This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

ICON HEADY LAMARR

Choosing this week’s icon wasn’t easy. Along with their panoply of runway looks, designers named a multitude of inspirations: Daryl Kerrigan reverenced Klute, “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale was the guiding spirit behind Philip Lim’s show, Behnaz Serafpour name-checked Vanessa Redgrave, in Camelot. Relative newbies Jason Wu, Bruno Pieters and Jose Ramon Reyes cited Jane Birkin, Tina Chow and heretofore unacknowledged fashion icon Elle Macpherson, respectively; new Anne Klein designer Isabel Toledo cited, well, Anne Klein. And I haven’t even the scratched the surface of influence.

Model-turned-photographer Lee Miller was one obvious choice for this space?not only because Gucci designer Frida Giannini claimed her, and not only because she was a Poiret favorite in a season padded with homages to the Poiret ‘20s, but also because Miller went from being a VOGUE cover girl to one of the first people to photograph a concentration camp. That trajectory seemed appropriate to Fall 2007’s “grow up and get with it” message; still, it seemed churlish to favor one designer’s muse over another.

Thus, no Lee Miller. Instead, I bring you Hedy Lamarr. The seasonal beauty trends are there in the Lamarr glamour shots of the late 1930s and early 1940s: Red pout, arched brow, artfully tousled hair. That era of Lamarr is echoed in the season’s most prevalent looks, as well: Spare, bias-cut gowns for evening; printed bias-cut dresses for day, plus a wide-brimmed hat; for weekends, mannish trousers with a svelte, belted sweater. I would have picked Katharine Hepburn, a forever idol of mine, but for the fact that Hedy Lamarr’s life itself seems emblematic of this season’s runway mood. Scandalous in her day for appearing nude in the film Ecstasy, she was a lousy actress who got by on her looks and married six times. Tabloid fodder, in other words.

Meanwhile: In 1942, Lamarr and friend George Antheil patented the Secret Communication System. Horrified by Naziism, they offered their frequency-hopping technology to the U.S. Government, which promptly filed it away and suggested that Lamarr’s services might be more valuable in support of war bonds. She sold them to the tune of $25,000 a kiss, and 20 years later, the Secret Communication System was rediscovered and deployed during the Cuba blockade. The patent had expired. Frequency-hopping went on to serve as the basis for mobile, spread-spectrum technology? over my head, but to make a long story short, you can thank Hedy Lamarr for your cell phone, your wi-fi connection, and the GPS system in your luxury car. The dame had beauty and brains. This season, they’re both in style.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

BEAUTY EITHER/OR

Whereas the clothes for Fall were a polyglot bunch, runway beauty you could whittle down to two major themes: Maximal and minimal. In keeping with the show’s homage to the 1940s, Pat McGrath at Gucci gave the models a polished look: Porcelain face, immaculate brow, a wide almond eye with a feline stroke of liner across the top and, most prominent, a scarlet lip. The red lip was a highlight at Proenza, too?though makeup artist Gucci Westman’s interpretation was a glossy maraschino cherry, created for the show and available for a limited time through Lancome. Westman alternated the red lipstick with another that matched the models’ nearly naked eyes and face, and Tom Pecheux at Derek Lam echoed the nude theme, adding only a bit more smoke along the lids.

Pecheux’s barely-there face got extra impact from Orlando Pita’s headbanded up-dos, and in fact, pulled-back hair was all over New York, from the severe buns at Costello Tagliapietra to the jaunty, loose ponytails at Karen Walker. Wherever hair was down, it was down in a time-intensive way. Zac Posen offered board-straight locks, the better to accentuate many of the models’ razor-cut bangs (stil in.) Versace likewise went for straight hair, albeit with some sexy, mid ‘60s rollers & hairspray body to it; back at Gucci, meanwhile, the hair was downright decadent, works of curling iron art that only pull off at the salon. Stick with the ponytail: Frankly, the big hair story for next season is hat head.

A few recommended products:

1. The Red Lip: Vincent Longo’s Velvet Riche Rejuvenating Lipstick is creamy and conditioning; Dakota Red is an almost universally flattering dark red, while punchier Fore-Plush is au courant. Finish either with Benefit’s She-Laq, which seals lipstick in place and stops bleeding.
2. The Nude Lip: Nars’s Belle de Jour lipstick has the power to erase your lips utterly; bring them back by blending with the brand’s Borneo liner.
3. Hair: Up or down, one thing all this season’s hair had going on was shine. Bumble and bumble Shine spray works wonders post-styling; for seriously frazzled, frizzed-out hair, invest in Fekkai’s Overnight Hair Repair.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

FASHION THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

In a season of grown-up clothes, it’s only fitting that several young designers would do some growing up, too. Fall 2007 vaulted no newcomers to celebrity status?there were no Zac Posens or Proenza Schoulers or Thakoons out dazzling the crowd, but this season was adamantly not about dazzle. Instead, several winning young designers set about soberly finding themselves, translating the individual idioms of their respective styles into collections that were focused and mature.

