There were a few celebs in attendance last night, including party host Neil Patrick Harris … who I finally got to meet last night :) After the jump, check out my pic with NPH and find out who else was at the shindig last night …

Now, I’ve been a huge Neil Patrick Harris fan for years so I was thrilled to finally get to meet him last night. While he played host, folks like Kellen Lutz, Gilles Marini and others (um, Ron Moss from The Bold and the Beautiful lookin’ like he walked in off the street from 1987) were in attendance to party … and shop. David and I also ran into new friends Emma and Josh who we first met at Alyson and Alexis’s Hallowe’en party on Saturday night. Here are a couple of fun Polaroids with NPH and our new friends Emma and Josh:

NPH was really cool and David and I got to chat with his boyfriend David Burtka as well. It was a really fun night … mostly because we got to spend more time with Emma and Josh. Unfortch, I was too bizzy socializing to do any shopping (boo!) but David and I did have a great time nonetheless :)

Tonight, David and I will be attending the LA premiere of the new film Dare which stars Emmy Rossum and Zach Gilford. Dare was written by our friend David Brind so we are really excited to see the movie. Should be another fun night in Hollywood :)

I have to say that I really love watching candid video of Madonna. She has so much personality and it really shows thru in this cute video. To be 100% completely honest, this video is the most interesting thing of the entire new Louis Vuitton ad campaign. The actual photos themselves are just … kinda blah. This vid is really cute. After the jump, check it out in full …

Marc Jacobs was so pleased with this spring’s Louis Vuitton campaign featuring Madonna that he was eager to do an encore. “But very quickly Marc said, ‘I want something completely different,’” related Antoine Arnault, Vuitton’s communication director. The new ingredients included a dash of Tamara de Lempicka and a soupçon of Man Ray for color-drenched images by Steven Meisel with a surreal edge, thanks to generous use of solarization, a technique of overexposure first perfected by Ray. “It gives something very graphic, more edgy” than the first Madonna campaign, also by Meisel, which depicted her as a French coquette in a Parisian bistro setting, Arnault said. The new spots, which break in a range of August titles, feature a variety of runway looks and leather goods, many in the house’s signature monogram. Asked about the impact of the first Madonna campaign, Arnault said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “Everything she was wearing in the first campaign was sold within a few months. People came into the store saying, ‘I want the Madonna bag, the Madonna shoes.” Arnault declined to specify budgets for the fall ads, but said investments would be “flattish” versus last year. “We’re one of the rare brands to have not reduced investments,” he said. Also slated for the second half is a new campaign devoted to the Tambour watch.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not too enraptured by this new LV campaign featuring Madge, mainly because I’m not really feeling the Photoshopping effect added to the photos. As you can see from these behind the scenes photos, she looked fine without all the color manipulation (well, as fine as a grown woman can look while wearing bunny ears on her head). Even still … these campaign photos will be seen in fashion magazines around the world for the rest of the year. After the jump, check out one more LV F/W 09/10 campaign photo featuring Madonna was that not included in the batch we saw yesterday …

She looks like an alien … but with a stylish baby Louis Vuitton clutch. That’s fashion, folks.

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As I mentioned last week (and is clearly evident in the photos), Maddy is rockin’ those fugly bunny ears that LV designer Marc Jacobs created for her to wear to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala back in May … an accessory I could really do without. This new LV campaign was photographed by Steven Meisel and seems to have a “candy-coated” feel. After the jump, check out a couple more photos from Madonna’s new Louis Vuitton ad campaign …

I have to say, now that I’ve been able to see the full set of campaign photos, that I MUCH prefer the last ad campaign that Madge did for Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 09. I do not really like the Photoshopped look of these photos. These photos have an interesting look but I think they’d look better without the color manipulation. Meh. I’m not a fan … are you?

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As you can see, Madonna is wearing the fugly bunny ear accessories that LV designer Marc Jacobs made for her to wear to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala back in May … which may or may not be a part of Vuitton Fall/Winter line. I’m not sure if I love this photo or not … it’s deffo colorful, heavily Photoshopped and not as intense as her last batch of LV photos. What do y’all think … do we like?

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As you may recall, we got our first look at the first images of the Madonna/Louis Vuitton campaign earlier this month so these new photos have yet to be widely seen. The setting and motif is the same … which I’m not sure it necessarily a good thing. Overall, tho, I really like this sultry campaign. After the jump, check out a couple more photos from this LV campaign …

Again, while I like these pics I think I’d like to see some diversity … they’re great photos and all but they’re all too similar, I think. I suspect there are even more photos to come from this new campaign … hopefully they’ll be a bit different from these first 6 that we’ve seen thus far.

