Integration Attempt by Alyssa Dennis

On September 8th, Baltimore-based artist Alyssa Dennis will be opening her first New York solo exhibition, Amalgamation.  Amalgamation is a collection meticulous drawings that explores bricolage and “anti-fixed” space,  revealing Dennis’s interest in architecture modularity and the built environment.

September 8th for the opening of Amalgamation, the first New York solo exhibition for Baltimore-based artist Alyssa Dennis. In a collection of meticulously constructed drawings that echo her interest in the modularity of architecture and the built environment, Dennis explores avenues of bricolage and “anti-fixed” space.

According to Gallery Director, Christina Ray, “Alyssa Dennis is assisting Swoon on large-scale public and museum projects, and it was she who pointed Dennis out to us as a young artist with a great deal of promise in her practice.”

The exhibition includes a color catalogue with an interview between Swoon and Dennis.

Menhir & Concrete

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Satirical comedy Ab Fab is back. But if the characters once looked absurd, in 2011 they are absurdly recognizable.  Some might say the show wasn’t prescient, instead reflective. 

This article titled “Why Absolutely Fabulous now looks absolutely prescient” was written by Paul Flynn, for The Guardian on Monday 29th August 2011 20.30 UTC

When the Pulitzer prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was interviewed recently, she noted: “When you try to write satire in America the reality catches up with you and takes over. By the time the book comes out it’s already naturalism.”

The same could be applied in Britain to the reprisal of that tour de force comedy and searing satire on the rise of the 90s media elite, Absolutely Fabulous. News that Jennifer Saunders is reviving the show for three episodes to mark its 20th anniversary next year could not be timelier. Two decades later, could the series seem any more prophetic?

Edina, the hard-boiled, label-hungry PR guru, and Patsy, her addiction-fuelled magazine editor sidekick, now look like prescient visions of the future. When they first emerged on screen they endeared through preposterousness. With their minute-long obsessions and faux-ethical bandwagons, the pair cascaded from one catastrophe to the next. Yet what was once recognisably absurd has become absurdly recognisable.

A preponderance of Ab Fab-type figures now clog the cultural landscape. It is almost as if there is nothing left to ironise. Simon Cowell, Mary Portas, the Beckhams, Gok Wan, Nigella Lawson and any number of Premier League footballers all come replete with their own free-floating relationship with comic cliche.

We are treated to tales that sound as if they were plucked straight from an Absolutely Fabulous storyboarding meeting. There’s Alex James, the former coke-addled rock star who opened a cheese farm in his countryside pile. Here’s Angelina Jolie, displaying her global awareness one adopted baby at a time.

There’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s commercial repositioning with a holistic self-help website. Sex and the City has built an entire franchise out of repeating Patsy’s mantra: that nothing cannot be solved by the purchase of a fancy pair of shoes. The Financial Times’s How To Spend It magazine has become a latter-day Ab Fab manual.

What started as a sly poke at ridiculous figures of fun has become a new aspirational model. Patsy’s cries of “Bolly!” and “Lacroix!” in response to any impending crisis predated the late 90s snowballing of branding culture, from smart phones to handbags.

In order to make a new series of Absolutely Fabulous work, Jennifer Saunders is going to have to work extra hard when the country already provides her with a former PR as prime minister, his wife with a creative directorship of a luxury goods company and his sister-in-law on the masthead at Vogue. In 2011, Britain is led by a family whose prime motor skill is fabulising stuff, absolutely.

And TV itself is driven by an engine of all-consuming self-improvement. Good taste and ceaseless acquisition have become indivisible. In straitened economic times, the audience is even more captive than usual. Pimp your home, improve your dress sense, cook fancy food. Since you can’t afford to leave your sofa, these opulent diversions from the hamster’s wheel become more, not less exciting.

So the Ab Fab generation has come of age. It will be marvellous to see how Patsy, Edina and the rest of the cast have progressed since they last graced the screen. And it will be fascinating to observe how they cope with recession. “Austerity chic” was surely a gift catchphrase coined at the first script meeting.

