There's a new player in the world of online flash sales for home décor and furniture. Launched Tuesday, DesignStory uses the membership model pioneered by Paris-based Vente-Privée and imported by Gilt Groupe to offer limited-time sales of home and design products. While sites such as Gilt and One Kings Lane offer up homegoods from a broad range of brands and designers, DesignStory is more focused on products with a modern edge. Look for a strong selection of Scandinavian stuff, as the San Francisco-based company boasts an "R&D innovation hub" in Helsinki, Finland, the home country of co-founders Mia Lewin and Inka Mero. "Our emphasis is on design and visual aesthetics—the emotion, the beauty, the functionality," says Mero, who serves as chief product officer and mans the aforementioned innovation hub. DesignStory's debut sale features a selection of colorful, kid-friendly items (like the $200 Zoo Mobile, pictured) designed by Eero Aarnio. Weekly sales begin every Tuesday at noon Eastern and run through the following Monday, or while supplies last.

A photo by Corinne Day that appeared in the November 2003 issue of Italian Vogue.

Photographer Corinne Day died last Friday of a brain tumor. She was 48. Best known for her iconic portraits of Kate Moss, who she stumbled upon 20 years ago in the London offices of Storm modeling agency, Day added a layer of grit to the high-gloss world of fashion photography, channeling the likes of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark into a new, commercial context. "Fashion photography had always been about fantasy. I wanted to take it in the opposite direction," she once said. "The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it. I wanted to put in that feeling of youth culture."

Day's untimely death has elicited a variety of tributes, memories, and considerations of her legacy. Writing in The New York Times, Douglas Martin highlighted Day's "unrelenting visual honesty," noting that she "refused to airbrush the bags from under models' eyes or de-emphasize their knobby knees." The Telegraph's Lucy Davies concludes that Day's work "fired the imagination of a whole generation of photographers," including Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, and David Sims. Meanwhile, Charlotte Higgins sees an even bigger picture, writing in The Guardian, "With hindsight, the power of Day's pictures is that they seem to echo a moment in British cultural history, one that goes beyond the emergence of grunge as a fashion trend, and might also call to mind the grubbier shores of Britpop, the youthful antics of artists such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and the publication of novels such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting."

Speaking of the Van Gogh Museum, its curator, Axel Ruger, was a part of yesterday's Twitter event called "Ask A Curator," which was itself curated by the UK-based Sumo Design. While the event was largely a success, with loads of people chiming in to ask questions of the hundreds of curators participating in the event, Aol News reports that the whole thing became a bit derailed once spammers started seeing the discussion's growing popularity. Suddenly links to Viagra were replacing legitimate questions, forcing the group to change their hash tag from "#askacurator" to "#askcurators" and then later requesting that people "Just search for '#askacurator -qwatmezix' and the spam disappears." So some hiccups along the way, but as to be expected in the lawless plains that are the internets. Go back and browse those tagged messages for a whole slew of links to recaps of the event for a good look at how it all went down, spammers aside.

Following up on a post from back in March, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have finished their six-month restoration of the famous painter's piece "The Bedroom" and will have it hanging again as of tomorrow. If you'd missed the work done over those last six months, you should really take the rest of the day to dig through the archives of the blog the museum put together to chronicle the exhaustive process from start to finish. If you ever wanted a crash course in both art history (with particular regard to Van Gogh in this case, of course) and what all is involved in restoring art that's now more than 120 years old, you'll find it right there on their blog. It gets incredibly detailed at times, getting into why he painted as he did, why materials were used the way they were, and how, where, and why the painting was damaged and what went in to fixing it, all accompanied by macro photos and even scans of x-rays taken during the endeavor.

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a "social twitterer." Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we're still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com. A few other twitterers we suggest following: Pentagram (@pentagramdesign), Frog Design (@frogdesign), Paper's Kim Hastreiter (@kimpaper) and Mickey Boardman (@AskMrMickey), designer Constantin Boym (@OhBoym), RISD president John Maeda (@johnmaeda), and of course, Karl Lagerfeld (@karl_lagerfeld).

Looks from J. Mendel's fall 2010 collection. (Photos: UnBeige)

New York Fashion Week doesn't begin until next Wednesday, but designer Gilles Mendel is already celebrating. His burgeoning fashion house, J. Mendel, has found a perfect fit in private equity firm The Gores Group. While the companies aren't disclosing the terms of the transaction—and describe the investment only as "significant"—a highly placed source in the M&A world tells us that Gores has acquired a majority stake in the ultraluxe label. "We are excited by the possibilities of this partnership and are honored to be The Gores Group's entrée into the luxury sector," said Mendel, who will continue as CEO and chief designer of J. Mendel, in a statement announcing the deal. "With the investment, we are now well capitalized and will be able to leverage the current momentum of the business into future expansion." The company is targeting new categories "that we believe complement our current offering," noted J. Mendel president and chief operating officer Susan Sokol, the fashion industry veteran who helped Vera Wang transform her bridal business into a lifestyle empire that ranges from sunglasses to mattresses. Meanwhile, in the last decade, J. Mendel has evolved from a French fur house to a global fashion brand whose fall 2010 collection (pictured) mixed sublime coats, fresh takes on fur, and knife-pleated gowns that looked plucked from Gainsborough portraits—but were in fact inspired by the otherworldly photographs of Ryan McGinley. Mendel will show his spring 2011 collection on September 16 at Lincoln Center.

Just over a year ago, Paste, the magazine that covered music, films, and culture (which sometimes included design, but was a well-designed magazine in and of itself), launched a campaign to raise desperately needed funds to keep itself afloat. Donations came in from readers, which staved off its death, at least until now. We just received a tip that Paper's associate editor, Rachael Maddux, had Tweeted last night that she was "suddenly in the market for a job." That, on top of relative quiet from both its usually chatty publisher and editor in chief seemed to say that something was definitely up. Gawker has now drummed up a couple more posts by (former) employees, as well as a tip that the entire staff was brought in and told about the closure yesterday afternoon. While an official release has yet to be published, based on all that information, it seems safe to assume that Paste is no more.

