IT'S only rock'n'roll (but we still like it) Samantha Critchell

Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor have come back to fashion with a second act, but they're sticking to their favorite tune: a rock'n'roll look with notes of girlie glamor.

The duo say they are committed to creating clothes for their closets, and if that means rompers, eyelet skirts and boucle jackets in a season when many other designers are toning it down, so be it.

"We are primarily wearing our own clothes. I see the label with our names on it, and it's still a thrill. We are sooo not jaded," said Skaist-Levy of their new line, Skaist Taylor.

These founders of Juicy Couture made a fortune (reportedly US$53 million) when they sold their hallmark business of casual California cool clothes to Liz Claiborne in 2003. They exited the brand in 2010, agreed to a non-compete clause for 17 months - the period Nash-Taylor calls "fashion prison, or hell" - and found themselves with a lot of time on their hands to browse flea markets and listen to music.

Nash-Taylor, who is married to Duran Duran's John Taylor, even tried to learn to cook. "That didn't work out so well," she said, sheepishly. "I can make a roast chicken, but that's about it."

"You dream about having time off, but when it comes, you don't know what to do with yourself," Nash-Taylor said.

She started sketching at the stroke of midnight when the clause expired, but they weren't going to go back to tracksuits and T-shirts they designed for Juicy Couture.

Their look had changed - really, their lives had changed - since the late 1990s and early 2000s Juicy heyday,

There is a lot more time at the office, explained Skaist-Levy, 49, and from there it could be a school or sporting event, and then anything from a party to a baby shower.

She said she has worn the opening look from last month's New York fashion show previewing their spring collection many times. The white knit jacket with black piping - which she wore home on the plane to Los Angeles after packing up their runway - is the sort of stylish, versatile piece they want to be known for. The same goes for the longer-hem lace dresses and a black fringe dress with strong shoulders.

She might wear that one with gladiator sandals and switch to booties at night, she said. "I want clothes that can take you anywhere, and do it chicly."

Nash-Taylor, 53, pulled the orange romper off the rack when models with frizzed-out hair were finished doing their strut to "Witchy Woman" on a Manhattan rooftop. She's drawn to a look with "a little pop."

These women talk about clothes - a lot. It's an "addiction," they agree. But the experience of creating a juggernaut like Juicy, joining corporate America and then going out on their own again has taught them that their passion is very much a business, too.

Their strategy is not to chase trends but to carve out an identity with their new brand, which targets all the other rock'n'roll fashion groupies out there. They want shoppers to be able to identify Skaist Taylor and its favorite leather, lace and cool-girl looks with nothing more than a passing glance.

"There's a crazy bevy of minimalists who are very good at their job," said Nash-Taylor, "and we're happy to be at the other end of the arch."

She added. "We wanted to make something that speaks to us today. It's always biographical. We call our look California eccentric because we are California eccentric."Giving Warhol another 15 minutes of fameLeanne Italie

Francois Nars had Andy Warhol coffee table books in his living room growing up in the 1970s in the south of France.

"I always feel so terrible for the people born after that era because there was something really in the air that was unexplainable," the makeup legend said, lounging in the lobby of a Midtown hotel in New York for a recent interview.

"There was something very, very free. Today, everything is so much more controlled and so much more prepared," he said.

Fear not, post-Baby Boomers. In this, the 25th anniversary year of Warhol's death, Nars' namesake company has taken on the pop icon's silvery Factory, silkscreened superstars and avant-garde films in a limited-edition cosmetic collection.

It's the first time the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has collaborated on cosmetics, and the 29-piece Nars line coincides with "Regarding Warhol: 60 Artists, 50 Years," an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Michael Hermann, licensing director for the Warhol foundation, said it decided to venture into cosmetics with Nars because of the latter's "fearless, cutting-edge approach."

"For Warhol, makeup was an arrow in the quiver one could use to embody his democratic approach to beauty best embodied in his own words when he said, 'If everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is'," Hermann explained.

