Forget the flowers! Mom wants a new designer handbag for Mother's Day

Hundreds of New Vintage stock added this week!

What mom really wants for Mother’s Day is a new designer handbag so eFashionHouse.com is making shopping for mom easy with free shipping.

Sky Valley, CA (PRWEB), April 24, 2008: Gone are the days where shopping for mom meant a pretty floral arrangement or a box of her favorite chocolate. Today’s moms are more interested in trendy or classic designer handbags, so eFashionHouse.com is making shopping for mom a little easier with free shipping for Mother’s Day (May 11).

Named Best of the Web by People StyleWatch for below retail priced designer handbags and recognized by About.com as the top of three online retailers of off-priced Chanel, eFashionHouse.com has all the designers and styles moms want. From handbag darling Elaine Turner, to couture legend Chanel, to American staple Coach, eFashionHouse.com offers the latest in designer handbags for all budgets.

"It’s not only fashionistas that want the latest designer handbag all the time, today’s mom is very hip and wants to carry a nice leather handbag as well" said Anna Miller, eFashionHouse Owner. "To meet the needs of our clients, we now carry handbags that are age-friendly…meaning most of the designers we carry cater to women of all ages who simply love fashion."

Not only does eFashionHouse.com, and its five fashion ecommerce stores (BrandsBoutique, LuxuryVintage, DesignersLA, ItalysOutlet and ValueBags), offer a wide variety of authentic designer handbags but they guarantee the lowest prices online for Tano, Melie Bianco, Murval, Elaine Turner and Pietro Alessandro. Plus the site offers a layaway plan that allows its clients to pay over time and still get the bag of their dreams.

If you still don’t know what to get mom, here’s a couple of hot selling bags that are sure to make her smile (and maybe even giggle with glee):

• COACH Hamptons Cream Large Tote – 26% off
• ELAINE TURNER Andie Platinum Distressed Leather Satchel – 24% off
• Tano Bauhaus Leather Tote – 21% off
• Gucci Brit Medium Tote in Brown – 26% off
• Yves Saint Laurent Downtown Tote in Cream – 21% off
• Vintage Chanel Quilted Lambskin Shoulder Bag – only $499

In addition to huge savings on brand new, 100% authentic designer handbags, shoppers will receive free ground shipping from April 24th thru May 2nd on purchase over $100 with coupon code MD08. Plus there is no sales tax on all purchases worldwide.

About eFashionHouse.com
Anna Miller is the President of i-GlobalMall.com, Inc. She operates the website http://www.efashionhouse.com/ and sells high-end authentic designer handbags and accessories at off-retail prices. EFashionHouse.com was named Best of the Web by People Magazine StyleWatch for Discount Designer Handbags and Purses. eFashionHouse.com should not be confused with any other website selling a similar product or using a similar name. EfashionHouse.com is the home of five fashion ecommerce stores: BrandsBoutique, LuxuryVintage, DesignersLA, ItalysOutlet, and ValueBags. Anna is considered an Internet Pioneer & Ecommerce Entrepreneur. She’s been reselling Designer Merchandise online since the early 90s. eFashionHouse.com has an extensive Press Page and a Fashion Blog Network. Visit the site for more details.

Fashion special: Still crazy about Coco

from The Independent

Chanel revolutionised women’s fashion, and 25 years after Karl Lagerfeld took over, the label is as iconic as ever, says Susannah Frankel

Ask Karl Lagerfeld to sum up – in only 10 words – the power of Chanel and it's no great surprise when the great couturier, who, let's face it, is far from a shrinking violet where his dealings with the media are concerned, comes back with a rather longer answer than that.


Chanel encapsulates the idea of "modernity" first and foremost, he says. It embodies "a contemporary attitude – whatever the time or the decade". Chanel also stands for "luxury" and "the power of the logo". The iconic double C branding is surely the most instantly recognisable in fashion history. Also, for Chanel , read "the power of the handbag – the most famous in the world". Lagerfeld speaks here of the 2.55 in particular, named after its date of birth in February 1955, quilted, to keep its shape and echoing the texture of classic British outerwear, originally favoured by jockeys. (Chanel , for her part, favoured jockeys in return, but more of that later.) Suspended from a gilt shoulder strap, this was the first purse designed for a woman ensuring her hands were free.

