Jo Piazza

Stories By This Author

Style

Stacy London Tells Us What to Wear After a Breakup

Now that we all know what not to wear after a breakup (yoga clothes for a week, too tight tube tops, bangs) I wanted to explore what to wear in the days after a split. See, the next time I have a big breakup I want to be classy about it. I don’t want to send nasty drunken text messages and be the girl who flashes everyone in a bar. I want to craft a style that will allow me to look like a lady who is handling my breakup with grace and dignity. On the inside I may be a basket case, but on the outside I want to exude a beautiful calm. I am not good at exuding a beautiful calm even during the best of times, so I asked my friend, the stylist and fashion guru and host of the show What Not to Wear, Stacy London, how to dress for success in the days after getting dumped.

Business

What Not to Wear After a Breakup

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the name of love. At the top of that list are the sartorial slip-ups I have made when love has gone awry. When a girl gets dumped her wardrobe isn’t always a priority. It should be. Looking back over the five most devastating breakups of my life, I wish that someone would have told me the many things I would regret. I wish 30-year-old me had told 20-year-old me a few fashion rules that would have helped me both heal and avoid the veiled laughter of my friends and frenemies.

Fashion Week

How Icelandic Designers Are Empowering Women

Maybe it’s the fact that their tiny island country was the first in the world to have a woman president (Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who served from 1980-1996) or maybe it’s the new necessity that everyone, women and men alike, channel their strengths and entrepreneurial spirit in the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown. Maybe Viking women are simply badass. Whatever the reason, Icelandic designers are keen to use the power of fashion to empower the modern Icelandic woman and to make sure that that empowered woman looks phenomenal as she helps to rebuild the country.

Fashion Week

A Dispatch from the Fashion Week Bathrooms (Really, We Went There)

Fashion Week does a beautiful job of being beautiful. On the runway fantasy becomes reality because reality is ugly. But for just a sliver of the week, we wanted to get real. That’s why we headed to the one place where even fashionistas can’t pretend—-the ladies room. So we eavesdropped from the stalls of Fashion Week so you didn’t have to.

Style

Slow Fashion Movement Picks Up Speed in Iceland

Many things have slowed down in Iceland since the island economy collapsed in 2008. Fashion is not one of those things, I learned at this weekend’s Reykjavik Fashion Festival. Still, two women are taking it slow, embracing the "slow fashion movement" to be exact, and trying to instill integrity, honesty and respect into design. Their show had one of the most talked about shows and collections at the RFF. When I first heard that the house of Ella was a proponent of “slow fashion” I immediately asked, “what is slow fashion?" Is it like slow food? Small-scale, sustainable, high quality? Designer Katrin Maria Karadottir and Creative director and founder Elinros Lindal explained to me that that's exactly what it is. They walked me through their movement like grownups explaining something complex (algebra, fusion, the Kardashians) to a child. At the end of our chat I came to see that slow fashion (and slow things in general in the hands of women like Elinros and Katrin could be the future of Iceland’s economic prosperity. Fashionista: What exactly does slow fashion mean here in Iceland?

Fashion Week

Seen On the Runway at Iceland Fashion Week: Hunger Games-Chic, Xanadu Schtick

Reykjavik--These Icelanders sure know how to put on a show. I was mere minutes into the Reykjavik Fashion Festival when I realized I might be watching a simulated snuff film while seated in the subterranean parking garage of the city’s Harpa Opera House where the week’s first show, Mundi, was taking place. The short flick featured a post-apocalyptic gang of well-dressed hooligans in bold patterned wool knits riding rough shod over the Icelandic highlands on the stocky yet self-assured Icelandic horse (a Viking breed that you mustn’t call a pony lest you upset the locals). At their destination they electrocute a man using energy from the country’s indigenous hot springs (so eco, so green, so wrong).

Style

Fashion MacGyver: When the Airline Loses Your Bags at Midnight, Wal-Mart to the Rescue

Celebrity journalist extraordinaire Jo Piazza is on the road promoting her first book, Celebrity Inc.: How Famous People Make Money. Here is her hilarious, inspiring tale of finding a camera-ready outfit for a morning news show after her luggage had been lost at midnight...in Orlando. It was too good not to share. I never check luggage unless physically coerced. But that is what happened to me as I boarded a small plane to travel to Orlando, Florida this week to do a series of early morning appearances on the show The Daily Buzz to promote my book Celebrity Inc.: How Famous People Make Money. As the tarmac Nazi pried my Vera Bradley tote filled with two beautiful television ready dresses, perfectly paired shoes and the only makeup I know how to apply to make myself look like a human on television I had a sinking feeling that things would go sideways. They did.