Brooklyn Decker & Sofia Vergara: Conde Nast Party Pals!

Brooklyn Decker hits the Conde Nast Traveler Annual Hot List Party on Monday (April 11) at Soho House in West Hollywood, Calif.

The model and Just Go With It actress turned 24 the next day. Happy b-day, Brooklyn!!!

Brooklyn met up with Modern Family star Sofia Vergara at the bash, where guests snacked on bites by chef Jose Andres and speciality cocktails created by Erick Lorincz.

FYI: Brooklyn is wearing a DVF dress with Manolo Blahnik shoes and Jen Meyer earrings. Sofia is wearing a Dolce&Gabbana dress.

Sex and the buggy... Not sure Carrie would approve as Sarah Jessica Parker dresses down for day out with twins

Sarah Jessica Parker looked rather dressed down at the weekend compared with her fashion-mad alter-ego Carrie Bradshaw.
But then it’s not easy pushing a bumper baby stroller in Manolo Blahnik shoes.
The 46-year-old Sex and the City star was spotted on a girls’ day out with her 21-month-old twins Marion and Tabitha in New York City.

Push me mummy! Sarah Jessica Parker enjoys a day out with her twins Tabitha and Marion in New York City

Her daughters with husband Matthew Broderick were born to surrogate mum Michelle Ross six years after the couple had their first child, James Wilkie Broderick, now eight.
And she made sure to have a special mother and children bonding day on her day off from shooting a romantic comedy in New York.

Looking like an every-day mother in grey jeans and a black and white cardigan, Parker took the girls to the Greenwich Village playground in Manhattan.
She pushed her children on the swings and let them have fun on the slide during the sunny day in the Big Apple.
Sarah Jessica is currently filming the sequel to Valentine's Day - New Year's Eve.

In it she plays a mother who relies too heavily on her daughter for company.
Her on-screen daughter is being played by Little Miss Sunshine actress Abigail Bresen, 15.
New Year's Eve is packed with an A-list cast of actors, including Robert De Niro, Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel and Halle Berry.
The Gary Marshall directed film is based around the lives of several couples and singles in New York who intertwine over the course of New Yerar's Eve.
It is set to be released in the UK on December 9.

Scarlet soles are a red rag to feminists' ideology

www.michaelmucci.com

The last piece of human architecture to be colonised, sexualised and merchandised was the hard-working, taken-for-granted, out-of-sight sole. The humble base of the shoe. Then Christian Louboutin, looking for an edge in a field already crowded with look-at-me gimmicks, began to paint the soles of his hand-crafted shoes with a glossy red lacquer.
Now, the signature flash of rich red beneath a towering pair of Louboutins has elevated the French designer from fashionable to cult. You want the Louboutin power strut? Don't expect any change out of $800. Millions of women pay, or would like to pay, to join this cargo cult. They see that flash of red as a flash of power.
Christian Louboutin is as big a commodity-maker as Manolo Blahnik was before his wave crested with the tacky embrace of Sex and the City. The red flash is as big as the Jimmy Choo fad, which peaked a decade ago, and sexually more potent. Louboutin is even suing Yves Saint Laurent for trademark infringement after the YSL fashion house introduced red-soled stilettos in its last collection. Red soles are hot.