The hottest newcomer by far was Chris Benz, a Parsons grad whose debut collection was preceded by two years in the J. Crew trenches. That experience showed in the clothes?a collection of preppy-gone-to-seed sportswear saved from banality by the unexpected cut of Benz’s trousers, and the designer’s remarkably savvy use of oddball colors and color combinations.

Californian by way of Paris, Erin Fetherston has made her reputation on both her floaty clothes and the famous people who wear them. This season, for example, pal Zooey Deschanel sang at Fetherston’s show. Her dresses, in particular, were undeniably pretty, and Fetherston brought enough imagination to her collections to keep people intrigued. This season, shetoughened up: Though a sense of romance pervaded the collection, her palazzo trousers and short wool dresses seemed made, at last, for girls who live on earth, and not in fantasy.

Yigal Azrouel is an established designer?he has a shop in New York City’s hip Meatpacking District, and his clothes retail at upscale stores nationwide. But the Yigal Azrouel identity has always been hard to pinpoint; his clothes were wearable, uptown sleek done with downtown panache, but they were also anonymous. Now he’s made a plus of that minus, fleshing out the neutral palette and draping ideas of his spring show by aggressively working the idea of luxe separates?clothes meant to jigsaw together any which way. It worked because each piece Azrouel did, he did right: It was a collection to covet.

After an ersatz show last season, Brian Reyes reemerged for Fall with his strongest collection yet, one that married his love of preppy dressing to a strong sense of geometry. Particular standouts include his cocoon coats in windowpane checks, flirty print dresses and metallic sacks and shifts. The show had an interior coherence, suggesting Art Deco architecture here, and its contemporaneous street style there, and overall, the trade between sculptural looks and vintage-inspired one reemphasized that Brian Reyes is a designer who understands our own mix-and-match times.

Canadian designer Jeremy Laing emerged in New York a couple years ago, following stints at London’s Preen and at Alexander McQueen. His clothes were always more conservative than that pedigree would suggest, but also just as immaculately and innovatively cut as that pedigree would allow you to hope. This season was a leap forward for Laing: He took two fundamental ideas, curvy, body-conscious dressing on the one hand, and abstract, origami-inspired details on the other, and worked both those ideas out individually and together for a show that was consummately, coolly elegant.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

PLAYLIST SAO PAULO

London should be nervous. Milan, too, for that matter. One city or the other is likely to topple as a fashion capital in the next decade or so, London because the new talent keeps leaving, Milan because they can’t seem to find any new talent at all. The fashion week that will emerge in place of one or the other, or possibly both, is Sao Paulo’s. Latin America is desperately seeking a style hub, and Sao Paulo, the capital of a country with two world-class cities, has recently come into its own, fashion-wise. For proof, look no further than the shop recently opened there by trend-setting design collective Surface 2 Air; the other two shops are in Paris and New York. Sao Paulo’s fashion week is larger and more interesting every season, and can already claim one breakout star in Alexandre Herchcovitch; Brazil’s impact on fashion can, moreover, be felt worldwide via its export of models. Presuming the country continues to produce leggy, Amazonian beauties a la Gisele, that’s another reason Sao Paulo is set to conquer: For one week at least, the girls get to work from home.

Playlist’s best of the rest:

1. IDIOCRACY Mike Judge hardly seems the likeliest person to start an anti-stupidity movement: As the creator of “Beavis & Butthead,” he added a lot to dumbed-down culture as we know it. That said, “B&B” was always more of a comment on boobishness than its most vocal criticsand fanstook it to be; moreover, Judge has more than redeemed himself with “King of the Hill” and the cult comedy Office Space. His latest film, Idiocracy, was buried by Fox on its release, but now that it’s out on DVD, Judge fans can revel in his typically perceptive commentary on modern life, disguised in the movie as the ultimate stupid future. Scathing, but also hilarious.
2. JEFF WALL at MOMA With this sprawling exhibition, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art pays homage to Canadian artist Jeff Wall, a force of pictorial nature who helped usher photography as an art form into its mature phase. At a moment when the hyped-up art market salivates at idiotic sperm collage, and its ilk, the Wall show is a welcome reminder of the beauty, discipline, difficulty and profundity of truly great work.
3. Chocolate Altoids Dark chocolate plus curiously strong peppermint equals deliciousness that’s not for kids. Sort of like a really pungent, really crunchy Junior Mint. But better.