The white camellia, too, says Lagerfeld, is an integral part of the story. It was Chanel favourite flower and her successor has, in the past, coloured it every which way, on one particularly memorable occasion, even casting it in diamonds the size of boiled sweets as the single closure to a perfectly cut Chanel haute- couture jacket. "I also love camellias," Lagerfeld goes on to confirm, "and gardenias. But I love old-style-looking roses too, like the ones you can only find in Paris at Odorantes in Rue Madame." The black ribbon bow – today a staple of every couture catwalk and no longer just Chanel's own – is treated with similar diversity. "We do this in all kinds of shapes, colours and materials," Lagerfeld says.

Perhaps more significantly, the Chanel name stands also for "timelessness, but for fashion at the same time" – while the recipe may be updated each season in line with the mood of the moment, the main ingredients remain the same – and for "the two-tone shoe, not only the pump but also 'the ballerina' and so forth". Chanel gave this to the world in 1957 – the first pair had a sling-back – in beige with a black tip, which has the miraculous effect of foreshortening the foot and lengthening the leg. Then, continues Lagerfeld, there's "the magic address: 31 Rue Cambon". Chanel set up shop as a milliner in that very street in Paris for the first time in 1910. The plaque on the door originally read "Chanel Modes". Although it is now significantly expanded, it remains the company's headquarters to this day.

Lagerfeld goes on to cite "the mystery of the Coromandel screens she loved and which have inspired her": it is the stuff of fashion folklore that Chanel was always surrounded and indeed shielded by particularly fine examples of these. Finally, the world has Chanel to thank for "the mixing of real and fake jewellery and the invention of fashion costume jewellery", enjoying something of a resurgence just now, incidentally, as seen at the most recent round of international collections everywhere from Balenciaga to Lanvin and from Louis Vuitton to, well, Chanel . True to her unusually democratic stance, Chanel herself thought nothing of mixing diamonds and paste, real pearls with great ropes of more reasonably priced approximations. She wore them well and today Lagerfeld embellishes everything from sunglasses to handbags with more of the same.

"You see," Lagerfeld argues with an energy and enthusiasm that belie his 74 years, "here are already 12 reasons and you asked for 10... That shows the power – and the staying power – of Chanel . The image, the fashion and the idea of the woman herself as the first modern one. It is the idea of modernity, a life and a lifestyle that women can identify with."

It is now 25 years since Lagerfeld took to the helm of France's most famous fashion house. Chanel died in January 1971 and it seemed only decent that a good decade should go by before anyone dared to step into her perfectly formed, not to mention supremely influential shoes. While contemporary fashion is elsewhere characterised by an increasingly high-profile – and at times inept – game of designer musical chairs where the revival of potentially lucrative status labels is concerned, it is worth noting that Chanel has remained unswervingly faithful to Karl Lagerfeld – by now the greatest couturier still practising the craft – and Karl Lagerfeld has stayed true to Chanel – today fashion's best-known name. Upon hearing news of his contemporary Valentino's retirement announced in the autumn of last year, Lagerfeld said: "I am not very pleased because I think it is not good that he's stopping; he is in great shape. He should continue. It's no fun; he'll be bored."

Although Lagerfeld is the man at the helm of the Chanel brand today, it all began in the hands of the house's namesake, whose life story is as much a part of the label's many signatures as a gilt chain is to the hem of the jacket of a Chanel bouclé wool suit. If anyone might reasonably be described as an autobiographical designer it is Chanel, after all. Even the lining of the aforementioned 2.55 bag is coloured garnet – mimicking, by all accounts, that of the uniform she wore at the convent where she spent her early years.