All right stop, collaborate, and listen. Ice is back with a brand new...expression of his passion for home renovation. Nineties pop sensation Vanilla Ice (né Robert Van Winkle), who you may recall cooking so many MCs like a pound of bacon, has mad home improvement skills. Since leaving the music world, he has kept busy buying land and flipping houses, from foreclosed gems to crumbling fixer-uppers. Now the rapper-turned-self-taught home renovation expert is getting his own TV series. Premiering Thursday, October 14 on the DIY Network, The Vanilla Ice Project finds Ice/Van Winkle preparing for his biggest project yet—the overhaul of a six-bedroom and five-bathroom, 7,000-square-foot lakefront home in Palm Beach, Florida. Ten half-hour episodes feature the erstwhile hip hop artist demonstrating his renovation knowledge as he calls the shots in the room-by-room home makeover series. "I think the process of transforming something from grime to shine influences me," says Van Winkle, still quick with a quasi-rhyme. "This house was in need of a major upgrade and my proudest moment will be when this house is revealed." Word to your mother.

Two follow-ups and reviews for the price of one post (that reminds us: why haven't you been sending us $2.50 for every post you read? Get on that). First, following all the protest against the new 15 Penn Plaza building, the inevitable happened and the city has okayed the project. If it does get built (remember, we're still in a recession), it will alter New York's skyline, blocking out a portion of the Empire State Building from certain angles. Though we can see the anti- crowd's point, our favorite quote about the debate has come from Mayor Bloomberg, who answered criticism after the plans were approved, in particular from the owner of the Empire State, by saying, "One guy owns a building. He'd like to have it be the only tall building. I'm sorry, that's not the real world. Nor should it be." In another response to 15 Penn, New York's Justin Davidson filed this piece saying the focus should be less about how the new building will be obstructive than how Pelli Clarke Pelli's design for it isn't much to look at, nor are any of the other big towers going up in Manhattan alongside it. That, he feels, is the larger issue at hand.

On a more positive note, we turn to the ongoing Venice Architecture Biennale. For those of you not traipsing through the streets, using the handy iPhone app the event made available, the Guardian's Justin McGuirk has written up this great review and recap. In it, he says this year's curator, the recent Pritzker-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima, has figured out how to breathe life into a Biennale that has always suffered by not being able to show off the one thing it's about: real buildings. Instead, she's tried to make the exhibits more personal and personable, encouraging participants to use what Venice has at their disposal. While McGuirk asks at one point, "Captivating moments, but are they architecture?" the review is uniformly positive and sometimes gushing: "The beauty of this year's biennale is that it puts the human experience back at the heart of architecture. Inspiring places are full of spatial and sensory drama. And so are inspiring exhibitions."

It seems like we've been referencing the debate over the late-2008/early-2009 battle to remove Jeff Koons' exhibit at Versailles a lot lately. While it only made tangential sense at the time, now it appears that there was something in the air and we were right all along (isn't that always the way?). Like when Koons' show was there at the palace of Louis XIV, a group who sees modern art exhibitions as a damaging intrusion into the history of the place is back to fighting it off as Japanese artist Takashi Murakami prepares for a show there which is set to run from mid-September to mid-December. Art Info reports that the group, the Coordination de la Defense de Versailles, has called the upcoming exhibition, "the veritable 'murder' of our heritage, our artistic identity, and our most sacred culture." And once again, support against the project has also come from the same descendant who took Koons to court to try to stop his exhibition, Prince Sixte-Henri de Bourbon. He lost that case and one would imagine that he and the group likely won't have much success on shutting Murakami down either, given the money involved and the draw these shows have proven to be, but only time will tell. If something big goes down, you'll hear about it from us. Here's Art Info's description of the upcoming exhibition:

The exhibition will display 22 works by Murakami in the château and gardens, including 11 pieces created especially for the occasion. One of his psychedelic flower sculptures, "Flower Matango," will be featured, along with other sculptures, paintings, and installations. Although the exhibition will not include any pornographic works by Murakami, the organization Versailles Mon Amour ("Versailles, My Love") has cited such works in order to rally others to its effort to prevent the exhibition from taking place.

If you weren't gaga over Daniel Burnham last year like we were here in Chicago for the centennial celebrations of his legendary "Plan of Chicago" (which included both temporary pavilions and ongoing plans for a permanent memorial), it's now time to catch up. On Labor Day, September 6th, PBS will be airing the documentary Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City. Written and directed by Judith Paine McBrien, it tells Burnham's story as well as offering up "drawings, archival photos, contemporary footage, and a fly-through animation of the 'White City' at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition." If you can't skip those precious holiday barbecues you've probably already RSVP'd to, then at least DVR it for later, as it's sure to be good. Here's the trailer:

Peter Marino and one of the many Chanel boutiques he has designed, this one a white stucco box in Los Angeles (Photos from left: Steve Benisty, Paul Warchol)

"I started off residential, and now only about 30 percent of my work is residential, but I still do residences for high-profile people. Residential work is extremely difficult, because it is much easier for Karl Lagerfeld to say, 'The image of Chanel is x, y, and z.' That's clear in his head. When you design someone's house, it's actually painful. I never say, 'This house will be a total reflection of you and any defects in it will make you look defective.' But people do expect their homes to be reflections of themselves. So what I say is, 'Just pretend this is your eighth home. By then you won't care.' People start loosening up around number five. It's no longer a reflection of them—they can just have fun with it. But the first one is excrutiating."