WWD Lifestyle – July 8, 2009

PARIS — Thandie Newton will soon be trading stilettos for espadrilles when she hits her summer vacation spot of Ibiza. “I can’t take these heels!” she said at the sumptuous dinner Calvin Klein hosted Monday night at Apicius, where guests lingered on the terrace to take in stunning views of its groomed gardens at sunset.

Newton appears next in Roland Emmerich’s “2012,” a disaster movie to end all disaster movies in which she plays the president’s daughter – and a stylish one at that. “I asked if I could take my stylist with me,” she related. “A suit’s not just a suit.” So what will fashion look like in the not-so-distant future. “Timeless!” she laughed. “We went Alexander McQueen, Lanvin and Narciso Rodriguez.”

Claire Danes suited up as a Girl Friday opposite Zac Efron for her next movie, “Me and Orson Welles,” due out this fall. As it’s set in the Thirties, there’s “a lot of belts and pencil skirts and strong shoulders,” she enthused. In Paris until Thursday, Danes said the Kandinsky exhibition at the Pompidou Center was on her cultural agenda.

Olivier Theyskens, Loulou de la Falaise, Joana Preiss, Elodie Bouchez and a chatty pack of young European socials mingled with Klein creative directors Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli before eventually sitting down to sup on caviar and potatoes, sea bass and a dessert of wild strawberries and meringue.

Meanwhile, up-and-coming French actress Vahina Giocante was asked to pose for a photo next to American actor Lee Pace, whom she had never met. Lo and behold, the two start filming “Thirty Beats,” in about two weeks. The movie is set in New York and Giocante plays a French actress trying to catch a break.  “I’ve got almost all my scenes with him – and we have a love scene,” Giocante gulped.