Lights, Camera, Action: Watch the Met Gala
Red Carpet Live

The Scene at the Met Art Gala, photo credit: Kevin Tachman

Gunter and Bardot in Vegas

In his memoir Don’t Mind If I Do, the Hollywood playboy emeritus George Hamilton, now a ripe 72, provided some tips he learnt over the years for attracting the most gorgeous women in the world, including the hardly press-shy Liz Taylor. “A world-class playboy once told me that the key to mesmerizing women is to listen to them and look deeply into their eyes. It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten. My father also had advice for me. It was always important, he told me, to be a ladies’ man and a man’s man.”

“The playboys always married for a time,” says Dana Thomas, a longtime Saint-Tropez vacationer, and the author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. “They were hopeless romantics after all. It just never lasted because they all had wandering eyes.” (Rubirosa was married five times, Robert Evans, the American film producer, seven.)

Their fables entered the zeitgeist in the form of pop-culture swordsmen like Thomas Crown, Simon Templar, John Steed of The Avengers and, most famously, James Bond (played for a while by one-time Gstaad resident Roger Moore). “Why is this bunch of endlessly naff, morally dubious, sun-damaged sex addicts so beloved by the media?” moaned The Guardian recently. Well, because they were beloved by so many men who wanted to be them and women who wanted to be with them.

Today we are left not with real playboys but with synthetic playboy nostalgia. There is Mad Men and its paler imitators, such as Pan Am. Hugh Hefner, America’s home-grown playboy, is a husk of his former self, celebrating being ditched at the altar on the cover of his own magazine. Perhaps the phoniest version of the jet-setting “good life” appears in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s television ads for his Sean John I Am King cologne. Diddy rides a jet ski in a full tux, arrives at a helipad armed with supermodels Bar Refaeli and Ana Paula Araújo at his side, and strides through the Mediterranean in his black tie. If he saw it, Sachs, the impeccably dressed, tousle-haired heir to Germany’s Opel automobile dynasty, might shoot himself all over again. In his day, a playboy didn’t shout he was a “playah” he just… was. What the deuce did he care if anyone else knew it?

Some fabled playboys were born to the manor, and provided with hefty trust funds, but made something of it. As a young man, the Italian Casanova Agnelli, the heir to the Fiat fortune and one-time lover of the screen goddess Anita Ekberg, was provided a faux title at the auto company. As vice president of nothing, he was told by his grandfather to “have a fling [at the job] for a few years. Get it out of your system.” His allowance was $1 million per year. After buying a 28-room villa on the Côte d’Azur (as well as playboy pads in Manhattan and St. Moritz), becoming a Formula One race-car driver and ultimately smashing his Ferrari going 140mph above Monte Carlo (breaking his leg in six places), Agnelli grew up and “stopped playing and started thinking”. Under his run as the company president, he saved the beleaguered Fiat from going the way of the Edsel. Agnelli lived to a respectable 81.

Some had real life thrust upon them. Roman Polanski, Helmut Newton, Kosinski and the composer Serge Gainsbourg (subject of the new bio-picture Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life) survived Nazi and wartime threats, poverty or family tragedy, and still won fame and fortune.

Evans, the Hollywood producer of such classics as Chinatown and The Godfather, was “discovered” tanning by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When his acting career proved fatal, he turned to movie producing, and the ladies followed. His father was a dentist.

The message such men sent out was: This could happen to you. Even the talented Mr. Ripleys of their day, the skilful gold diggers, proved to be loyal friends, generous hosts, discreet lovers and, well, just too damned much fun not to invite to the party. Take Rubirosa, who wed two of the richest women in the world, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, helping to support his race cars and polo ponies, while befriending his country’s president, who provided him with diplomat-in-residence titles and salaries. Men and women alike adulated him, enjoying his “ride” in the sidecar, regaling in his getting away with it all.

Cheryl Tiegs and Peter Beard

The Rat Packer asked him how he kept going. “Your profession is being an entertainer,” said Rubirosa. “Mine is being a playboy.”

