Despite fears of a looming recession, Italy's top designers have paraded fall collections that showed breathtaking decadence, as well as panache
By Clare Coulson
It's unlikely that Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani or any of the other designers showing in Milan over the past week have been pondering the effects of dizzying utility bills, surging inflation or the American sub-prime mortgage crisis. In fact, while the collections last week may have been restrained in mood, they were certainly no less luxurious than usual.

[ FULL STORY ]

On Monday, the Czech band that helped spur the Velvet Revolution discussed human rights and Communism
By Ron Brownlow
There are rock 'n' roll bands that sing about revolution, but only one can claim to have actually inspired one. They are the Plastic People of the Universe, whose Velvet Underground-influenced, psychedelic art rock the Czechoslovak Communist regime found so threatening that in 1977 it sentenced them to prison for "organized disturbance of the peace."

[ FULL STORY ]

After decades of analysis, the Italian director has a new take on his classic 'The Conformist'
By Stuart Jeffries
One rainy night in Paris in 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci was standing outside the Drugstore Saint Germain. It was a quarter to midnight. He was waiting for his mentor, the great New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, to arrive from the French premiere of the Italian's new film, The Conformist. "I haven't talked about this for dozens of years," says Bertolucci, "but Godard was my real guru, you understand? I used to think there was cinema before Godard and cinema after - like before and after Christ. So what he thought about the film meant a great deal to me."

[ FULL STORY ]