Alaia 2012

If you're still kicking yourself for missing the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty retrospective, there are twelve ways to fill your fashion exhibit void this year. MTV FORA has put together a solid list of displays across the globe, and it features everything from the Azzedine Alaïa exhibit in Holland (one displayed creation pictured) to the highly-anticipated Louis Vuitton - Marc Jacobs tribute in Paris. See the roundup—which includes three events that you can catch right here in New York—after the jump.

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Courtney Love, who is now 46 and out of excuses to do this kind of thing, carjacked photographer David LaChapelle's SUV from New York's SoHo House on Monday night. She sped off to director Brett Ratner's house, promising to return and collect LaChapelle, but she ended up hanging out at Ratner's till near dawn while the "fuming" LaChapelle had no idea where his car was.

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● David LaChapelle is not happy with Rihanna's new "S&M" video, which he believes borrows heavily from his own photos. A side-by-side comparison of the images makes it clear that this is about more than candy-colored sex. [Reuters] ● Say what you will, but we refuse to believe that the King and Queen, Jay and Bey, are anything other than meant to be. [MediaTakeOut] ● Paramount is cutting a second version of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, to be released in a few weeks so that we can all go see it again. Which is totally cool, though, because we saved our 3D glasses. [NYM]

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Recession schmession. At the Art Basel events in Miami, the champagne is still flowing like Fiji water. From the rumor that UBS would not tone down their annual dinner and gala -- even amid scandal speculation -- to the abundance of caviar on hors d'ouvre trays, it all smells like decadence to me. Cartier hosted a preview of “Diamonds, Gold and Dreams,” an approximately seven-minute film by David Lynch projected inside the Cartier Dome in the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens. The transfixing film features cascading diamonds and Cartier jewels on 180 degrees of ceiling projection with an equally mesmerizing score. It played once every hour, leaving partygoers hungry for more. The Dome, built specifically for this event and film, took two weeks to construct and will be disassembled directly after Basel.

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imageA self-professed surrealist, David LaChapelle has a talent for skewing close to reality when need be -- as in, whenever Amy Winehouse calls on him to direct a music video -- and making that reality look eye-popping, campy, and cogent to boot. But he shines the most not through his MTV cache, but through his own visual artwork. It's within the galleries where he's truly entitled to toy with and reshape reality.

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When photographer David LaChapelle sought a new muse—or at least someone, as he puts it, “a-musing”—to join the ranks of Pam, Courtney, and Amanda—he found his love doll of inspiration in a Savannah art student named Molly Gottschalk, who boasted the coolest personal page on the coolest of Internet websites. She now lives with the mad-hatter of visual surrealism in his Beverly Hills home. This is their love story. It is unconventional.

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