TUSTIN — Forty-two young rabbits found stuffed into several boxes and one animal carrier in Santiago Canyon are awaiting new homes at the Orange County animal shelter.

The bunnies — ranging in age from a few months to two years — were reported abandoned Aug. 7 near Diamond Haul Road. Some had minor injuries from being in a confined space, but have recovered.

There are no plans to investigate the dumping of the rabbits, which are domestic short-hair and Rex-type breeds, said OC Animal Care spokeswoman Sondra Berg, who previously worked in animal control.

“As an animal control officer, it was not uncommon to get clusters of rabbits,” she said.

In many cases, she said, people get rabbits, don’t spay or neuter them and let them breed out of control. When that happens, the owners often leave the rabbits in a public space, such as a park or an industrial area.

“We don’t investigate them because it doesn’t lead anywhere,” Berg said. “Generally, they do it because they don’t want to pay owner relinquishment fees. Usually, they leave them somewhere where they think people will find them.

“If there had been some sort of trauma to the rabbits, that would have elevated this,” she said of the newly rescued bunnies. “There was no obvious sign someone had inflicted any trauma to them. They were well taken care of.”

Since January, OC Animal Care has taken in 575 rabbits. The shelter housed 636 in 2017 and 911 in 2016. According to shelter officials, the euthanasia rate for rabbits is 18 percent, compared to 44 percent for cats and 10 percent for dogs.

Shelter officials are currently waiving adoption fees in an effort to lower the animal population at the shelter.

In 2016, the Orange County Board of Supervisors approved the OC Animal Care Fee Waiver Resolution, which allows the temporary waiver of regular adoption costs when shelter capacity climbs above 80 percent.

As of Wednesday, Sept. 19, the shelter was at 86 percent capacity. There are 200 dogs, 240 cats and 75 other animals including bunnies, reptiles and birds.

Without a waiver, adoptions fees for a rabbit would be $50 if it is unaltered, $90 if the adopter requests the rabbit be spayed or neutered. With the waiver, the fee is free. If the adopter wants to implant a microchip, the cost is $14.

As with people adopting other animals at the shelter, Berg said, those who plan to adopt a rabbit must first meet with shelter staff and go through training.

“Rabbits are similar to pet dogs and cats in that they enjoy human contact and love to run around and play,” Berg said. “They should be spayed or neutered to prevent unwanted bunnies if they are kept with other rabbits, to prevent overcrowding local shelters.”

Maintaining separate personalities when designing two lines is never an easy feat. This season, Alessandro Dell’Acqua’s Rochas girl spilled over into his collection for No. 21. “It’s the erotic side of the bourgeoisie,” he said of his ladylike outfits with a whiff of “Belle de Jour.”
He opened with an all-black sequence of decorous staples done in glossy fabrics that gave them an off-kilter edge. Glazed chiffon lent a bin-liner sheen to a Forties-style button-up blouse, while a pencil skirt in faux patent ostrich leather shimmered like an oil slick.
A plain vest and skirt, meanwhile, were layered with a thick rhinestone chain that suggested the outline of a T-shirt, in a use of negative space with fetishistic overtones. Dell’Acqua dialed back his signature masculine tailoring, save for the boxy outerwear rendered in sculptural fabrics like a soft nude Neoprene.
“Some of them zip open to reveal a glimpse of bare back, and the shoes are very sexy,” he said backstage, pointing to the barely there sandals with transparent straps.
The designer kept embellishment to a minimum — a quartet of dresses trimmed in showy ostrich feathers, and a bugle-beaded slipdress that was a walking sparkle filter — and instead used couture-inspired volumes for

