The chic refinement of '50s French actress Capucine may have guided Giles Deacon's Spring 2010 collection of treated-suede cloaks, down-filled puffas and cropped trench coats for the Italian house of Fay. But it was the Italian starlet Margareth Madè who filled the silhouettes at an intimate dinner hosted by the Fay chief designer and his boss, Giulio Guasco, at the Sunset Tower in WeHo recently.
With a hand from L.A. pal Anne Crawford, Giles and the folks from Fay welcomed some three dozen friends, including stylist Elizabeth Stewart and her husband Rob Bragin, Christina Ricci and her stylist/pal Lisa Michelle, artist Liz Goldwyn, hairstylist Jamall Hamadi, Dita Von Teese's manager Melissa Dishell, art advisor William Kopelman, Tracey Ross and, yes, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, for some inexplicable reason. But those tough guys are very nice.
Giles did his time at Gucci, Bottega Venetta and Louis Vuitton before getting to fully flex his ideas with very own label in 2003. He, thankfully, continues to design under his own name and joined the outerwear brand Fay in early 2008. "I guess I know something about the cold," he shrugged matter-of-factly in his charming, regular-guy manner.
Does he ever. Giles now lives in north London, when he's not zigzagging around the globe for the job. He was in and out of L.A. in a snap. But he originally hails from the same land of the Lakes as Andy, Cumbria (in Giles' case, specifically Darlington). Yes, that Cumbria which is now drowning under several feet of rainfall. When I suggested I really wanted his men's pea coat over anything else in his collection, he knocked his head back and jokingly cried "No, no, no." Apparently, I'm not the only gal eyeing that style for her very own.
Margareth wasn't the only one who slipped in and out of the coats, otherwise displayed on mannequins like frozen guests outside our dining area. Guinevere Van Seenus, who's taken more than a few turns for our host on the runway, played dress up, too, without much prodding from the designer either (and she, too, drove him with a request for the pea coat!).
Over the steak frites most of us ended up ordering, we had a cozy evening catching up on life over work talk. The tall and swarthy Francesco Scianna, who stars opposite Magareth in "Baarìa," whispered cautiously that their film is already generating some Oscar talk--which is why the pair of them, along with director Guiseppe Tornatore, were in town. The Sicilian comedy was nominated for a Golden Lion at the recent Venice Film Fest, and is already its country's entry for best foreign language film. What's more, Guiseppe already took home an Oscar for his 1989 "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso." So maybe it is worth checking out, after all.


Photos by Donato Sardella