WWDSTYLE A PREVIEW OF LONDON FASHION

WEEK:See page 2.

The Story Of O

PHOTO BY THOMAS IANNACCONE

Oscar de la Renta is ready to storm back into the fragrance market. See page 7.

FOOD FOR THOUGHTHeston Blumenthal has finally transported his weird and wonderful recipe book to London with the opening of Dinner, his first restaurant, located at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Blumenthal — whose dishes include snail porridge and worm pizza — has tapped into British history for inspiration with a menu that features pig’s ear and spiced pigeon.

The signature dish is “Meat Fruit,” which looks like a tangerine, but once cut, reveals a smooth foie gras parfait. There is a date of origination for each dish, too, so diners can taste their way through delicacies from the 14th to the 19th centuries.Dinner, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London SW1X 7LA; +44-207-201-3833. Open Monday to Sunday, lunch: noon to 2:30 p.m.; dinner: 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. AMAZING BLAKESelected works by Sir Peter Blake, the artist who famously created album covers for The Beatles and Oasis, will go on display at the Paul Stolper gallery next week. “Peter Blake — The Paris Suite” features 20 silk screen prints on paper. One shows gigantic butterflies flying around the Eiffel

Tower while another is of an elephant lowered on a pulley in front of Notre-Dame. “Peter Blake — The Paris Suite,” Feb. 18 to March 19, Paul Stolper, 31 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH; +44-207-580-7001. Wednesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

RUSSIAN REBELLIONThe Aktis Gallery in St. James’s is celebrating the defiance of four Russian artists — Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Oscar Rabin, Oleg Tselkov and Vladimir Yankilevsky — during the

era of Socialist realism. The show “Squaring the Circle” features their work from the Sixties to the present and their quest to express themselves freely at a time when aesthetics were in the iron grip of Communism.

The show already has garnered rave reviews, and highlights include Tselkov’s “Work” (2006) and Krasnopevtsev’s “Still Life, Stones and Skull” (1962). The gallery specializes in émigré artists from the Soviet Union and in Russian nonconformist art of the Sixties and Seventies. “Squaring the Circle,” through March 31, Aktis Gallery, 10 Park Place, London, SW1A 1LP; +44-207-629-6531. Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. CHAMELEON KARMALN-CC, or Late Night Chameleon Club, is a new basement store that houses seven concept rooms, including The Tunnel and Light Space, designed by set designer and illustrator Gary Card. Books, music and clothing are set within areas that aim to communicate various moods and influences.

Owners John Skelton and Dan Mitchell describe LN-CC as “an all-encompassing world combining the roots of traditional retail twinned with the progressive nature of the online boom.” The brands are an eclectic mix: Pieces by Ann Demeulemeester and Issey Miyake hang alongside more obscure labels such as Sasquatchfabrix. It’s an unusual retail environment, made even more enigmatic by its by-appointment-only policy. LN-CC, Dalston, London; appointments@ln-cc.com.

00 WWDSTYLE XXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXX XX, 20112 WWDSTYLE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2011

london preview

Eat, Shop, Gallery HopA few new places to check out during London Fashion Week. — Catherine Tipple

The Next WaveSome new names and faces join the fashion week frenzy.

JAMES LONGJames Long has already made a name for himself showing men’s wear in London. This season, the designer known for his leather and knit cre-ations is taking on a full women’s wear collection, too.

The women’s line was conceived because Long found himself selling a lot of his men’s designs — such as oversize, intricate knit sweaters — “to girls” he said.

“We thought maybe we should trans-late what we do into women’s wear, but with a new twist,” said Long, a Brit who’s a graduate of London’s Royal College of Art’s master’s of arts course.

The fall women’s collection will fea-ture plenty of Long’s men’s wear sig-natures, such as knitwear, embroidery and leather. His touchstones this sea-son include Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks and Nancy Spungen. He will show as part of the Fashion East lineup.

Among the looks: chiffon shirts with macramé details, Aran knit dresses and leather biker trousers.

“There is an element of glamour to it, but it’s not in-your-face,” said Long. “It’s understated, but still very sexy.”

— Nina Jones

ELLIOT ATKINSONElliot Atkinson, a graduate of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Art, is making his debut on the London Fashion Week schedule, where he’s showing as part of the Fashion East group show.

