because they cannes; William Norwich follows designer L'Wren Scott in the social swim on the Cote d'Azur.

From her morning perch at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the fashion designer L'Wren Scott opens her PowerBook to check her E-mails and sneak a peek at photographs from last night's parties on the French Riviera.

Summers fly and winters walk, and here is the perfect sunny day, with hypnotic blue sea views to remember the next time it is cold outside. With fresh fruit and orange juice, warm croissants and French-roast coffee plus umpteen international newspapers and magazines, breakfast is served buffet-style all morning, until lunch appears, at the villa of the Harvard-educated venture capitalist and photographer Jean "Johnny" Pigozzi.

Speaking of the next meal, the host passes by on the way to his office (a painterly colored canopied tent) by the pool (two pools, actually, one kidney-shaped and filled with enormous animal floats, the other for swimming laps). Pigozzi announces, "Fanny is coming for lunch."

"Fab-u-lous," L'Wren says.

The famously beautiful French actress Fanny Ardant will be arriving by boat from nearby Cannes, where the film festival, on its sixtieth anniversary, is in full swing.

"Cannes is business; the South of France is life," explained Irena Medavoy, wife of the producer Mike Medavoy, last night at the Hotel du Cap. Julian Schnabel, Brad Pitt, George Clooney-Cannes is where the boys are this year, which no doubt explains some of the curious blondes in the Hotel du Cap lobby: Everyone assembles here after whatever official parties they have been obliged to attend earlier.

With its fragrant honeysuckle, bluebells, and sunflowers, and the giddy drip of local rose wine, the South of France still suggests the lifestyle you read about in biographies and see in movies: Elsa Maxwell's parties, Marella and Gianni Agnelli's alfresco swims, serene Grace Kelly, Jackie and Ari on the Christina, Mary Wells Lawrence at La Fiorentina. . . . Now Paul Allen is jamming with his band all night on his yacht, and one hears Roman Abramovich is hiring the noted Wertz family gardeners from Belgium to create a $30 million landscape at his place in Cap d'Antibes. He is building a swimming pool on the roof of his house because local officials supposedly refused his plans for the one he wanted on his lawn. Besides mere tycoons, a younger generation of social sorts is also filling the ranks here. Just last night, at an amfAR auction at the Moulin de Mougins, were Tatiana Santo Domingo, Eugenie Niarchos, Olympia Scarry . . . and from yet another camp, Dita Von Teese, who brought her own curtains to her hotel and will use the pool only at night, "to stop the sun doing anything to me."