many people turned back to basics that prints started to feel new and fresh again. That’s what we saw—working with these African fabrics, everything felt so new and original. And that’s exactly how women want to portray themselves.”

It’s certainly how designers from Dries Van Noten to Isabel Marant have been portraying the women on their runways. They’ve styled bold, brilliant pants with sheer tops, slick moto jackets, eye-popping lamé blazers, and, yes, even more prints. Cuts range from cropped, peg-legged jeans to billowing, carrot-shaped harem pants, but whatever the shape, the style isn’t for the shrinking violet. “Printed pants, especially, are so confident,” Beatty continued. “I think the reason printed pants are scary is that women are always very protective of the way our legs look—it’s the ongoing lifetime search, finding the perfect pant. But the printed pant that actually fits well and flatters your figure can even enhance your figure.”

Do you agree? Click here for a slideshow of some of our favorite options from the runways (and a few stylish girls trying the trend), and let us know if you’ll be rocking the look this fall.

—Matthew Schneier

Photo: Marcio Madeira / FirstView.com

To celebrate her new denim collection, Tory Burch turned to the pros—a handful of online fashion editors and bloggers, that is, who descended on her Meatpacking District store on Tuesday to check out the new goods. Each one styled an outfit on a model, and in a bout of friendly competition, Tory’s put the results on her Facebook page and is encouraging readers to vote for the ensemble they like best. Call us partial, but we like the look our senior market editor, Marina Larroude, put together. She’s paired a plaid ruffled blouse with a cropped-sleeve black leather jacket, overdyed skinny jeans, and embellished boots. The cuff, Larroude says, is from Burch’s first collaboration with her longtime friend, jeweler Kara Ross, and the blouse is said to be Tory’s own favorite top. Click here to go to the Tory Burch Facebook page to vote—the winner will be announced on Monday (and, in full disclosure, will get their entire outfit).

Photo: Courtesy of Tory Burch

Designers design. Photographers photograph. Models model. That much—in broad strokes, at least—is clear. But what about the artists, technicians, and industry insiders, often unpublicized and underappreciated, who help to get clothes and accessories made and shown? Call them Behind-the-Scenesters: people who shape our experience of fashion but never take a bow on the catwalk or strike a pose for the camera. Without them—from pattern-makers to production designers—the show wouldn’t go on. And in a new series, Style.com sits down with a few of these pros to find out, basically, what they do.

If God is in the details, as the saying goes, then art directors are the gods of fashion. The job is hard to summarize—LOVE magazine creative director Lee Swillingham (pictured), for example, has a hand in everything from conceptualizing multi-page fashion spreads to setting the type in the credits. For him, as for his hero Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary former art director of Harper’s Bazaar, success comes of making a series of micro decisions add up to one iconic image. Even before LOVE came along, Swillingham and partner-in-design Stuart Spalding had already entered the art director pantheon—they were the founding creative directors of POP, and their firm Suburbia has created campaigns for the likes of Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, and Alexander McQueen. Here, Swillingham talks to Style.com about the gestalt of logos and layouts.

So, Lee: In one sentence, what do you do?
Really, what I do is I make things look beautiful. That’s my mission, as I see it. The way that relates to reality is, I’m a graphic designer, a typographer, and an art director of photography.

Elaborate, please—what does it mean to be an art director of photography?
It depends on what you’re doing and who you’re working with. Here’s a good example: Prior to POP, I was the art director at The Face. And we did this issue with four different covers, each one with another nineties supermodel; I literally planned out, on the computer, the different shapes of each cover, because we needed them to look coordinated, and yet totally distinct. Or, another good example from The Face is the portrait of Kurt Cobain; it’s very famous. Nirvana had gotten a lot of press in the U.K. at that point, primarily music magazines like NME, and we were trying to figure out how to make a picture of Kurt feel new. We asked David Sims to shoot it—he was a massive Nirvana fan—and it was around the time that Kurt was wearing dresses. We were tossing around ideas, and the whole dress thing gave David the idea of dress up. And that’s how we wound up with Kurt Cobain on a white background, in a Tigger costume. There’s not one element in the photo I could point to and say, that’s mine, right there, but I was involved in every decision and the development of every idea that went into the image.