Although he’s a new name on the schedule, Atkinson’s fall 2010 collec-tion was carried exclusively at Browns Focus in London. The designer — who describes his look as “tough and feminine” — said this season he was inspired by the idea of “Americana,”

from elements of Native American cos-tume, to Westerns, to extreme body art.

“It’s sharp tailoring and shirts, and then mixing fabrics like animal skins against fine woven jackets — it’s a very sleek silhouette,” said the designer.

He has also refined his aesthetic by working with the stylist Vanessa Coyle of British Harper’s Bazaar, whose edgy look is a favorite of street-style pho-tographers. Though Atkinson has now planted his flag in London, he noted that studying in Edinburgh — well away from the British capital’s bustle — had influenced his work. “You have that space to really think about who you are and who you’re dressing,” he said. “You are really isolated there — that’s very me, a bit of a misanthrope.”

— N.J.

PRINGLE POWERPringle has teamed with master’s de-gree students at London’s Central Saint Martins to put a fresh spin on some of its vintage designs. As part of the Pringle Archive Project 1815-2011, students have reinterpreted argyle knits from the Fifties and updated the fit and colors for a collection of 14 sweaters in lamb’s wool or cashmere.

“It’s rare for us to get a project where we are working in tandem with a com-pany, and the students were very aware they were working on designs for the market,” said Professor Louise Wilson, head of the master’s program at the col-lege. “The learning curve was steep: One student’s design took 40 hours to make.”

The collection will be displayed inside trunks and wooden crates at a static presentation on Feb. 21 — in the same venue as the Pringle run-way show. Prices will range from 295 pounds, or $475, to 595 pounds, or $958.

— SAMANTHA CONTI

MR STARTLaunched three years ago as an in-house tailored clothing collection for the East London designer bou-tique Start, Mr Start is stepping into the spotlight with a runway show and plans to grow.

Its creator, Philip Start, who owns and runs the multibrand boutique with his wife, Brix Smith-Start, said his mis-sion is simple: “It’s about men dressing in their own style, but smartly — not schleppy.”

The runway show will feature tailored shirts, woolen outerwear, suits and cotton or silk ties. “The focus is on a beau-tiful fit. There is nothing superflu-ous about these clothes,” he said.

Start added that a women’s apparel offshoot is in the works, and will like-

ly bow for spring 2012. He said he hopes the runway show will give him the expo-sure to form partnerships, and open op-portunities with other retailers worldwide.

— S.C.

TALI LENNOX Tali Lennox may have been born into a high-profile family — her mother is singer and songwriter Annie Lennox, and her father is Israeli filmmaker Uri Fruchtmann — but recently she’s been seeking her own fame, as a model.

Lennox’s strong features, high cheekbones and willowy frame won her a number of coveted spots in the spring 2011 runway shows, when she walked for Burberry Prorsum, Prada, Miu Miu and Christopher Kane. She’s also starring in the spring ad cam-paign for Burberry, and has already appeared in Acne’s pre-fall and Topshop’s Christmas ones.

She said she’s looking forward to London Fashion Week, although her shows have yet to be confirmed.

“It’s home, so I get to sleep in my own bed, which after living out of a suitcase is a real treat,” said Lennox, who’s signed to Next Model Management in London.

She said she’s particularly looking forward to Christopher Kane’s fall show — either as a spectator or participant.

Despite the glam aspects of her job, Lennox is plugged into the more prosaic side of her life as a model. She cites her wardrobe essential for the shows as “Nude thongs — it’s very unglamorous, but they’re what every model has to wear for fittings and shows. I al-ways stock up before I travel.”

— N.J.

FOR THE FASHION WEEK CALENDAR AND MORE ONES TO WATCH, SEE

WWD.comNEWS/MARKETS.

Elliot Atkinson

Mr Start

Tali Lennox in a Topshop ad.

Oleg Tselkov’s “Work.”

Magnetism redefined.

Karolina Kurkova and the new CLS.

