Valentino Garavani

Anne Hathaway explored the Swiss town of Gstaad today with her husband Adam Shulman. The newlyweds have been in Europe vacationing with their good friends the designer Valentino Garavani and his longtime partner Giancarlo Giammetti. On Monday, Anne took in the sights with Valentino and Giancarlo while Adam was elsewhere, but the couple was seen together today sneaking a sweet PDA. Valentino is especially close with Anne, and designed Anne's wedding dress for her and Adam's September 2012 wedding. Anne wasn't the only famous guest of Valentino's for the holidays — Madonna reportedly joined Anne at his NYE bash.

2012 was full of major milestones for Anne. Not only did she tie the knot in September, but she turned 30 in November and has been racking up critical acclaim for her role as Fantine in Les Miserables. The movie was No. 1 at the Christmas Day box office, making it a hit with audiences, too.

The rain didn't stop Sarah Jessica Parker, Rachel Zoe, and other stars from stepping out in NYC for the launch of Valentino's virtual museum at the IAC headquarters last night. Rachel Zoe looked glamorous in a beaded gown by the designer and was joined by husband Rodger Berman. Claire Danes, who's starring in Showtime's new series, Homeland, came out in a bright red dress. She wore another look by Valentino on Wednesday when she was honored at the NY Women in Film and TV Muse Awards for Vision and Achievement.

SJP pulled double duty with Matthew Broderick and also attended the premiere of New Year's Eve yesterday. She's been promoting the film all week with appearances on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and LIVE! With Kelly while costars Jessica Biel and Zac Efron have been making the talk-show rounds as well.

>> Next month, Valentino will open his archives to the world. Using 3D technology, the Valentino Garavani Virtual Musuem — found at Valentino-Garavani-Archives.org — catalogs over 300 dresses from Garavani's five decade-long career, including Julia Roberts's Oscar dress and the couture dress Jackie Kennedy wore to wed Aristotle Onassis.

The site, which officially launches Dec. 5, will also feature over 5,000 images and 95 fashion show videos. Giancarlo Giammetti, Garavani's longtime business partner, explains of the site's content: “Animated galleries show a life’s work, and key dresses have been photographed in 360 degrees. Click on them and they revolve to show every line and stitch. Click again and discover the history of the dress, who wore it where and when, see it in the amazing campaigns that we created for the collections in the late 1960s, 1970s, '80s, '90s . . . move through to other spaces leading off the sunlit courtyards under the Roman sky to new galleries full of photographs of friends, models, drawings, animations, videos.”

Garavani adds of the project: “I see it as part of my legacy. I am happy that thousands of students, young designers and fashion people will be able to see and study my work in every aspect of it, and in a manner easy and accessible for the younger generations. But it is also important to remember things of the past, to review the fashion that has shaped our lives. I would call it ‘Future Memory.’”

A preview video of the site, below.

>> On to the next: Not a week after Paris Fashion Week ended, fashion's attention has already been shifted to London, where the Frieze Art Fair gets under way today. Yesterday, designers Alber Elbaz and Phoebe Philo, art dealers Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld and Philo's husband, Max Wigram, plus Natalia Vodianova, Caroline Sieber, and Valentino Garavani were all spotted taking in the wares at the VIP preview.

>> To close out the Fall 2011 couture season, Natalia Vodianova invited a who's who of fashion to her White Fairy Tale Love Ball last night, hosted at Valentino Garavani's Chateau de Wideville estate on the outskirts of Paris. Her goal? To raise money for her Naked Heart Foundation, which has already built 60 playgrounds in 44 Russian cities.

She succeeded in pulling in 2.3 million euros ($3.3 million) from the night, which included a fashion show featuring 45 custom dresses created by Olivier Theyskens, Alexander Wang, Stella McCartney, and every designer in between. Although the night's dress code called for white or silver gowns, Vodianova, for her part, wore a scarlet Little Red Riding Hood-inspired confection by Garavani himself — the first dress he has made since retiring in 2008. “I always wear red to my events,” Vodianova explained.

A video from the festivities, below.

>> Elizabeth Taylor, she of the violet eyes, plunging necklines, and ostentatious jewelry, passed away this morning at 79. She first broke onto the scene at 12, in the 1944 film National Velvet; she became the highest-paid actress of the time when she accepted $1 million in 1960 to play Cleopatra; and her White Diamonds perfume, launched in 1991, remains a bestseller. But aside from all that, she was a Hollywood icon — the "beauty incarnate" to Marilyn Monroe's sex goddess, Grace Kelly's ice queen, and Audrey Hepburn's eternal gamine, as the New York Times put it.

Although she wasn't known as a fashion icon, she did have her moments: the strapless white gown covered in daisies Edith Head designed for Taylor in 1951's A Place in the Sun inspired the most popular prom dress that year, and the white dress she wore in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was licensed by its costume designer, Helen Rose, and sold in the thousands.

Valentino, who dressed Taylor in 1991 for her eighth wedding, said: “Liz is a very faithful friend. She can be the most extraordinarily beautiful woman. But what makes her a big star in my eyes is that she is like everyone else. She puts on weight, she loses it. She has depression, faces health problems just like everyone. It’s why she is a lasting personality.” A look back at some of Taylor's iconic moments, in the gallery.

>> Designers are well-represented at the Academy Awards when it comes to gowns, but a few made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles themselves to have their own Oscars red carpet moment. Georgina Chapman, Valentino Garavani, and Tara Subkoff made an awards appearance, while Diane von Furstenberg, Carolina Herrera, Jason Wu, Tom Ford and the like hobnobbed later at Vanity Fair's after party.

>> With Rachel Zoe styling her behind the scenes, Oscars host Anne Hathaway is said to be wearing up to seven dresses over the span of the awards. So far, she's done the red carpet in vintage Valentino couture and kicked the ceremony off in Givenchy couture. What might she wear next? Watch this spot, we'll update with every dress change.