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October 2008. Marc Jacobs is in a photo studio in downtown New York, stripped down to a tiny pair of American Apparel underpants while his naked legs are silk-screened with the words LOUIS VUITTON in fuchsia paint. He’s trying to decide if a cigarette would make him feel less self-conscious, in spite of the fact that he’s wearing a nicotine patch — and in spite of his new fabulously healthy and trim physique, decorated with and celebrated by loads of tattoos, including one of Elizabeth Taylor’s visage on his back. The lettering is poppy and familiar. It’s the graffiti done by Stephen Sprouse as part of the duo’s collaboration for the French house eight years ago. This time the graffiti is blindingly bright: neon pink. Stephen Sprouse died in 2004 at the too-young age of 50. “It’s an homage,” Jacobs says of the new collection, which features clothing, bags, and other accessories. It’s a limited release, timed to coincide with the opening of a Sprouse retrospective at Deitch Projects this month in New York and the publication of Rizzoli’s The Stephen Sprouse Book. “Stephen was one of the first people to deliberately eliminate the boundaries between fashion, art, music, and design,” says gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. It was Deitch who approached Jacobs and Vuitton with the idea for the collection. “And product,” he says, “is a great way to get a message across.” The story of Marc Jacobs, Stephen Sprouse, and Louis Vuitton began in the late ’90s, when Jacobs found himself thinking about Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who once sullied an image of the Mona Lisa with a funny little beard and mustache and called it L.H.O.O.Q., which, if you say the letters fast in French, roughly translates to “she has a hot ass.” “It’s about taking something that’s very iconic and revered and defacing it and creating something new, somewhat rebellious, and kind of punk,” Jacobs explains. “Cut from Marcel Duchamp to me going to see Charlotte Gainsbourg’s apartment,” he continues. “She had, by the side of her bed, a Louis Vuitton trunk that had been painted black by her father, and the Monogram was sort of peeking through.” Suddenly it was very clear what Jacobs needed to do. He needed to deface the revered and iconic Monogram canvas, and he needed to do it in a way that was modern enough to attract a new customer to the big old French brand. To do this, he reasoned, he needed Stephen Sprouse. Sprouse was one of the first high-fashion designers in the ’80s to make clothes that were painstakingly constructed, as well as hip and young and cool. A mantle, perhaps, inherited by Jacobs himself? “God, I can’t say that,” Jacobs says, still clearly in awe of his late friend. “I mean, you could say that, but I never could.” The parallels are difficult to ignore: “He had this desire to take what he saw in the streets and elevate it,” Jacobs says of Sprouse. “He was using all this stuff that was so costly, really beautiful materials, and he was doing it all so beautifully. There are so many people who try to affect a street style, but it doesn’t have the integrity. Stephen’s work was so stylistic, and it had street cred. You can’t calculate that. You have it or you don’t, and Stephen did.” It took some time for Jacobs to convince the Vuitton powers that be that scrawling all over their time-tested bags was a good idea, but Vuitton did, eventually, come around, and Sprouse came to Paris. The rest, of course, is It-bag history. “They thought the bags would be for the show,” Jacobs says, “or for editorial.” But as names on wait lists piled up, the bags were produced. And Jacobs was a genius. Vuitton did reach a new customer — $300 million worth of them, Jacobs has said — and has continued to do so through similar partnerships with artists like Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. Each of these bags has been a triumph. They have been shown — and sold! — in fine-art museums. Jacobs doesn’t live in a vacuum: He knows that these luxurious, spirited bags will hit the market at a touchy economic time for conspicuous consumption. But he shakes it off. “Retail therapy,” he says, offering his leg up to the silk-screen artist. “It seems to work. It’s not the longest-lasting therapy in the world, but it does its job. I’m not pretending to cure the nation’s economy, but we do what we do, and if people enjoy it, even better.”

While I didn’t really love the Sprouse LV bags and accessories the first time around, I gotta admit that I really like the new neon-colored collection:

As a child of the 80’s, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the day-glo prettiness of neon colors. Unfortch, tho, I thought that the neon craze was already over. That being said, I’m pretty sure that Louis Vuitton will have *no problem* selling these expensive accessories no matter what the economic climate is. And Marc Jacobs is gonna do everything he can to help sales … including using his nekkid body. After the jump, check out another more NSFWish photo of Marc Jacobs nekkid — this time without the bag to cover his naughty bits …

… that’s what his hand is for ;) I’m sure it won’t be long until we’ll be seeing these brightly-colored baubles on the arms of fashionistas and drag queens the world over. Love it!!