Mercedes-Benz – official partner to the

London Fashion Week. 18–23 February 2011.

www.mercedes-benz.co.uk/fashion

Agon, 54, has taken the Owen-Jones formula and projected it into new mar-kets in the developing world. Since becoming ceo on April 25, 2006, Agon has increasingly left his mark on how L’Oréal does business. For one, Agon’s acted on his long-held belief that glo-balization is among the most powerful pistons in the company’s growth engine. His wide-ranging focus has included driving sales in markets as far afield as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Vietnam, Egypt, Pakistan and Kazakhstan in the company’s quest of doubling its consumer base by 2020.

During a financial analyst meeting in February 2010, Agon said, “Our aim is to seek out, win over and secure the loyalty of one billion new consumers in these countries within the next 10 years and so double the number of women and men who use our brands and our products around the world.”

To help reach that goal, in some emerging markets L’Oréal has for the past three years been implementing “reverse innovation.” That strategy in-volves beauty products being developed locally for a particular region after in-formation about its denizens is culled in situ and then the products possibly roll-ing out worldwide.

Agon is also a firm believer in the power of “accessible innovation” to help broaden L’Oréal’s consumer base. During the February 2010 meeting, he explained the company calls the strat-egy as such “because our aim is to posi-tion the prices of new products in such a way as to optimize volume and value or, in other words, to find each product’s right price. The term ‘right price’ is in no way a synonym for low price.”

Another way to draw new consumers is through extensions into new catego-ries, such as deodorants, and accessibly priced products in existing brands.

During the worldwide economic crisis — when having a wide geographic reach paid off since business in emerging mar-kets helped offset weaker sales in more mature markets — L’Oréal kicked off an “anticrisis” strategy, which included sus-taining advertising and promotional in-vestments plus reducing costs.

Ground had been broken for all of this by Owen-Jones, who had spent his tenure perfecting what became known in the business as “the L’Oréal model,” which involves the company not only op-erating at different price points in the prestige, professional and mass mar-kets, but also achieving a rare global reach of enveloping brands. He interna-tionalized his top management, too.

Owen-Jones, who spearheaded L’Oréal’s U.S. business from 1981 to 1984, had understood the potential of American brands and, during his ten-ure as ceo, stocked the company arse-nal with acquisitions such as Helena Rubinstein, Ralph Lauren Fragrances, Redken, Kiehl’s, Maybelline, Matrix and SoftSheen-Carson.

The young ceo — always with a strong belief in R&D — saw the oppor-tunity of makeup with technology; put the company’s name on a mass color cosmetics line, and launched L’Oréal Paris. Later, Owen-Jones saw an oppor-tunity to break into China and Japan with a Maybelline mascara.

However, he also hit a number of

bumps in the road, the latest occurring in recent months as controversy swirled around two board members — L’Oréal’s largest individual shareholder, heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who was locked in a bitter three-year family feud with her daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. The latter in December 2007 had taken photographer François-Marie Banier to court, claiming he exploited the weakness of her mother, who had given him assets valued at about 1 bil-lion euros, or $1.36 billion at current ex-change. Banier denied any wrongdoing,

while Bettencourt maintained she was sound and acting on her own free will. But the scandal mushroomed, even en-veloping some French government offi-cials and brushing against Owen-Jones.

He gave an interview to Le Point magazine in September 2010, after news broke that he had received a gift in 2007 of 100 million euros, or $136 mil-lion, from Bettencourt, who also report-edly had bestowed a similar sum upon his predecessor, François Dalle. There was also the fact Banier had been paid 710,000 euros, or $965,536, yearly by L’Oréal for a decade, under two con-tracts begun during Owen-Jones’ tenure. One was for organizing expositions and the other was for the services of advis-ing in artistic matters.

In the Le Pont interview, Owen-Jones discussed having ended the contracts in fall 2010, a year earlier than their term.

“Jean-Paul Agon and I wished for some time already to stop them because the young, destitute artist from 1991 is no longer today neither young nor — apparently — destitute, but we were held by the contracts and didn’t wish to open a new judicial front,” Owen-Jones was quoted as saying. “The media buzz around this affair constituted a major case that allowed us to break the con-tracts in advance to preserve L’Oréal’s reputation.”