How couldn’t you like a guy like that, a throwback to Bogie in Casablanca, a ladies’ man and a man’s man? Rubirosa, by the way, exited the scene in 1965 in true playboy style, wrapping his Ferrari around a tree just a day after his racing team won the Coupe de France polo cup and celebrating all night at a Paris nightclub. He was 56.

According to Venezuelan-born Reinaldo Herrera, Carolina Herrera’s husband and heir to his family’s art-and-land-owning fortune, real playboys, “an unflattering term to be called in that day”, “were gentlemen, and often sportsmen”. Herrera, once an accomplished horseman, now a Vanity Fair contributing editor, adds: “They were interesting to be around. They worked but played well and lived well. They didn’t buy $10,000 bottles of champagne to impress a girl or their friends. They were brought up with an instinctive sense of obligation.”

“The word ‘millionaire’ was like the clap, you didn’t talk about it,” says Evans, who at 81 still counts in his intimate circle playboys such as Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski and Warren Beatty. “When money is everything, charm goes out the window.” Evans differentiates between style, a good thing, and fashion, a superficial thing. “Style preceded fashion for these guys.” Newton, the photographer who died in a 2004 car crash by the driveway of the Chateau Marmont hotel, in Los Angeles, was to the film producer “the epitome of style. He was the only person you couldn’t officially invite to a party because then too many people would try to crash it. He was that much of a wonderful charmer.”

Saint-Tropez acts as a bellwether of what’s been lost. It’s now all about alcohol-brand-and-celebrity-endorsed private parties, pop-up clubs and techno-Gaga spectacle and whirling choppers hitting the Riviera with the subtlety of a Transformers movie. Baggy shorts and backward baseball caps are the uniform worn by the new players, even at once-chic seaside spots like Club 55 and La Voile Rouge. This summer, the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin stayed in an $8,000-per-night suite at the Hotel Byblos and ran up a $50,000 bar tab entertaining a flock of models.

“I don’t go to Saint-Tropez anymore,” says Evans, who spent more than a decade hitting the French Riviera and staying at the once discreetly chic Hôtel du Cap. Evans says that the problem with the new-money players is that they’re money-smart but culturally anemic. The 10-digit successes have come so fast for them that there’s been no time and, for most of them, no inclination to pursue character-broadening hobbies like Lepidoptery or Oenology, or interests in Flemish paintings, Gregorian literature, the opera, learning new languages. No time to break Everest records for the Explorers Club or hunt black rhinos in Tanzania.

Have pity on the nouveau-riche playboys, for they know not what they do.

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal Europe, Copyright © 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Follow Mr. Glitterati on Twitter: @MrGlitterati

The Millennium Biltmore

I arrived the weekend of the LA Marathon and saying the property was swamped is an understatement. Amidst this hustle and bustle the staff maintained poise and managed to move an army of people rather quickly. I would actually like to commend the staff as they managed to remain friendly, capable, and timely. At onset the renovation and team members were impressive, however, once checked in and after arrival in my room I was a bit disappointed. The hallways, as some others have stated, carry an unfamiliar smell or odor, along with carpeting clearly taped down with gaffers tape and paint in need of rampant repair. My room, albeit very spacious, was in need of repair in many facets and the list is rather long and invasive. I feel as one renovation has finished, the remodel should begin.

Giving credit to the amount of effort required to renovate a property of this age and size, one cannot slight the entire property for peeling paint, odors, and yesterday’s technology. Nevertheless, until the “room renovation” occurs, The Biltmore will ever so slightly miss the mark.

The Smith Center for The Performing Arts

Taken in from the outside, the Smith Center for the Performing Arts is a statement of opulence. Defined by its art deco/Hoover Dam-inspired exterior and its major accent note of Symphony Park, it visually lifts downtown Las Vegas onto its shoulders and carries it forward.