Saunders may choose to refrain from making any implicit reference to recent comments made by Jane Horrocks – the actress who brought to life Edina’s ditzy assistant, Bubble – in a case of life imitating art. Horrocks claimed that she’d named her north London mansion Tesco Towers, after paying for it with the proceeds of the numerous advertising campaigns she’d fronted for the supermarket goliath, then bemoaned the fact that it was “full of chavs”. The tipping point from Absolutely Fabulous to absolutely fatuous is upon us. Ms Saunders’s work may be cut out for her.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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The man known in the UK as ‘Thor’ runs an empire as opulent, and opaque, as ever,  three years after the failure of the savings bank that swallowed up £5bn of UK savers’ money

This article titled “Icelandic tycoon still living the high life in London after the collapse of Icesave” was written by Simon Bowers and Sigrún Davídsdóttir, for The Observer on Saturday 27th August 2011 23.05 UTC

One of the world’s most extravagant superyachts, which recently became the most expensive item ever put up for sale at Harrods, was designed as a floating palace for a controversial Icelandic billionaire who, together with his father, controlled the bank behind Icesave.

The 90-metre luxury cruiser, projected to cost more than £100m, was to be the ultimate testimony to the vast fortune built up by London-based investment tycoon and amateur bodybuilder Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, known in the UK simply as “Thor”.

His lavish private spending plans, while unconnected to the affairs of Landsbankí, the bank behind Icesave, will stick in the craw of many British victims of the online savings scandal.

Thor’s relationship with Landsbankí, before it collapsed almost three years ago, has been criticised for allegedly providing him with abnormally easy access to borrowing, in his capacity as one of the bank’s largest shareholders. He denies this.

Lured by market-beating interest rates, hundreds of thousands of British savers, together with scores of councils and charities, poured almost £5bn into Icesave internet accounts, mostly between the start of 2007 and October 2008, when Landsbankí collapsed. Over the same period, companies linked to Thor rapidly expanded their already huge borrowings from the ill-fated bank. In fact, Landsbankí’s loan exposure to the Thor empire leapt by 58% to €973m over the period, according to a special investigation commission’s report for the Icelandic parliament. Thor disputes many of the report’s findings.

The collapse of Landsbankí forced Thor’s empire to retrench. The plan for a superyacht, known as Project Mars (a play on his thunder god name), were abandoned just as building work was about to begin at a shipyard in Italy. Since then the designers have been hawking the concept around, looking for another billionaire to pick up Thor’s dream.

With its almost vertical bow, Project Mars is designed to echo the shape of a dreadnought. The blueprint incorporates a helipad, a gym and spa, a seven-metre pool, a “beach club” and a sail-in “garage” to house a tender and two motorbikes. Artists’ impressions of the imagined interiors playfully include images of James Bond. The yacht had been a playboy’s dream for Iceland’s richest son, echoing a life of entrepreneurial adventure that had seen Thor amass rapid fortunes in brewing, telecoms and pharmaceuticals in some of the most notoriously challenging eastern European markets, among them Bulgaria and Russia.

His equally swashbuckling compatriot, Jón Asgeir Jóhannesson, cultivated fame and became a celebrity figure on the business pages of UK newspapers as his Baugur empire bought stakes in British high street chains such as Hamleys, House of Fraser, Iceland Foods, Oasis, Karen Millen, All Saints and Goldsmiths. But Thor chose to avoid the media spotlight and his successes, though orchestrated from offices in Mayfair, went largely unnoticed. And despite his imposing stature and vast wealth, the young tycoon was outshone on the public stage when his father, Björgólfur Gudmundsson, bought West Ham football club in 2006.

Glimpses of Thor’s high living occasionally reached the Icelandic media, most notably when he flew friends out to Jamaica to celebrate his 40th birthday in 2007. The entertainment was provided by pop stars Jay Kay, 50 Cent and Ky-Mani Marley, Bob Marley’s son.

As well as having a reputation for partying that stretched back to his school days – when he is said to have run a Reykjavík nightclub and established Iceland’s first Oktoberfest beer festival – Thor was equally well known for the pride he took in his physique. Rumour spread in banking circles that he was immensely physically strong and could bench press more than 450lbs.