Equally important is that Chanel desire to create clothes sprang above all from her wish to dress herself in a manner she saw fit. She was nothing if not reactionary. "If I embarked on this profession it was precisely to make everything I didn't like unfashionable," she once said and she lived and worked by that rule tirelessly. Whichever way one chooses to look at it, the romance of this, perhaps the ultimate rags-to-riches tale, is unprecedented. With this in mind, it is small wonder that, almost 40 years after her death, not one but two Chanel movies begin filming this year: Audrey Tautou will play the young designer in Coco avant Chanel, directed by Anne Fontaine, and devoted to her young life; and Marina Hands (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is set to play the lead in Coco & Igor, directed by William Friedkin and telling the story of Chanel relationship with the composer Stravinsky. Potentially less chic is a forthcoming TV mini-series starring Shirley MacLaine.


Gabrielle Chanel was born on 19 August 1883 in the French province of Saumur. Her father, Albert Chanel, was a market trader. Her mother, Jeanne Devolle, was of humble origins, bore several children and died young, in 1895, leaving her daughter to be educated by the nuns at an orphanage in Aubazine. Gabrielle was taught how to sew there and, when holidaying with her sisters, learnt the art of millinery – they loved hats. Aged 20 and based in the garrison town of Moulins, Chanel worked as an assistant in a shop specialising in trousseaux and layettes and then as a seamstress. By night she sang for her supper in cafés and bars and it was there that the slim, slight, dark-haired, black-eyed figure first became known as Coco.

In the early years of the 20th century, Coco Chanel moved in with Etienne Balsan, a famous horse breeder, and although not accepted by the elevated echelons of society in which he circulated, she became an accomplished horse woman and among the first of her sex to dare to wear jodhpurs. In order to deflect the received ideas of a mistress, dressed in the requisite frills and furbelows of the Belle Epoque style, Chanel set to adapting the staples of menswear to her needs, often scandalising others in her entourage by actually wearing men's clothing. "A woman is always over-dressed and never sufficiently elegant," she said later and few did more to correct that fact than Chanel . Her uniform of strictly tailored, unembellished garments topped with nothing more frothy than a straw boater caught on and it wasn't long before she was making hats, in particular, for her friends.

In her mid-twenties, Chanel was befriended by an English industrialist, the renowned polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel, who duly installed her in an apartment in Paris where she became his lover and began making hats on a more professional basis. By 1910, interest in her minimal and profoundly modern designs was such that she had outgrown this space and opened a shop at Rue Cambon, naming it Chanel Modes. It wasn't long before she had expanded her operation to include a store in Deauville selling clothes as well as hats, and then a fully fledged couture house in Biarritz where, by 1916, she was responsible for 300 employees all dedicated to the task of creating naturally feminine and relatively simple clothing, favouring freedom of movement and rejecting anything even remotely ostentatious or superfluous.

Across the Atlantic – and the American market was as important then as it is today – US Harper's Bazaar picked up on her success, publishing a picture of what they described as "the charming chemise dress", again borrowed from menswear – this time, specifically, a man's shirt. A year later, Chanel cut her lustrous dark hair into a neat bob, the better to suit her naturally androgynous silhouette and sun-tanned skin. Although it is often said that she invented the swimsuit – and it's certainly true that she went on to craft stretch clothing in jersey, formerly the preserve of nothing more haute than men's underwear – here Lagerfeld begs to differ.

"There are no images of Chanel in swimsuits and we know only the heavy bathing-suit costumes she designed for the Ballets Russes' Le Train Bleu," he says. Jean Cocteau also worked on the 1924 production and the collaboration between the fashion designer and the artist, who later also introduced her to Picasso, was to continue for more than 10 years. "But Chanel embodies the idea of the modern women and so she inherited that image too. People think she was the first. In fact she was not, but she is remembered that way. Now sportswear is all over the world and is not only worn for sport. Some sportswear and some sports did not exist in Chanel's time, but they represent something she would have liked if she had known it."