This week, BurdaStyle gets serious.

TREND REVENGE OF THE NERDS

I really wanted glasses when I was a kid. Some character in a book I loved probably had specs; maybe Harriet, in “Harriet the Spy.” Around the same time I made my mind up that I wanted glasses, I also decided to change my name to Clarissa, indeed, would answer to nothing else all of first grade. My judgment as a child was dubious.

When I was nine, I got my glasses and I’ve regretted my imperfect eyesight ever since. Carol Gilligan has done studies showing that young girls in general like to appear smart they raise their hands in class, they suck up to teachers and get good grades. By junior high, however, the paradigm has flipped: Intelligence is a one-way ticket out of popularity. I was the kind of kid who read past bedtime with a flashlight under the covers, and until I had glasses, I guess I‘d wanted them as a badge of my bookishness. And that’s exactly what my glasses were. I didn’t mind at first at first, I merely discovered that wearing glasses, and needing to wear glasses, was a hassle. Only later did I see that having glasses made me suspect, a nerd.

I’ve had contact lenses since high school. I wear them almost always. When I do go out in my glasses, a half-rimless, sexy librarian style of pair, people often tell me that they “work” for me. Nothing sends me back to the contacts faster than that comment. It’s not like I’m shy of acting smart, but something in me doesn’t like to signal my personality in advance. Glasses match me too well, I suppose; they reveal me, and little of my me-ness is generally in vogue. This season, I think, is the exception to the rule. When Yigal Azrouel sent models down his runway wearing big, black-rimmed glasses, it struck me that a sharp tongue, a sagging bookcase and a subscription to The New Republic were appropriate accessories to the largely serious and, yes, bookish looks for Fall 2007. You often hear talk of a “thinking man’s sex symbol,” but Yigal’s show summarized the rise of the thinking woman’s sex symbol: The thinking woman, herself.

Like pretty much everyone else on earth, I watched the Academy Awards last month. I watched the show, and I watched the red carpet pre-show, and the after-party post-shows, and frankly I found the experience exhausting. It’s not so much that the year’s marquee nominees were kind of meh, or that the ceremony itself was so typically boring. No, it’s the clothes that did me in.

A few years ago, the Academy noticed that the audience for the Oscars was getting smaller. There are plenty of reasons for this: TIVO, box office decline, the fact that the show no longer promises much in the way of hoot-inducing dance numbers or epically wrong formalwear. The Academy pointed its finger at the competition: Too many lesser awards had stepped into the breach between the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars’ traditional late-March air date, and by the time the biggest red carpet of all unfurled, suspense had plummeted and the public had award show fatigue. There’s something to be said for this theory, too.

So the Academy moved the Oscars up by a month, and that’s why I’m screwed. The last week of February is Paris Fashion Week. Was, is, always will be. I have stylist friends who board planes from Milan with dresses under their arms, spend a hard four days in L.A. at fittings, and return to LAX the morning after the Oscars in order to make it back to Paris for Balenciaga. For me, the conflict is more temperamental. By the time the Paris shows start, I’ve spent three weeks on clothes. This season, much of the remaining patience I had for fashion was devoted to anticipating Paolo Melim Andersson’s debut at Chloe.

For the record, I liked Paolo’s show: I felt like he was talking about me when he described his muse as a girl who’s “angry, but funny-angry.” The genesis of all my hilarious rage is a story for another time, but suffice to say that living a double life has done much to augment my native personality. I’m a fashion journalist, yes, but I’m also an aspiring filmmaker. I spend most daytime hours thinking about clothes and most of my nights on movies - watching them, writing scripts for them, editing the one I just made. I don’t sleep much. Instead, I drink coffee and I smoke and I take scary amounts of Vitamin B and I have bags under my eyes the size of Paddington bags. “Funny-angry” is where I live, creatively, and my sense of style could likewise be described as dyspeptic. I’ve assembled a wardrobe that makes an art of looking tired, clothes that work despite dressing in the morning dark, on no sleep, by taking blind stabs into the closet. I recognized quite a bit of myself in Andersson’s marvelously awry collection.