How did you get into art directing?
Well, I always knew I wanted to do it, from when I was a kid. Then, when I was still in school at [Central] Saint Martins, I began assisting at Arena magazine. Back then, they only did six issues a year, so I could work on a whole issue at a time and only miss a few classes now and then. There was one issue I was working on, when the art director and the editor had a huge fight, and the art director walked out, and I wound up designing that issue of Arena all by myself, essentially. When I graduated, I took a job at The Face. In a similar way, life just sorted itself out in such a way that, within a year, I was made the art director of the magazine. Which is insane, a year out of school.

The Face had such a strong identity. How did you make it your own?
Well, for one thing, I brought in a whole new crop of photographers. That’s something I’m really proud of, commissioning people like David Sims and Inez van Lamsweerde very early on in their careers. Also, we began doing a lot of photo retouching, which was pretty unusual at the time.

Do you feel like you have a certain style?
Oh, definitely. If you look at all my work together, you see the influence of Pop art, for example, a Warholian influence I bring in pretty much unconsciously. I love color. A lot of art directors are very monochrome; not me. Another thing is that I really love to design typefaces. For better or worse, I’ve been pretty influential, in that regard. Like, the 2005 Kate Moss covers of POP, where she’s an angel in one and a boxer in the other, I did handwriting. That was very me, now you see handwriting everywhere. And for The Face I introduced this very stencilized militaristic font—it’s on posters all over the place now, and on American TV, and it makes me cringe. The handwriting trend is getting to that level now.

You mentioned that at The Face you pushed retouching. Do you feel like that’s another trend that’s gone too far and/or gone on long enough?
What bugs me the most about the retouching going on lately is that, much of the time, it’s just hiding bad photography. I love what Mert & Marcus do, that hyper-stylized thing, but fundamentally those guys are great photographers. When they retouch, they’re elaborating an image, not trying to cover up bad technique. But of course, there are photo trends, just like there are font trends, and so you wind up with all these mediocre people trying to do “that Mert & Marcus thing” and really, no matter how much they retouch, they’re not going to get any closer to those guys, because they’re not as talented. And the more bad imitations of that style you see, the more you want to see something else entirely.

Are you feeling ready for images that are more raw?
In general, yes. More real, more raw, more off. It feels fresher. I’m speaking for myself here, by the way—I don’t push this at the magazine too much because we’ve got a LOVE look and feel to account for, and we have to consider the stories we’re working on, who we’re shooting, what the clothes are, and so on. But for me, personally, I love the kind of thing Juergen Teller does, shooting some insane, elaborate outfit in this completely raw style.

I feel we’ve gotten a little off track. I’m still not sure exactly what you do. I know you talk to photographers a lot, and I know you like to design typefaces. But what’s an average day like for you?
I don’t think we’re too off track, because thinking about things like, how do I feel about retouching, is in a way part of my job. But to answer your question, when I’m not at the magazine I’m usually having meetings with clients and meetings with creatives like stylists, and when the magazine is in production, I’m in the office doing layouts. I still get a kick out of laying out fashion stories. When the photos turn up from the shoot, that’s the most exciting thing, because then I get to start thinking about how to pull everything together. The moment has been diminished, a little, by e-mail—it used to be you got a lovely big box of prints delivered by FedEx. It was like a gift. Now it’s “ping” in the inbox. I try very hard not to look at images on my BlackBerry.

We’ve talked about your experience at The Face, but you’ve launched two magazines now, from scratch, and I wonder how that works? Where do you start?
LOVE, for me, started with the logo. It’s such a strong, powerful word, “LOVE,” and I wanted to do a strong, powerful expression of that name. Nothing cutesy. And this was my first time I was working with Condé Nast, which I’ve always considered the home of fashion, and I wanted to stand up to the great logos, like Vogue. I wanted the logo of LOVE to feel like, this is a title that’s been around for a hundred years. I researched old engravings, going back to Roman times. I went around Grand Central and took photos of the engraving on the stonework. Another big influence was the old movie studio logos from the golden era of Hollywood—Columbia, RKO. The references were very different from POP, which we launched ten years earlier. Then, I wanted the magazine to feel very new, very of-the-moment. Anyway, in both cases, I did the logos and everything else kind of followed from there.