Earlier in his career, Owen-Jones had suffered other setbacks, such as a painful experiment in owning a major-ity stake in the Lanvin fashion house in the early Nineties. Then there was a brief flare-up of controversy during the

same period involving the World War II Nazi affiliations of former executive Jacques Corrèze, whose death ended the dispute. Owen-Jones confronted the issue at the time and took action. His performance was praised in 2005 when he received an international leader-ship award from the Anti-Defamation League in New York.

In the end, the man known simply as O.J. to friends and associates, with a penchant for fast cars, motorcycles and boats, compiled one of the most remark-able records in the beauty industry’s history. He not only built L’Oréal into a powerhouse, but ran up 21 consecutive years of double-digit profit growth.

One financial analyst, who requested anonymity, was somewhat surprised at the news that Owen-Jones would be stepping down in March, since his con-tract as chairman had been renewed to 2014. However, she said, “The chal-lenges L’Oréal is facing now are dif-ferent from the past and the market has changed dramatically since Mr. Owen-Jones was running the company. L’Oréal’s priority today is to return to growth, and it seems the board thinks Mr. Agon is the right man to deliver.”

Guy Peyrelongue, who headed the U.S. operations for L’Oréal for 15 years and retired at the end of 2001, said bow-ing out at age 65 is part of the L’Oréal tradition. Dalle made way for Owen-Jones, even though he still had plenty of vitality, and now the tradition is re-peating itself. “Jean-Paul is doing a very good job as manager,” Peyrelongue said.“It’s time he became ceo and chair-man. The rule at L’Oréal is normally to have a changing of the guard at 65. It’s good for L’Oréal. It’s now up to Jean-Paul to build another stage for [the com-pany].” Peyrelongue observed that Dalle had started building L’Oréal into an in-dustry heavyweight by making acquisi-tions mostly in Europe with companies like Lancôme. Owen-Jones completed the globalization by acquiring American brands. Now Peyrelongue expects Agon to turn the BRIC countries in search of acquisition targets.

beauty6 WWDSTYLE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2011

Our aim is to seek out, win over and secure the loyalty of one billion new consumers.

— JEAN-PAUL AGON, L’OREAL

Now the Agon Era Begins{Continued from page one}

Jean-Paul Agon

Lindsay Owen-Jones opening Shanghai in the early Nineties.

7WWDSTYLE FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2011

Oscar Reenters Fragrance FrayBy PETE BORN

OSCAR DE LA RENTA is back in the fragrance game.

More than a year after legally wresting his fragrance license back from YSL Beauté, the venerable de-signer and Alex Bolen, chief execu-tive officer of his fashion house, aim to breathe new life into the long-endur-ing brand that made a huge splash in 1977 as one of the first big American designer scents.

“It’s not that I ever abandoned the fragrance business,” de la Renta said of his namesake scent business, which has been sold and resold through the decades — first to Avon Products, then Sanofi, then YSL Beauté and, finally, L’Oréal. “But I’m really happy to be back in control of it, and we have plans to make it really great.”

De la Renta will make his reentry into the business prior to Mother’s Day with the introduction of an updated eau de parfum version of the brand, complete with a contemporary inter-pretation of the famous 1977 perfume bottle. The line extension is called Esprit d’Oscar Eau de Parfum. “We felt that the Oscar story was im-portant enough that we needed to tell it again, but tell it in the context of some-thing new,” said Bolen, who is leading the ef-fort to reclaim and restore the brand. The packaging of the fragrance’s eight ancillary products also has been upgraded and Bolen is thinking about adding more products to the line — a body scrub and a body spray.

Then, once the new edp has broken the ice, the house plans on launching an entirely new fragrance under the Oscar umbrella in September.

Bolen’s overall objective in winning the license back in December 2009 was to bring the fragrance business into brand-imaging synch with de la Renta’s fashion and accessories. During an ear-lier interview, Bolen said he started tightening up the fragrance distribu-tion, which now stands at 2,200 doors in the U.S. In a subsequent session, he discussed the design implications of the new edp. “The cap kind of looks like a ring and maybe there’s an oppor-tunity to tie our jewelry business and our fragrance business closer together,” Bolen noted.