It was not until 2002, after significant success in Russia, that Thor and his father reinvested some of their newfound fortune in Iceland, acquiring a 42% stake in Landsbankí when it was privatised. At the time, there were murmurings about the suitability of Thor and his father as owners of a bank. The two appeared to have returned from Russia with a sizable fortune after selling a brewery in St Petersburg. They had earlier fallen out bitterly with fellow investors in a Russian soft drinks venture.

Moreover, recalled the detractors, Thor’s father had a blemished past, having been convicted in 1991 of false accounting and given a 12-month suspended sentence.

Initial misgivings were quickly drowned out as Iceland’s economic miracle, as it was at the time perceived, transformed one of Europe’s smallest economies into a financial powerhouse. And at the vanguard were the powerful banks whose affairs were tightly intertwined with a handful of seemingly Midas-like tycoons, Thor and Jón Asgeir among them. Then, abruptly, a shadow was cast over the party in 2006, as international bond markets started to question Iceland’s success, in particular the robustness of funding for the island’s voraciously expanding banks.

Landsbankí’s aggressive entry into the UK savings market in October 2006 was a direct response to this looming funding gap. “What we considered a permanent solution was simply not being as dependent on the financial markets,” said Landsbankí’s triumphant chief executive Sigurjón Arnason in early 2007. “All I have to do is to check at the end of the day how much money has come in: £50m was deposited only last Friday.”

But as concern about risky banks spread around the world in 2007, Britain saw a run on deposits at Northern Rock, and the government was forced into a bailout. Meanwhile, on the Icesave website, savers were told: “You can also rest assured that with Icesave you are offered the same level of financial protection as every bank in the UK.” Ultimately, savers were, rightly, unconvinced. A mini-run on deposits in spring 2008 temporarily abated, but began again after the fall of Lehman Brothers.

After a panic-filled weekend during which the Icesave website was shut, it fell to the then chancellor, Alistair Darling, to stop the run. The Treasury extended a state guarantee to Icesave retail deposits and at the same time temporarily seized the bank’s UK assets using emergency financial stability laws.

As a result of the scandal Landsbankí and Iceland’s ministry of finance was for a period placed on a UK list of “financially sanctioned” organisations alongside al-Qaida, North Korea and Burma.

While a major additional headache at a critical time for the UK, the failure of Landsbankí was part of a near system-wide financial meltdown in Iceland that effectively left the country facing insolvency. Iceland had to ask the International Monetary Fund for a loan.

In the frantic days before Landsbankí fell, Thor personally took part in meetings with Icelandic ministers in his capacity as a major shareholder in the bank. To those present he appeared to be in control of the bank, according to witness testimony later published in the parliamentary report.

Arni Mathiesen, who had been finance minster at the time and held talks with Darling over Icesave, claimed in his testimony to the commission that several bankers had lied to the government over a range of issues in early October. “The worst one was Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson … he lied to others as well and they came to us later that evening and said: ‘Nothing that this man says can be trusted’.”

Thor has responded by accusing Mathiesen of misunderstanding the situation, and suggesting the former minister had been relying too heavily on competitor banks for information. He said he did attend some emergency meetings concerning Landsbankí “as a representative of the shareholders”, together with top executives from the bank.

Three years on, despite having to drop Project Mars, the 45-year-old tycoon retains many of trappings of the super-rich, including a townhouse in Notting Hill acquired in 2000 for £4m and substantially extended. Other UK assets include an Aston Martin car with a personalised number plate and a number of motorbikes. He declines to say whether he still owns a house in the Home Counties, a Challenger private jet, or a 42-metre yacht called Element.

“He neither uses nor operates a private jet or a yacht,” a spokeswoman for Thor said. “Many of his private assets were part of his settlement with all his creditors… Many of the assets he was previously reported to own may not be in his possession any more.” But neither the jet nor the yacht appears to have been sold.

Thor claims to have drawn a line under the financial turmoil that engulfed much of his business in 2008, and to have reached a confidential settlement with Landsbankí and other creditors a year ago. As a result the scale of his empire is harder than ever to measure.