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The pervasive power display of women wearing stilettos, despite the style's innate and obvious potential to damage the wearer, is not an evolution that feminists of the 1970s might have expected. But the world is an infinitely more complex place than the one laid out by Jurassic Feminism. Anyone who still wants to see the world through the prism of gender fixation, where women are structural victims and men are structural oppressors, is locked into a fusty bigotry that the stiletto generations are walking away from.
All the great recent advances made for women have been made by people - men and women working together. Most of the legislation that seeks to advance the progress of women has been passed by legislatures dominated by men. And no amount of government social engineering is going to stop women behaving badly to women, which happens all the time. Women bully women. Women block women in the workforce.
It's not all sisterhood. Often it is competition, exclusion and ridicule. This can apply with even more Darwinian brutality among teenage girls. Teenagers are also the most vulnerable to the Great Insecurity Machine, and that machine will crank into action in all its glory on May 2, the first day of Australian Fashion Week.
Already, the giraffes are beginning to gather. Soon they will be strutting and pouting down the runways in the tents at Circular Quay. The giraffes are the models with the one-in-a-hundred bodies used to project not just the clothes but the ideal of what a woman should look like. And they are so very young.
That's the foundation lie fed to women, largely by women, via the Great Insecurity Machine, the commercial fashion industry. It is the lie fed by women's fashion magazines - the most corrupt genre of journalism - and fashion designers and fashion retailers. The fashion industry may have a noble goal - to give people pleasure, make them more appealing, and more confident - but even more important is profitability and cash flow. Along with the accelerating speed of online commerce and social networking, the fashion cycles are quickening. The energy required to stay sharp and current is becoming more acute. Commercial survival trumps consumer pleasure.
Reality also trumps ideology. Which is why academic ''feminism'' is ageing so badly. The entire edifice of classic feminist ideology, and gender studies, is devolving into an intellectual artifice as grand as Marxism or complex financial derivatives. Academic feminism in the West has turned out to be little more than another flag of convenience for the left, in the way the Greens use environmentalism.
The most totemic book of the 1970s wave of feminism, The Feminist Mystique, by Betty Friedan, was written 50 years ago and published in 1963. It became the paradigm of the dubious methodologies and victimologies still being marketed on university campuses under the brand ''feminist''. Friedan was not a scholar; she was a journalist. She was not oppressed; she was privileged. She was not rigorously impartial; she was a hardline leftist. She was not honest, and sought to cover up her early work for the largest Communist-led union in America. She also mined the work of Simone de Beauvoir for her book but gave no credit. Above all, Friedan was a navel gazer. Her feminism was about middle-class, middle-brow white women.
These flaws were not hers alone. They can still be found embedded in feminist ideology. We are living in the middle of a massive global struggle over the rights and freedoms of women, a life-and-death matter for a billion women and girls, and secular middle-class Western feminism is proving irrelevant.
What drove the great changes now - called the feminist revolution in the West - was not a wave of brave and articulate women activists, though they had a role, but something far deeper and more significant: the vast demographic deformity caused by World War II. It took two generations to unwind this deformity. Part of that unwinding was the liberation of women from the expectation of domesticity. It happened because of the actions of millions of people, men and women.
Society is still trying to reconcile the distortions caused by the most important difference between the genders: the mothering drive. This is the bedrock on which family and culture is built. Yet women must assume all the risks of fertility. It is a fundamental inequality.
It makes today's fertility and power displays, all those flashes of teetering red, even more loaded with density of meaning.

"Stilleto Strut" raising money for Star Children's Charity

Ladies, it's time to get those spring pedicures and new heels for the annual "Stiletto Strut" at Neiman Marcus Willow Bend and just in case you've got a budget badger, remind him that those new stilettos are for charity.

Shoe-lovers of Collin County are counting the days until the April 14 Neiman Marcus Willow Bend Stiletto Strut benefitting Star Children's Charity.Ê The annual event boasts big names and large donations for the children's charity that donates funds to several Collin County children's charities.

"We are strutting for the children of Collin County," Jan Richey, co-chair and Star member, said. "Each day the demand grows for services to meet the safety, health and well being of our children.Ê Neiman Marcus Willow Bend and Star have partnered to create a fun event to raise much needed money to support the nonprofits of Collin County who serve children.Ê It is an honor to chair the Stiletto Strut with my dear friend, Maureen Steitle."

The evening is dedicated to raising funds for the children of Collin County through Star Children's Charity, which provides significant financial support to improve services for medical, education, enrichment and safety through children-serving, nonprofit organizations in the county.

Beneficiaries of Star Children's Charity include Boys and Girls Club of Collin County, Children's Medical Center at Legacy, CITY House, Plano Children's Medical Clinic, The Samaritan Inn and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Plano. Sponsorships and ticket reservations for the Stiletto Strut are available at www.StarChildrens.com or by calling 972-943-3344.ÊÊ

Get a pair of summer shades that fit perfectly at the sunglass fit event, or grab a snazzy sketch to take home by the stiletto sketch artist. A party photo booth will also be on hand to capture new looks after the Chanel makeovers and participants will have a chance to win $1,800 worth of designer shoes from Neiman Marcus during the designer shoe raffle.

A runway workshop will also take place to help obtain the perfect strut and swagger, not to mention the celebrity shoe auction featuring shoes from Magic and Cookie Johnson, Victoria Snee and others.

