(wwd)Lanvin to Open First New York Store
“We’re the last designer house in the world that didn’t have a store in New York,” said Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz. And now it has one. Lanvin is poised to open at the end of the week its first location here at 815 Madison Avenue near 68th Street. The store will occupy 3,550 square feet and the first three floors of a 6,875-square-foot, five-story town house. The two upper floors will become the company’s corporate headquarters in September. “It’s about time,” Elbaz said by phone from France. “It took us four years to put it together. We’re really slow. I can’t tell you how proud I am” that the store is opening. The designer said the raw space dictated in part what the finished store would look like. “I’m not very flagship oriented,” he said. “We don’t take a concept that we opened in Paris or Tokyo [and replicate it]. We have to go with the structure of the store and the architecture. Sometimes when I work with a fabric it has a mind of its own. I have to listen to the fabrics. Some are very stubborn. The easiest thing is to do a white box.” Lanvin’s flagship is definitely not a white box. In the main display window, Schläppi mannequins, their white faces painted with red cupid’s-bow lips, hold birdcages. The ground floor resembles a residential apartment from the Twenties, the decade when the house’s founder, Jeanne-Marie Lanvin, was at the height of her career. read more
(the cut) Six Things We Learned From Diane Von Furstenberg’s TimesTalk
Diane Von Furstenberg has been in the biz since "antiquity," she joked during last night's TimesTalks panel, which also featured Norma Kamali, Prabal Gurung, and Fern Mallis. And though she knows a thing or two about timelessness, as evidenced by her ever-popular wrap dresses, she also works hard to keep abreast of current social happenings (Twitter) and Next Big Things (China, for one). Best of all, she's never stingy with her two cents. Click ahead to read six pieces of wisdom gleaned straight from the D to the V to the F.
1. Leopard print will never go out of style.
2. Be careful with Twitter, lest you offend the Spanish government.
3. Fashion would exist with or without designers.
4. Soon, China will be buying our products.
5. She's kind of over talking about wrap dresses, but it's cool that women still wear them. Especially when women wear them and get jobs or get laid.
6. You don't need a signature look to survive in the industry.
click to read what DVF said about each.
(wwd)TJX Canadian Push
The TJX Cos. Inc. said Tuesday that it will open its first Marshalls store in Canada in the spring as part of a six-unit rollout in the country next year. Like TJX’s Winners, HomeSense and StyleSense nameplates, the Marshalls stores will be managed by the company’s TJX Canada group. Carol Meyrowitz, president and chief executive officer of Framingham, Mass.-based TJX, said TJX Canada provides the company “our highest financial returns” and estimated the country could ultimately support 90 to 100 Marshalls units. No specific locations for the Marshalls stores were disclosed. In the U.S., Marshalls is part of the Marmaxx Group and operates 819 off-price units in 42 states and Puerto Rico. TJX entered the Canadian market through its 1990 acquisition of Winners, which has 208 stores in Canada. Last year, TJX’s sales rose 6.8 percent to $20.29 billion.
(wsj)Wal-Mart Is Sued Over Care
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is facing a potentially costly legal challenge in Colorado, where a class-action lawsuit accuses the world's largest retailer of conspiring to limit medical care for injured employees in a bid to save money. The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart broke state and federal laws by using a subsidiary to control the treatment for employees with workplace injuries. Wal-Mart sent the injured workers to clinics run by Concentra Inc., which operates 300 medical centers and 250 workplace clinics in 40 states. The suit, filed last year in the U.S. District Court for Colorado on behalf of roughly 7,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees in the state, accuses Wal-Mart, Concentra and insurer American Home Assurance Co., part of American International Group Inc., of conspiring to violate a Colorado worker's compensation law that bars companies from dictating medical care for workers hurt on the job. Lawyers for Wal-Mart, Concentra and American Home deny the allegations. "The health and wellness of our associates is important to Wal-Mart, and we want our associates to get the best treatment and care," said Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter. Lawyers for the Wal-Mart employees suggested the retailer could face similar legal action in other states, such as New York, Texas, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa, and Oklahoma, which likewise bar companies from dictating injured workers' care. "The motivation here is clearly to save Wal-Mart money," said Solomon B. Cera, a San Francisco attorney on the legal team representing the plaintiffs. In Colorado, like other states, the law gives employees with on-the-job injuries the right to file medical-care claims against their employer. Most companies carry insurance policies to pay such claims. Wal-Mart is self- insured in much of the U.S., but uses American Home as its carrier in Colorado. Employers have the right to choose the doctors injured employers see, but Colorado requires them to pay for all "reasonable and necessary" treatment their designated doctors recommend, and to refrain from interfering with physician's care decisions. The state is the referee in any dispute. read more