He continues to pursue business interests from a penthouse office on Park Lane, but there are signs that his grip on his biggest asset, Swiss-based generic drugs maker Actavis, which he bought in 2007 for €4.7bn, may already be largely lost. Deutsche Bank now states that it is able to exert “significant influence” over this business following a punishing refinancing of the debt-laden firm. Significantly, the German bank’s interest in Actavis is now treated as an investment rather than a loan.

Many victims of the Icesave affair would dearly like to know the details of the backroom deal in Reykjavík between Landsbankí administrators and Thor – not least because of serious questions about the relationship between his business empire and the bank in the months before the collapse. Concerns raised in the parliamentary report, which runs to more than 3,200 pages, include allegations that:

■ In the summer and autumn of 2008 Thor’s business empire appeared to be in a “difficult” situation after taking on €4.4bn of borrowings to acquire Actavis in a highly leveraged deal one year earlier. Despite this, loan exposure to Thor continued to grow.

■ Landsbankí’s foreign currency loan exposure to Thor companies increased at a time when it was straining to retain enough reserves to deal with Icesave and other foreign currency obligations.

■ Loan exposure of almost €1bn to Thor companies when the bank fell were equivalent to about 70% of Landsbankí’s capital base – far exceeding the 25% legal limit concerning large exposures.

Thor disputes all the allegations as incorrect or misleadingly incomplete. “The commission writes at length about how the rules should have been, or how they should have been interpreted at the time,” said a Thor spokeswoman. “That hindsight does not amount to any rules having been broken.”

The affairs of another failed Icelandic bank, Kaupthing, which also took billions of pounds in deposits in the UK and also stands accused of having a questionable relationship with its largest shareholder are now the subject of an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. While British fraud investigators are known to have gathered intelligence on several other collapsed Icelandic banks, including Landsbankí, there is no suggestion that they are pursuing inquiries in relation to Icesave, Landsbankí or Thor.

A spokeswoman for Thor said: “Icesave was never the monster it was made out to be… Thor [has said] Landsbankí assets would fully cover the claims.”

Landsbankí administrators paint a more nuanced picture. They are hopeful that priority creditors, including the UK Treasury, will eventually recoup much or all of their losses, but without interest. Non-priority creditors, including many UK universities, pension funds and councils, can expect to get little or nothing.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Today Rigby & Peller has seven stores and recorded sales of £10.1m last year. Its bras sell for between £50 and £100, although a bespoke version costs up to £200. Last week the Kentons sold an 87% stake to Belgian bra-maker Van de Velde for £8m.

This article titled “From corsets for comedians to bespoke bras: Rigby & Peller has seen it all” was written by Zoe Wood, for The Observer on Saturday 20th August 2011 23.07 UTC

The small brass plaque reads B Rigby and G Peller, corsetières. The discreet sign once hung on a nondescript doorway in London’s South Molton Street and marked the threshold to a secret world of ribbons, lace and stays that was for women’s eyes only.

The nameplate, now in storage, is also a small piece of history, a reminder of one Jewish woman’s flight from the horror of the second world war. Last week Rigby & Peller, the now-famous lingerie business founded by the nimble-fingered Bertha Rigby and Gita Peller, was sold in a deal that valued the company at nearly £10m. Both the founders are long dead but the sale is a footnote to a rich history intertwined with the immigration that shaped London’s rag trade in the last century, as well as the latest throw of the dice in the fickle world of fashion.

Little is known about the enigmatic Peller, who fled her native Hungary, legend has it, with samples of her intricate work stowed in her suitcase. June Kenton, the matriarch of the Jewish family that took over the business in the early 1980s, doubts she would have given up precious space in her suitcase for the samples: “She left [Hungary] very late. Those who escaped in 1939 left an awful lot behind.”

Peller was taken in by Rigby when she arrived in Britain, and the duo established a company that, over the past 70 years, has become recognised as the gold standard in lingerie. Its famously “proper” fitting service has a formidable reputation, while rigorous levels of discretion have won it the patronage of several generations of the royal family including Princess Margaret and Princess Diana. Margaret stepped out only in bespoke R&P, while Diana mischievously took away lingerie posters for her teenage sons’ walls at Eton, reveals Kenton. It has also served Hollywood stars: actresses such as Scarlett Johansson and Gwyneth Paltrow are numbered among the glamorous clientele that has relied on R&P’s oomph to attain red-carpet perfection.