You’ve been working with Katie Grand for a long time now. At this point, do you guys share a brain? Or is it more like, this is your thing, this is my thing?
The great thing about working with Katie is that she’s incredibly visually aware. She’ll talk about the clothes, but she’ll also say things like, remember when i-D used to use photocopying? Remember what that was like? She’s magazine literate, and we share a vocabulary. It’s always a pleasure to work with someone who can think like a graphic designer without actually being a graphic designer. Like, my favorite photographers to work with are the ones who are thinking about layout while they’re shooting. They already have a sense of where the copy should go.

Do you see yourself as having a bias toward one part of your job over another? Like, do you think of yourself as a type guy?
I love type—I’m someone who walks around seeing typefaces everywhere, I’m reading out names of fonts in my head all the time. And I really enjoy hand-creating a type, like the calligraphy-esque ink on the first cover of LOVE, which was based on Jean Cocteau’s handwriting, or the stamp we did on the nude issue. But as interested as I am in type, I’m just as interested in photography. My heroes are people like Brodovitch, who could do it all. It’s hand in glove. If you want to do a layout where there’s a photo of a girl reaching out and touching the letter Y, that has to be art directed. That’s the reason I’ve always loved magazines. The layout, the combination of images and text, the type. All the disciplines come together. And if you’re into graphic design as a kid, why wouldn’t you want to work at a magazine? What’s not to like? No one sits around daydreaming about designing crisp packets.

Below, a few examples of Swillingham’s work, from POP, The Face, and LOVE.

Photos: Jeff Bark (portrait); The Face; Pop; Love

It was stiff competition to draw the concert-going crowds last night—with the Dead Weather at Don Hill’s, Robyn and Kelis at Webster Hall, and Arcade Fire in Central Park—but Intermix still managed to get a crowd to its own bash at Skylight Studios. English popsters Locksley and Deluka played for a crowd stylish enough for a music video—which, it turns out, was exactly the idea. “I wanted this to be like U2’s ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ video,” Intermix founder Khajak Keledjian said.

Bono wasn’t on the premises, but Sophomore’s Chrissie Miller (pictured; she also curated the evening’s music), Rag & Bone’s David Neville and Marcus Wainwright, and Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra all were. And according to the latter, it was a rare night out. “We have the shades drawn, the windows closed. We don’t know what time of day it is. It’s too hot to do anything, so we’re Googling for inspiration,” Tagliapietra said of the weather-induced lockdown he and Costello are under at their Brooklyn abode. But that’s given them plenty of time to focus on their upcoming collection, which they appropriately describe as “influenced by the gestures of nature”—even down to how the recent heat and sun has affected the flora of their neighborhood.

Miller’s inspiration comes more from a summer past than the summer present—the ‘82 cult movie Summer Lovers, to be exact. “It’s the worst movie,” she laughs. “But its style is incredible—Darryl Hannah goes to Greece for the summer and wears amazing, comfy beachy tees. I don’t believe in wearing dresses, really, so it fits my ‘dressed-up basic’ vision well.” Her own summer refuge has been Montauk, where she’ll be hosting a Sophomore pop-up shop at the new Cynthia Rowley store this weekend. “I may do something similar for Fashion’s Night Out.” And then? “Paris for fashion week—I don’t take real vacations!” As working vacations go, that one doesn’t sound too bad.

—Colleen Nika

Photo: Courtesy of Intermix

It’s just about a month until New York fashion week, and at his Garment District studio, Yigal Azrouël is busily preparing for not one but two shows. This season, unlike last, he’ll present his men’s and women’s collections separately, the better to let each speak for itself. (As our reviewer noted for Fall, showing jointly tends to lead to a little commingling—and Yigal himself admitted, “I love a woman in a suit.”)

Making their runway debut alongside the military-inspired men’s collection will be the collection’s first men’s shoes. Showing off two styles yesterday, an ankle boot and a sandal in distressed leather and canvas, Azrouël explained that their origin was simple: Canvassing the market, he just couldn’t find the boots that he wanted for himself. The two-tone, hand-distressed styles are made by Peron in Italy, the factory that manufactures footwear for Rick Owens and Maison Martin Margiela. The boot style has decorative ties and zips up the back, and can be worn up—Azrouël noted it fits close in to the ankle so it will fit under skinny jeans—or rolled down, to reveal a supple black leather lining inside. The boot will retail for $795, and the sandal somewhere around that range, when they go on sale at the designer’s Meatpacking District boutique next spring.