The only way I’ve found to make this double life work, and to stay on the funny end of “funny-angry,” is to overlap as few of my obligations as possible. Two months of the year, September and February, I used to be able to absolve myself of film and dedicate myself to the runways and doing the work that, for now, pays my rent. Oscars in February muddles everything up. The biggest movie night of the year competes for my attention with the most important week of fashion, and I should be one place or the other, in L.A. schmoozing or making showroom visits in Paris, and instead, I’m smack dab in the middle in New York, leaving the catwalk dispatches aside for a few hours in order to show face at my friends’ annual Oscar fete. I resent the intrusion. And though I couldn’t help notice that Reese looked amazing in another Nina Ricci, and that Gwyn managed to pull off that Posen, the mostly yawnful fashion show on the red carpet merely represents an intrusion upon the intrusion.

I do realize that it’s asinine to complain of being pulled in two oh-so glamorous directions at once. But the very glamour of both the fashion and film industries is maddening, itself; working in either is like throwing yourself into a boiling vat of inadequacy. Anyway, I’ve made my bed, and as a general matter I try to avoid complaining about not getting much sleep in it. But at some point at the Oscar soiree I hit my limit. I was still preoccupied with Ari Sandel, winner of Best Short Film, and I was having all kinds of private conversations with myself about how much money and time he might have spent on post-production, when someone asked me for a critique of Kirsten Dunst’s dress. You remember - that seafoam thing with a Peter Pan collar and flapper feathers along the foreshortened hem. “Chanel couture,” I replied, by way of explication. She pressed me: “But what do you think?”

I don’t care, I said. And it was at that moment that I left it all behind, my mind ranging away from cinema and style all at once and alighting somewhere at the top of a lonely mountain peak. “You know what I want to do?” I asked the Oscar party crowd, generally, but talking mostly to myself. “Go skiing.”

That sentiment - go skiing - pervaded the close of the fall fashion season. Ski-inspired fashions were all over Milan and Paris; Lagerfeld at Chanel even set the show on a rink, and made it snow. More generally, however, there was a certain screw-it-all feeling to the shows, Pilati sweeping away the baroque flowering of spring in favor of clean lines and precision; Alber Elbaz exchanging Lanvin’s loud futurism for a quiet rebellion of silhouette; Nicolas Ghesquiere mooting high style entirely by showing streetwear remaindered from the more hipsterish boroughs of any large, multi-culti city. And Paolo at Chloe, nodding back at punk with those angled zippers and neon platform Docs. I don’t think that these designers are sick of fashion, exactly; I do sense impatience with the showboating aspect of the runway season, the transformation of an industry event into entertainment.

I sensed the same fatigue at Sundance, in January, and I sensed the same fatigue at the Oscars. It was written all over Kate Winslet’s face. She’s a serious and remarkable actress, Winslet, and I’m pretty sure she hates the part of her job currently devoted to modeling. It’s an intrusion, if you will. Every time the camera lit on her, Winslet would smile the same mirthless grin. I kept expecting her start laughing, furious from the lunatic absurdity of it all, the blandly glamorous dress and the endless red carpet and the billion people watching what is, in essence, a corporate convention. “Funny-angry” indeed. There are two ways to be mad.

This week, BurdaStyle takes off, goes off and gets off track.

This week, BurdaStyle takes off, goes off and gets off track.

ICON CLAUDINE LONGET

When I think about skiing, I think about Claudine Longet. It’s too bad that I do; if things had worked out better for the gamine Parisienne, if all she’d done was marry Andy Williams and croon basically anodyne love songs, I might never think of her at all. But apparently Longet meant what she said when she titled her best-known album “Love is Blue,” and after three kids and a few passable hits, she left Williams and took up with Olympic skier “Spider” Sabich. Then, one night in Aspen, she shot him.

I can only imagine that Longet was already a long way toward homicidal by the time she met Sabich; who knows for what reason. No matter how bad, one lousy relationship doesn’t make you pick up a gun, according to Longet because Sabich was “showing her how to work it,” and fire a bullet at the person you love. I’m not going to hypothesize what drove Longet to the very end of her wits. Instead, I like to imagine her as she was on the Love Is Blue cover, doe-like in a petal shift, and as I see her in my mind’s eye when she first fell for Sabich. There they are, laughing as they take the first steep plunge off the mountain, she so slender in her belted alpine jumpsuit, watching him ripple sleekly through the virgin snow, the most beautiful man in the world. It was all down hill from there.

This week, BurdaStyle takes off, goes off and gets off track.

