House of Orange, the Amsterdam-based agency for hair, makeup, styling, photographers, and models, has come up with a creative way to showcase its team’s talents: It’s launched a self-published, biannual magazine. The oversize pub, conceived by agency founder John Kattenberg as a “revolt against a system that makes uniformity and superficiality the standard,” is currently only available in the Netherlands and Paris. The debut issue features profiles and (mostly) uncommissioned work and collaborations. Highlights include a feature on Fedde Hoekstra—who spends an hour on eBay every day scooping up Barbie dolls whose hair he then styles—and the images of Carmen Freudenthal and Elle Verhagen, a photographer/stylist team who work closely with Bernhard Willhelm. For more information, see www.houseoforange.nl.—Laird Borrelli-Persson

Photo: Marieke by Annemarieke van Drimmelen (cover); Martin Butler by Carmen Freudenthal and Ellen Verhagen/Courtesy of House of Orange

Though summer is just getting underway (or so we hope), it’s the nature of the fashion business to look ahead a season. While I’m certainly not ready for a return to winter temperatures, I am looking forward to wearing something from Julia Jentzsch’s Fall ‘08 collection, preferably one of her cleverly seamed lean jersey skirts, salt-painted silk cocktail dresses, or her belted rain capes, all of which were loosely based on the life and work of by Lee Miller and forties work wear. “I’m inspired by subtle and abstract [things], rather than direct inspirations—and always a mix of several different references,” says the German-born designer, who’s done stints at YSL (under both Alber Elbaz and Tom Ford) and Calvin Klein. “I want to create new possibilities for clothing by merging future technologies with luxury fashion.”—Nancy MacDonell

Photo: Courtesy of Julia Jentzsch

“I was just out of school and I really had no idea where I could show my work,” explains Sophie Morner of her inspiration for Capricious magazine, which just released its eighth issue. “It turned out that a lot of my friends had no idea where to show their work, either.” A similar inspiration drove Morner to create Capricious Space in Williamsburg. The new gallery opened on Friday with a show of photos from the new Capricious magazine; later this month, the space will play host to an exhibit featuring work by artists such as Mirabelle Marden. Future shows in the works will be guest-curated by the likes of photographer Collier Schorr and Hedi Slimane. For all the starriness, Morner is characteristically low-key about her new project. “I don’t even want to call it a gallery, you know? I’d like it to be a place where lots of stuff can happen, like we can have a thrift shop for plants, for example.” A thrift shop for plants? “Well, people move, and they have these plants that get left behind. I’ll be happy if Capricious can be the place for those kinds of random things.”—Maya Singer

Photo: Courtesy of Sophie Morner, Capricious magazine

Karl Lagerfeld finds something to match his driving gloves. Make it work, Karl.

Plastic enhancement alert: The wait for facelifts is only a month—that’s practically nonexistent! You can thank all those penny-pinching working moms who’d rather shell out for “injectable fillers” than go all the way. Pansies.

Viktor & Rolf’s retrospective of clothes for the very, very small opens today. Note to MK and Ashley: Items are not for sale.—Alison Baenen

Photo: Sécurité Routière

Oskar Metsavaht, the designer behind Brazilian powerhouse brand Osklen, hasn’t followed a conventional career path. A physician by training and an avid surfer, skateboarder, and snowboarder, he entered the design world in 1989, creating activewear for fellow fans of his favorite sports. A decade later, he began to evolve a high-end effort that introduced elements of luxe to his signature aesthetic. Now, nearly 20 years after he first began, he has seven flagship stores, including outposts in New York, Tokyo, Rome, and Geneva, and has become perhaps the most successful designer to expand beyond Brazil’s borders. He took a break from São Paulo fashion week to share some insights about his journey so far.

What made you want to go into design?

For me art means the creative process, not the purpose of what you’re doing. To me medicine is an art, not a science. I was a successful physician, but the lifestyle didn’t agree with me. I wanted to find a way to express my ideas.

