We found ourselves in an empire state of mind, inspired by the rather fabulous TV series, by the music industry in general and the glamor it evokes as well as a new interpretation of deco style. We wanted to work on a collection that was all about the glitz, giving a modern, vibrant, yet no less elegant slant on dressing up.

What did you particularly enjoy working on?

For the first time we have used the ancient technique of cloisonné, an incredibly intricate craft found originally in Byzantine jewelry and Chinese porcelain. My very first experience of it was at the Met Museum’s Chinese Wing, and we managed to find a small family run factory that have been passing the skill down through generations. Working with them to take it in a new deco inspired direction was really exciting. The results are pretty good, too!

Which are some of your particular favorites in the collection?

Our Empire Bacall is a real standout for me. I love carrying it because it just really is quite special. It comes in a wonderful vibrant blue with a cloisonné peacock inspired motif that is just so elegant, it has this wonderful handcrafted feel to it and it stands out without being too outspoken.

Who have you designed the collection for?

You could imagine Truman Capote’s swans heading out for a night on the town to kick up their heels to a bit of a heavy bass and you’d get there!

How will you be wearing your pieces from this collection?

The collection found its beginnings in the Big Band era, in the time when going out was a magical experience and glamour was the order of the day. I looked to the supper clubs of 1950’s New York, to The Stork Club and El Morocco as well as to the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, and to the wonderful crowd that used to head to them of an evening – think Diana Vreeland, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack et al. There is something so vintage and retro about that time, and yet it’s still really the ultimate touchstone for glamour in all of our lives.

Who are we meeting for the first time this season?

Our Lady Luck minaudière is making an entrance for the first time. She comes in a wonderful vintage color palette with details inspired by old Hollywood era billboards and is designed to sprinkle a little stardust on any outfit she’s paired with. We have also given our Morley a makeover in jewel toned vintage brocades and lace. Some also feature embellishments inspired by the wonderfully opulent work of the jeweler Falco Verdura. It’s an unapologetically glamorous collection, and it really sets the tone for an evening.

Who do you imagine carrying this collection?

Back then, it would have been the social swans and the starlets! Lauren Bacall, Diana Vreeland, women dressed up for a wonderful night on the town and looking for a little bit of pizazz to finish off their outfits. Today, I imagine them for women who love the good life, and are keen to up the ante on the glamour front a little.

Do you have a personal favorite?

I’m really looking forward to taking our Taylor out on the town with me. I never met an animal print I didn’t like and I can just imagine her paired with my Le Smoking for an evening to remember.

Photo Courtesy of Balancing Acts

Recent inspiration came from a newly released book, The Spy who Loved: The Secret Lives of Christine Granville by Clare Mulley. Telling the story of the remarkable life of Granville, a British Secret agent and World War 2 hero, it got us looking for similar figures in history. Here are our picks for the books to read this summer that might tell you their stories. Theirs are stories of fearlessness and femininity, of boundary breaking in style, stories of inspirational women who crossed frontiers both literally and metaphorically and whose remarkable lives cannot do anything but inspire.

Christine Granville: As told in her biography, Christine Granville was more than just a spy. Polish by descent, this renegade and remarkable woman (thought to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Vesper Lynd,) joined the British intelligence at the outbreak of World War 2. She skied over Hungary and the High Tatras mountain range to regain access to her country before ferrying intelligence out for the British, she parachuted behind enemy lines in France to join the French Resistance movement, saved the lives of countless fellow officers, collected countless lovers along the way and charmed everyone from high command to Gestapo officers as she went, securing the release on one occasion of some fellow agents just hours before they were executed by walking into the local Gestapo office and demanding that they were let go. Awarded an OBE for her efforts, nevertheless after the war she struggled to make a living as a hat check girl and a stewardess on a cruise ship before being murdered by an obsessed former lover in London in 1952. A legend in her lifetime but, until now, largely uncelebrated, hers is a story of guts and guile, of a love of life and sense of adventure put to a higher purpose and deployed under extreme danger.

The Spy who Loved:  By Claire Mulley is available on Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Who-Loved-Christine-Granville/dp/1250030323/ref=la_B00356CF5O_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367226183&sr=1-1

Amelia Earhart – The famous aviator was a pioneer, a feminist and even something of a fashion icon. Born in Kansas, the lifelong tomboy took her first flying lesson in 1921 and quite simply, never looked back. The first female to fly solo across the Atlantic, she was an icon of the feminist movement, a supporter of Equal rights, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and a celebrity in her own lifetime. On July 2nd 1937 Earhart’s plane disappeared on the final leg of her second attempt to circumnavigate the globe as she approached Howland Island never to be found, cutting her life tragically short. Her legend and her inspiration as a feminist icon, however, lives on.

