Sales of fur reached record highs this year, the International Fur Trade Federation (IFTF) said on Thursday, as China’s growing appetite for luxury goods put the once-taboo material back on the catwalks. The value of the global fur market should exceed US$15 billion this year, compared with US$9.1 billion in 2000, driven by demand from...

Fresh from the successful re-launch of sleepy French shoemaker Roger Vivier, Italy’s king of luxury Tod’s Chairman Diego Della Valle is resuscitating Schiaparelli, a fashion brand inspired by Surrealists that has lain dormant since 1954. Della Valle aims to bring back the name to its haute couture past and kick-start the business with custom-made suits...

A Swiss-based art foundation on Thursday unveiled what it argues is Leonardo da Vinci’s original “Mona Lisa”, backing its claim with evidence from a US research physicist, a forensic imaging specialist and a top Italian expert on the artist. Members of the group told a packed Geneva news conference that the portrait of a woman...

London topped New York as the global fashion capital for the second consecutive year, according to a new ranking released on Thursday, the start of New York Fashion Week. As designers, buyers, models, stylists and fashionistas converged on the Big Apple for the semi-annual event that attracts 116,000 people, New York placed second on the...

If ,like French fashion house Balmain, you can sell a ripped cotton tee-shirt for more than EUR1,000 , you might wonder if there’s any price your well-heeled customers won’t pay. It’s a question the luxury industry has been posing for years as it skipped through the financial crisis in diamond slingbacks – House of Borgezie,...

  Affluent shoppers shrugged off anxiety about the global economy that cast a pall over the luxury sector in the spring, leading Estee Lauder, Michael Kors and Saks to issue bullish sales forecasts. Consumers showed a willingness to pay for high-end handbags and designer gowns and anti-aging creams despite fears earlier this year that rocky...

The live ants served by chef Rene Redzepi with creme fraiche were the stars of the show when Noma – voted World’s Best Restaurant for three years in a row – reinvented itself as a pop-up at Claridge’s over the weekend. It’s disconcerting to watch the main ingredient making its way across a cabbage leaf...

Dry pink wines have been a fad, a craze, a global trend and now they’ve settled into what everyone drinks in summer, and not just at the beach. My favourites come from France’s Provence, where drinking pink has a 2,000-year history. With silky textures, vivid aromas of strawberry and fragrant white flowers, and tangy chalky-spicy...

An assumption that chocolate is a recession-proof treat that consumers continue to buy despite the grim economic outlook was proven wrong on Thursday by the sharpest fall on record in Europe’s quarterly cocoa grind – an indicator of demand. Analysts said worsening economic conditions in the eurozone had prompted a sharp slowdown in European demand...

Italian art experts say they have discovered about 100 previously unknown sketches and paintings by Caravaggio, the Italian baroque painter whose realistic and dramatic canvases set a new standard for Western art. Only some 90 paintings by Caravaggio, who died in 1610 in his late 30s after a turbulent life, and was a master of...