• Charlize Theron has nabbed the September cover of a slimmed-down Vogue. The issue counts only 584 pages, compared with the 840 pages of Sienna Miller's 2007 issue. Theron last made the cover in October 2007. [TFS]

• Kate Moss is the fall face of Just Cavalli. Splitting the difference between the competing trends of top- and bottomlessness, she poses for one ad in a tuxedo jacket and nothing else, and for another in some kind of leopard-print leotard. In a third, she wears a micromini sequined dress that seems to be held up with magic. [FWD]
• Legendary photographer Corinne Day — whose pictures of Kate Moss for The Face helped put the supermodel on the map — is facing a serious illness, and requires expensive medical treatment. Friends are trying to raise money by selling 500 prints of a 2001 photo of Moss nude on a bed; the pictures are £100 each. [LOVE, link NSFW]
• The first images of Jil Sander's hotly anticipated +J line for Uniqlo have just surfaced, and it looks fantastic. Japanese magazine Non-No shot seven looks from the men's collection, and it's entirely apparent that the German designer has not lost her talent for tailoring and her ability to pare down a look to its most basic, striking elements during her years in the fashion wilderness after being fired from her namesake label by owners Prada. +J, which hits Uniqlo stores this November, includes around 140 pieces of men's and women's wear, and prices start at $25. [Hypebeast]
• Macy's has announced that Ne-Yo will be the new face of Alfani's Red men's wear. [WWD]
• Uma Thurman has the campaign for Givenchy's new Angel or Demon perfume. [The Sun]
  
• Under Isaac Mizrahi's direction, Liz Claiborne continues to seek a higher-fashion image without shedding its affordability. To wit: this fall, Coco Rocha and her old flaming red hair star in a very kaleidoplaid campaign. Also, count this as another example of the models-in-the-supermarket fashion imagery trope. [Design Scene]
• Patrick Robinson and his design team at the Gap have been concentrating on the basics — and particularly on revamping the company's various styles of jeans. To advertise the offerings, the company has chosen a bevvy of top models, including Carmen Kass, Anja Rubik, and Arlenis Sosa, each identified with a particular style of denim — "The Boyfriend," "Curvy," "Long & Lean," etc. We wonder who it was, though, who chose to put the lesbian model Freja Beha Erichsen next to giant type that reads "Real Straight." [Models.com]
• Loeffler Randall is adding e-commerce to its website. [WWD]
• Jewelry designer Anna Sheffield's collection for Target hits stores at the end of this month. The pieces range from $19.99-$79.99; some are made of sterling silver. They all look very cool. [Lucky]
• You know the economy's terrible when Jessica Seinfeld serves pigs-in-blankets to Gwyneth at a charity gala. [WWD]
• In Paris, several recent fashion school graduates are starting their own lines — with a difference: instead of focusing on the tradition ready-to-wear, these young designers each want to do small collections made-to-measure for each client. And the prices are right: 50-80 Euros for a shirt, 70 Euros for a dress, 150 Euros for a jacket. In putting an affordable price on services that are something more than tailoring and something less than couture, with all its connotations of excess, these youngsters have almost certainly found a gap in the market. [DazedDigital]
• Meanwhile, shoe designer Jeffrey Campbell knocked off a Chloé boot. His offerings this season are basically just Ann Demeulemeester's and Balmain's shoes done for cheap(er). How is it this guy hasn't gotten sued yet? (Of course, Chloé probably took inspiration for their shoes from some vintage boots.) [The Greyest Ghost]
• And there are also instances of high-end brands ripping off less-expensive ones. Cf. Proenza Schouler's version of the Frye boot. [On The Fringe Of Fashion]
• After the record-breaking sale of all the art he collected with Yves Saint Laurent, partner Pierre Bergé plans to go ahead with an auction of furniture, sculptures, and textiles in November. The works are expected to fetch around $5.7 million; the proceeds will go to AIDS research. [WWD]
• Miss J's new memoir, Follow The Model: Miss J's Guide To Unleashing Presence, Poise And Power contains a troubling blind item about not being let in to a fashion show on the explicit instructions of the head of the PR company running the designer's front-of-house operations. The PR company seems to be Kelly Cutrone's People's Revolution, and the designer — specified as Brazilian — seems to be either Carlos Miele or Alexandre Herchcovitch. Was Miss J denied entry because he is black, or because he now bears the taint of Night-Time Tyra? The latter seems unlikely, since Miss J points out that the same designer later begged America's Next Top Model to use his line for the finale runway show when ANTM went to Brazil in Season 12. (That particular laurel went to Rosa Chá.) [Fashionista]
• The New York Fashion Week menswear schedule is out, and it contains some surprises. This season, Yigal Azrouël is killing his separate men's wear presentation, and combining his two shows into one. Philip Lim is doing the exact opposite, adding a separate men's wear presentation. [WWD]
• Feast your eyes on ShopBop's "WARTIME" array of products, and ponder the aestheticization of orchestrated human killing. [ShopBop]

The abstracted, angled black shadows on the white background, the strong, slanting light that hit the model just so, the black-and-white photography, and the simple lines of the featured clothes, all made one clear announcement: the cashmere brand pointed to the latest Calvin Klein campaign with Suvi Koponen, and told its creative team to copy like their lives depended on it. But then I got to thinking, haven’t I seen the architectural black and white theme elsewhere in fashion photography this season? In a business as crowd-sourced and trend-based as fashion, how can you tell the difference between recycling an aesthetic and taking inspiration from an old idea, anyway?

