Oprah Article (click photograph below to read article)

Yellowbook Commercial featuring our home

Soon after we built our home, we transformed the front lawn into a drive-in movie theatre by projecting Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas onto a 9 x 16 foot waterfall wall that faces the street.  Originally designed as a an architectural feature of the home, it took on a life on its own on Halloween night, much to the delight of trick-or-treaters and passersby.

With an increase in confidence in our design capabilities, we decided to focus on a career creating simple yet elegant clothing and handbags. We’ve spent the past few years developing our sense of style and processes, working and understanding materials and techniques, and sourcing and changing materials to suit our needs. We’ve also developed proprietary processes for creating textiles. 

We then took to the road to present our clothing and handbags, meet with customers, and develop made-to-measure pieces. Our business concept has always been a direct-to-market approach; in other words, a model whereby we deal directly with the consumer. We’ve always favored this approach, as it has been the way we’ve done business for over 25 years, whether it is with businesses like Bloomberg, HBO, or Johnson & Johnson, or individual customers like you. It enables us to get feedback and improve our line, and fully understand our customers’ desires and needs. It also enables us to manage our costs in the most efficient means possible, so that our resources are concentrated on product development and customer support.

Along the way, our products have been featured in publications like WWD, Zinc, and MOD. In Ocean Drive, Padma Lakshmi (of Top Chef) wore one of our pieces to a shoot, and it ended up actually being used in the magazine, completely unplanned!

We have realized that in order to continue to grow and strengthen our customer relationships, we need to increase our online presence so that we can better reach you. More than anything else, we love customer interaction, and this blog will serve as one of our primary means of interacting with you. We view our blog as an open dialogue, and we encourage you to comment both on your likes and dislikes and to question and challenge us about our thoughts and designs.

Everything I described about slow cooking is equally applicable to our fashion design.  We begin by designing our patterns on computers, which like a recipe, serves as a guide.  There's a lot of technical requirements and skills involved in this stage. Following that, it's the details.  Similar to adding "a pinch of salt" the art of design is in the details, both seen and unseen. Over time, ideas are added, subtracted and allowed to simmer. Quality rather than quantity is the focus.  We source the finest materials, focus on craftsmanship, creating timeless, enduring and tasteful products. Making a single piece takes several weeks.

Overall, fashion like cooking, is a process that requires time.  Our goal is to make products that will last, not from season to season, but from generation to generation.

Along with these thoughts,  I'm including a recipe for our favorite fresh tomato sauce, passed on to me by my mother.  It's memorable!

FRESH TOMATO SAUCE

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs. fresh tomatoes, cleaned, cored and chopped.  (During the summer months, fresh local plum tomatoes make the best sauce.  During other seasons you'll find great ripe tomatoes on the vine).
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• Sea salt
• Fresh ground pepper
• 1 small yellow onion, peeled and cut in half
• Fresh basil leaves

You'll also need a tomato strainer for removing skin, a large 6 quart pot for cooking, paring knife and wooden spoon. 

Clean, core and dice tomatoes.  Add the tomatoes and 1 teaspoon salt to large pot and cook on medium heat for about 1.5 hours (until tomatoes are cooked through).  Stir tomatoes occasionally with large wooden spoon.

Remove tomatoes from heat.  Strain cooked tomatoes through strainer, in batches into large heatproof bowl. Continue straining until there's barely any tomato (mostly skins as shown below).

In a large 6 quart pot, warm olive oil and small yellow onion until onion just begins  to brown.  Add the tomatoes and bring to a simmer.  Add salt to taste, fresh ground pepper.  Allow to simmer about an hour.  Add fresh basil.  

The sauce is so fresh and tasteful.  Enjoy with pasta, seafood...!

Credits:

Russian-born classical pianist virtuoso, LOLA ASTANOVA, featured in ZINK Magazine, photographed by Nesti Mendoza, interviewed & styled by Montgomery Frazier, hair by Lazarus Douvos, makeup by Edward Cruz. Dress by Pure Couture, jewelry by Perez Sanz,. Shot at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, Palm Beach.