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For 2019, the designers at Tse are looking to Godhra, a municipality in India located in the Kutch region, for inspiration; throughout the year, they will focus on a new facet of the area to develop each collection (and hope to travel there in the process). For spring, the focus was the personal style and bandhani technique of the Bari people.
“Bari men — they do a lot of particularly agricultural [work], but their wives and women do a lot of dying and knotting, which is called Bandhani knotting, which looks a little bit like [Japanese] Shibori and when they dye the fabric it looks a lot like these tied and knotted strands. So we did that a lot for the inspiration,” explained design director Michelle Robinson.
The result included hand-knotted cashmere cased beads that appeared on a large part of the collection through belts, dress straps and trimmings as well as through a blown-out print of the Bandhani circular outline on cashmere sweaters. A chai colored slipdress with long strings of the beads for straps made for a standout in the strong collection. Wrapped and typing details also made for an important tie back to the personal style of the

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Elizabeth Hilfiger’s spring collection for Foo and Foo played on her first two collections — piercing details from the first, pull ties from the second — and evolved them into another great lineup full of interactive details for spring. Pull ties on hoodies were given attachable lighters while studlike piercings were formed in a hexagon shape on the front of a green T-shirt. There was lots of newness as well: rougher utility pants and matching jacket, F+ logo tank tops cut like a bodysuit but without the bottom snaps, and really great graphic Ts. Inspiration was pulled from a mixture of Art Brut and folk art, resulting in graphic and text-adorned Ts and hoodies with the words “Art Brut,” or “Neuchatel Switzerland,” with “naïvely placed” (as Hilfiger called it) logos. Hilfiger described it as the “Foo and Foo Alpine Tour going through Switzerland,” as well as a collection that “Snapped back at the world today.”

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There is no question that Fausto Puglisi is Italian to his core, but one of his ongoing obsessions is America. The culture, the women and their sense of independence and fun have informed his work from the beginning and continued to do so for spring. Puglisi homed in on some of his favorite designers from the Seventies, namely Stephen Burrows and Halston, taking their sense of color and sexy sportiness and molding into his va-voom maximalist sensibility. “I’m not saying this is ‘the new Halston’ or ‘the new Stephen Burrows,’” Puglisi said during his presentation at Larusmiani. “It’s just Fausto thinking about the things that shocked my mind as a kid.”
In addition to Burrrows’ color-blocked intarsias, worked into bustier bodysuits worn with stretch jersey long-on-one-side, mini-on-the-other skirts, and Halston’s slinky jersey, reimagined as a tank dress and more bodysuits, Puglisi paid homage to Azzedine Alaïa. Specifically, Grace Jones in the famous lace-up, purple hooded dress, which inspired a scant mini and mid-length dress, both painted on the body with wide-open lacework up the side. Nothing in the collection was for a wallflower. Nothing ever is. Puglisi’s clothes are for women who’ve got it, know it and are proud to flaunt it. There’s

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Arthur Arbesser has always used art as a springboard for his cerebral designs, so it was only natural that the muse for his spring collection should be an artist herself.
While the lineup was anchored in his Austrian heritage, with geometric prints that harked back to the Vienna Secession, he spliced in an eclectic Italian reference in the shape of sculptor Fausto Melotti. A contemporary of Lucio Fontana and Gio Ponti, he is the subject of an exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York.
Arbesser imagined a female alter ego for Melotti, dressed in clothes inspired by his little horse sculptures and ceramic bowls with marbled and metallic glazes. The primitive horse figurines appeared as a naïve pattern on midi dresses and skirts; the porcelain surfaces translated into shiny effects that ranged from a dusting of sequins on a checkered slipdress, to a flashy copper lamé short-sleeve shirt.
It requires a certain confidence to pull off Arbesser’s aesthetic, with its intrepid sense of layering and eclectic mix of mannish checks, harlequin motifs and bold stripes — a signature of the brand.
A sheer lozenge-patterned dress was overlaid on a checked bodysuit so that the two motifs appeared to merge, while a