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When Marc Jacobs found himself in a meeting on a recent Monday morning to brainstorm about Louis Vuitton’s next fashion advertising campaign, inspiration struck. “I just blurted out, ‘I think we should do Madonna,’” said the designer, Vuitton’s creative director, mentioning he’d attended a concert by the pop icon the night before in Paris. “I was totally just blown away by it, and moved by her performance, by what she had to say, and her energy.” As the meeting went on, Jacobs tapped out a message to Madonna on his BlackBerry, and within about five minutes came the reply: “I’d love to.” The result is six atmospheric pictures of a smoldering Madonna by Steven Meisel that will break in a range of fashion magazines in February. “It’s a big change from what we were doing. It tells a story,” said Antoine Arnault, Vuitton’s director of communications. “This I think is an amazing coup, but more than that, there’s real logic behind it. It’s very linked to Marc’s fashion show.” Although Arnault declined to give figures, he said media budgets for the fashion campaign would be on par with a year ago. And he dismissed as “absurd” reports pegging Madonna’s fees at $10 million. “It’s very far away from that,” he assured. The campaign marks the end of Vuitton’s six-year collaboration with photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, with the parting characterized as amicable, and another reunion for long-time collaborators Madonna and Meisel. Jacobs last worked with Meisel in his Perry Ellis days. (Arnault noted it’s “very probable” Vuitton’s association with Meisel will continue.) The campaign takes the very Parisian theme of Jacobs’ hit spring Vuitton collection, with a smoky French bistro the setting, and the sepia-toned images evoking a Brassai atmosphere. “As cliché as they are, I love all these French references,” the designer said. (Although the restaurant, Figaro, is on North Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles). “I still feel it looks like beautiful, gorgeous Madonna,” Jacobs said about the images. “Excepting the references and excepting the clichés, this still feels very today. And it didn’t feel so much like a fashion shoot, it feels like portraits.”

The concept and photos are brilliant. When I first heard that Maddy would be appearing in the new Louis Vuitton ad campaign I thought, Why hasn’t this happened already? I’m not surprised that she would agree to appear in the ads so quickly but I am surprised that the six campaign photos were all shot in one day. After the jump, check out another photo from Madonna’s Vuitton campaign spread and read more about the day of the shoot …

The shoot wrapped up in less than a day and without incident, although Jacobs said hordes of paparazzi literally “appeared out of the bushes” the moment Madonna arrived. “It went from a quiet street to complete chaos,” he said. The designer also marveled at the singer’s incredible fitness that allowed her to recline, her back arched, on bentwood chairs, or shoot a leg straight up in the air, no sweat. “She’s so sure of herself as an icon and as a woman. It was her idea to do the fishnets,” Jacobs said. “What fascinates me the most about her is her never-ending energy, and the idea of becoming and changing. She’s an artist who’s unafraid to use her voice.” Arnault said the fashion campaign would appear “very strongly” in February and March issues and with few changes in media placements. “We’re staying on target,” he stressed. The first visuals will spotlight slouchy bags in monogram canvas and monogram-embossed leather, along with ethnic-inspired sandals, bangles and sexy ready-to-wear. In tandem, Vuitton will continue to run its “core values” campaign, with spots featuring Sean Connery, the latest celebrity spokesman, continuing into next year. Analysts have estimated Vuitton spends more than $250 million annually on advertising, most of it print-driven.

The old skool Parisian vibe is kinda neat … honestly, Madonna looks like she could be a performer in Britney Spears’s Circus (and considering how close they’ve become again in recent weeks, well, mebbe Brit has a job waiting for good ol’ Madge on her upcoming tour). I am very impressed with these photos. Photographer Steven Meisel is a genius. I can’t wait to see the other four images from this ad campaign. What do y’all think … do we like?

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MADONNA is being paid handsomely to be the new face of Louis Vuitton’s 2009 marketing campaign. The pop queen, who’s getting divorced from Guy Ritchie over issues ranging from sex to kabbalah water, is raking in $10 million for her modeling gig, sources told Page Six. And, despite online buzz that the shoot would be done by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, WWD reports the nod went to legendary Steven Meisel, who did Madonna’s notorious 1992 book, “Sex.” Madonna was seen last weekend cozying up with Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, discussing the clothing. Madonna’s rep declined to comment.

I understand that Maddy sat for a new photoshoot in SoCal on the same day that she was snapped carting around this LV purse from the Kabbalah Centre. While I think the shoot prolly wasn’t for her new LV campaign, I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before those photos get snapped. I can’t wait to see them … Madonna + Steven Meisel + Louis Vuitton = Woot!

[Photo credit: Splash News; Source]