Lacroix's owners, Florida-based Falic Group, bought the foundering house from the LVMH conglomerate in 2005, near the height of both the real estate bubble and the luxury goods boom that easy credit helped fuel. Despite the fact that Falic was best known for its duty free retail chain, it set about an ambitious company restructuring, and opened two new U.S. stores.

Lacroix made certain gestures toward becoming the kind of brand that produced profitable marginalia like sunglasses and perfumes — two scents were eventually produced under license by Avon, and Christian Lacroix did a designer water collaboration with Evian in 2007 — but fundamentally never became the kind of luxury brand that could turn its couture business into a loss-leader. Unlike Balenciaga and Gucci, two other houses revived by the combination of skillful collections, and then astronomical sales of handbags, sunglasses, and watches, Christian Lacroix never quite crossed over. The company restructuring and expansion was completed just as the retail economy as we knew it imploded; there can hardly have been a worse time to be in the business of selling $20,000 dresses than last fall.

Thus the bankruptcy filing this May. Thus the angry interviews. Thus the somber but masterful couture show in July. Though during the bankruptcy court process various companies expressed interest in buying the brand — two seriously, an Emirate sheikh who talked about licensing Christian Lacroix private yachts and Christian Lacroix luxury hotels, and France's Bernard Krief Consulting — neither could produce financial guarantees for the court. So the judge ruled that the Falic Group's plan to deal with the bankruptcy would be approved.

What is the Falic Group's plan? It involves the closure of both the couture and ready-to-wear clothing lines, the firing of nearly all the company's 120 workers, and the brand's continuation only as a name to be licensed.

The brand is not being liquidated, chief executive Nicolas Topiol is keen to point out. This leaves open the possibility that another party might buy the company and revive it as a clothing line — depending on the creative team in charge, and Christian Lacroix's involvement, potentially a good option. Of course, it also leaves open the possibility that the Falic Group might license out the Christian Lacroix name to other clothing manufacturers who have nothing to do with the famed designer from Arles: it's not hard to imagine Christian Lacroix denim, Christian Lacroix lingerie, Christian Lacroix sportswear. The company executives could decide to enter Pierre Cardin territory.

It's not known at this time whether or not Christian Lacroix — who has been working unpaid for over a year now — is intended to be among the 15-20 employees the Falic Group might keep on staff to run the licensing operation, or indeed whether or not Lacroix would want to continue his involvement with the company. But there is nothing to stop him designing for another fashion house, so long as it doesn't trade under the Christian Lacroix trademark. There's a small but tenacious number of designers who continued working in fashion after being dumped from the namesake labels they had founded: Jil Sander, who had the distinction of being fired from her company not once but twice after Prada bought a controlling share of the business, being one. (Sander eventually took on a creative director role at Uniqlo, and does a line of clothing, +J, with the Japanese retailer.) It's far from outside the realm of possibility that Christian Lacroix the person might continue on in fashion, even if Christian Lacroix the brand does not, or does so only under the limited terms of licensing agreements.

It's ironic that Lacroix, one of the designers most identified with the 1980s — at least, the 1980s of pouf skirts (which he famously invented), mixes of bright colors, and graphic prints, if not the 1980s of Armani greige — should experience a business failure just as fashion tastes were flirting hard with the decade of excess. (The Fashion Spot users started a thread tracking Lacroix's influence on contemporary designers, and spied convincing Lacroix-a-likes in the collections of Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Dolce and Gabbana, and Erdem.) Given he went 22 years without a profit, it might seem hard to argue Lacroix deserves a second chance. But to lose his talent from fashion entirely would be a terrible shame.

Image of Nadja Auermann in a Lacroix dress from Richard Avedon's 1995 editorial "In Memory Of The Late Mr. And Mrs. Comfort", via Paranaiv

End Of A Fairytale: Christian Lacroix Fashion House To Strip Down [Guardian]
A Misfit In The Couture Business [WSJ]

• Victoria Beckham is out at Armani, and Megan Fox is in. The actress has just been photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott for next January's Emporio Armani underwear and Armani Jeans campaigns. [WWD]