How did Osklen come about?

In the beginning Osklen was a lifestyle brand. Jackets for snowboarding, bikinis, T-shirts for surfers. But then, in the nineties, when I looked at the kind of lifestyle my tribe had, it seemed cool and special, and Okslen began to be more involved with “fashion.” I decided that I had a style, and I only had to channel that style into a fashion language. It was a very gradual evolution.

So what defines your tastes then?

I’m a surfer, I like to snowboard and skateboard. I like to wake up early and go surfing, but I also like to go out late at night. I like art exhibits, but I also like reading skateboarding magazines. I am an environmentalist—not eco-granola, but scientific and informed.

Who are some of your favorite fellow Brazilian designers?

Reinaldo Lourenço and Gloria Coelho. Reinaldo’s work is feminine in the best way and modern. Gloria’s work is very strong. For swimwear, Lenny. Her work has a sophisticated elegance but with a Brazilian feel.

How do you see Brazilian fashion evolving?

I think we’re like Italy was 30 years ago. We’re learning to work with the industrial process and to produce the best quality. We have good self-esteem, we see that we can do something original. The generation before mine would just copy.

What do you think needs to happen in order for Brazil to make a bigger impact globally?

If Japan is technology and France is high style and India is philosophy and spirituality, then Brazil has a chance to be the environmental and socially sustainable country. I’m sure everyone would love to buy products with a Made in Brazil label if they knew that these products were made to be sustainable. It might be more expensive, but I think this is the new luxury. We need to embrace these values.

Do you design with these values in mind?

Yes. It’s funny—in my recent show I used a material that people didn’t like, crocodile, and some people criticized this, saying, “Oh, it’s not sustainable,” etc., but they weren’t informed. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s hypocrisy! There is actually an overabundance of crocodiles in some parts of Brazil , near the Amazon, and they have to control the population because they threaten the ecosystem and the people living close by. These indigenous people sell some of the skins, so purchasing them is actually sustaining these people as well as the environment.—Sameer Reddy

Photo: Courtesy of Osklen

Mary-Kate Olsen doesn’t let a little long-distance commuting interfere with her work-life balance. In between taping a guest appearance on “Samantha Who?” in Los Angeles on Tuesday and walking the red carpet in New York for her new film “The Wackness” on Wednesday, she managed to fit in a little R & R. Wednesday evening saw her squeeze in the Pearl Jam concert at Madison Square Garden and hit up the after-party on the roof of the Gramercy Hotel. This morning she dropped by David Letterman (the show airs tonight), then headed to the airport to go back to L.A. and more work on “Samantha Who?” “It’s been a busy week, for sure,” she said.—Derek Blasberg

Photo: NEIL RASMUS/PatrickMcMullan.com

Film is said to capture fleeting moments. But while it can crystallize an ephemeral image, the medium itself is as fragile as flesh. This off-putting contradiction underlines the powerful and piquant art of New Orleans-raised, New York-based photographer Clayton Cubitt. Cubitt buries his clean and crisp fashion photos, portraits, and pornographic images in earth, where natural decay eats into the imagery, creating a disquieting counterpoint to our efforts to fight mortality. The work he’s showing in “This Eclectic Explosion,” a group show curated by Peter Miszuk at the Tribeca Grand hotel, has an added layer of personal and political poignancy. “The more recent work, the personal and the fashion work,” he reveals, “where I’m literally degrading the quality of the image—injuring it, damaging it—is a result of Hurricane Katrina, what it’s done with New Orleans, and what it’s done with my family. It’s that notion of beauty—not in spite of decay but because of decay. It becomes so horribly beautiful that you can’t look away.”—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Clayton Cubitt