—Matthew Schneier

Photos: Courtesy of Yigal Azrouel

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, no stranger to the L.B.D., is patroness of an auction of them. She’ll be in New York this September for Phillips de Pury’s auction of commissioned dresses by Lanvin, Givenchy, Armani Privé, Vivienne Westwood, and more, the sale of which will benefit U.S. and French cancer charities. [WWD]

Speaking of good works, Diane von Furstenberg has pledged to donate half her fortune to charitable causes for the “Giving Pledge” initiative, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The wrap dress just keeps on giving! [Vogue U.K.]

Daphne Guinness (pictured) is battling the military for first crack at a special fabric similar to an LCD screen, on which films could be projected. (She’d like to watch Sunset Boulevard on her chest; no word from the military, but we imagine they’d be more into Platoon.) [WSJ]

Leighton Meester’s new Gossip Girl co-star: a Celine tote. Blair Waldorf does not do last season. [Gawker]

And finally, Robert Geller has some tips for guys looking to wear shorts: Keep them basic, keep them fitted, and keep them through the fall. [WSJ]

Photo: Adriel Reboh / Patrick McMullan

A question that doesn’t often present itself to your everyday, working supermodel: what to wear to a war crimes trial at the Hague? But that’s one that Naomi Campbell had to wrestle with: The supe testified this morning at the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor at the Hague. (Taylor allegedly gifted Campbell some raw diamonds—she described them as dirty pebbles—during a stay at Nelson Mandela’s South Africa home. Slumber parties of the rich and famous!) For her court appearance, Naomi chose a demure, elegant cream-colored cardigan and dress by Azzedine Alaïa, with a heavy, sixties-inspired beehive and bangs and very little makeup. (And suffice it to say, no diamonds.) We’d call it courtroom classy, but we’ll let this case be decided by a jury of our readers. What say you—yea, nay, or eh?

Photos: Reuters TV / Reuters

Dan Black, pop star on the rise, is fresh from a fitting at Dior Homme, sipping tea in a Comme des Garçons spotted T-shirt he’s cut off at the neck. In the era of ultra-styled pop darlings, this starts to feel like really something: a guy dressed by himself, occasionally distressed by himself. And who dares take a scissor to CdG?

“Well, you know,” Black says with a little laugh. “It was either that or I couldn’t wear it. I don’t like it when it’s too close around the neck.”

You’ll likely be hearing a lot more from—and about—Black, who’s in town on tour with Robyn and Kelis. The stylish young Brit (aside from CdG, he’s wearing Surface to Air jeans, Converse shoes, and a Margiela necklace) has been making music for years, first in a few London bands (”the classic English four-man guitar-piece thing,” he says), but it’s his solo work, recorded in Paris, that’s brought attention his way. And “attention” is putting it mildly. There’s the opening spot with the mega-tour of the moment, for one, and then there’s the two MTV Video Music Award nominations he picked up yesterday, for “Symphonies,” his video featuring Kid Cudi. “It was very, like, ‘huh?’ and surprising,” Black says of the nominations. “It still feels like what I’m doing, I’m in the foothills, and I’m trying to get up into the mountains.”

MTV viewers will be less surprised. “Symphonies” has been in heavy rotation on the network lately, thanks in no small part to its witty mélange of special effects and styles—everything from Tron to Hitchcock. The video was produced, as are most of Black’s visuals, by a collective of friends and collaborators he calls the Chic & Artistic Agency. There are shades of Lady Gaga’s Haus of Gaga to the partnership of a slightly eccentric musician and a dedicated visual team—and come to think of it, Black does share the Lady’s penchant for occasional face paint—but as he describes it, it’s all a matter of necessary and expedient collaboration. “When I’m trying to articulate something, it’s very hard to articulate and put into a visual form,” he says. “They know I won’t like or will like, or what will work.”

