>> In the first fashion project he's endeavored since his financially strapped eponymous label was reduced to a shell at the end of 2009, the couturier Christian Lacroix, who has since been spending his time designing stage costumes, hotels, and trams, curating museum exhibits, and serving as the French mint's artistic adviser, has teamed up with Spanish brand Desigual.

Lacroix's capsule collection, known as Desigual by Monsieur Lacroix, since the designer is no longer authorized to use his name after leaving his former brand, will consist of 30 pieces — including jackets, skirts, and lingerie — for Fall 2011, with a bigger collection coming for Spring 2012. The collection was previewed this week at Barcelona Fashion Week. Lacroix says on Desigual's blog: “I was awestruck by the first girl dressed by Desigual that I saw in Paris. As I watched her, I could recognise in her a member of my own tribe. It was an explosion of colors and patchwork under the elegant, discreet and always monotonous French sky. It was fantastic, truly love at first sight, a breath of fresh air, all multicoloured, scorching, revitalizing, radiating Mediterranean colours and flavours and creeping into this global and colourless magma inhabited by zombies and clones.”