Tailoring and dressmaking were the most common occupations of the Jewish immigrants who huddled together in the East End of London at the start of the last century. “Tailoring was traditionally a typical Jewish occupation in the small towns and industrial cities of eastern Europe and, subsequently, immigration countries such as Britain and the US,” says Sarah Harel-Hoshen, curator of the Jewish Museum in London. One estimate is that five out of seven male immigrants worked in the ready-to-wear clothing workshops that mushroomed in the area at that time. Single women worked alongside the men and after they were married would help in their husbands’ workshops. The community’s rich skill base included millinery, hosiery and corsetry, with the products sold from shops as well as stalls on large street markets, such as that in Petticoat Lane.

There are no exact numbers, but according to the Jewish Museum the biggest wave of immigration took place between 1880 and 1905, when between 200,000 and 450,000 Jews arrived in the UK following the pogroms and restrictions in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, the area Jews were allowed to live in. That flow was staunched by the Aliens Act of 1905 but the rise of fascism saw another 50,000 Jewish refugees, including Gita Peller, arrive from Austria, Germany and central Europe in the 1930s. “Many of those in the clothing industry, who started as sweat-shop workers or very poor artisans, did well and after one or two generations – if the family remained in the tailoring or textile business – moved their businesses to the West End,” explains Harel-Hoshen. In the West End the focus was on the more exclusive custom-made tailoring trade, skills that would overlap with the demands of theatreland, with firms such as Berman & Nathan and Angels gaining prominence.

Rigby & Peller has also played its part in the showbusiness tradition, by providing the corsetry that underpinned The Two Ronnies‘ costume extravaganzas in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the antics of Dick Emery and Benny Hill.

A rummage through the Rigby & Peller archive, which is stored in silk-lined suitcases in an office above its Conduit Street store in Mayfair, shows that a lot has changed since Vogue coined the term “brassiere” in 1907. Kenton fingers the fine stitching on one of the pieces, a scrap of innocent-looking pink ribbons and lace – with no wires – that would truss only the daintiest of frames. R&P’s stores still channel that old-fashioned glamour, with swagged curtains and thick red carpets patterned with gold, but the company has consciously moved with the times ushered in by upmarket, risqué rivals such as Agent Provocateur. Indeed, in the video for her recent single Alejandro, Lady Gaga is vamping it up in a pair of Rigby & Peller lace pants, and not much else.

Kenton reminisces that her mother had “sitting down” and “standing up” corsets, with the latter negating the possibility of the former. A romp through bra history sees the advent of adjustable straps and the creation of cups in the 1920s, the sanctity of which, in the days of eye-popping Wonderbra cleavages, Kenton is keen to preserve. “You were born with two,” she says. “And as far as Rigby & Peller are concerned, those two should be in the cups. They shouldn’t meet in the middle.” The 75-year-old is an authority on bras, and when she says, “I dream about bras, I breathe bras, I live bras”, you tend to believe her. Kenton can tell women their bust size without using a measuring tape, a skill that must save blushes at the palace – but when she narrows her eyes and promises “to get her hands on you”, it is clear that you have come up wanting.

The 1930s saw the mass-production of bras with different cup sizes for the first time, but despite the competitive threat and the hardship caused by the war, Rigby & Peller’s business thrived thanks to a loyal and well-heeled customer who sought out that easily missed doorway in the West End. As the cold war ushered in jutting, cone-shaped bras, the business passed to Peller’s cousin, who continued its bespoke service despite the industry’s own nuclear threat: the Wonderbra, which rose to prominence, so to speak, in North America in the late 1960s.

By the 1980s the lingerie market was a world away from the hushed environs of the corsetière’s workshop; it was big business and the majority of women had turned against bespoke lingerie and the deft hands that could magically create an hourglass figure.