Judging from the video’s success—to say nothing of the song, a fizzy bit of electropop—they know what they’re talking about. “I like things that have an amazing little universe, and that seem to be on a little iceberg of their own, floating out into the sea,” Black says of the songs and artists that most appeal to him. If you’re missing his own iceberg tonight (both dates are sold out), you’ll have another chance when he and his band hit Lollapalooza this weekend.

—Matthew Schneier

Photo: Neilson Barnard / Getty Images

The good kind, that is. For fall, the Fifth Avenue retailer is expanding its offerings in the luxury luggage category. For the lady who never travels light, new carry-ons, rollers, and cases from YSL (a leopard trolley and the black patent trolley, left, which retails for a mere $3,795), Lanvin, and Balenciaga are already on the floor, with more coming from Givenchy (a covetable trolley version of the Nightingale in printed stingray). And across the street, the men’s store will also get an infusion of high-end travel bags, including exclusives from Nancy Gonzalez.

Bergdorf Goodman, 754 Fifth Avenue, NYC, (212) 753-7300, www.bergdorfgoodman.com.

Photo: Courtesy of Bergdorf Goodman

Richard Chai recently sat down with GQ.com to let the world in on his 10 essentials—the products he just can’t live without. And while many of the CFDA Swarovski Award winner’s picks are what you might expect (pants from his own line, cologne from his brother Eddy’s store, Odin), he’s got a great tip about socks—yes, socks. Hosiery made more of a splash than we were expecting at the Fall shows (like these great, cabled knee-high socks at Prada), and Chai’s found some great ones. His picks are space-dyed, recycled yarn pairs from Muji, the Japanese retailer that keeps a few New York outposts and is better known for its sleek office supplies. (Highbrow seal of approval: They’re stocked at the MoMA Design Store.) “It’s a space-dyed yarn, so when they’re knit, the socks look almost like a Missoni sweater,” Chai told GQ. “I wear them all year round, even under chunkier socks in the wintertime.” And unlike a Missoni sweater, they’re $17.50 for five pairs at www.muji.us.

Photo: Courtesy of Muji

One worth reading from the archives: WWD’s back-in-the-day interview with, uh, Daria Morgendorffer. The animated misanthrope talked fashion with the daily, including the message behind her ever-present boots (they say, “I can kick you”). [WWD]

Coco Rocha went on a fabulous honeymoon in Corsica (which, for the record, she’d never heard of), and all we got were these cute photos. [Huffington Post]

Marc Jacobs to do plus-size? Robert Duffy tweets that they’re working on it. [Vogue U.K.]

A few minutes of jail time hasn’t slowed Lindsay Lohan’s career, for better or worse. She’s on the cover of Maxim’s September issue, and was revealed last night as the muse and face of Marc Ecko’s Cut & Sew line. “I wanted a classic Hollywood bombshell,” Ecko said—we fear he may be confusing “bombshell” and “explosion.” [WWD]

Photo: MTV / The Kobal Collection

Coco Chanel has been all over the box office lately—played first by Audrey Tautou in Coco Before Chanel and, this September, by house favorite Anna Mouglalis in Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. The latter has Coco in medias res at Chanel, which means a great wardrobe—and a pretty big challenge for costumers Chattoune Bourrec and Fabien Esnard-Lascombe, who work under the name Chattoune & Fab. But as they told Vogue.co.uk, they had a little help from a ponytailed guardian angel. “Karl has an inspiration cupboard where he keeps little prized vintage tokens—not all of them Chanel—but just special little finds that he uses to help him. He opened that up to us and said ‘Help yourselves,’ ” Bourrec says. A gallery of their designs for the film are now on view over at the English mag’s site, which should just about hold you over until the flick’s 9/28 wide release.

Photo: Chattoune & Fab/vogue.co.uk

The Material Girl’s new collection, Material Girl, officially went on sale at Macy’s today, where lines formed around the block for first grab at Madge’s affordable outfits. And since any and everything Madonna tends to bring out the true believers, so no surprise that there were a fair number of impersonators (besides those the store hired to promote the line!) shopping the racks. A few of our favorites, above and below.