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TIME FOR A SECOND ACT: After a four-year hiatus, Nary Manivong is back on the scene with a direct-to-consumer signature collection.
The designer decided to hit the reset button, even leaving New York for the better part of 2014, before returning. Interestingly, Manivong said he didn’t jump at the opportunity to start his own label when Handa Fashion’s Jack Shi presented the idea. The duo have known each other professionally for 10 years, but their partnership evolved over time. Not wanting to rush back into fashion full time, the conversation played out over 18 months during which Shi offered to provide all the production services for his signature label at no cost.
Manivong now occupies a floor that serves as a factory, sample room and showroom in a West 35th Street building. His capsule collection — three dresses, a skirt and six tops — will be sold online direct-to-consumer starting Thursday. Aiming to be strategic with his growth plan, he wants to find the right retail partner initially rather than multiple ones. Retail prices will range from $400 to $900 with the higher-end of the spectrum made from Laotian textiles. The Ohio-born designer took the 19-hour flight there earlier this year to meet many relatives for the

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ACTING OUT AGAINST FUR: Animal rights activists have recruited actress Pamela Anderson to lobby Prada to go fur free.
Her support is being tagged onto an international effort against Prada Group that was started earlier this month and led by Fur Free Alliance. For what appears to be more of a personal appeal, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has enlisted Anderson. The “Baywatch” actress has penned a letter to Miuccia Prada that was sent today, according to a PETA spokeswoman.
Anderson wrote, “I have long admired your creativity — and Prada’s timeless nylon bag — but I was disappointed to learn from my friends at PETA that instead of going fur-free, Prada has chosen merely to reduce the amount of animal pelts that it sells. A ‘ gradual’ reduction is no consolation to animals who are languishing inside tiny cages on fur farms and being anally electrocuted and skinned alive for their fur right now. Please, I urge you to drop fur immediately.”
In response to this month’s global effort, Prada executives responded by noting how PETA had been informed that Prada has committed “to a gradual and concrete reduction in the marketing of these products which, to date, represent less

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Orla Kiely, the Irish homeware and fashion brand has shuttered, after parent company Kiely Rowan PLC ceased operations, earlier this week.
The brand’s web site and brick-and-mortar stores — located in Covent Garden and King’s Road in London and Kildare in Ireland — have also stopped trading, with immediate effect.
According to British media reports, company employees were also made redundant without pay and escorted out of the building on Monday.
“We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Orla Kiely’s Home and Design licensing business will not be impacted and its selection of its homeware and accessories will continue to be sold through its distribution partners,” the company said, in a statement published on its web site. “Thank you for embracing our brand and designs throughout the year and for ongoing support.”
According to the latest company filings by Kiely Rowan on Companies House, the official registry for U.K. businesses, profits decreased to 74,000 pounds in 2017 compared with 109,000 pounds in the previous year.
Paul Appleton, managing partner at the consultancy David Rubin & Partners has been appointed to wind down Kiely Rowan and liquidate its assets.
A representative from David Rubin & Partners confirmed the news and said that Orla Kiely will be placed in

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LONDON — Harvey Nichols is seeing its revenues grow, as the storewide refurbishment of its Knightsbridge flagship starts to take shape.
In the financial year ending March 2018, revenues were up 9 percent to 210 million pounds, compared with 194 million pounds last year.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization were up 102 percent, to 14.7 million pounds, compared with 7.3 million pounds last year, when the store’s ongoing overhaul ate into the retailer’s bottom line.
“Our ambitious Knightsbridge store refurbishment plans have had a positive impact,” said Manju Malhotra and Daniela Rinaldi, the group’s joint chief operating officers. “However, the retail environment remains challenging and competitive. With this uncertain outlook, we are focused for the remainder of this year on continuing to drive sales and delivering an omnichannel experience for our customers.”
In the last two years, the store unveiled revamped men’s, beauty, fine jewelry, accessories and women’s wear departments, introducing more modern, sleek interiors and a boutique-life feel.
“The difference between us and the other main department stores is our size. We’re small, and so we wanted to play on that more and make it our strength rather than be apologetic with smaller spaces,” said Hazel Catterall, head of women’s wear buying,

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