The road to hell, we are assured, is paved with Good Intentions, which inexplicably is the name of this Seychelles wedge:

The Seychelles brand, says their manifesto somewhere, is “designed for a girl with a different point of view. Her soul is romantic and her spirit is independent. She has a keen eye for style and she mixes classic and modern style with effortlessness.” Fortunately for me, I know a few such.

“Good Intentions” is three inches tall plus one inch of platform, and it’s here because it’s orange, or so they say. Lindsay of Broke & Beautiful likes the silver version, and she thinks this color is really more of a fire-engine red; she may have the better of the argument. There are blue, black and tan variants as well, all with this stacked heel, and they run $110ish, though Zappos will let them go for $87.99 for, as the phrase goes, a limited time.

Lynn contemplates this year’s Pantone Color of the Year, Tangerine Tango, and reminds us that she wasn’t crazy about the name they gave to last year’s color:

Last year’s color of the year was “Honeysuckle”, a lovely pink that was in no way related to the actual color of real honeysuckles, which everyone knows are yellow and white, and occasionally red. I spent all year wanting to have a Talk with the colorblind and/or mentally challenged person or persons who picked and named 2011′s color of the year. Tangerine Tango is a bit disappointing as an orange. (Or is it. There are several different shades of orange in the photos on the Pantone site.) I don’t like it as well as last year’s color of the year but I am glad that whole “Honeysuckle” travesty is over.

Not everyone, of course, defends orange:

There were a number of orange discussions there last year which made me crave something orange. The fact that some people think it’s a terrible color only makes it more attractive to me. It’s a rebellious, in-your-face color and though I’m not an in-your-face kind of person I do definitely have a rebellious side.

How rebellious? At least this much:

Web colour orange, defined as FFA500, is the only named colour defined in CSS that is not also defined in HTML 4.01.

Viktor Yushchenko was not available for comment.

It’s an extremely simple dress — normally it covers both shoulders — but Milla Jovovich makes it look amazing:

This dress (“Califfo”) is from the Marella collection for Spring ’12. The brand description, according to owner MaxMara:

Marella offers a complete and diversified collection with a fresh and contemporary feel in line with today’s moods and lifestyle.

Coats, jackets and suits are a must, to be combined with easy chic separates: seducing and easy to wear proposals for refined, dynamic and positive women who want to like themselves and be liked.

Um, okay. I’m pretty sure Milla’s having no problem with her self-image.

(Via Fashion Gone Rogue. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.)

Model decides to become an actress? Not news. Model who became an actress later decides to go into photography? Meet Fiona Xie:

That’s the story, anyway:

Singapore actress Fiona Xie has announced that she will leave MediaCorp for Hong Kong to pursue a career in photography.

This revelation quashes rumours that she is leaving because she was pregnant or has become a kept woman.

“The rumours are so ludicrous that I don’t even feel hurt. If I wanted to become a kept woman and leave the business, I would have left eight years ago,” she said, explaining that she had gotten a number of sleazy propositions when she was fresh in the business.

That I don’t doubt.

Koolcampus, from whom I swiped the above photo, is perhaps a bit cynical:

What price security?

FIONA XIE made an exceptional claim that she earned SGD 500,000 annually (of course Miss XIE should also mention that this amount should factually include her collective product endorsements for her best years), that she has found love in a rich boyfriend in Hong Kong, and that she is giving everything up for love and “peace of mind”.

“What is the point of being in a place that brings out the worst in you?” was her bold departing statement.

This spells out a thousand woes for the remaining surviving artistes in the Singapore film factory, as nobody can be that fortunate to find viable alternatives.

Not at all related to the photo: Fiona Xie’s first film appearance was in the soccer comedy One Leg Kicking in 2001, though she’d done some television the year before. Oh, and she just turned 29.