Rising above all its design touches, lush landscaping, sculptures and courtyard to symbolize that is its Carillon Tower. Climbing 17 stories into the downtown sky, it is the center’s capstone, housing a four-octave carillon of 47 handcrafted bronze bells — nearly 30,000 pounds of them — that will ring with the promise a cultural nexus brings a city.

Surely, with Las Vegas’ Strip-full of massive, magnificent hotels that make for eye-popping spectacle and a global playground, the tower is comparatively modest, structurally. Yet for what it represents as a turning point into another level of accomplishment, it stands unmatched.

Though sparkling with surface sophistication that passers-by can absorb, it is the center’s previously unseen three performance spaces — plus the gateway into the largest one — that will leave visitors with lasting impressions and provide the most memorable experiences.

Thanks to a sneak peek given to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, here’s a look into the beating heart of the Smith Center for the Performing Arts:

■ ■ ■

Look up. That trio of massive chandeliers dominating the ceiling and a good deal of available air space? Seventeen feet long from top to tip.

With that, welcome to the grand lobby of — and elegant entranceway to — Reynolds Hall, the center’s 2,050-seat performance hot spot.

Slowly level your gaze to take in the expanse of the lobby, all 5,000 square feet of it — from the rich marble floor (Fior di Pesco is the specific style) and marble lining the walls to the majestic, stainless-steel staircase that widens into a balcony embracing and overlooking the lobby.

Staring down at the floor pattern from the 4,000 square-foot upper lobby, beware of dizziness. That handrail is there for a reason.

More than a well-appointed holding pen for patrons to idle before performances and between play acts, the two-tiered Reynolds lobby is its own experience. Flowing in its feel, the design eschews the boxy and rigid atmosphere that marks lobbies of many performance halls, its semicircular layout fostering a social atmosphere. (Go ahead, lower-floor patrons: Hobnob with the box holders.)

Emphasizing an airy vibe, the space features huge windows revealing dramatic views of downtown Las Vegas. Natural light streams through the staircase via skylights and circular twin cupolas, or domelike structures that are open-air, allowing views down to the main lobby (dizziness alert again). Beyond the chandelier behemoths that anchor the ceiling design, other chandeliers and lamps accent the hall. (Note the local pedigree: Though designed in New York, light structures were built by Creative Light Source Inc. of North Las Vegas.)

Further decorating the lobby are designs of the iris, the favorite flower of the late Mary B. Smith, for whom the center is named along with her husband, former Review-Journal executive Fred W. Smith.

Highlighting the lobby is a Benjamin Victor sculpture. Inspired by the Hoover Dam, the winged piece is depicted moving forward, representing progress.

Should you for some reason forget you’re at the Smith Center, its logo of architectural lines, inspired by the Hoover Dam’s penstock towers, is everywhere: columns, door handles, even carved into the handrails.

Abundant wheelchair access exceeds federal requirements, and the Smith Center has addressed the most vital intermission issue. Forget your fear of 5-mile-long bathroom lines; there are 66 stalls for women and 38 for men.

Lollygagged outside enough?

■ ■ ■

Certainly there’s a “wow factor.” Reynolds Hall is more an arts arena than a mere hall, a symphony of elegance in brown and beige. Contradictory as it sounds, the horseshoe-shaped venue marries immensity to intimacy, creating a cozy colossus inspired by centers from New York’s Carnegie Hall to Milan, Italy’s La Scala.

As theater designer Joshua Dachs, president of Fisher Dachs Associates Inc., told the R-J when construction began, stacking the gently curving balconies, rather than staggering them on an upward curve, was crucial to creating a shared experience for the audience.

“If you look around the world at theaters people love to go to, they all have a very compact footprint,” he said. “By stacking vertically, everybody gets much closer. If we took the same audience and made it with just one balcony, the room would be twice as long and patrons would be twice as far away, and that would be very damaging to the whole experience.”

