The In Crowd

Also:

Here's the NY Post's take. [YouTube video]

Very cool looking and great for Summer but $6 million?!?!

Also:

A view of the Wave Deck in use. [YouTube video]

Waves of differing opinions - Depending on who you talk to, new Harbourfront structure, the Simcoe Wave Deck, is either 'crap' or 'spectacular.' [Toronto Sun]

According to Metro. Who knew Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Scotland (see above), Tehran, Iran or Seoul, South Korea had any kind of skiing?? Click here for more details.

From the NY Daily News:

"Now that 70-degree days have us craving pints on the patio and brunch in a bistro garden, anyplace with even a few inches outdoors is perpetually slammed. So when everyone else queues up for the same stretch of SoHo sidewalk, head to one of these great city spaces to skip the crowds."

Click here for the full list. How'd they miss 230 Fifth though?? I swear I have never seen a bar, especially an outdoor one, this big.

I discovered this place on a recent vacation to Colorado. Quality designer street & snowboard wear in the heart of swanky Aspen. Check it if you run in 'those' kind of circles and happen to be out there some time. Just make sure your private jet has enough space for all the gear you're likely to cop!

Online:  Website  |  MySpace 

YG on the new Armani Hotels and resorts.

Reuters article on the new super-luxury St. Regis Hotel in Singapore with its fleet of customized Bentley limos to ferry guests around - sweet! (spotted via the Toronto Sun)

Jay-Z becomes a hotelier with his just-announced J Hotel in NYC. 

From my good friend Taj at the excellent Dork magazine comes info on his brand new online travel boutique WEJETSET:

I remember reading something about the Sapeur movement in Paris a couple years ago but here's a snip from an interesting article in Colors magazine titled "Paradise Is a Fabulous Suit: Music and National Pride in the Republic of Congo" about these gentleman dandy-slackers from Africa:

"Their canon of saints reads: Pierre Cardin, Roberto Cavalli, Dior, Fendi, Ferré, Gaultier, Gucci, Jourdan, Miyake, Prada, Saint Laurent, Versace, Yamamoto. A typical ballad runs: “Listen my love. On our wedding day/The label will be Torrente/The label will be Giorgio Armani/The label will be Daniel Hechter/The label for the shoes will be J. M. Weston.” Brussels, their shopping mecca, is referred to in Congolese as Lola, meaning paradise.

These are sapeurs, acolytes of a 25-year-old movement called la SAPE—La Societé des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (aka Kitendi, the religion of the cloth) — that revolves around the possession of the most expensive, most luxurious, most extravagant fashion in the world. Followers of SAPE wear $10,000 jackets and $500 shoes, but these mostly young Congolese men otherwise barely eke out a living in the rubble of Kinshasa and Brazzaville or the ghettos of Paris and Brussels, washing dishes or washing bodies, and sometimes selling their own (ed note: n/h)." (click here to read more)

The New York Times' Travel section on the design-conscious European city of Helsinki:

"Seen at its radiant best, Helsinki can be hypnotic. It has held me in its thrall for decades with its genius for modern design, displayed in textiles by Marimekko, ceramics by Arabia and glassware by Iittala, created by the likes of Kaj Franck, Timo Sarpaneva, Tapio Wirkkala, Alvar Aalto and Eliel Saarinen, to say nothing of those nifty orange-handled scissors made by Fiskars. Some names are less familiar than they should be — Aalto stands, in my view at least, with Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier at the apex of 20th-century architecture — but certainly not through any fault of their own.

Don’t try Helsinki in the off season, no matter what the brochures say. The Finnish capital’s time is now, right now, high summer, when daylight lasts for 20 giddy hours out of 24, when the sidewalk cafes and the waterside markets are thronged by handsome, hardy people, when the procession of crayfish feasts builds toward a climax, and when the pale blue waters of the lakes and the harbor and the white bark of the birch trees match the national flag." (click here to read more)