In 1919, Capel, described by Chanel as "the love of her life", was killed in a car crash and she threw herself into her work creating many of the looks that remain the staple of the contemporary woman's wardrobe to this day. In 1926 she designed her first "little black dress", described by Vogue as the fashion equivalent of the Ford motorcar; in 1928 she came up with her first tweed suit. That is not to say that her personal life was anything but colourful. Over the years she was linked to the exiled Russian Grand Duke, Dimitri Pavlovich, related to Tsar Nicholas II, who introduced her to Ernest Beaux (the perfumier with whom she created Chanel No 5) and to the sparkling beauty of baroque jewellery. She was also the lover of the second Duke of Westminster, Hugh "Bendor" Grosvenor, who shared her life for 10 years, demonstrating the potential power of great wealth – he was widely considered the richest man in Europe at that time – and whose aristocratic English wardrobe inspired her work continuously. "Westminster is elegance itself," she once said. "He never has anything new – I had to go out and buy him some shoes. He has been wearing the same jacket for 25 years." Despite the longevity of their relationship, Chanel refused to marry the Duke. "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster," she would say. "There is only one Chanel."

By 1935, Chanel owned five buildings in Rue Cambon, employed 4,000 people and was at the height of her power. In 1939, however, and just before the outbreak of war, she closed her couture house, stating: "I thought there wouldn't be any more dresses." She would, of course, have been able to live out the rest of her days in splendour, profiting from the sale of accessories and fragrance alone. Throughout the Occupation, Chanel spent most of her time at the Paris Ritz where she conducted an affair with a Nazi officer. At the end of the war she was arrested – though not charged – for collaboration and spent the following years in relative obscurity based in Switzerland. And that could have been that.

Some things are not to be, however, and in 1954, at the grand old age of 71 and spurred on at least in part by her rancour at the immense success of Christian Dior's proudly people-pleasing and retrogressive New Look, she began designing couture collections once more. Dior, she said, was "a madman" for wanting to put women back into corsets and overblown skirts. There was nothing for it but to show the world once again how it might be done.

While the French – by then in the thrall of not only Dior but also Cristobal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain and Jacques Fath – were less than effusive over Chanel's new designs, emancipated American women were more quick on the uptake, viewing her softly tailored jackets, silk blouses and wrap-over skirts as more fitting for women in the latter part of the 20th century than anything her competitors had to offer. It wasn't long before what was described as "The Chanel Look" was restored to its former glory. It upholds its position as purveyor of all that is quintessentially understated and chic to this day.

"I don't remember the first time I saw the Chanel logo," says Lagerfeld – in its original form, the double C was the fastening on the 2.55 bag. "But I noticed it when I took over Chanel , when real logo power started all over the world. For a company it is very important today because, much more than in the past, we all sell in parts of the world where they cannot read our writing or understand our languages. In one part – a very big part – of the world it is all about signs when they write. They can memorise perhaps the famous "CC" but they have difficulties reading the name first. They find out later. In the past we sold mostly to people who knew our culture and could read English or French. Now it is only a part of our clientele. Logos are the Esperanto of marketing, luxury and business today."

And there is perhaps no more potent signifier of luxury than the name of Chanel – from the logo itself to the cosmetic and fragrance lines, accessories and, of course, clothing. Lagerfeld says that these – and he is speaking of the Chanel jacket in particular – have "a staying-power that is difficult to explain".

The secrets of its success are manifold but inextricably linked to the life, times and pioneering spirit of the late Coco Chanel herself. "Many of Chanel's private dicta have entered into the unspoken rules that still govern fashion," wrote Cecil Beaton in The Glass of Fashion, published in 1954. "Though Chanel herself echoed the theory that fashions are never revived, it is a tribute to her rare and remarkable practicality, and an anomaly in the annals of recorded fashion, that few of her innovations became dated."

More than 50 years on, his words continue to resonate, and of that, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel herself would be proud.

Elegance of Chanel jacket never fades

By Bernadette Morra
The Star.com

Introduced in 1954, Coco Chanel's iconic jacket is constantly reinvented but never

All it took was one jacket and Dee Dee Taylor Hannah was hooked.

"A few years ago, a client gave me a black bolero," recalls the Toronto architect, who runs her own firm and co-owns construction and project management companies.