Using state-of-the-art computer software, Dachs and his designers were able to virtually sit in every seat to gauge sightlines until they were convinced that they provided good visibility. Perhaps the only slightly compromised views are a couple of seats at the extreme corners of the hall, where the first moment of a performer’s entrance might be blocked.

Around 90 percent of the seats are fixed, but there is more flexibility in the boxes, where mohair-covered chairs can be shifted around for comfort, as well as making more maneuvering room for wheelchair-bound patrons. Boxes also have private anterooms.

Continuing the Italian marble theme are terrazzo floors, lending a warm, burnished feel. Design flourishes include sawtoothed patterns in the ceiling surfaces, disengaged pilasters on the walls and, notably, the music-inspired paintings of artist Tim Bavington.

They are, however, supporting players to the hall’s big visual bang: a ceiling light of five large cascading rings of opal glass set into a silvery metal armature and crowned by a glowing laylight.

Wide, deep and dramatic, the stage is equipped to be reconfigured for different types of performances with a fly tower providing space for sets and curtains ferried in and out during theater productions. Below, a full orchestra pit can hold a hearty 98 musicians.

Built for the Las Vegas Philharmonic — which is sharing Reynolds Hall as a permanent co-tenant with Nevada Ballet Theatre — is a “shell” that creates a controlled environment that will prevent sounds from shooting off into space, balance them and allow musicians to better hear each other. Housed in an upstage niche with an 80,000 pound ceiling measuring 60 feet wide and 40 feet deep, it can be lowered in place and secured by 13 wheeled-in wall towers.

Visiting performers are sure to be spoiled here. Defying show-biz tradition that usually relegates show people to airless, basement bandboxes as dressing rooms, Smith accommodations are hotel suites by comparison. Most are set along the street with plantation shutters over frosted glass, allowing the sun to shine through. Inside the “star” dressing rooms, showers, fold-out buffet tables, wall-mounted flat-screen TV monitors and plush furniture join the makeup area to make quarters so comfy that it might take a bit of cajoling to lure performers out and up to the stage.

■ ■ ■

Kindly walk this way as we stroll over to the Boman Pavilion, which houses the smaller of the center’s three performing spaces. Emanating a jazzy classiness redolent of the late Bobby Short’s legendary dates at New York’s Cafe Carlyle, the Cabaret Jazz room could create something similar for local favorite Clint Holmes, who will hold forth there monthly.

Intimacy is the key inside the two-level, 3,800-square-foot Cabaret that accommodates approximately 260 patrons and features table-and-chair seating on its mezzanine level. Performers including Barbara Cook, Branford Marsalis, the SFJAZZ Collective and Andrea Marcovicci will take the stage against a windowed backdrop to expose a vivid panorama of Symphony Park and the downtown area against the neon-lit night sky of Las Vegas.

With no disrespect intended toward the smaller clubs and restaurants that have nobly kept jazz breathing in this city, not since the former Blue Note has that distinctly American but neglected genre had a local home of this caliber, inspired by the Jazz at Lincoln Center program in New York.

U-shaped and radiating warmth, it is an intriguing layout in that the upper level, creating a double-decker viewing area, lends it a sense of minigrandeur rare for most jazz outposts. Atmosphere can match artistry here. Aficionados could argue that it is grittier venues — basement clubs and little performance nooks tucked into the urban maze in other cities — that gave jazz its authenticity over the years.

But there will be an undeniable feel here: that blue-light, late-night vibe in which clinking glasses provide their own musicality to accompany the music onstage.

Versatility is the watchword for the Troesh Studio Theater, a 3,000-square-foot space that can entertain up to 240 people and is designed to be redesigned from event to event to fit the needs of performing ensembles or community groups. Large windows can be covered to create a “black box” for smaller theater shows — including those by children’s groups — and a softer “sprung floor,” favored by dancers, was installed to absorb shocks and minimize injuries.