East to the Dawn, The Life of Amelia Earhart is available on Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/East-Dawn-Life-Amelia-Earhart/dp/B002U0KOJ0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374570422&sr=1-1&keywords=amelia+earhart+east+to+the+dawn

Martha Gelhorn – A writer, a journalist and generally accepted to be one of the finest War Correspondants of the 20th Century, Martha Gellhorn was known for her sense of adventure, her bravery, her style and her wit. Married for a short while to Ernest Hemmingway (she said she never wanted to be the ‘footnote’ to his life,) hers was a life of European wars, Parisian bars and louche London living, all held against the backdrop of a job covering every major conflict of her lifetime – as she once put it, “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.” From the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, Gellhorn followed the story mercilessly, blazing a trail for female correspondents the world over, being one of the first to report from the concentration camp Dachau after it was liberated and posing once as a stretcher bearer in order to be able to cover the D Day Landings of World War 2. Sharp, superbly stylish and never, ever shy of an adventure, she lived out her days in London, remaining indomitable until the end, once saying, “Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It’s great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I’m not complaining,… Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven’t done what they wanted with their lives.” What she did with hers is quite rightly legendary.

Martha Gellhorn: A Life by Caroline Moorehead is available here http://www.amazon.com/Gellhorn-Twentieth-Century-Life-Caroline-Moorehead/dp/B00AK3FAZC/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1374569669&sr=8-4&keywords=martha+gellhorn

Karen Blixen – ‘I had a farm in Africa,’ may now be thought of as the immortal lines from a film starring Meryl Streep, but their basis is found in the very real and remarkable life story of the author Karen Blixen. Born in Denmark, she migrated to Kenya with her new husband   Baron Bror von Blixen Finecke in 1914, where they bought some land and established a coffee plantation. After divorcing her husband in 1925, she continued to run their farm, whilst her affair with the dashing Denys Finch Hatten (later immortalised in the film made of her memoir of the time, Out of Africa,) has become the stuff of romantic legend. In 1931, thanks largely to the Great Depression, Blixen was forced to sell her farm and return home. To this day, the area around it’s location in Kenya is known as Karen. Once home, she became a writer, publishing several books and becoming nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is, however, for her adventures in Africa that she remains best known. Of her journey to that then very far away place she once wrote, “Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!” It is for precisely that sense of freedom and not giving a damn for conventions that she is still so celebrated today.

Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa is available here http://www.amazon.com/Out-Africa-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141183330/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374570005&sr=1-6&keywords=karen+blixen

Beryl Markham: This British born adventuress was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya, the first woman to fly east to west solo over the Atlantic, an eccentric and an author of an unputdownable memoir. Brought up in Kenya by her father (her mother moved back to England a short while after the family’s relocation,) she was a famous beauty, married three times and had famous affairs with the Duke of Gloucester and Denys Finch Hatten (Karen Blixen’s lover.) She learnt to fly in Kenya, working for a while as a spotter for big game hunters on safari before becoming the first woman to gain a commercial pilot’s licence. In 1936 she set out in her plane to cross the Atlantic, crash landing in Canada and falling short of her original New York destination, but nevertheless completing her quest. She lived until the age of 83, training horses for the rest of her career. Her memoirs went on to become a bestselling book. Her story is as gripping today as it every was.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham is available here http://www.amazon.com/West-Night-Beryl-Markham/dp/1578989531

Launching next week, specialist online vintage fashion auction house Kerry Taylor are selling some key pieces of Vreeland’s personal wardrobe, available for the first time ever. Taking in such design classics as a couture, be-jewelled velvet Saint Laurent evening ensemble created especially for her to wear to the Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Royal India’ exhibition opening in 1985 and a 1968 YSL Safari jacket, plus her famous ivory cigarette holder, it’s a small selection of items that not only perfectly reflect Vreeland’s sense of style but also serve as design classics that would be amazing additions to any modern wardrobe.

Click through our gallery above for some of our very favorite Vreeland images and words of wisdom.