Photos: David Livingston / Getty Images; Jemal Countess / Getty Images

Eva Mendes stars in Anchorman director Adam McKay’s new flick, The Other Guys, where she plays Will Ferrell’s impossibly hot wife. Her dress at the film’s NYC premiere last night? Somewhere a little below that. Mendes selected a silvery gray number from Oscar de la Renta’s Resort collection, complete with a detachable, bow-tied puff around the waist. She accessorized the look with Sergio Rossi peep-toes and a chic, slicked-back pony. The peplum detail flatters Eva’s hourglass shape, and we think the rain-cloud color looks great on her. What do you think? Is Eva’s look a storm waiting to happen, or does it send you to Cloud Nine?

Photo: Jimi Celeste / Patrick McMullan

Nom de Guerre, New York’s bellicose-named menswear label, has spent years turning out sharp, military-inspired pieces from a small, subterranean shop on Bleecker Street. It’s stayed largely off the radar—it’s got no visible shop front, after all—but its latest collaboration, on a new sneaker with Converse, may send it flying onto the map. All to the good, we’d say. NdG’s designers (the collective label was founded by Holly Harnsongkram, Wil Whitney, Devon Turnbull, and Isa Saalabi) dug through the archive for the skater-favored Skid Grip CVO style, which they’ve updated in sleek, rubberized black canvas. It’s available exclusively at the Nom de Guerre store in New York and Opening Ceremony in L.A., and to date, nowhere online. (The label’s e-shop is slated to open sometime this summer.) Getting a pair, in other words, still requires a bit of legwork, which may keep the style an insider’s secret a little longer.
$95, available at Nom de Guerre, 640 Bleecker St., NYC, (212) 253-2891, and Opening Ceremony, 451 North La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 652-1120.

—Matthew Schneier

Photo: Courtesy of Nom de Guerre

The ever-laconic Dries Van Noten (pictured) submits to Hint’s One Sentence or Less interview series. It’s the perfect form for him! [Hint]

Hide your velour sweatpants and spray tan: The Kardashians are reportedly looking for a New York space for an outpost of Dash, Kourtney and Khloe’s Miami-based boutique. They’re scouting—where else?—the Meatpacking District. [Racked]

Play the fill-in-the-blind-item guessing game: Who’s retiring, who’s moving, and who’s returning to august fashion houses? We vouch for 0 percent of this’ accuracy, but it’s fun to imagine in any case. [Fashionologie]

Louis Vuitton, world-renowned maker of handbags, ready-to-wear, and…forests? It’s true: The label’s sponsors a Japanese reforestation project called Louis Vuitton Forest by More Trees, which recently celebrated its one-year anniversary with a symposium in Tokyo. [WWD]

Photo: Marcio Madeira

The issue itself—the much-blogged, Lady Gaga-covered September Vanity Fair—doesn’t hit stands until Thursday, but royal watchers, social chroniclers, and the legions of Little Monsters can get the answers they’ve waited for today: VF’s International Best-Dressed List is now online.

Conclusions? It’s a good time to be in politics. Michelle Obama made the women’s list, as did SamCam (a.k.a. Samantha Cameron, wife of Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron), and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Carey Mulligan and Diane Kruger made their first appearances on the women’s list as well. On the Originals list, Lady Gaga makes her debut, joining Helena Bonham Carter, John Galliano, and the Duchess of Alba, among others. On the men’s side, Waris Ahluwahlia shares space with Javier Bardem, Alec Baldwin (on the list after a 21-year hiatus), and André Balazs, to name a few. And the fashion industry is repped by Tory Burch, Marchesa’s Georgina Chapman, Alice + Oliva’s Stacey Bendet, Alber Elbaz, and Glamour’s Cindi Leive.

The complete list—including couples, sibling pairs, and the hall of fame—is now up at www.vanityfair.com.

Photo: Francis Specker / CBS / Landov

Most of us are familiar with the biggest names of the international music-festival circuit—your Coachellas, your Bonnaroos, and so forth—but it’s mostly die-hards and the Japanese that trek all the way to Fuji Rock, the annual multi-stage fest in Niigata, Japan. The lineup this year included legends (Roxy Music, Belle and Sebastian), current indie faves (The xx, Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer), and a host of more local acts, but the action was just as good offstage. We sent photographer Cedric Diradourian to shoot the fashionable crowd—check out all the outfits here—but he also sent back a few breathtaking shots of the scene overall. Enjoy the mini-vacation.