Dedicated patrons of locally produced theater probably will feel that the longtime studio theaters or “black boxes” in town — at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the College of Southern Nevada and Las Vegas Little Theatre — have a funkier, down-and-dirtier off-Broadway feel when compared to the Troesh. Here, the sense is more pristine as opposed to dark and contained, especially with those sizable windows.

Unlike those other venues, however, Troesh is a multipurpose space, meant for variety and a wider performance palette. Productions come in packages big and small, and this space is the other end of the seesaw from Reynolds Hall.

■ ■ ■

Opulence and artistry intertwine at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, as glimpsed in this peek of what could represent our cultural peak.

Whether the city responds over time to what it offers is the X factor — the city of gaming’s half-billion-dollar gamble.

BY STEVE BORNFELD
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
View original piece here: Click Here

Spago Las Vegas

Dining alone, I was offered a seat at the very outer rail affording great people watching. The wait was very brief which was a surprise as the restaurant was very busy and I did not have a reservation; welcoming staff that even went as far as to correct my disheveled lapel.

On the patio, the seating is a bit crowded for egress and passage, but ample for movement. I chose the Soup du Jour and Cascerecci Pasta à la Bolognaise as an entrée. The soup texture was rather thick, and hot but very, very flavorful; spicy a bit. I do not recommend this to everyone, yet those that enjoy a bit of “heat” and a flavor reminiscent of Jambalaya will be very satisfied. The Cascerecci Pasta à la Bolognaise was very good – not outstanding, but very good. The sauce didn’t bore or excite and the pasta was cooked just right, but didn’t “wow.” I didn’t catch the Garlic, I did however, enjoy the Braised Beef – and the Ricotta Cheese was most pronounced and flavorful of all with each mouthful.

I’m very satisfied with dinner and actually can think of no detractions. I suppose it’s rare to dine and the venue hit a mark where you are without comment beyond a great meal without incident. I must say the view, a meal that meets exact expectations, and a dialed in professional staff is a surprise.

A new standby has been located as the culinary fare is predictable and the view is worth every dollar.

Three Square Food Bank

Las Vegas has suffered through its share of challenges since then, but both the food bank and the annual event are thriving. This year, more than 120 restaurants plan to participate, and Restaurant Week actually is two — Monday through Sept. 11.

“We kept hearing that people were saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t get to go to all of my favorite restaurants,’ ” said Brian Burton, president and chief executive officer of Three Square, explaining the new two-week window.

Aside from the charitable aspect, Restaurant Week is a good time to go to those favorite restaurants — or those restaurants that normally aren’t quite in the budget — because the special menus created for the two-week period are generally priced lower than the restaurants’ regular offerings. Depending on the meal and the restaurant, they’re $20.11, $30.11 or $50.11. (For a complete list, go to www.HelpOutDineOutLV.org or www.ThreeSquare.org.)

“I think that’s what makes it magical,” Burton said. “It’s such a great value for the price point. They get a night out that’s very, very special for them and their family or significant other, at the same time knowing that that meal cost is being directed into hunger relief locally. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

Rick Moonen, executive chef of rm seafood at Mandalay Bay, has been a Restaurant Week supporter since the first year.

“I was tempered into the idea of Restaurant Week because we did it for many, many years in New York City,” Moonen said. “I was already really excited about helping end hunger in the United States. There’s a lot more than you could possibly fathom. Being involved in the food-service industry, having the luxury of such great products, I get to give back to the community.”

Moonen said he has long supported Share Our Strength, which “takes more of a teach-a-man-to-fish approach. Three Square is more food disbursement. That’s where it starts; therefore, I wanted to be a part of it.”

In addition to donating money to Three Square for every Restaurant Week meal sold, Moonen said he invites his customers to make direct donations to the food bank.

“You get another reminder of why you’re there,” he said.

Burton said the company that’s now MGM Resorts International “really was the catalyst that first year. We wouldn’t have had a Restaurant Week without them.” Indeed, a letter circulated by Three Square singles out MGM Grand food and beverage executives David McIntyre and Scott Hamilton for their early support.