Or maybe not “spring,” exactly. Designer Erdem Moralıoğlu — who, quite understandably, goes by simply “Erdem” — has announced a Pre-Fall 2012 Collection, and while I think most of it is worthy, this is, I think, the dress to die, or at least waste away, for:

Possible downside: Erdem enjoys “Premier Designer” status at Neiman’s, so this means a four-digit price tag. Yes, I checked. I’m just that way. I also looked at some of his previous collections, which are also worth some of your time.

(Suggested here. Hire her for design work so she can afford this, wouldja please?)

Once upon a time, readers of FHM selected Gillian Anderson as the Sexiest Woman in the World. And that time, you’ll want to know, was 1996. How does she look today? (By “today,” I mean “earlier this week on a British talk show.”)

I’d say, certainly better than FHM, which wound up withdrawing from American newsstands in 2006. And besides, when’s the last time I showed you anything this orange?

Since we’re all about the orange these days, Lynn points us in the general direction of Hot Orange Pieces for these Hot Summer Days, most of which she doesn’t much care for, not so much for the orangitude but for the shapes in general.

She did, however, work up a few kind words for the “Terrazzo” dress by Diane von Furstenberg:

I might wear that one if it was a little longer and there was a little less of me, but I’m not a big fan of wrap dresses either.

Of course, DVF does wrap dresses the way Volkswagen does Beetles — after a while, you cease to be surprised by them — but I thought this one was rather spiffy, and just in case we’re going to fuss over its inherent orangeness, be advised that technically it’s “Leopard Falls Coral.”

And I must point out that the site promoting such orangery is Mode Bay Area, as in San Francisco Bay Area, which is having no Hot Summer Days: this week in SF, it’s mostly lows in the middle 50s and highs in the lower 70s. And, of course, fog overnight.

Orange socks, yet, from London’s Jonathan Aston:

MyTights.com advises that these socks are “incredibly stretchy and really soft. They will look great with your pants or ankle boots and a skirt.”

This completes the Orange Trifecta, unless of course something else comes along that draws my attention.

In Prokofiev’s satirical opera The Love for Three Oranges, from which you probably already know the March, a prince is cursed with exactly that obsessive affection: he will — he must — find those three zesty fruits.

Which fruits, incidentally, turn out to contain fairy princesses, albeit fragile ones: two of the three don’t make it out of their opening scene. I don’t have a picture of the third, but this will do for now:

This is Katie Cassidy, and if the last name rings a bell — yes, she’s David’s daughter. At twenty-four, she’s a very busy actress indeed: IMDb lists twenty credits for her, apart from the usual “Self” stuff.

Here, she’s resplendent in (yes!) orange from Hervé Léger by Max Azria. The heels come from Jimmy Choo; the almost-matching clutch, from Rebecca Minkoff.

And in the opera, the same witch who plants the enchantment on the prince, spiteful little trollop that she is, manages to turn the third princess into a Rodent of Unusual Size. I suspect this will not happen to Katie.

There was a spirited little discussion on orange shoes, and orange apparel in general, in this space a couple of summers ago, and I think we can safely say that not everyone is willing to wear something all that citrus-y. (Said the lovely Duyen Ky: “Orange should be reserved for road-hazard cones by federal law.”)

With that in mind, consider this tweet: “The most fantastic orange shoe evahhhh!” A TinyURL was attached, which I followed. The shoe in question is from Giuseppe Zanotti’s Giuseppe for Christopher Kane line, and, well, it is definitely orange. I haven’t decided whether I like this or not. The customers seem to have spoken, though: all but two sizes are sold out at this writing, and the price has been cut from nosebleed-level $875 to a merely sniffly $401.

Mundane stuff: 4½-inch heel, ½-inch platform, pretty much all leather, and made (of course) in Italy. Let’s see how this goes over with our panel of critics.