Participants will have a chance to mingle with celebrity co-chairs Victoria Snee of 102.9 and The Beauty Buzz with husband, Jeff Crilley as well as Lev Glazman, founder and creator of FRESH in Cosmetics.

Beauty experts and authors Sandy Linder and Lois Joy Johnson will be on hand at the Lancome counter in cosmetics where guests can receive a complimentary copy of their book, "The Make Up Wake Up" with any $100 Lancome purchase.

This year, men are also welcome to hang out in a special lounge while the women enjoy a little pampering and a lot of high fashion. Men can relax in the "Loafer's Lounge," which includes casino tables, a sports viewing center, cigar rolling, a Robert Graham Men's Fashion presentation, and complimentary men's facials in The Man's Store.

"Neiman Marcus Willow Bend is excited to partner with Star Children's Charity on our second annual Stiletto Strut event," Marcus Wyss, Vice President and General Manager for Neiman Marcus Willow Bend said in a release. "We know women in Collin County love designer shoes and we have the best selection from vendors like Chanel, Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, Prada, Gucci and more. ÊThe event will be an evening of fashion and fun while raising money for seven Collin County non-profit agencies.

The lowdown on high heels

After teetering on vertiginous stilettos, women may get some relief as designers have lowered their heights for their 2011 Fall/Winter collections.

Spiky heels and stilettos haven't disappeared from the catwalk, but designers showing their newest lines at New York Fashion Week featured plenty of lower, stacked, chunky heels, wedges, booties and coloured socks.

“They're quirkier. I think they're more wearable and cooler,” said Dana Schwartz, the director of communications for Jill Stuart about the shoes and the look.

“It goes with the current trend of longer hemlines, blouses and more done-up, sophisticated silhouettes. The shoes counter that to bring it back.”

New York designer Stuart paired bold, abstract animal prints, strong colours in rusts, red, oranges, black and aubergine and below-the-knee skirts in a collection inspired by the forest and a dark, wintry fairytale with wedges, booties and socks crumpled around or above the ankles.

The chunky shoes offset the feminine looks and gave the collection a quirky touch.

“It adds playfulness to the overall look,” Schwartz added.

Dark coloured socks were an added touch and accompanied nearly every outfit, including tapered trousers, elongated skirts, as well as softer shifts and feminine dresses.

Adam Lippes, the founder and creative director of ADAM, also featured socks in his fall collection, but instead of sturdier shoes he matched them with Manolo Blahnik high heels for a funky yet feminine look.

White, brown and black socks worn with strappy ankle-tie stilettos added the finishing touch to a button-topped pleated skirt, silk printed dresses, a strapless black lace gown and a gold embroidered dress in the collection inspired by a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan.

“It (the sock) really draws a lot of attention to the shoes,” said Erin Conroy, a spokesman for Italian shoemaker Via Spiga.

Wedged booties, stacked heels and combat boots also completed New York-based English fashion designer Charlotte Ronson's sombre grunge, outdoorsy look that featured chunky sweaters, military jackets, wide-leg trousers and maxi and miniskirts.

“Part of it is the comfort factor,” Conroy said. “For women who are seeking comfort, the wedge is a great solution because you don't have to give up the height to be comfortable.”

For Emmanuelle Alt, the new editor-in-chief of French Vogue, who will be presiding over the Paris shows, shoes are the most important element of an outfit.

“You can wear just about anything as long as you have beautiful shoes, but you can't do the opposite,” she told Elle Decoration in 1977.

Fans of super-high platforms weren't disappointed by designer Christian Siriano, of Project Runway fame. He opted for drama with shoes not for the faint-hearted. His towering clunky designs included snakeskin, studs and buckles.

But Siriano's shoes were a bit too challenging for one model, who tumbled on the runway during his New York show.

Manolo Blahniks vs. Cheaper Heels

When it comes to high-heeled shoes, most women are willing to tolerate pain for for fashion.

But does paying top dollars for high heels make a difference on comfort?

Consumer Reports ShopSmart tested basic heels ranging from $30 a pair all the way up to $575 a pair to find out.

The shoes on display at the Manolo Blahnik boutique are top of the line and you can easily spend a small fortune there. Anywhere from several hundred to thousands of dollars.

