The Financial Times has announced the launch of FT’s How To Spend It magazine’s standalone website www.howtospendit.com.

The new site will carry the core values of the luxury lifestyle magazine into a highly innovative and stylish digital format.

The site will debut Saturday. How To Spend It is the newspaper’s financial magazine, which appears 28 times a year.

For two days Elena Gregusova’s “Wear the News” collection will be exhibited at the Financial Times “Business of Luxury Summit” in the famous Salle des Etoiles in the Sporting Monte-Carlo.

The outstanding collection of six haute couture sculptures created exclusively from Financial Times newspaper represent Elena’s artistic transformation of recycled newspaper into extraordinary luxury wearable paper sculptures.

These photographs were all taken by Gregusova’s talented husband Martin Gregus. Website

Chaired by the Editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, The FT Business of Luxury Summit will bring together leaders from one of the world’s most successful industries.

This year’s theme is “Beyond Green: Economics, Ethics and Enticement”.

The annual event, now in its fifth year, will be hosted at Monte Carlo’s Salles des Etoiles in June, and will be attended by luxury brands, luxury consultants and brand experts.

Debates are expected to centre around the impact of the economic crisis on the luxury sector and future plans for businesses to become more ethical and environmentally friendly.

De Beers has launched a global campaign to convince investors that diamonds are an alternative to gold as a safe-haven investment.

The move is a sign of the pressure on the world’s biggest diamond miner to find new markets following the collapse of traditional sales.

Stephen Lussier, De Beers’ executive director for corporate affairs, told the Financial Times the group had been approached in the past two months by “half-a- dozen” brokers linked to sovereign wealth funds and wealthy individuals.

Luxury brands make sure they look after their customers, at least in the high street. Online, it is another story.

A recent article in the Financial Times shows that some of the smartest names in retailing struggle to work out how to use the web to interact with their clientele.

On the whole, luxury brands have neglected the potential of the Internet.

Many luxury brands still prove poor at offering personalised custom service online, a keystone of what makes their brand high-end instores.

Are these brands underestimating how new technology and social networking tools can help build personal relationships and loyalty between visitors and the brand across global markets?