Select items from Diana Vreeland’s wardrobe are available to bid on at auction at Kerry Taylor’s Passion for Fashion Sale launching on 25th June here http://www.kerrytaylorauctions.com/sales/

Growing up the youngest of six sisters (her brother, Tom, was killed in the war,) Debo had an idyllic, bucolic old fashioned English childhood in Gloucestershire. Soon, however, theirs was a family that grabbed headlines. Her sister Unity became famous for supporting Hitler during the war, the eldest, Diana, a renowned beauty, married Oswald Moseley, head of Britain’s Fascist Party, and ended up interned in prison for the duration of the conflict, whilst Nancy wrote novels closely parodying her family (The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate,) and Jessica, (or ‘Decca’) eloped, joining the Spanish Civil war before becoming a Communist and an author. Debo followed the least shocking route, marrying the dashing Andrew Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, a man who inherited both his title and the beautiful and extremely sprawling Chatsworth Estate that went with it after his older brother Billy was killed in the war.

The Duchess and her Duke soon set about reviving Chatsworth, a neo Classical splendour perched in the middle of the Lake District, and on the edge of the River Derwent. They inherited a 297 room pile deeply in debt and struggling to survive, and transformed it into a thriving business with 600,000 visitors a year. With it’s rambling parkland, exquisite interiors and extraordinary Old Master’s collection, the house quickly became a must see in Britain, and with it’s fame, rose that of it’s Chateleine, too. Known for her wit, the circles she ran in and her English sense of style, the Duchess herself became almost as famous as the house she ran. An author of several books (her latest, Wait for Me, is her memoirs,) hers is a life full of stories. She danced with Kennedy, knows the Queen, was photographed by Cecil Beaton, has been shot for Vogue, is a huge fan of Elvis, loves keeping chickens and was painted by her good friend Lucien Freud.

Today, her son having moved into the big house following her husband’s death in 2004, The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire lives on the Chatsworth Estate, in the Old Vicarage at Edensor, about a mile down the road. Photographed for W Magazine by Simon Upton, who she also collaborated with on a beautiful book on the estate, the heavenly house is in some ways an homage to her life. Apple green hallways, a sitting room full of books, pale pink bathrooms, walls chock full of prints, a garden full of chickens and a heavenly blue and white dining room are all perfectly imperfect, full of the stories of a very full life. Stuffed full of collected artworks and nick nacks (there’s room for a picture of Elvis, her ultimate hero, on the mantlepiece in her Drawing room still today,) her nest displays colour and charm in equal and plentiful parts. Much like the lady herself.

Pictures: All photographs by Simon Upton as featured in W Magazine

http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/archive/home_devonshire

Find The Duchess of Devonshire’s books here:

http://www.amazon.com/Wait-Me-Memoirs-Deborah-Mitford/dp/B00969INPU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1368589055&sr=8-2&keywords=duchess+of+devonshire

http://www.amazon.com/Chatsworth-House-Dowager-Duchess-Devonshire/dp/0711216754/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1368589062&sr=8-5&keywords=duchess+of+devonshire

These are tough times, and when the going gets tough, the tough get chicer by being resourceful and imaginative.

Here are a few favorite Iris-isms that mean much to me, and I hope will to you, quotations from assorted conversations with Mrs. Apfel, including one in particular with the interviewer Marilyn Kirschner.

Most Famous Iris Apfel Quote: ‘I am the world’s oldest teenager.’

The Cost of Style: ‘Today with places like H & M and all the discount stores there really is no reason not to be well-dressed.’

On Being Fashionable: ‘Just being a clotheshorse is not my idea of heaven…I’m not a fashionista…I love beautiful clothes, and I appreciate them, but…’

Her First Job: Copy girl for Women’s Wear Daily.

The Family Business: With husband Carl, the prestigious textiles and materials company Old World Weavers.

Trademark Iris Apfel Look: Her ‘Traveling Ensemble,’ a three-piece outfit matching outfit of coat, boots, and an oversized bag made from an upholstery-style animal print.

An Iris Don’t: Flip-flops in the city. ‘Everybody looks like they are going to the shower.’

An Iris Do: Accessories. ‘I couldn’t live without any accessories…Very few people are buying couture anymore and designer clothing is really beyond many people…but almost everybody, with a little scrimping and saving, can have an accessory designer piece, so it could be a bag or a scarf, or a pair of eyeglasses, but there you are!