The Daniel Swarovski collection – the high end couture collection of Swarovski accessories generally found adorning celebrities on the red carpet, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and with that come 20 new bag designs and 20 new pieces of jewelry to commemorate the brand’s history.

Rather than reviving accessories from the archives, Swarovski artistic director Nathalie Colin chose to highlight how far their crystal technology has come with innovative applications of the famed crystals, from crystals applied to precious stones and pearls to exotic skins. The processes add up to spectacular-looking pieces with blinding luminosity. Bling is definitely not out it’s just made out of crystals now, instead of diamonds.

This season, 1920’s art deco design inspired the look and feel of the pieces, from the vintage-looking styles of the delicate evening bags to the deco patterns used for the crystal settings. And in a nod to the changing demands of red carpet walking clients, the bags are now slightly larger to accommodate their number one purse accessory: the Blackberry.

Also new for Swarovski this year is an expanded watch collection, with high quality Swiss-made timepieces at the core of the new designs. For women, styles range from a crystal cuff, the “D:Light,” with a time display made up of crystals that light up only when a button is pressed ($1,500-$1,7000), to edgier styles like a wrap-around leather band ($575) or classic timepieces with a metal watchband and subtle crystal bezel ($650-$750).

Swarovski’s signature jewelry collection for autumn/winter 2009/10, “Nature Reloaded,” follows the nature-oriented theme started for spring with “Super Nature.” For this collection, Swarovski took a trip to an enchanted forest with wooden pendants embedded with crystals, to mushroom-shaped charms to smoky hues of plum, forest green and black crystal. Other key looks include serpent bangles and necklaces and Swarovski’s unofficial mascot characters, Erika and Elvis, re-imagined as a butterfly and a bumblebee, respectively.

At Valentino on Tuesday, March 10, the house’s creative directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli sent out lavish ladies-who-lunch fashion despite the recessionary winds. Where Paris catwalks have featured lots of working women and sexy power CEO’s, Chiuri and Piccioli opted in their ready-to-wear debut for a more languid femme.

The silhouette was lean, the shapes compact, but throughout there was an permanent air of a grand dame descending to instruct her servants and not a dynamic woman going out to confront the world. Jackets with arm-impeding cape sides did not seem to allow much space for actually shuffling papers across a desk.

That’s not to suggest that Chiuri and Piccioli are not adept tailors, whose opening cocktail looks had a refined gentility and pizzazz worthy of the house’s founder; in particular the sinful look sported by Russian model Sasha Piovarova. And with their hand painted, graffiti-like print, fabrics took the Valentino girl to a newer, artier world than the one designed by the house’s founder.

Valentino announced his retirement from the company in September 2007, seven weeks after celebrating his 45th anniversary in fashion with a sumptuous weekend in Rome. His departure came three months after equity fund Permira won a takeover battle to acquire the Valentino Fashion Group, in a deal that valued the designer’s fashion house at $380 million.

Chiuri and Piccioli, two former assistants of Valentino, replaced the founder’s initial successor, Alessandra Facchinetti, last October after the new owners decided she had strayed too far from the master’s original oeuvre.

The new design duo had a savvy sense of the staging of this show, held in the Palais de Tokyo’s Galerie des Moulages, a truly magnificent, soaring space with models of Gothic arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles. The smart and intriguing casting of mega stars and new faces strutted out on a silver mirrored runway, reflecting the Eiffel Tower through the giant windows of giant curved hall.

In their program notes, the pair called for a “more relaxed dimension” to elegance, but these clothes were formal with a capital F.

Chiuri and Piccioli delivered the goods when it came to accessories with frosted snakeskin platforms and some eye-catching rosette encrusted snakeskin bags. They also scattered crystals all over the collection, edging black bobtail boleros, as trim on scalloped back yellow satin dresses or even as a circuit board pattern on dashing mink coats.

The soundtrack was a mix of a dub version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” and Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown,” which left most members of the audience smiling ironically because West, who has attended nearly every big show in New York, London, Milan and Paris this season, was not at the Valentino show when they boomed the rapper’s music over the catwalk.

Though the collection had plenty of chic ideas, the design duo seemed too locked into to the founder’s concept of fashion at the very moment when all the signs suggest a fundamentally new era.

If any fashion show these past weeks said it loud and clear that we are in the age of escapist fashion it was the fall 2009 collection of Christian Dior seen Friday, March 6, in Paris. John Galliano created a ’20s inspired Fall collection filled with Indian and Asian nuances for Christian Dior. He played it safe with streamlined, feminine cuts but made up for it with bold colors, textural fabrics, and most prominently — bold prints. “I’m sure Mr.Dior would have loved these prints,” said Galliano when talking about his use of Ikat prints.

If the last Depression taught us anything, at least aesthetically, it’s that people want to forget about their everyday blues, so magazine covers of that era feature woman as Alpine ski goddesses or fearless aviator explorers. Dior’s creative director John Galliano did not have any active wear on his catwalk in the Tuileries Gardens tent, but the escapism was as loud and clear as the grinding Laurent Wolf dance cut that climaxed Jeremy Healey’s dramatic soundtrack.

On the catwalk, Dior looks for autumn were heroic yet chic. Batik beauties in curvy, beehive sleeve jackets or tops, tulip skirts and Tartar princess spherical hats began a hike up the Roof of the World.

Covered up in coats with oriental embroidery, Orson Welles’ femme fatales slinked from Ascot across to Shanghai. Beaten silver Nepalese pendants, layered over “Empire of the Sun” frocks caught the mood of elegiac summers, those of a certain gentility. A great ocre Astrakhan vest over billowing silver satin pants was an ace look.
“I don’t want to work today… I don’t want to waste my time,” belted out the final song of this splendidly presented show. The memorable hair, a Marlene Dietrich Expressionist look with a waxed skullcap of hairpins, was a striking coup by Orlando Pita.

Several score of PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – noisily protested outside the gate of the city’s central garden. PETA’s presence notwithstanding, it’s probably fair to say that fashion’s elite appears to feel the storm of anti-fur feeling may be abating, and that their argument – that fur is a renewable material – is slowly winning more supporters.