But Burton noted that the event has moved well beyond the Strip, with the participation of suburban spots including Todd’s Unique Dining, Petra, DW Bistro and Create. And the website enables users to sort restaurants by cuisine, location or the size of the donation to Three Square, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to the price of the meal.

Burton, who started at Three Square on April 25, said he has had quite an introduction to Las Vegas.

“As a new member of this community, the thing that blows me away is just the amazing diversity of restaurants and the network of chefs and really how they rallied around the formation of Three Square food bank five years ago,” he said, adding that the food bank building, which has a kitchen as its centerpiece, was finished in 111 days.

“To think that this food bank started from scratch and the major donors in the community and the grocery markets and the restaurants all coalesced so quickly behind it at a time when the economy was really starting to slide, that all says to me there was a great sense of urgency in getting out to meet the increased need in our community,” he said. “It also spoke to the incredible compassion of the community. Becoming aware of hunger is a very real issue here in the valley — everybody realizing that we are part of the solution.

“Some causes are so far out in the future. Hunger is a solvable issue. This is something we can do together.”

Contact reporter Heidi Knapp Rinella or telephone 702-383-0474.

Source:
Heidi Knapp Rinella
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Richard Geoffroy speaking to audiences in London, Hong Kong, Paris, New York and Tokyo via hologram.

There are many places one could wear a sleek blue suit.

For Richard Geoffroy, Chef de Cave for Dom Pérignon, that place just happened to be a hologram.

Geoffroy, the tall handsome scion of a long line of Côte des Blanc winegrowers, was transformed into a foot-high digital version of himself for Dom Pérignon’s unveiling of its 2003 vintage. Geoffroy’s shimmering image was beamed simultaneously to press conferences in London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong, where myself and other reporters watched in rapt attention as he declared, “Yes, there is a Dom Pérignon 2003 and I am very proud to show you this wine today.”

Perhaps the simple announcement of a vintage should hardly warrant a presentation worthy of Star Trek, but 2003 was not just your average year and this Dom Pérignon was not your average vintage.

“The year 2003 has remained in the collective memory of all wine producers in France, and in the Champagne region.” explained Geoffroy at the press conference.

“It is a vintage that was a real challenge to create. The frost… will forever leave their mark on the people of Champagne. There was a small harvest, especially in the Chardonnay areas, and then a really hot, blistering summer.”

These circumstances discouraged several houses to produce limited quantities of wine and champagne — if at all. But Dom Pérignon pushed full steam ahead.

“For us, creating (this) vintage has always been more than just positioning. It is a commitment, more philosophical than just knowing how to deal with climate constraints, whether they are moderate or extreme like in 2003. [It was about] taking this constraint and turning the challenge into a chance of greatness for Dom Pérignon.”

Geoffroy’s poetic words about a glass of bubbly could easily fly right over the head of those, like myself, with a simple palette. And yet, once the audience finally got their chance to sample the delicious vintage, we understood.

Like a selection of suits for the presentation, producing a 2003 vintage was the right choice.

Source: Zandile Blay Founder of The Blay Report.com
Read the original article by Blay via Huffington Post: Click Here

What is the most impressive way to open a bottle of champagne? I present you The Noble Art of Sabrage

History

Sabrage is the technique of opening / beheading a Champagne bottle with a sword or a Saber. It's origins have been traced back to the Napoleonic Era and practiced to celebrate victory.

In those days the wire ‘cage’ around the cork was very tough and not easy to remove. After doing battle, the cavalry were hot, thirsty and also in a hurry to quench their thirst, which is what led to this impressive technique.

Technique

Sabrage is done with a slicing action rather than a chopping one. The sabre is slid along the body of the bottle towards the neck and the force of the blade hitting the lip (called the annulus) breaks the glass to separate the collar from the neck of the bottle. Due to the high pressure inside the bottle the cork shoots out at high speed and can travel quite far. The inside pressure of a typical traditional method sparkling wine bottle is around 5-6 atmospheres – the same amount of pressure as the tyres on a London double-decker bus.