To find out if high-end, expensive shoes are worth the high price, Consumer Reports ShopSmart rounded up more than a dozen testers to try out three different pairs.

"We covered up all the labels so the women couldn't tell which were the less expensive pairs of shoes and which were the expensive ones," says Mandy Walker of Consumer Reports ShopSmart.

The shoes included a $30 pair of Mossimo's from Target, $69 heels from Nine West, and a $575 pair from Manolo Blahnik.

The women walked a defined course twice a day for a week in each pair of shoes. They filled out a ballot each time.

Most of the women thought two pairs looked and felt pretty good, but not the $30 pair from Target.

"I was holding onto the wall when I was walking around the building testing them," says Cathy Cotters, a Consumer Reports tester.

"These shoes were the most uncomfortable of the ones that we tested," says Lisa Gill, another Consumer Reports tester.

To size up how well each shoe was made, ShopSmart went extreme by cutting the shoes in half.

"Overall the Manolos were a better-made shoe," says Walker. "The materials they were made of were superior, and many of the women liked the styling, too."

However, in the blind tests more women thought the $69 Nine West shoes were more comfortable.

ShopSmart says the smart money move with high heels is to make fit the deciding factor.

"Determine the style you want, what your budget is, and if they feel good when you walk around in them, buy them," says Walker.

Consumer Reports ShopSmart says good leather heels need special care. It's best not to wear them two days in a row. That gives the shoes time to dry out. And avoid wearing them in bad weather. Step in a puddle with oil, gas, or road salt, and you can ruin them.

Taking a tasty gamble on Singapore

I once dated a guy who halfway through our relationship was grumbling about having taken me to the best restaurants in Sydney and the expense that I had incurred on his credit card.

"I should have started in the mid price range and then I could have worked my way up to the top. Now you’ll be expecting five-star three-hat restaurants all the time."

I looked at him like he was crazy. "What makes you think I would have dated you if you had started in the middle range?"

(It’s not strictly true. My first date with Mr NQN was bad take away pizza. But then I thought Mr NQN was much more fabulous than this guy.)

But in any case, I couldn’t help thinking about this ex of mine when I arrived in Singapore to be whisked away to dinner at Waku Ghin, Tetsuya Wakuda’s new restaurant in Singapore. With food completely unlike his Tetsuya’s restaurant in Sydney and only seating a mere 25 people at one time, it was something that I was more than curious about. And when Mr NQN took my place at the Waku Ghin dinner in Sydney there was much gnashing of the teeth and moaning as I was committed to another event. But no matter, I finally got to try it here! It’s no ordinary dinner, costing about $S400 ($A307) per head, but it has a clear emphasis on Japanese cuisine as opposed to the French Japanese cuisine at Tetsuya’s.

We walk into the Marina Bay Sands complex. There are shops from Miu Miu, Gucci, Chanel and the mother lode, a Manolo Blahnik shoe shop. We make our way up to the second floor where we look down and see floors and floors of the casino. I’m not one for gambling, but because they allow for smoking here some of the cigarette smoke does end up in Waku Ghin, so there was a bit of sniffling throughout the night from yours truly who is allergic to cigarette smoke.

There is an illuminated sign above the doors and white drapes on the outside giving it an almost 'closed' look. But then the doors swing open and a battalion of staff greet us. And given that the restaurant seats 25 there has got to be at least 25 staff in both the kitchen and on the floor.

The restaurant experience was said to be one where you move from one table to another, but in reality it is much less complicated than that. There are two seatings, one at 6pm and one at 9:30pm. The diner is led to a room where the savoury courses are brought out (about eight in total) and then you adjourn to another room for the dessert courses. I was envisaging much more getting up and down so I am relieved given my heels!

We are seated in front of a long grill plate and facing a wall with protruding wood blocks. Ghin means silver in Japanese and for this restaurant it is represented in the knives, the grill and even things like fish, which feature prominently on the menu. Shortly after we arrive we settle in with a glass of NV Pol Roger to soothe the nerves after travelling.

The first course is a seasonal Japanese fish called Sayori, or needlefish, with Nanohana and Japanese strawberry. Now I usually run screaming from savoury dishes with strawberry in them. I don’t mind some fruit but strawberries are not a favourite with savoury. This changed my mind completely.