Suvi Koponen — Finland’s next top model, would you believe — has been favored for Calvin Klein Collection campaigns for the past few seasons. This fall, she was shot by Fabien Baron for a series of images that took dramatic delight in the lines of Francisco Costa’s garments, which this season were a little like 90s minimalism gone very good. Dodai is on record calling this campaign one of fall's worst ads, but I gasped when I first saw it. Working with so little — no props to create an atmosphere, no other models to generate charisma — could easily result in a tedious set of images. Sure, Suvi looks a little like a robot (an awe-inspiring fashion robot). And I don’t love the Stepford coiffure, which seems to unhelpfully contrast in era with the clothes. But I think these pictures are unmistakably beautiful. And I prefer their flirtation with high-concept self-serious absurdity to a million here’s-a-pretty-girl-now-buy-our-product luxury campaigns any day.

So clearly any images that distinctive were going to get knocked off. TSE photographed both its men’s and women’s lines in a style that looks like a dumbed-down retread of Baron and Koponen's Calvin Klein campaign.

The buttons on this coat don’t lie flat down the front, and the shadows cast by the lapels make the man’s chest look hollow. The coat hangs like it’s too big and nobody cared to pin it. Whereas in Baron's images, the bare-bones minimalism worked, here the same aesthetic looks under-thought and under-inspired. The result is boring.

Another fashion personage supping from the black-and-white cup this season? Patrick Demarchelier. The iconic photographer had an editorial in November’s Italian Vogue with models Mariacarla Boscono and Anja Rubik where the nearly all-black styling, plain white studio set with angled walls, and dramatic spot lighting all point to the same originating idea as the Calvin Klein campaign. But Demarchelier is enough of a creative mind to push the edges of the concept just enough to spread it over some different ground.

Gone is any attempt to make the models look 'natural': their poses are exaggerated, their torsos and legs twist and weave to bizarre effect. The shadows they throw are occasionally grotesque, and the weird black shapes on the walls play with the same ideas of scale as the built-up shoulders, jutting collars, and rigid teacup peplums of the clothes.

Hair is a frizzed bowl cut in bleach blonde (Rubik) or jet black (Boscono); makeup an ungodly pallor etched with mannequinish black lines at the jaw and lips. It all feels a little stagey, but that is the point: Demarchelier is reminding us that everything we see in the pages of a fashion magazine is artifice. Any magazine is an experience engineered by the conscious aesthetic choices of hundreds of individuals, and the same hours of of styling, hair, makeup, and post-production go into a 'natural' Steven Meisel editorial as into one where the models look like aliens experienced in posing. There is nothing natural about it. I think Demarchelier’s adjusted reflection of Fabien Baron’s campaign is a welcome contribution to the fashion discourse.

To me, this is a perfect example of fashion's hot-house idea-sharing — how an idea as old as the sun (black and white) is made to seem new again in an ad with weird styling and solid photography, inspires an old hand to take up the idea and add something new to it outside the realm of advertising, all while other brands move to piggyback and do so with less skill than the original. That's the fashion cycle, right there.

• (Photoshop of) Horrors! It's Drew Barrymore on the March Vogue and something just does not look right. [Just Jared]
  
• You won't be seeing Lily Allen in her underwear anytime soon: the rumors about her being the latest face of Agent Provocateur are allegedly BS. [Sassybella]
  
• The Gap's spring advertising campaign features Coco Rocha, Anja Rubik and other top models. Think this will finally be the advertising campaign that convinces everyone to start buying their crappy clothes again? [Sassybella]
  
• Because the Oscars are actually on (thanks WGA!), the WWD reports that all the big celebs are already headed out to Hollywood to primp for Sunday night — you know it takes a week of preparation for these things — meaning the biggest celebs that can be wrangled for the front row of the Milan shows are James Blunt and some soccer players who are not Beckham. [WWD, 1st item]

• And yet... Monica Bellucci, Naomi Campbell, Sheryl Crow, Fergie, Lindsay Lohan and French actress Fanny Ardant are all expected to show for the Dolce & Gabbana show. Because, uh, that other thing we just said about no big celebs was just some stupid angle we made up. You think it's easy filling an ENTIRE NEWSPAPER with material solely about the fashion industry every day? [WWD, 4th item]
• Kanye: Likes Chanel cell phones. [Chic Report]
• Isla Fisher on her upcoming starring role in Confessions of a Shopaholic: "I've done a lot of research." LOL. [Sassybella]
• Yay Bob Mackie! The man who dressed Cher, Carol Burnett, Diana Ross and Barbie in some of their finest frocks is being honored by the Costume Designers Guild today. [WWD, 8th item]
• Gemma Ward: The face of Karl Lagerfeld's spring line. It's all sorta suburban goth girl....so I'm weirdly into it. [Sassybella]
• J.C. Penney and Ralph Lauren have teamed up to create a new, "exclusive" label. Polo Penney! We can't say this aloud and not laugh. [NYT]
• Takashi Murakami: He's everywhere! First on Vuitton bags, then at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in April and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA in October. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Isaac Mizrahi's designing the costumes for the New York City Opera's production of King Arthur, which could actually be enough to get our asses to the opera. [Fashion Week Daily]
• It's so hard to be a model: "Everyone sees you as merely another pretty face, and I work really hard every day to show I am more than that," says Vanessa Hessler. [WWD, 2nd item]
• Execs at Gianfranco Ferre are all grumpy that the fashion community is being all gossipy about the unexpected (and unexpectedly swift) exit of creative director Lars Nilsson from the label. Um, are they new to the fashion industry? Gossip always takes precedence over clothes. [Vogue UK]
• Fight MS! Wear lip balm! [BellaSugar]
• Playboy cosmetics: Definitely skeeve us out. [BellaSugar]
• Matthew McConaughey. Dolce & Gabbana. Video. LOL. [Sassybella]