One must be very careful to remember to slide rather than chop. Chopping the neck of the bottle will shatter a cold pressurised bottle, deluging the area and, what is very sad, leaving one with no wine to drink. A baptism of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir is perhaps nothing to complain about however.

Safety

One should be extremely careful regarding the safety of others (and oneself!) when attempting this ceremony. Whilst there is no risk of glass falling into the bottle because of the pressure of the wine, the cork and annulus at the top of the bottle fly at some speed. Always point the bottle away from yourself and anyone else in the vicinity.

Highlights from the 2011 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

Last night’s show, the 16th annual event for the high street lingerie powerhouse, offered no hard clues. What is certain, though, is that it’s the company’s marketing juggernaut. There is a reason the executives put on a show that costs $12million to produce, and it’s not just for the fun of it.

See the Victoria’s Secret fashion show

“It’s Show Time” was the theme of this year’s pageant, divided into six vignettes. Kanye West performed and he introduced a surprise appearance and performance by Jay-Z. The two hip-hop stars sang as top models Adriana Lima, Karlie Kloss (her first time in the show) and Erin Heatherton strutted up and down the silver glitter catwalk dressed as supermodel superheroes.

Victoria’s Secret Angels over the years

Unlike most fashion week runway shows, where dour faced models tend to walk passionlessly up and down so as not to distract from the clothes, here the models are encouraged to wink, wave, blow kisses and whoop up the crowd. At the end of the runway, there is more winking, wiggling – and at one point Joan Smalls pulled the rip-cord on her costume and a silver parachute inflated around her shoulders. Alessandra Ambrosio wore gold-plated wings that weighed 22lbs and were decorated with 105,000 Swarovski crystals.

What does it take to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel?

Orlando Bloom, in the front row, stood to cheer and clap his wife Miranda Kerr’s appearance in a Victoria’s Secret “Very Sexy” bra and knickers accessorised with a custom-made silk wrap and tutu. The designers had commissioned red ballet style shoes with ribbons criss-crossed up the models’ legs. Kerr’s came undone and she left the runway with ribbons trailing behind her.

Miranda Kerr reveals her $2.5million Victoria’s Secret ‘Fantasy Bra’

Maroon 5 performed their current single “Moves Like Jagger” during the “Angels Aquatic” themed portion of the show. Adam Levine hammed it up on the runway, cooing at his model girlfriend Anne Vyalitsyna and then held her hand as she walked the runway. Carine Roitfeld, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld and Patrick Demarchelier cheered and danced in the front row.
Straight men at fashion shows are a rarity, but last night they were out in full force. Self-respecting fashion people do not greet each other with the words, “What’s up, dude” but junior Wall Street bankers in conservative suits do. The crowd was full of aspiring Gordon Gekkos.

Behind the scenes at the Victoria’s Secret fitting with Adriana Lima

The booming voice announcing the start of the show called it “an unforgettable entertainment experience… with the world’s most beautiful women and the hottest musical acts.” In all the hype, it’s easy to forget this is a company that began by simply selling bras and knickers.

BY MELISSA WHITWORTH | 10 NOVEMBER 2011
Source

Ago West Hollywood

Also, as some others have mentioned, the staff did indeed speak Italian. The team was very pleasant and was very open to recommendations and advice – I was impressed.

I chose, with a bit of advice from our friendly server, the Pesce Bianco. The texture was soft but did not tear as I expected, possibly the sautée? The taste was colorful with the spinach and artichokes – especially with combined bites; I certainly recommend this dish. Her Paste e Risotti was great to levels of a cleaned plate as well. Moreover the team took it upon themselves, after overhearing a bit of our conversation, to gift us dessert.

Fancy a brief trip to Italy? Visit the outdoor seating at Ago in West Hollywood.