The jacket was two sizes too big, but Hannah had it cut down to fit her well-toned size 38 frame.

The piece added French polish to Hannah's hip L.A. style, which is heavy on Vince T-shirts, snappy Tevrow + Chase separates, sexy boots and a wardrobe of jeans.

But so versatile is a Chanel jacket that the same item can be worn more conservatively with a matching skirt and pumps, if need be.

And in terms of construction, nothing else comes close.

"There are a million other jackets out there," Hannah says. "But there is weight and depth and substance to a Chanel jacket. "They are so beautiful and comfortable and flattering. Once you have one, it's hard not to buy another."

Hannah has built a wardrobe of Chanel that includes a quilted leather cardigan jacket, a red tweed motorcycle style, a peplumed wool jersey jacket that reaches to mid-thigh, and the cream boucle cardigan she wore to a cocktail party at Chanel's Bloor St. boutique last week (shown on the cover).

"I try to buy one or two a year," Hannah explains. "And I shop the sales. But even on sale they are a fortune."

Starting price point for a basic Chanel jacket is $4,500. Flourishes like sequins and embroidery can push the expenditure close to what one might pay for a compact car.

A black jacket with silver tiaras encircling each sleeve – the tiaras embroidered by the famous couture house of Lesage, which Chanel now owns – went for $15,000.

"We sold 35," says Mary-Adair Macaire.

Macaire is Chanel's director of global marketing for ready-to-wear and accessories and was in town from Paris along with an exhibition titled Secrets of the Chanel Jacket.

The pieces from the "conservatoire," Chanel's private museum, dated to 1954 when Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel staged her comeback after closing her Paris-based house during World War II.

The fashion of the time was Christian Dior's New Look, with voluminous skirts in up to 20 metres of fabric. Chanel shocked the fashion press with her relaxed suits and a narrow silhouette.

"Chanel hated the New Look," Macaire says. "Her collection was all about comfort, and this jacket was key."

The jacket was modelled on a cardigan with soft shoulders and a boxy cut. "It's a shape we still find relevant," Macaire says. The spring 2008 collection includes cardigan styles in pink leather and red, white and blue checks.

Karl Lagerfeld, designer of the house since 1983, riffs endlessly on the cardigan and other Chanel classics: the spencer jacket, the military jacket, and yachtsman's blazers.

"Chanel was very fond of men and their closets," Macaire says, hinting at the designer's passionate affairs. "She pulled the jacket out of a man's closet and tweaked it."

Chanel's focus on the jacket dates to 1914, a period when women were still corseted and immobilized by stiff fabrics. She allowed women to move – what a concept! – with designs of pliable wool jersey.

"At the time, that was the only fabric she could find and afford," Macaire says.

As usual, Chanel caused a stir.

"Wool jersey was men's underwear fabric, so imagine what women thought when they came to see her collection and found it made from the fabric in their husbands' underwear drawers."

Her renegade spirit led to many Chanel classics: the little black dress, the quilted shoulder bag, Chanel No. 5, the spectator pump.

But her attention to the jacket never waned and she analyzed and re-analyzed its construction to ensure it always delivered comfort and elegance.

Chanel added a chain to the hem so the jacket would fall straight. "She used to say, every woman wants to be wrapped in chains," Macaire quips. And armholes were cut high "because she thought it was very inelegant when a woman raised her arm and the whole jacket went with her."

With her return to fashion, Chanel embraced her favourite fabric, tweed, another house icon that Lagerfeld has pushed to the edge. Chanel tweeds are hand-loomed at Lesage in complex weaves of silk ribbon, satin cord and threads bearing minute embroideries or tiny passementerie.

"I pulled one tweed apart that had a strand of mother-of-pearl hearts in it – definitely not your average tweed," Macaire says.

Yet for all the preciousness, Chanel wanted women to move, to live, to love in her clothes.

"You can sleep in a Chanel tweed jacket and it will look better than you in the morning," Macaire promises.

No doubt, at some point in her remarkable life, Coco put that maxim to the test.

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