Miuccia Prada in 1998 and Else Schiaparelli in 1934, via FashionEtc.com

Can New York’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Exhibit possibly top the success of their recently-closed Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit in 2012? The McQueen show was seen by 661,509 visitors.

It will be ladies night at next year’s Met gala, with the Costume Exhibit’s Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton turning their attention to two highly-influential women in the fashion world: Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli.

Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli’s house closed in 1954 over her inability to adapt to post WWII fashion, unlike her great rival Coco Chanel. Schiaparelli’s surrealism-influenced designs included collaborations with Salvador Dali and other surrealist artists, including Jean Cocteau.

The idiosyncratic Schiaparelli was born into an Italian family of wealth and nobility. Believing that privilege stifled her creativity, Schiaparelli moved first to New York City and then Paris to pursue her love of art and career as a surrealist couturier.

As a young woman Elsa Schiaparelli studied philosophy at the University of Rome, where she published a book of sensual poems that shocked her family. The unconventional young woman then went on a hunger strike to protest being sent to a nunnery.

Miuccia Prada

People

At Home w/Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton Gets Into the Design Game NYTimes

Diane Keaton is going strong, actively involved in preserving, then flipping homes in Southern California. The actress is on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy, showing off her Spanish Colonial Revival house in Beverly Hills for Architectural Digest.

The latest design venture for the actress is a tabletop collection that she created for Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The stoneware cups, bowls and plates, which are available online and in some stores now, have her trademark whimsy (some are stamped with the words “eat” or “bite”) and lack of pretension (prices start at about $5). But they also reflect Ms. Keaton’s latest obsession: the heartland. The “farm-y, landscape colors” she used, she told a reporter, were inspired by wheat, grass and bark.

NYC Urban Farmer

Fellows Friday with Viraj Puri TED Blog

Viraj Puri’s Gotham Greens was created in 2008 with a mission of providing New Yorkers with local, sustainable, premium quality produce year round. Puri’s associates grow everything, from seed to harvest, in a 15,000 square foot hydroponic rooftop greenhouse.

There are a number of ways to farm responsibly and sustainably. Gotham Greens has selected methods based on a unique geographic, urban location and a largely underused resource of rooftop space. There are plenty of large, unshaded, unused rooftops in New York that may be well suited to some form of urban agriculture.

This interview is brimming with insights from social entrepreneur and social citizen Viraj Puri, who volunteers that he spent years working in Malawi working on the development of fuel-efficient stoves. In 2004 Viraj develop a company that implemented green building and renewable energy installations in Ladakh, India.

A Martha’s Vineyard Escape

New York restauranteur Keith McNally’s island farm ELLE Decor

When New York City–based restaurateur Keith McNally sets up house for the summer on his four-acre farm in Chilmark, he works the land instead of plying the sea. In addition to his wife, Alina, and five children, McNally shares the property with several Berkshire, Tamworth, and Gloucester Old Spot pigs, as well as goats, sheep, lambs, and free-range chickens and ducks. Although they have all the fixings for some pretty great dinner parties (and the famous neighbors to round out the guest list), McNally and his wife like to lead a low-key life on their mini farm. “I have the need to produce my own food when I’m always around people consuming food,” says McNally, who has even taken to making his own goat cheese. “I cook a lot too, sometimes for dinner parties but mostly for the family.” More photos at ELLE Decor