When Kenton and her husband Harold got the opportunity to buy Rigby & Peller in 1982, the business was struggling. It was still just a workshop, with four corsetières, that the two women had established above the shop in South Molton Street 40 years earlier. The writing was on the wall for bespoke lingerie, and though her husband was against buying R&P, Kenton got her way, acquiring the firm for the princely sum of £20,000. “It was too old-fashioned for most people,” she says. The couple made it profitable by combining R&P with the lingerie business they already owned, and introducing off-the-peg bras and an own-label range.

Fashion also came to the rescue, as corsetry and the 1950s shape enjoyed a renaissance, in no small part down to Madonna strutting around in a pointed-cup bra at the Cannes film festival in 1991.

Today Rigby & Peller has seven stores and recorded sales of £10.1m last year. Its bras sell for between £50 and £100, although a bespoke version costs up to £200. Last week the Kentons sold an 87% stake to Belgian bra-maker Van de Velde for £8m.

Despite the sale, June and her son David, who runs the day-to-day operations, are staying on as directors. “It will be business as usual,” says Kenton, adding: “When we open new stores I’ll be running around doing fittings. Like us [Van de Velde] are a family-oriented company and appreciate the value of heritage.”

Throughout Rigby & Peller’s long history, the only relatively straight line in an industry obsessed with curves records the expansion of the British bust, a phenomenon attributed to factors such as diet, exercise and the contraceptive pill.

“In my mother’s day, if you were bigger than a C, you’d have to have something made for you,” says Kenton. “When we first got D and DD in 1970s, there was a waiting list. Today we go up to an N!”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco with Michael Saylor

During the 2011 Monaco Grand Prix, movers and shakers enjoyed My Yacht Monaco, a 3 day yacht hospitality venture created by Nicholas Frankl.  Hope Gainer of Hope International enhanced this luxury event with fine wines, champagne and art.

This year Artist, Fareen Butt was invited to create a mountainscape painting to donate to HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco’s foundation.  Guests sipped on Chateau d’Esclans with the finest rose wines from Cote d’Provence, 24 karat gold infused Luxor Brut and Icelandic Glacial water.

The weekend kicked off with a Friday night soiree attended by Prince Albert and numerous high profile guests from around the world aboard the 44 meter award-winning Feadship, owned by Michael Saylor.

Fisker & Spyker displayed vehicles at the entrance.  Saturday and Sunday a more intimate group of VIPS boarded Snowbird megayacht to view the Formula 1 races while enjoying a gourmet lunch and liquid libations.  Asprey showcased their fine jewelry all weekend to the uber audiences aboard both yachts.

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Last weekend I had a wonderful escape to Vero Beach, a seaside town on Central Florida’s Treasure Coast.  The place is perfect for relaxation in the sand and surf.

It was a reunion of sorts to rendezvous with an old college beau. We stayed at Vero Beach Hotel & Spa, a  Kimpton Hotel in a lovely suite.  After some R&R on the beach, we ventured to the best restaurant in town, The Tides.  Here we enjoyed a culinary treat of fresh local fish and organically grown veggies topped off with homemade sweets for dessert.  The place was cozy and the servers congenial and attentive.  Afterwards, we tried out all the local hotspots including the karaoke bar to the Riverfront Lounge…all a bit honky tonk compared to sexy South Beach, but a fun change of scenery.

Sunday, we checked out the other hot hotel along the beach, Costa d’Este, owned by Gloria and Emilio Estefan.  I loved the architecturally cool, contemporary entranceway with circular design details.  The hotel was more zen-like with a special spa as well as a hip meeting room with circular ball-dangling chandeliers carrying out the circle theme inside as well as out.

On the way home, we played tourist and drove down Main Street, photographing the deco theater.  Then we stopped at Al’s Family Farm for fresh squeezed Indian River orange juice and picked up a pack of chocolate coated coconut patties to continue to savor the sweet weekend.

Whether you come from near or far, Vero Beach is a world-class exquisite retreat.  I highly recommend it for a change of pace!

Contributor: Hope Gainer

Gloria & Emilio Estefan at Costa d'Este Resort

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Austerity is out as French luxury goods group beats analyst forecasts with 13% sales increase in six months to June 2011

This article titled “LVMH’s ‘remarkable’ half-year results reveal luxury is back in fashion” was written by Zoe Wood, for The Guardian on Tuesday 26th July 2011 19.08 UTC

LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods group, on Tuesday reported waiting lists for its Louis Vuitton handbags and a thirst for its finest Krug and Dom Perignon champagnes – illustrating that austerity chic is so last season.

