Italy's Emanuele Filiberto, Prince of Venice and Piedmont, recently reminisced fondly about his 2001 fling with Kate Moss, whom he met in Corsica. "Who would not fall in love with Kate Moss? She is charming, intelligent, and very beautiful ... not bizarre or weird at all," the Prince said in the Italian magazine Chi. Apparently, the couple stayed together for about eight months.

Love is in the air! While the Italian prince waxed poetic over lost supermodels, the Japanese royal family got a little poetic themselves. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko celebrated 50 years of marriage with a poetry-reading ceremony. The theme of this year's reading—which is a 1000-year-old tradition—was "light."

VF Daily plowed through a serious pile of Sundance party and swag-suite invites to bring you this authoritative and interactive Sundance itinerary, which we will continually update throughout the festival, January 21–31. If it’s not on this map, don’t bother going!

Designed with input from snowboarding Olympic hopeful Shaun White, these goggles are a part of Oakley's new signature series.

Athletes are the inspiration behind Oakley's new Pro Rider series of performance outerwear and its signature goggle collection, which were designed and developed with a number of renowned skiers and snowboarders, including U.S. Olympic hopefuls Gretchen Bleiler and Shaun White.

Writing from her tiny Boston apartment, Jilly Gagnon is a 25-year-old struggling novelist who's starving more than she's selling. But this month, she's decided to "Goop" her way to the good life by following the advice outlined in Gwyneth Paltrow's weekly Internet newsletter. Track her progress with these daily status reports.

Day Eleven

I wake up feeling heavy all over, with my head weighed down, tilting forward on the stem of my neck, and depressed. The last two mornings, in fact, I've woken up wishing, more emphatically than usual, that I didn't have to leave my bed the entire day. Isn't this whole cleanse thing supposed to make me feel lighter?

But I can't let that stop me; I need to summon all that remains of my rapidly flushed-out traces of resolve. Why? Because today may be my hardest Goop yet.

Lunch is going to be a re-purposed breakfast smoothie (this seems just plain cruel to me) and I have to spend the entire day at home, read: close to real food, with only the diversion of writing work to keep me from the fridge, and more hunger than ever before.

I'd probably better spend some time surfing around Gwyneth's favorite Web sites to take my mind off the brutality of it all.

Every September, Vanity Fair unveils the annual International Best-Dressed List, a roster that showcases the globe's most stylish sartorialists. Check back here every Friday as we select the standout outfit of the week worn by one of this year's B.D.L. members.

Penelope Cruz arrived at the January 13 Rome screening of Nine in a brocade halter gown. By Dave M. Benett/Getty Images for Martini.

Earlier this week, the U.K.'s Daily Star reported that Mariah Carey elbowed Paris Hilton out of a music video for a song by Prince Azim of Brunei. Curious whether this was true, we rang up Sensible Music, who released the Prince's iTunes single "A Ballad for You Know Who," and the Prince's producer and sometime manager Jeff Allen set us straight. "I don't actually know where that came from," Allen said of the rumored Paris-Mariah cat fight. "We did ask Paris at one point, but she was tied up. Mariah came in last minute."

Furthermore, Allen tells us, the music video in question is not for a new Prince Azim single but for one by 22-year-old Brunei artist Hill. A former contestant in P2F—Brunei's answer to American Idol—Hill now counts the incredibly wealthy Prince Azim as a patron, producer, and collaborator. Hill's big break came when he performed at a lavish joint birthday party for the Prince and his siblings this past June, where guests included Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, and Sophia Loren. So impressed was Miss Mariah with Hill's performance that she agreed to fly in for a last-minute appearance in the music video for Hill's single "Stay in the Middle." Her perky good-bye wave, at 00:13 below, kind of undercuts the moody opening chords of Hill's ballad, no?

Clockwise from top left: Chef Andrew Carmellini's citrus-braised veal cheeks with polenta; tuna crudo with Meyer lemon; Nantucket Bay scallops with blood orange, celery, and fennel; and lamb meatballs with caprino. The dishes were paired with Solerno Blood Orange Liquor cocktails.

Chef Andrew Carmellini at the Bouley Test Kitchen.

Earlier this week at an intimate three-course dinner prepared by chef Andrew Carmellini, of New York City’s Locanda Verde restaurant, one young lady let her diet overtake her manners. “Does that have cheese in it?” she asked Carmellini as he was about to spoon a generous portion of his beautiful, buttery, citrus-braised veal cheeks onto a perfect creamy mound of polenta. “I don’t like cheese,” she said to the chef, who was dumbfounded at her boldness. Not only was this young lady’s behavior impolite but she also lacked respect for the space in which she was dining: the Bouley Test Kitchen.

Taking the train to Chambers Street and walking a block to 88 West Broadway may not be a holy pilgrimage, but entering chef David Bouley’s Bouley Test Kitchen, which opened in 2006, is certainly a religious experience for food lovers like me. The shiny, stainless-steel work surfaces! The multi-leveled convection ovens! The deep industrial refrigerators filled with blocks of butter and cartons of milk and heavy cream!

On Tuesday night in New York City, Henri Bendel's glittery Fifth Avenue shop was buzzing long after close. The occasion was to celebrate the publication of You Know You Want It, a coffee-table book written by Eric Daman, Gossip Girl's costume designer. Between the presence of hosts Leighton Meester and Ed Westwick (and their co-star besties) and the crew of cameras shooting the reality show The City,, it was abundantly clear that this evening was all about making appearances.

