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What do the names in the headline have in common you might ask? Nothing, absolutely nothing, but they serve to introduce the themes I’m going to talk about today.
The Palm Springs International Film Festival was celebrated in January and it reminded me of an article I read months ago in Vogue, the fashion bible, called “Palm Springs: California’s Desert Playground” and also got me thinking about the Coachella Valley.
It may bring back the “Rat Pack,” the merry band of amigos led by Frank Sinatra, who hung out in the area, along with other film stars and assorted royalty. I could get lost in the details behind such places as the Hotel Mirador or the neighborhood of Las Palmas, but I’d rather focus on the fact that many years later it is still has a cult following.
In particular, the Ace Hotel, one of a chain, that I mentioned when I spoke of hotel shops, and I must say again that these people have a very clear idea of what they are doing, using the original building and adapting it to the style or feeling of the chain while at the same time respecting the original construction. In this case the shop is not what counts, but rather the life by the pool and perhaps most of all the isolated tranquility.
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I love that they have respected the original construction and that it has this aspect of the 1970s, and with their permission, I find it reminds me of the “apartments” of an earlier time in the south of Grand Canary Island.
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And if I mention that I should also mention the Korakia Pensione, a place that at one time was a hideaway where the former proprietor entertained his friends and has become a place for romantic escapes or the perfect spot to shoot some of the fashion editorials that we see every month.
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If I continue thinking of the fashion connection to this place, I come to the Coachella Music & Arts Festival, held every year alongside the Film Festival, an event par excellence to see and be seen. The whole camping theme is fantastic.
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These are places for very independent travelers looking for something really personalized, and very, but very, authentic, very retro, however I have my doubts about the tranquility at festival time, but in any case it is the perfect shooting location for fashion spreads, to give one example.
Changing gears, there was a time when a hotel stay meant the addition of a distinctive sticker with the name of the place on your luggage. In an effort to bring back that tradition, the Louis Vuitton brand has issued a box of 30 stickers of the world’s great hotels, reflecting the stories and adventures Gaston-Louis Vuitton must have lived. It seems the French house has a collection of 3,000 hotel stickers in its archives.
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Nor can I forget to mention their travel guides.
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Last Christmas I stumbled upon the web Changing Room, a name that suggests a “change of room,” prompting an investigation and it looks like a topic worthy of comment. How would it seem to you to have a pop-up store in you hotel, with a number of designers who put their creations on sale for a few hours in a series of rooms? Something like that is what Barcelona’s Changing Room does: a hotel is chosen, 25 designers are selected (national and international) and during one day some of the hotel’s rooms are turned into shops and like all pop-up stores there are parallel events.
The last edition was celebrated in the Hotel Chic and Basic Born, a very minimalist Barcelona hotel.
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They’ve been holding the event since 2006, twice a year, calling the winter event “cold” and the summer “hot.”
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A place or hotel destination that is still there, “fashionably,” a wink to hotels of the past by the French luggage house (clothing too) and an example of the pop-up store but with a treatment different from the usual one – converting the rooms of a hotel into shops for a day. Today we can conclude with: Shall we reinvent the familiar?