The French group beat analyst forecasts with a 13% increase in sales to €10.3bn (£9.1bn) in the six months to 30 June. Its chief executive, Bernard Arnault, said the bumper sales figures for the first six months of the year were “remarkable” as they came on top of an equally strong performance a year ago. Profits from continuing operations at the group, which makes €1,500 Louis Vuitton handbags and Givenchy perfume, jumped 22% to €2.2bn.

“LVMH’s excellent performance in the first half once again demonstrates the exceptional appeal of our brands, the attraction of our high-quality artisanal products and the pertinence of our strategy,” said Arnault. During the period the French group, which owns 60 brands including Marc Jacobs, Givenchy and Tag Heuer, acquired Italian jeweller Bulgari.

The company singled out Louis Vuitton for praise, highlighting the success of the Damier collection of handbags and luggage made out of the eponymous chequered material that is one of the brand’s signature designs. “Louis Vuitton continued to register an exceptional performance, confirming the brand’s strong appeal to both its most loyal and its new clientele,” said Arnault, who added that some of its products now had waiting lists. He also flagged stellar sales at its jewellery division, which makes €12,000 Hublot watches, where sales jumped 30%. At its champagne business the company reported a “particularly sharp” rise in demand for prestige cuvées such as Dom Perignon.

While the high street remains in the doldrums analysts predict that sales of designer clothes, watches and handbags will reach a new high of €186bn this year as the jet-set release the purse strings following the self-imposed spending purdah brought on by the global financial crisis.

Indeed the annual wealth report published by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and Capgemini last month showed that the world’s high-net worth individuals had recovered in number and wealth to pre-crisis levels, giving them the confidence to spend again. That confidence has seen rival luxury brands Hermès and Burberry report better than expected second-quarter sales this month, thanks to strong demand in emerging markets such as China and tourists travelling in western Europe. Louis Vuitton is a magnet for brand hungry shoppers in Asia, which is increasingly the engine of the global luxury goods industry. The region now accounts for nearly a third of LVMH’s group sales.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Sant Singh Chatwal and Vikram Chatwal welcomed guests to experience their dreamy environment on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.  The new property includes two deco hotels they have transformed into their high style.

The hot, steamy, sexy night under the moon of Miami was made even hotter with a fire show poolside and platinum blonde-wigged babes and boys in skimpy, gold lame attire.  The rooftop setting with multiple bars is the perfect place for partiers to congregate.  The liquids flowed endlessly and the food was flavorful and fabulous. The chef presented unique items in visually appealing ways from appetizers to mini desserts.  I personally loved the little key lime pies in crushed graham cracker shells. DJ’s Andrew and Andrew were center stage sending sounds out to the crowd keeping the mood elevated.

I ran into new and old friends from near and far.  I also had the pleasure of congratulating the Chatwals on a job well done.  Welcome to South Beach.
May your dreams come true here!

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This article titled “Cy Twombly, René Magritte and Thomas Struth – the week in art” was written by Jonathan Jones, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 8th July 2011 16.17 UTC

Jonathan Jones’s top shows this week

Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010
When is a documentary photograph not a documentary photograph? When it’s by Thomas Struth. The German artist’s epic studies of people marvelling at sites of such profound cultural value as the Pantheon in Rome cause you to wonder what these places mean to their modern visitors.
• At Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, until 16 September

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900
Seize the last chance to see the best London exhibition of the year so far, a subversive visual essay on the true nature of our ancestors – the Victorians. Nineteenth-century British artists, designers, and writers are revealed as radical hedonists whose luxuriant worldview helped to shape the modern imagination.
• At V&A museum, London, until 17 July

Urs Fischer and Georg Herold
The most compelling works at this year’s Venice Biennale are life-size wax sculptures by Urs Fischer which, you come to realise, are actually slowly melting giant candles. Here Fischer collaborates with German sculptor Georg Herold in a two-man show with an equally surprising twist – there is a life model present in the gallery at all times.
• At the Modern Institute, 14-20 Osborne Street, Glasgow, until 3 September

Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500
Many paintings that we look at in art museums were once part of carved wooden multi-panel altarpieces. In this free exhibition, the National Gallery recreates the original contexts of some of its oldest paintings so that they are shown as they were meant to be seen.
• At the National Gallery, London, 6 July to 2 October

René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle
One of the true modern greats, René Magritte fascinates because he so poignantly questions the power of painting to create illusions. With irony and finesse, his works portray objects and spaces with a deadpan realism that is undermined by sheer impossibilities.
• At Tate Liverpool until 16 October

Up close: artworks in detail

Simone Martini, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342
If you are heading to the Magritte exhibition at Tate Liverpool it is worth a detour to the city’s outstanding Walker Art Gallery to see this masterpiece of medieval art. Simone Martini rose to fame in 14th-century Siena as an artist of sinuous beauty, and his celebrity took him to Avignon (home of the schismatic Pope at the time), where he painted this gorgeous work. It is a very rare survival of his Avignon works and contemporary with his lost portrait of Laura, the beauty to whom the poet Petrarch wrote hundreds of verses. One of the most important medieval paintings in Britain.
• At Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mere (Girl born without a mother), about 1916-17
An eerie prophesy of our digital age, created a century ago. In the years before and during the first world war artists were fascinated and spooked by the idea of humans as machines. Picabia’s techno-child is one of the most compelling of these science fiction modernist images, along with Jacop Epstein’s Rock Drill and Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even.
• At Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

Henry Moore, Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1961
If visiting the popular new Hepworth gallery in Wakefield you should also treat yourself to a stroll around nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park where, among a huge variety of modern sculptures set in rolling green spaces, the works of Henry Moore are particularly impressive. This towering yet whimsical figure and other organic forms by Moore take on a dreamlike quality against grass and sky. Is Moore a truly great sculptor or a soft imitator of Picasso? In the Yorkshire landscape, Standing Figure has a romantic character that argues powerfully for the former.
• At Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Andy Warhol, Jacqueline, 1964
A Warhol portrait of Blondie’s Deborah Harry recently sold for several millions, yet this moving image of Jackie Kennedy at President John F Kennedy’s funeral is a far more powerful work from Warhol’s most creative years. You can see it, for free, in a Midlands public collection. Warhol claimed he was left cold by the assassination of JFK, but his portraits of Jackie in mourning ache with the pain and rage of a nation bereft.
• At Wolverhampton Art Gallery

GF Watts, Paolo and Francesca, 1872-75
George Frederic Watts was a Victorian symbolist, whose paintings shared with contemporary European artists an urge to dig below the surface and illuminate the world of imagination. This painting of doomed lovers from Dante’s Inferno is in the collection of his works at the Watts Gallery. It explores the same intense imagery of death and desire as French artists such as Moreau and Redon, and is a rich insight into the mythic ambitions of 19th-century British art.
• At Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey

What we learned this week

The real reason Habitat went bankrupt

Exactly why artists think Cy Twombly was a knockout

Why no one will pony up for Mark Wallinger’s giant horse sculpture

Why Hipstamatic became the weapon of choice for photojournalists in Afghanistan

Final proof that Hollywood has always been heavenly

Image of the week

Your Art Weekly

What exhibitions are you going to see this week? Have you been to any of these shows? Did you agree with our reviews? Give your review in the comments below or tweet us your verdict using #artweekly and we’ll publish the best ones next week.

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Portuguese  artisanal luxury brand, Boca Do Lobo has revealed its latest works of art: “Mondriam”, “Heritage”, “Crochet”, “Oporto” and “Time Goes By” in their 2011 Limited Edition collection, Large Emotion designed by Pedro Sousa.  Artisan, Pedro Sousa created 12 distinct furniture designs and only a limited series of 20 pieces per design are crafted  by this single artisan.  Applying traditional methods of crafstmanship that can stand the test of time, Sousa adds a whimsical fusion of art and design that gives each piece an opulent, yet fun vibe.  See below for more photos of the Large Emotion collection.

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