Photo: Cedric Diradourian

Style.com’s Fashion Feed brings you the best of the news around the Web and on Twitter, and ranks the most-discussed designers, labels, models, and celebrities. In our weekly series, we call out the top five designers of the previous week (with our handy gloss on the hows and whys).

1. Marc Jacobs (pictured; last week: 1)
His relationship with Lorenzo may be over, but Marc Jacobs is wasting no time getting back in the saddle: he’s Banging all his friends. Thanks to a new Facebook game-cum-promotion for his new men’s fragrance, that is. Meanwhile, anticipation ramps up for his Bookmarc bookstore, which Robert Duffy hints will open September 15.

2. Vera Wang (last week: N/A)
Two words: Chelsea Clinton. (Oh, okay, two more: Alicia Keys.)

3. Victoria Beckham (last week: N/A)
Sure she landed the cover of Turkish Vogue, but the real achievement of the last week was luring hubby David Beckham into the design studio to create a menswear collection.

4. Karl Lagerfeld (last week: N/A)
Business as usual for Karl this week: shoot Abbey Lee, Heidi, Freja, and Baptiste for Numéro Homme, get made into a pendant. No big deal.

5. Alexander Wang (last week: 5)
The Wang e-shop went on sale, and, well, the entire blogosphere caught fire.

Photo: Ray Tamarra / Getty Images

For our Fall Shopping Guide, we asked a few of our favorite style mavens—including model-of-the-moment Tati Cotliar—what they’re dying to buy this season. Tati sent us a few items she’s lusting after—and a veritable dissertation on style. Read on below for her thoughts (slightly edited and condensed) on the vintage, the contemporary, and how you can make just about anything work for you. And check out the full Fall Shopping guide, with picks by Cotliar, Anna Dello Russo, Natalie Massenet, and more.

So, normally, I’m not looking forward to items in particular. When I shop, it’s something of the moment. I enter a store and suddenly, music and clothes all together—ha-ha, I find what I want. I usually like one-of-a-kind pieces, or those ones that remind me of something in the past, or just because they look nice.

I’ve been looking around for seventies jumpsuits, with [a wide] leg, some orange color, with a cool low-waist belt, big. For that, I think I’ll have to run over [to some] vintage shops. I like also catsuits, transparent, very sexy, to wear with something super oversized on top, like a big-shouldered jacket—very early nineties, like secretaries used to wear. I got one in yellow at the Salvation Army in Chelsea, which is great! Otherwise, with some cool big Ramones punk leather jacket—very big as well—or a suuuper big jean vest, no sleeves, a bit Boy Scout. I kind of like mixing incredibly sexy or feminine or chic [pieces] with boyish or rocker pieces. I think that maybe, these pieces by themselves, they go too much to their either sexy-elegant or punk-rocker side. But I don’t know, you put them together and they&#8230work. I also like to put my hair on the side, continuing with this punk-rocker attitude. But then, if I think about it, that’s how girls in the nineties used to wear their hair! Like in Beverly Hills 90210! So then it also matches the secretary jacket—ha-ha!

I love the feeling when you get excited or inspired in a store by something you like, all together, as a look. It’s incredibly nice to feel that you just created a character, or that at least, it reminds you to something from another movie or another time, like an icon. I just think that this is a time where everybody is looking back to unique pieces, unique looks. There is no such thing as “the 2000s look” or “the 2010 look,” it’s just a big mélange, which I love, ’cause we can be so playful. I like to feel that you can put on whatever you want and if you just feel it’s for you, that it’s your energy, it’s going to work.

Also, I feel the energy of people on the street wanting to be unique, they are looking for icons, from the movies, from the music, from fashion (like the supermodels’ era), from historic designers like Yves Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel, Paco Rabanne (Like Jane Birkin’s dress—who doesn’t love that?), Dior, Pierre Cardin, etcetera. They all created something that inspired people and artists. They made a wave, a groove. So, what is better than to try to use that and re-create it, adapted for yourself? Everybody is [looking] for a strong personality in the looks—I think that all stylists and designers can feel that, and are doing an incredible job. Find what’s best for yourself and just play, show what you feel, ’cause today, I like to think that everything works or [at least], that if you want it to, it can work.

—Tati Cotliar

Photo: Olivier Claisse