We're sure many of you are swept up with Fashion Week happenings, but there's a pop-up to consider. Eponymous boutique OAK is hosting the limited edition designs of the hottest names in independent fashion for an event they're calling "Bondage" to celebrate their newest brick and mortar opening on Bond Street. For a few special days you can pick up designs by Vena Cava, Form, LD Tuttle, Complex Geometries, and Unconditional (see left for a complete list) all of which play with the notion of bondage from various conceptual perspectives. What's more, one of your editors has a side project with designer Stephanie Draves we once editorialized called boyfriend, and these designs will be included in the project. OAK is busy photographing the designer offerings this morning so, even if you're not in New York, you can buy them online later in the week. We'll keep you posted, and if you're in New York, be sure to stop by Bond Street for the opening reception. Meanwhile, some just-delivered fall goodies from the store, below. Update: See below for photo leaks of the limited edition items!

Michael Kors is moving overseas by opening 25 collection stores in Europe, starting with one in Milan. To which we say, whaa, Michael Kors, lover of jetsetting advertisements and perpetual tans, doesn't have any collection stores in Europe? Are we the only one's who just assumed he did? Anyway, this first space in Milan is taking over the Viktor and Rolf store (Viktor & Rolf just sold stake to Deisel) and opens on September 23rd. Another twist in the story is that Kors is opening a Palm Beach boutique shortly thereafter and Kors himself acknowledged that the venture is a head-scratcher to most people, "A lot of people look at me and say, ‘You don’t have a store in Palm Beach?’ So much of our clientele spends a good part of the winter season there. It’s really our first resort store. I have always loved designing resort and things that have a resort mentality, and Palm Beach is one of the few places left on earth where a jeweled $800 bikini is a basic.”. We don't watch Project Runway but we've always loved Kor's articulate and humorous sound bites. Of his Chicago store opening he said, “I am a camel hair and gray flannel kind of guy and Chicago is a camel and gray flannel kind of town.". Which basically makes us love him. Below, some spring and fall offerings from the designer.


Click here to see the Michael Kors Fall 08 collection

Our obsession with talking to people about Built by Wendy has become pathological. It's not the brand, specifically, it's more the conceptual vantage point we've been mulling over. It started a few weekends back when, on our way to Opening Ceremony, we stopped in the store, to which we had never been. We perused the racks, it was more expensive than we remembered. Three hundred dollars for a cotton bomber or a cotton poplin dress? Curious. Well, we can say for sure that what you have there is a firmly placed contemporary price point but what makes the defining tricky is when you look at the clothing quality and the basic premise on which the company was first built. Built by Wendy always cost just a little bit less than contemporary which was its essential draw. The point was "Hey check out these clothes that look kind of like they're from A.P.C. but cost a little bit less. They look homespun which means, if you really wanted to, you could make them yourself." Now, really, Built by Wendy is not able to put 'cost effective' on its resume. So, can the clothing hold its own? Well, sure. It's just not very much fun is all. We don't blame anyone, we know it's hard to make money as a designer and finance a business in this economy, we just miss the old days when it felt like Wendy was building those frocks so that we didn't have to spend three hundred dollars on them.

OAK, who threw quite a party to celebrate the return of menswear and the Capsule trade show, is now having a huge sample sale. If you can't make it over to their Brooklyn and Soho locations, you can still find those markdowns online. From Staerk to Opening Ceremony this summer's duds are sharp and worth a late-summer investment. We happen to think the way OAK shoots products for their site is quite revolutionary. From our days working in e-commerce we know that the most important thing, above all, is to depict the garment as realistically as possible. That means thinking about scale, color, texture, fit, and movement in one single picture. In addition to this cardinal rule, you want to make sure that the consumer can relate to the product, can see themselves wearing it. That means booking models whose look fits your identity as a site. OAK, in our mind, wins on both accounts. They're shots show the garment in motion (and in additional views, stationary), giving us a real feeling for what the garment really looks like in 'real life'. Secondly, they leave the model's faces out of the frame, encouraging us to imagine wearing the garment and leaving out the kind e-commerce celebrity factor that sites like Shopbop thrive on. They book girls with, let's face it, 'ideal' proportions but we happen to know that these gals are not signed girls. That means they are not necessarily 5' 11" and size zero. They might be slim, they might be leggy, but they sure aren't emaciated nor are they super-human tall. In other words, shop on. This is an online sample sale we wholeheartedly endorse.

Adora, the new store opening in Manila, scored prime time real estate in the retail section of WWD today. Why is that? Because they've all the niceties of a luxury goods store (lavish interior, hang tags with four figures) but with a slight affordable-accessible slant. Our question: is this so revolutionary? Adora carries brands like Jil Sander, Marni, Missoni, and Chloe in addition to a more affordable line called Tyler (among a few others) which prices garments in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. Tyler, funnily enough, is owned by the same company that backed the store in the first place; Republic Retailers. The article goes on to say that Adora also mixes high/low by carrying Diane Von Fursterburg's lower priced line, H. Stern, in addition to handbags and clutches made locally, from exotic skins. To us, this is just a plain 'ol department store carrying everything from thousand dollar trousers to fifty dollar tank tops. If Adora supports local artisans by stocking luxurious handbags were pretty sure they wouldn't be sold for anything less than what they're 'worth' (i.e. quite a lot). We're all about finding a variety of price points under one roof, but as far as we can tell, this is isn't some rebel retail venture. It's just another place to buy a bunch of stuff when you're visiting somewhere new or when your a bored, wealthy resident in the Philippines.