The ShoeperWoman recalls:

When I was a child, we used to play a game: you’d take a piece of paper, and fold it into a shape a little bit like the embellishment on the front of these shoes — how, I don’t remember. On the outside, you’d write numbers, and on the inside would be… actually, I’ve long since forgotten the kind of thing you’d write on the inside, except that I think it had something to do with telling people’s “fortunes”, and there was some complicated means by which these “fortunes” would be revealed. Does anyone have even the slightest idea what I’m talking about here?

Ah, yes, the cootie-catcher. Trini made one for me once.

It’s a bit odd to see this sort of origami on a shoe, but Beatrice Ong managed to capture some of its spirit, formalized yet goofy, on this “Kami” flat and on “Oru,” a version with a 12.5-cm heel. The upper is suede, the cootie-catcher leather; it seems a little more orange than red to me, but I’ve been looking at snow all day and my white balance is off. These were over $400 new and are being closed out; apparently it takes more than three people to get the joke, and you’ll never catch Trini in five-inch heels.

Not everyone loves orange as a fashion color. From a thread on this very site:

Duyen Ky: “Orange should be reserved for road-hazard cones by federal law.”

Lisa Paul: One fashionista once observed that orange is a hard color to wear: “In general, if you look good in orange, you’ll look even better in another color.”

There are, admittedly, few really stirring examples of going orange — although I confess I am slightly shaken by this one:

From not quite a year ago, Alyssa Milano, who turns 37 this weekend.

Bonus orange content: An actual rhyme, sort of, by Tom Lehrer:

Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.

Your inflection may vary. See linguist for details.

One way you can tell the real world from the dream world is that in the dream world you do things like this:

I dreamed that I was desperately searching for a pair of orange dress shoes. While I was searching I found a very nice pair of soft casual shoes that I wish really did exist but no orange dress shoes. I searched lots of stores, more stores than actually exist in my area but no orange dress shoes. I also started thinking about an orange purse — the purse must match the shoes, after all — and just generally getting a bit angsty about the whole thing. I’m not sure what I was getting dressed up for that required orange shoes.

I missed the Citrus Festival myself. However, I take “go thou and do likewise” very seriously sometimes:

I didn’t think of Endless.com until I woke up but I had to look and, sure enough, when you search for orange women’s shoes you get 520 results including some that could be considered “dress shoes.” Not all of them are what I would call orange. Some are actually tan and some are a peachy pink but there are a lot that are actually orange — bright orange.

So I betook myself to Zappos.com, gathered about 490 results, and there’s a lot of coral and scarlet and mango and some other colors you could take for pomegranate, but not a whole lot of #FFA500 orange, reminding me of my earlier search for green shoes, which turned up a lot of samples that were greenish without being all that green.

Then there was this, not so dressy but otherwise meeting the basic criteria:

This is “Ricky” by Bouquets, a shortish (2¼ inches high) wedge, simulated leather contrasting with presumably genuine burlap, at the $60 price point. It’s also available in black, yellow and green(ish). Probably insubstantial, but then so are our dreams, mostly.

I wore an orange T-shirt to work today. (No, that’s not all I wore. Don’t be a wise guy.) This, in itself, is nothing too unusual: this particular tee is in my regular rotation, and probably gets worn three, maybe four times a month. And inasmuch as it is in my regular rotation, I didn’t think twice about it when I pulled it out of the closet this morning.

It was a few hours later when I remembered the errand I’d scheduled for after work: buying Gwendolyn’s 2008 tag, and renewing my driver’s license. The license didn’t expire until July, but I figured a single stone would be sufficient for both birds, inasmuch as trips to the tag agency, even a good tag agency — and the one I go to is fairly decent — tend to leave me drained, both emotionally and financially.

And then I had to ask myself: “Do I really want to carry around for the next four years a photograph of me in an orange T-shirt?”

So I went home and put on a green polo shirt, which goes better with my particular smirk. And inasmuch as the young woman in line in front of me admitted to a height of five foot three when I would have sworn she was at least five-six, I had them shave two inches off my height, which evidently isn’t what it used to be.