_slither thou goest.(Victoria Beckham)

Byline: Andre Leon Talley

Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles has been one fashion frenzy.

For her official launch party, hosted by her L.A. friends and neighbors Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, she went to her designer of choice, Giambattista Valli, for a smart little black dress and croc sandals on the ever-necessary ubergiant sole to elevate herself to Hollywood-star level.

Beckham would take Katie to the front row at Valli's shows in Paris (where the future Mrs. Cruise arrived at a 12:30 p.m. show in a full-on, ankle-length Valli evening dress), and attended the formal Cruise-Holmes wedding in Italy last fall in a strapless Valli and a portrait hat by Stephen Jones to accompany her hourglass look. Still, the designer found his inspiration for his current fall-winter collection not in Posh, Katie, nor his other fave-rave client, Queen Rania of Jordan, who came to the Met Costume Institute ball in his navy-blue scoop-neck dress. He turned to Maria Felix, the fiery Mexican beauty who died in 2002, and whose couture wardrobe and entire sprawl of furniture, decorative arts, museum-quality porcelains, and portraits raked in $7 million at Christie's auction in July. Valli opened the show, which included seven important day looks based on Felix's style, like great swagger coats with faux-monkey-fur hems, with a quintessential Felix look: a black sweater tucked into a red skirt with a big belt and a crisp white shirt, almost Puritan in its rigorous chic, topped off with a Stephen Jones hat.

"She always had this mix of eccentricity and elegance. She was overdressed yet stunning," Valli told me after I returned from Rome, where I went to see black velvet dresses crawling with snakes in Valentino's retrospective, mounted in Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum and brilliantly curated by Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda of Rome.

Felix, an actress who starred in 48 films, including Dona Barbara, was known for her wardrobe. I once saw her walking up Madison Avenue and into the antiques store Vito Giallo, a favorite of mine and of Andy Warhol's, who introduced the place to me. She was wearing enormous sets of matching silver jewelry studded with turquoise and diamonds. While her style may have struck some as over-the-top, she believed in the best quality: Cartier for jewels, Balenciaga for couture, and, from Dior, pink fur coats to the floor, as well as a long suede-and-sable coat inspired by Native American clothes. Felix was like Millicent Rogers, another woman of bold originality, and liked to dress as if she were a heroine out of a great novel, say James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Her fascination with reptiles was legendary. I had heard about her Cartier articulated snake necklace for years before I finally held it in my own hands for a shoot in Paris in the nineties. Made in 1968, the 22-inch-long hinged platinum-and-enamel necklace was composed of 2,473 brilliant-cut and baguette diamonds with two pear-shaped emeralds for the evil eyes (dear!). By the time I saw it-for a shoot with the photographer and filmmaker William Klein-Felix had sold it as well as her extraordinary crocodile necklace, which was inspired by two baby crocodiles she actually carried into Cartier in a large fishbowl. She sat down at the counter and said, "I want this to be made into a necklace," and she wanted it in a nanosecond. Why? Because the snake necklace took two years to make in the peerless workrooms of Cartier's Paris atelier, renowned for exceptional craftsmanship since opening its doors in 1899. ...