July 02, 2008	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 27, 1429

PARIS: Descendants of Russia’s fallen czars and the cream of global fashion feted the re-launch on Monday of a 1920s label founded by high-society Bolshevik exiles, the Romanovs and Yusupovs, for the international elite of the time.

Champagne flowed and waiters kept trays of tidbits circulating at a crowded open-air evening launch appropriately held amid the towering columns of the art deco 1930s Palais de Tokyo in a posh part of town.

“This is incredible, a dream,” said star-of-the-evening Countess Xenia Sheremeteva-Yusupov, also known as just Mrs Ilia Sphiris, grand-daughter of the illustrious couple who in 1924 founded Irfe, a fashion house with a brief but equally illustrious history.

“I know how much my grandparents loved that house,” she added.

Oxford-educated prince Felix Yusupov, descendant of a famed Russian dynasty dating its roots back to the Islamic Prophet Ali, inherited one of the biggest fortunes of Russia, cavorted across Europe, hob-nobbed with the rich and arty, and wound up banished from court after taking part in Rasputin’s assassination.

In 1914, he married Princess Irini Romanov, related to Nicholas II and said to have been one of the most dazzling beauties of the time. The couple fled Russia in 1919 to live in relative comfort and style in emigre circles in Italy, then France.

Lovers of fine arts and fine things, the white Russian pair in 1924 founded the house of Irfe in Paris, after the first two letters in each of their names, launching their first collection at the Ritz and then showing inside their own theatre, built in their Parisian home.—AFP