THE labels came to town on Tuesday and most of Dublin's fash-pack and society types turned out in force. First up was Shu Uemura, which as any fashionista will tell you is the name of a highly desirable range of make-up, beloved of It girls the world over. To open his huge range of dolly-mixture eye-shadows, lipsticks and powders in Dublin's latest temple to hedonism, Blueiru on South William Street, Shu himself made a rare trip outside his native Japan.
Even through an interpreter, he managed to charm the fashion press, making such oddities as his Depsea water (water from 200 feet below the sea's surface mixed with aromatherapy fragrances) seem like essentials and confiding that kabuki actors - and Gwyneth Paltrow - swear by his cleansing oil.
At 6 p.m. Shu was entertaining at the store again - champagne and sushi of course - and many of the guests stopped by on their way to the second label fest of the evening. Louis Vuitton has arrived in Brown Thomas and the folks from LMVH, the mother company, decided to throw a huge bash at the Morrison Hotel.
A scion of the Vuitton family, Patrick Vuitton, was there puffing on a pipe and reacting to compliments about his bags and his party with a typical Gallic bien sur shrug. Francois Steiner, president of Louis Vuitton Europe, had also made the trip.
Among those there for what people were calling "the opening of a handbag" were former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and his wife, Kathleen; publisher Kevin Kelly who's off to New York next month for the party to launch America's Elite 1000; Fumi Giwa of Absolute Hair, sporting a red LV number; publicist Sonia Reynolds fulfilling every cliche about blooming pregnancies; designer Cuan Hanley; publisher John Ryan; hotel manager Gerard Denneny who, having launched the Morrison Hotel was quickly snapped up by the new Four Seasons in Ballsbridge; the enfant terrible of the Dublin Socialite Party, Gavin Lambe-Murphy; model Henny Connyngham and her dad Lord Henry Mount Charles and Maureen Cairnduff, who's in the final stages of putting together a new Who's Who for Ireland.
L.E.