BEAUTY AFTERBATH

Here’s the thing about winter: It’s cold. Newsflash, yeah, but for some reason I always find myself surprised and dismayed when the frigid weather rolls into town. I’m freezing, I’m cranky, I need a vacation, and so, in an act of perfect illogic, I take off for a few days of skiing. The skiing I adore, but inevitably I spend the half my time on any trip trying to make myself warm again. As a kid, I used to stop at the lodge halfway down the mountain, strip off my boots and socks and sock liners and splash boiling water on my frozen toes. I’ve always had a hard time with the cold.

Which is why I was skeptical, the first time I traveled to Iceland, when the guy I met there suggested a trip to the Blue Lagoon. For the uninitiated, the Blue Lagoon near Reykjavik is a geothermal marvel, a large sulphur hot spring carved out of the island’s lunar plain. It was the middle of January, daylight lasted an hour, and the wind could blow you backwards. The idea of an outdoor pool was, to cold-averse me at least, unappealing.

The things you do for love. Or, in this instance, a rather heady and hormonal kind of like. He dragged me to the Lagoon, I put on my swimsuit, shivering, and made my way into the water. For the first time in days, I felt warm, warm to my insides, warm in my very soul. As long as my Icelandic boy and I remained together, he’d bring me salt rocks from the Blue Lagoon spa, and I’d save them up: A hot bath with those rocks was just thing, après-ski, it brought me back to my senses. One sense - smell - told me that sulphur is rank. The things you do for love of warmth.

We broke up. The only tragic part about the break-up was that I lost my salt. I’ve tried a few other bath salts since, powdery ones that come in packets, and I’ve tried bath oils and bubblebath, too, and everything has smelled rigorously floral and nothing has made me feel summertime to my marrow. Then a friend introduced me to farmaesthetics, an herbal and all-natural skincare brand from Rhode Island. The line’s Solar Salt Mineral Bath gives my après-ski bath the same sort of earthy heat I’d loved from Iceland, but it’s better, because these rocks don’t stink of bad egg and gas leaks. Neither are they perfumed up with, say, lavender and patchouli. What scent they have I associate with the fresh, bracing air on the slopes, and the visceral feeling of hot tea going down at the lodge, and a good night’s well-earned rest, and happiness.

This week, BurdaStyle takes off, goes off and gets off track.

FASHION SPEED RACER

It’s vastly in the interest of the big fashion houses for me to say this, but Fall 2007 really is a major season for accessories. I say it’s in their interest because accessories are where the money in fashion gets made these days; whether that was a motivating factor for designers or not, much of the shows’ collective energy derived from fresh ideas about how to finish an outfit. It was a busy season for stylists.

In Europe, the accessories as well as the clothes took an Alpine turn. Miuccia’s bizarro Prada collection had one universal winner in boiled-wool, racing-striped hats that looked like ski caps. At Marni, Consuelo Castiglioni showed numerous ski-inspired looks, among them goggle-inspired sunglasses and webbed belts pulled around almost every outfit. Then there were the Marni moon boots: With a stiletto heel and platform sole, they’re probably hell for walking, to say nothing of trying to ford a snow bank. But that’s fashion for you. Bruno Pieters had his own, no more practical take on the look, showing red, black and gold metallic thigh-high boots with a high heel and a sporty feel.

Karl Lagerfeld, too, was definitely feeling the snow drift: His whole show for Chanel channeled Tyrolean resort living; at Fendi, meanwhile, he winked at ski chic by belting fur jackets with wide, neon logo belts reminiscent of parka fastening. Indeed, those snap-front belts were everywhere this season – big on the medievally black puffer coats at Burberry Prorsum; narrow around the waist of the ladylike looks Marc Jacobs showed at his accessory-obsessed Vuitton collection. (To wit, the show was titled “The Girl With the Monogrammed Handbag.” Vermeer was less the important influence than the handbag, never mind the mushroomy Flemish painter caps.)

Elsewhere, ski chic made an oddball marriage with the season’s other late-breaking, and possibly most directional trend: Militarism. Witness the boots at Lanvin, which like those at Marni crawled just below mid-calf for a new, sporty proportion. Triple-fastened across the front, the Lanvin boots suggested ski boot binding, but in shiny, blue-toned leather, the effect was of a punkish gendarme. Likewise, even the elegant dominatrixes at Hermes found room for a cuddly, winter wonderland gesture: Muffs made to look like clutch bags. And finally, thank heaven for Jun Takahashi at Undercover, and for Rick Owens. Neither show summoned a day on the slopes overtly; neither show was about accessories. But they had a wintry appeal of their own: Both Owens’s cocoonish shearlings and Takahashi’s razor-cut jackets with experimental, weather-sensitive linings had been designed, explicitly, for the weather.