Yasmin Le Bon

>> This season, Stella McCartney decided to forgo her usual show in Paris for an intimate — and unorthodox — dinner presentation at London Fashion Week. Around 100 guests — including Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, Yasmin Le Bon, and Rihanna — attended the Saturday evening event, which began with a magic show and finished with a formal jazz band. The real excitement, however, came with the presentation of McCartney's Fall 2012 collection. While guests dined unassumingly at their tables, models burst forth from the crowd — flash mob-style — in an energetic display of table-dancing, chair-passing, and rowdy hip-shaking. "It was nice to see something different, something dramatic. The clothes looked great," guest Bianca Jagger exclaimed.

>> Five of the original supermodels — Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Yasmin Le Bon, Cindy Crawford, and Eva Herzigova — teamed up with Duran Duran in June to shoot the music video for the band's upcoming single, "Girl Panic!" . . . and the December 2011 issue of Harper's Bazaar UK has a first look.

As Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes explained of the project, "Harper's had approached us about collaborating with the magazine on something really special when the new album came out. I’d had this crazy idea for a video for the song 'Girl Panic!', that looked fantastic on paper, but that I thought in reality would be impossible to pull off. The idea was to re-create a day in the life of the band, with five of the world’s greatest supermodels playing all of us. Lucy [Yeomans, editor of Harper's Bazaar UK] loved the idea of doing a cover shoot within the video itself — and so it all began."

On the cover, the five supers wear black Dolce & Gabbana corsets — designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were also on set for the shoot — and then inside, transform into Duran Duran band members, with Campbell playing lead singer Simon Le Bon.

The "Girl Panic!" video, which was directed by Jonas Ackerlund — who also did Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" and "Telephone" music videos — is expected to be serialized virally online before premiering in whole later this year. See the first, below.

>> On Monday, supermodels Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova, and Helena Christensen flew in to join Yasmin Le Bon on the two-day shoot of Duran Duran's upcoming music video for "Girl Panic." Directed by Jonas Ackerlund (who did Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" video and the recent Kate Moss Dior Addict commercial), the video was filmed in central London "at a posh hotel," with Crawford riding in the back of a Rolls Royce and the supermodels performing as the band.

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were also on the set, which doubled as a cover shoot for Harper's Bazaar UK. The magazine's editor Lucy Yeomans Tweeted: "Longest, latest Bazaar shoot in history. Didn't start on cover til 1am & got home at 4, but utterly worth it. One more day to go..." And later: "This has to have been one of the most extraordinary days of my life. A little bit of fashion history made!" The video is expected to be serialized virally online before premiering in whole later this year.

Photos from the set, as snapped by Gabbana and Duran Duran, in the gallery.

UPDATE: Images from the set removed upon request.

>> Roberto Cavalli reportedly spent about $2 million on his 40th anniversary bash held last night at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris — and that doesn't include the budget allotted to bringing Natalia Vodianova (and perhaps some of the other 1,200 attendees) to the party. As the New York Times's Eric Wilson wrote: "It was one of those fashion parties that felt like another era, when it was possible to enjoy such extravagance without wondering how a designer could possibly be selling enough animal-printed evening gowns and exuberantly distressed denim to afford it all."

Kylie Minogue performed, the walls were lined with Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott's images of models in Cavalli, and Heidi Klum introduced the designer as a four-tier, 10-foot birthday cake covered in sparklers was wheeled onto the stage. But even through all that, Cavalli, almost 70, admitted he's not the party animal he used to be: “Don’t say it, don’t say it, please, because the people should still dream with me,” he said. “The young should think that, instead of sparkling water, I drink Krug, or that I still smoke 10 Cuban cigars every day.”

>> In honor of Lanvin's first London store, Alber Elbaz — who is apparently on a post-show, protein-only diet — flew in to give a guided tour of his Spring 2009 collection.  During the day, there was a "girls only" policy, but at night, the ladies — Alexandra Shulman, Yasmin Le Bon, Anouck Lepere — were joined by the menfolk — Jefferson Hack, Juergen Teller, Jonathan Newhouse.  Microphone in hand, Elbaz had the audience "in stitches," according to WWD, as he cracked jokes while presenting: “I dress women. I don’t undress them — unfortunately. My mother would be happy if I did.”

As for his denim collaboration with Acne: “It’s so nice when Acne tells me, ‘No problem, we can do that.’ I live in Paris, where you ask a cab driver to take you somewhere and he says ‘No.’”  When he introduced Anna de Rijk, hot off the runway, as his bride, he joked on his decision to carry wedding dress in the store: “I have friends — Liz Taylor types — who are on their third and fourth weddings. They tell me they need a different dress for each one.”  And to wrap it up, a little comment on what women want: “Next to chocolate or a rose, I think the only thing that can make a woman happy is maybe a pink dress.”
*image: source