A <i> Haute</i> Move for De La Renta
New York designer Oscar de la Renta will design two lines of haute couture and ready-to-wear for the respected French house Balmain, the fashion house announced this week.
De la Renta steps into the shoes of Herve Pierre, fired after 18 months as head of the haute couture division. Balmain said De la Renta will bring “new life and momentum” to the house.
De la Renta, 59, has shown his ready-to-wear collections on Paris runways for the past two years in an attempt to penetrate the European market. He will continue to design under his own label.
* COCAINE CLOTHES: Berlin airport police arrested a Peruvian after opening his luggage and finding clothing that had been steeped in cocaine, officials said Thursday.
A police spokesman told the Reuter news service that smugglers apparently dissolved more than 10 pounds of cocaine in water, soaked 60 pieces of clothing in the solution and dried them.
* RICH STAPLES: When it comes to food, Rodeo Drive conjures images of caviar, not macaroni and dried beans. But Monday, shop owners on the glitzy street are urging their workers to contribute such staples to a Thanksgiving food drive benefiting the Westside Food Bank. Appropriately, one of the street’s vacant stores--formerly housing the incredibly pricey Torrey Steele boutique--will serve as a collection center.
* CLEAN AND GREEN: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly gave the shirt off his back this week to help promote an environmentally safe dry-cleaning process that avoids dangerous pollutants.
Reilly dropped off his clothes at a Washington demonstration project that uses heat, steam and biodegradable soaps to clean clothes, avoiding the chemical percholoroethylene (perc), a chlorinated solvent used by 82% of U.S. dry cleaners.
Perc is listed as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA will study the risk, cost, performance and energy use of the alternative process. Many German cleaners already offer the alternative steam-cleaning process, and it has been used in Britain for specialty clothing for more than 60 years.
* DEATH AND TAXIS: Faced with massive inheritance taxes, Germany’s widowed “punk” Princess Gloria raked in a very respectable $13.7 million this week from the sale of such modest family heirlooms as a jewel-encrusted snuff box made for Frederick the Great of Prussia. A London dealer forked over $1.76 million for the snuff box at a Geneva auction, conducted by Sotheby’s, that drew a crowd of 1,400--including European and Arab nobility.
A pearl and diamond tiara ordered by Napoleon III for his wife, Empress Eugenie, was bought by the Society of the Friends of the Louvre for $649,000 and will be exhibited in the Paris museum.
Princess Gloria of the Thurn und Taxis family, known as the “punk princess” because of her extravagant hairstyles and love of motorcycles and parties, has been criticized in Germany for “selling off the family jewels.” She says the proceeds are needed to pay huge inheritance taxes due on the estate of Prince Johannes, whom she married in 1980 and who died 10 years later, leaving her as trustee for their 9-year-old son, Albert.
* CRIMES OF BATMAN: Youngsters at a Dallas day-care center were duped out of money by a bogus Batman and Catwoman, who posed as members of the police department’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.
DARE, a nationwide program intended to deter children from using drugs, sends an officer and his wife dressed as Batman and Catwoman to speak at area schools.
The day-care center was contacted Oct. 1 by a woman who identified herself as Jacqueline Pogue. The woman said that for a $50 fee, Batman and Catwoman would come to the school and deliver a lecture, then pose for pictures with students for $7 each, police said.
The not-so-dynamic duo showed up Oct. 9, and after a lecture posed for photos with about two dozen of the center’s 80 students.
Four days later, the school received a call from the pair, who said the film they shot had not developed properly. That was the last the center heard from them. They got away with $182.