“Our complete objective, very gener-ally, in doing what we’re doing now is to bring fashion and fragrance and beauty closer together. Everything we do — fra-grancewise, packagingwise — we want to try to have it hit on multiple brand points.” Elaborating further, he added, “We talk about fabrics that are twisted by Oscar to look like flowers, start to become things that are caps for bottles. So we really want to bring everything to-gether in our business.”

As part of fine-tuning the brand’s posi-tioning, Bolen said he has been “shrink-ing, materially, our distribution at all lev-els of distribution. For example, we were in 600 doors at Macy’s with the Oscar fra-grance, we are now in 200,” Bolen said,

adding that he has been working with “the folks at Macy’s, who have been great partners, to figure out exactly the right distribution for where we want to take this fragrance.” He said the new edp edi-tion will go to all the present retail part-ners, with an on-counter date in April. But a different distribution strategy will probably be employed for the new fra-grance in the fall.

“The Oscar fragrance has been and will remain the heart and soul of our business,” Bolen added. But it is the

franchise that has developed sprawl over the years with the addition of other fragrances: Pour Lui in 1979; Ruffles, 1980-81; Volupte, 1990-91; So de la Renta, 1997; Oscar for Men, 1999; Intrusion, 2002, and Rosamor, 2004. Apparently, the company will have plans for the other fragrances in the fu-ture, but right now the only non-Oscar scent on the radar screen is the men’s

fragrance, Pour Lui. Bolen noted, “It is going to get some focus from us.”

Through all the years of turnover, the brand appears to have held up. The en-tire global fragrance franchise was es-timated to have peaked at $250 million to $300 million in retail sales in 1989 or 1990, according to estimates by industry sources who calculate that the franchise is still generating about $40 million in retail sales globally.

According to the in-house team that Bolen has assembled to rebuild the business, the Oscar brand had a fairly good Christmas. “There were a lot of comp-door increases, which means definitely there’s a lot of life in the brand,” said Jean Hoehn Zimmerman, a former longtime Chanel executive who now is consulting at de la Renta under the title of executive at large in the fragrance division. She noted that the brand had a plus-40 percent jump in comp doors at Macy’s for the fourth quarter. Michele De Bourbon, senior vice president of U.S. wholesale in the fragrance division, said Oscar ranked in the top 15 at Belk and placed second in the Canadian market.

Bolen credited his wife, Eliza, the company’s creative director of licens-ing, with the idea of updating the formu-la of the Oscar fragrance to produce a scent that “is still recognizable as Oscar, but a little different.”

While preserving the scent’s floral oriental character, the top note has acquired a citrus sparkle, thanks to a bouquet of Sicilian lemon, bergamot and citron. The formula retains its flo-ral heart with Egyptian jasmine, orange flower and tuberose. De Bourbon noted that the base has a “creaminess” that “makes [the fragrance] very smooth, easy to wear and long lasting.”

The edp was created by Frank Voelkl of Firmenich, working with Ann Gottlieb. The fragrance will come in two sizes: a 1.6-oz. spray for $78 and a 3.3-oz. size for $98. De Bourbon said the company will use scented strips in an advertising and promotional campaign designed to make 10 million scented impressions. Ads are slated to appear in fashion magazines like Vogue, Allure, InStyle, Elle and Glamour.

Figures were not broken out, but industry sources estimate that the advertising budget could exceed $3 million and the target for the resultant sales increase is $25 mil-lion at retail, spread across the whole brand. Without mentioning numbers, Bolen said he hopes the adver-tising for the new edp will also spark sales of the old eau de toilette.

In his effort to recon-stitute the fragrance busi-ness, Bolen also has been busy lining up distributors: Hugh Winters in Canada, Kenneth Green in the U.K.,

Trimax in Australia and New Zealand, Essence Corp. as master distributor of Central and South America and Nobilis of Germany. There are also other play-ers in Europe and Bolen is working on the Middle East and Far East. Some markets are so important, they have to be approached directly, like France. “That’s taken some more time,” he said, adding, “we want to proceed patiently.”

We have plans to make it

really great.— OSCAR DE LA RENTA

The bottle for the new Oscar scent is a reinterpretation of the original (inset).

Jean Hoehn Zimmerman and Oscar de la Renta with Eliza and Alex Bolen.

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