Nars, who is in his late 40s and moved to New York in 1984, missed out on meeting Warhol, but has visited Andy's world in the past with his Chelsea Girls lip lacquer and other homages.

This time he went big with an Edie Sedgwick screen test on a mini metal film can for one gifty set. Lip glosses are packed into a soup can and bright greens and blues are intricately shaped into one of Warhol's famous self-portraits in an eye palette etched with the Andyism: "I believe in low lights and trick mirrors."

"If Andy was still alive, we probably would have met at a certain point and I would probably have photographed him for a book. We would have connected, definitely," said Nars, who remains creative director of Nars cosmetics, acquired in 2000 by Shiseido, and still shoots the company's ad campaigns.

Nars has worked on some of the fashion industry's most famous faces, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangalista and Naomi Campbell among them. He has taken photos for the industry's top magazines, produced books of portrait art and is working on a book on Tahiti, where he owns an island.

Looking back, Nars said his fashion-forward mother, Claudette, was a "big, big influence."

"My mother and my two grandmothers, I was lucky to have three women around me who were very special, very elegant women, very beautiful women."

After graduating from the Carita makeup school in Paris at 18, Nars got a break as an assistant to Olivier Echaudemaison, now creative director of Guerlain.

It was a few years later when Nars caught the eye of Vogue fashion stylist Polly Mellen and made the move to New York. "Polly knew the makeup I was doing through magazines in France and said 'I want you to work for Vogue'."

Nars' perception of beauty hasn't changed since he launched his company in 1994.

"I really wanted to have a different approach because when I came to America they were still heavily, heavily plastic," he said.

"My goal was always to make the girl look real, and look beautiful. It didn't matter how much makeup.

"Sometimes it was none at all."Sense of purpose from repurposingJamie Stengle

Ilaria Venturini Fendi has translated the same attention to detail and craftsmanship she learned working over the years in her famous family's Italian fashion business to her own line of bags that feature repurposed items including everything from old light switch plates to leather seats from cars once used in crash tests.

"What I did was simply to add my already existing know-how I had from my family to my new vision of the fashion industry," said Venturini Fendi.

Her Carmina Campus bags are each different, made from "only reusable materials, or unused but out of production, which give a second life."

As Venturini Fendi puts it, she "grew up in fashion." Her grandparents, Edoardo and Adele Fendi, founded the Rome-based design house in 1925. The house was then inherited by the five Fendi sisters, including Venturini Fendi's mother Anna, before being taken over in 2001 by French conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.

Venturini Fendi spent two years working for Chanel in Paris before going to work for the family business, where she spent about two decades. She worked a shoe designer and creative director for the Fendissime line, and stayed for several years after LVMH took over.

Eventually though, she had the desire to do something different. She left the family company and bought a farm in northern Rome.

"My dream since I was a young girl was to live with nature and to work surrounded by nature, so the first thing I did was to buy a farm," she said.

As she worked on her farm filled with sheep, horses, pigs, goats and hens she began to feel her original passion for fashion re-emerging.

Then, after designing bags to raise money for a group aimed at stopping female genital mutilation, she began to develop the idea of resuming her career in fashion, but in a "different way."

In 2006, Carmina Campus was born, which translates from Latin to "chants of the fields."

Working with repurposed items, she said, made her look at the way she designed much differently. Where before she would start with a sketch of what she had in mind and then search out the materials, now she finds the materials first and creates the designs around those.

"The creative process changed tremendously," she said.

In a collaboration with the Mini car company she used materials from cars used in crash tests, incorporating seat belts, handles and even visors, which can be flipped up when affixed to a purse to create a makeup mirror.

Another group of bags have been constructed from trash bags with accents made from the bottoms of aluminum cans. Leather samples are also made into bags, complete with the stamp indicating the sample's color intact. For other bags she's incorporated old light switch plates.

She also has a line of bags that is made in Africa with locally reclaimed materials in collaboration with the International Trade Centre, a joint United Nations and World Trade Organization agency that fights poverty with trade-driven projects employing locals. The line's motto, seen on some bags, is "Not Charity, Just Work."