Since Gossip Girl began filming more than two years ago in New York, the series has had somewhat of a meta quality in the city. Eager fans text spottings much in the manner of the show’s titular spy, while the actors seem to be as fond of interdating as their characters are. As a result, it becomes difficult to distinguish the player from the role. But at Bendel, the cast members proved to be exceptions to the rule that life imitates art, as each made moves to clearly distinguish themselves from their on-screen counterparts.

Traditionally, Olympic hockey is nowhere near as rough as the N.H.L. Fighting isn’t tolerated, and the larger ice surface favors the European-style finesse game. That said, Team Canada reliably rolls out some heavy hitters—and with this year’s tournament being played on N.H.L.-size rinks, they’ll be more of an asset than usual.

When the Canadian squad was announced on December 30, one of the biggest surprises was that Dion Phaneuf wasn’t on it. The multi-talented Calgary Flames defenseman (and, for what it’s worth, boyfriend of 24 hottie Elisha Cuthbert) can drive a guy into the boards with the best of them. Despite his absence, though, the host team has plenty of punishers. Here are the top five.

Mike Richards
The Philadelphia Flyers captain loves catching opponents with their heads down. Richards courted controversy earlier this season when he threw a somewhat reckless shoulder-to-head hit in center ice that resulted in a concussion for the other guy. Any Europeans who want to get fancy in the neutral zone against Canada might want to have a look at this first.

Rejoice, denim-lovers (and who isn’t one, really?). Someone over at Banana Republic remembered that once upon a time—the 1990s, to be exact—premium denim was a nonentity. And as the recession flushes out other undesirables, such as doggie cashmere and pyramid schemes, scarily expensive jeans are going the same route, thanks to the seven new women’s and four new men’s spring styles that Banana Republic introduced to fashion editors this week.

Writing from her tiny Boston apartment, Jilly Gagnon is a 25-year-old struggling novelist who's starving more than she's selling. But this month, she's decided to "Goop" her way to the good life by following the advice outlined in Gwyneth Paltrow's weekly Internet newsletter. Track her progress with these daily status reports.

Day 10

Late last night, my boyfriend arrived home from band practice with a weird plastic card in hand, retrieved from some hidden section of the mailbox I'd missed.

"What's that?" I asked, trying to feign curiosity through my cleansing headache and hunger.

"Dunno." He threw it on the counter.

Now I didn't have to look—it was clearly some kind of junk mail—and he didn't have to leave it out, since he has managed to master the concept of throwing things in the garbage, but I did, and he did, and it …

One of the big talking points at this year’s Detroit Auto Show concerned all the delicious technology being integrated into the infotainment (information and entertainment) monitors embedded in the dashboards of new vehicles. Like a tangle of Eastern European porn stars on an Atlantis Cruise of the Cyclades, the manufacturers openly boasted about who could pack more in (and how cheaply). And like watching the resulting movie, I couldn’t help but wonder a few things: Is there actually such a thing as too much? Is that really safe? And at what point do we transcend the Venn-diagram overlap between what is technically possible and what actually enhances enjoyment? In order to answer these questions, I set up a series of interviews with as many humorless engineers, geeky product managers, and flamboyant interior design specialists as I could find, had them walk me through every tedious feature in their inane arsenal, and learned the adulatory power of terms like “nice interface,” in order to put together this intentionally reductive slideshow for you, which shows whose does what, whose doesn’t, and how hard each is trying to keep you from looking at all those distracting roads, signs, and vehicles out there beyond your mobile living room/computing station.

Ryan Philippe and Abbie Cornish. By Jeff Vespa/WireImage.

Last night in Los Angeles, Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor Krista Smith co-hosted an event with C.A.A. agent Hylda Queally, actress Carla Gugino, and stylist Samantha McMillen in honor of the January 26 DVD release of Jane Campion’s Bright Star. The event was held at the Stella McCartney store in West Hollywood and drew an eclectic group of guests, beyond the usual awards-season crowd.

From producers Jennifer Todd, Bruce Cohen, and Stacey Sher to Abbie Cornish’s co-stars in the upcoming Zack Snyder film Sucker Punch, lots of interesting mixing was going on. Vanessa Hudgens attracted a throbbing swarm of paparazzi outside the glass-front building, while Vanessa Paradis entered without a media frenzy. Jamie Chung looked sweet in a puffy skirt and chignon, and Jena Malone rocked a cropped and bleached bob while trying on Stella clothes.

Princess Lia of Romania, the 56-year-old wife of the self-styled Prince Paul of Romania, gave birth to a baby boy this week. Prince Paul, or Paul-Philippe Hohenzollern, is said to be thrilled his wife gave birth on Romanian soil in Bucharest, as the royal hopes to reinstate the defunct Romanian monarchy. Until then, their little prince is an heir without a throne.

Prince Paul isn't the only member of an abolished monarchy who is celebrating. Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, son of formerly exiled Greek monarch Constantine II, King of the Hellenes, has finally proposed to his girlfriend of five years, Tatiana Blatnik, an event planner for Diane von Furstenberg. The couple will most likely wed later this year in a Greek Orthodox service.

Left: Under Armour's uniforms for the U.S. Olympic Bobsled team; right: the label's uniforms for the freestyle ski aerials team.

Only a real daredevil would jump in a sled and hurl him- or herself down a track at more than 90 m.p.h, like the U.S. Bobsled team will do this February at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, so it makes perfect sense that the team’s uniforms, designed by performance-wear purveyor Under Armour, were inspired by stuntman Evel Knievel’s aesthetic. The one-piece speed suit—adorned with stars and stripes—was made with a compression fabric designed to keep athletes warm and dry on the track.