On New York’s hot streets these days, what French-born, Big Apple-dwelling Beatrice Coron terms “human interactions with the urban environment” are usually uncomfortable, sweaty, and testy. But the intricate images Coron creates by slicing into painted paper with an X-Acto knife tell a different story. Her delicate silhouettes, currently on display at the city’s Grady Alexis Gallery, create complex scenes of people at work and play. Their lacy beauty not only previews one of Fall’s biggest runway trends, it reminds us of the unexpected beauty of urban life—think of her work as an antidote to the sweltering world outside.—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Beatrice Coron

About a year ago, photographer James Gooding was flipping through a copy of The New Yorker when he came across an article that, once he’d read it, he couldn’t shake. Titled “There and Back Again” and written by Nick Paumgarten, the piece was about urban sprawl and commuting. But as he cataloged the discontents of the exurb class, Paumgarten touched on a theory of a triangle of happiness. “Where you live, where you work, where you shop—those are the three points,” explains Gooding. “And I began to wonder, where on that triangle do I find my happiness in a given day? Where does anyone?” Those questions went on to form the premise of Gooding’s latest series of photographs, “The Triangulation of Happiness.” Now on view at the Diesel Denim Gallery in Soho, the series is composed of triptych works, portraits of each of Gooding’s far-flung subjects at home, at work, and at retail. The project that began with an article about commuting required Gooding to do a fair amount of commuting himself—par for the course for an Englishman preoccupied with the lifestyles and landscapes of his adopted United States—but before he hopped on a jet back to L.A., Gooding chatted with Style.com about peak emotions, Wikipedia, and life on the road.

In the New Yorker magazine article, the stuff about the live-work-shop triangle doesn’t take up much space. It’s like, one short paragraph. You seem to have extrapolated quite a bit from that.

Yeah, that paragraph was just a jumping-off point. His whole article made a big impression, but it was the idea of the triangle that got me painting images in my head. I kept imagining people ferrying themselves from one place to the other, always the same routine, and somewhere on that map of points they make, there’s happiness. Floating around, elusive.

I find it a very oppressive concept. Like, we’re all just rats creating our own mazes.

The concept struck me as both beautiful and sad. The thing about happiness is, we’re not very good at measuring it for ourselves, or figuring out what in our lives genuinely makes us happy, versus what we only think does, or will. You may believe your happiness is about having a big house, but if having the big house means you have to spend all your time working at a job you hate, or even just tolerate, and it takes you two hours in traffic each way to get there and back, how happy has that house made you? Speaking from my own personal experience, I’d say that people have a set point of happiness—one person’s up here, and someone else is down there—and most of what we do in the pursuit of happiness is just the seeking out of peak emotions.

Judging by your essays in the catalog, you got pretty immersed in your subjects’ lives. How did you find all of them?

Honestly? Wikipedia. Well, that’s sort of a half answer. I knew I wanted a good cross section, so I went to Wikipedia and looked up job descriptions. There’s an entry on the site about a thousand pages long; all it does is list job titles. I scrolled through, picked out a few that seemed interesting—or in some cases, particularly uninteresting—and then I started sending out e-mails, seeing if my friends knew anyone who knew anyone, and so on. But some of my subjects I met on the road, too. That’s an advantage of being English, occasionally—people are sort of intrigued by my accent, I think.

Shooting this series entailed a pretty much nonstop commute for you, and according to Paumgarten’s piece, every extra ten minutes you spend getting from here to there knocks another ten percentage points off your cumulative happiness. So I must ask: How’s your triangle?

Are you asking if I’m happy? That’s a good question; I suppose I’m about as happy as I typically am. If you’d mapped my triangle while I was working on “Triangulation,” at least the shooting part of it, it certainly would have looked rather strange—work, work, work; driving, driving, driving. Sleeping in motels, eating in the car, shopping for nothing but film. But I’m gearing up for another round of the same in the spring, so I guess that must mean I like to keep moving.

“The Triangulation of Happiness” is open through April 1 at the Diesel Denim Gallery, 98 Greene St., NYC, and will move to Galerie du Jour in Paris later this year.—Maya Singer