• Amber Valletta has a clothing line, and Saks Fifth Avenue will donate $250,000 to breast cancer research from goods it sells from this Thursday through Sunday, whether you shop there or not. [USAToday]
• Betsey Johnson — who has talked openly of wanting a diffusion line, perhaps with Target or H&M, in the past — might get her wish. She told the National Arts Club last night that she was in talks to do a line with QVC or HSN. [The Cut]
• Women's Wear Daily tries cheekily to make the point, through historic quotes and photos, that Emanuel Ungaro, the couturier, and Lindsay Lohan, the fake tan executive who now runs his label, share an aesthetic. But, seriously, he's the guy who said "Shock for its own sake doesn't interest me," and, "A maison de couture is not a circus." [WWD]
• Former Calvin Klein underwear model and Guess? campaign star Jason Lewis — also known as that hot guy Samantha starts banging on Sex And The City — is now shilling for something called Charisma Linens. [NYDN]
• Tory Burch is getting into microfinance for women entrepreneurs — domestic microfinance for women entrepreneurs. [TDB]
• A New York University-affiliated group has ranked Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, and Clinique as the top three luxury fashion brands, by "digital IQ." Strange that a company with so much apparent investment in its e-commerce division could show such an utter lack of understanding of the online media; Ralph Lauren's Filippa Hamilton Photoshop debacle, with its manifold examples of the company's digital stupidity, could be hurting the brand for years to come. [WWD]
• M.I.A. wore a $10 suit from Goodwill to meet Anna Wintour. [Twitter]
• Someone get 19-year-old French model Constance Jablonski a beer: she walked in 72 fashion shows in four cities in less than a month. [Models.com]
• Joe Corre, the famous loose cannon behind the Agent Provocateur label, has quit the brand abruptly. He will maintain his ownership share of the company, but no longer work for it. Instead, he'll concentrate on his men's wear line, called Child of the Jago. [WWD]
• Jennifer Connelly isn't returning as the face of Balenciaga. The brand's spring campaign is understood to feature Kasia Struss, and three other models. [Fashionista]
• Lacoste has collaborated with Brazilian industrial designers Fernando and Humberto Campana, and the results include a $7,000 polo shirt made entirely of the label's alligator appliqués, hand-sewn together in a lacey pattern. [WWD]
• Tommy Bahama is doing a line of shirts for Major League Baseball. The first one is for the next World Series. [Crain's]
• Patrick Robinson showed this season's Gap collection in Tokyo, after showing previous seasons in London and New York, to show that "We're all so super-connected. A lot of our stores are in big urban cities, and all of my friends now are all around the world." The designer continued, "But they're texting me and e-mailing me, and we're all connected. But we're also all trying to get back to nature. We're all starting to care about what we drink, and the food we eat, and where that food comes from. There's something about us that's longing to be back in nature. Those two things are sort of at odds with one another, and what I like about this collection is it sort of brings them together." Whatever. The guy makes incredible pants. [WWD]
• Marc Jacobs is bringing back its popular nude celebrity "Protect The Skin You're In" skin cancer awareness t-shirts. They cost $35, and all the proceeds go to the NYU Cancer Institute. [Hypebeast]
• L.L. Bean is trying to update its image with a new collection, designed by Rogues Gallery's Alex Carleton. [WWD]
• Some snooty society magazine editor named Rachel Johnson — Oxford-educated sister of London mayor Boris — decided it was proper to make fun of Twiggy's accent in her editor's letter. "I bumped into Twiggy at a Burberry event at London Fashion Week. I thanked her for being our cover girl. She went a bit blank but when I mentioned this publication her Bambi-eyes lit up and she said, 'Oi love The Lie-dee,' which made me feel very happy." [Daily Express]
• Abercrombie is planning on lowering its prices slowly and strategically, in the hopes of luring customers back without hurting its brand image. [NYPost]
• Burberry's sales in the most recent quarter rose 5%, to $545 million, ahead of analysts' forecasts. Same-store sales also rose 5%. [WSJ]

• Australian Vogue's September cover is out, and it features a stunning illustration of Cate Blanchett. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, Fashion Week Daily is reporting on a rumor that Victoria Beckham might be American Vogue's October cover model. [FWD]

• The Kanye West-Gap intern story is back, this time as written in the Chicago Tribune. But no sources are named — doubly so where the rumor-within-a-rumor that West is looking to launch a clothing line with the retailer is concerned. But it would be so perfect! Amber Rose could model it. [ChicagoTrib]
• Jessica Simpson, on her new lingerie line, produced by a licensee of a licensee: "Of course I love lingerie. What girl doesn't? My lingerie reflects the way I'm feeling when I wake up and helps me set the tone for my day." [WWD]
• Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton stuffed animals: no celebrity artist megabrand collaboration should ever be this goddamned cute. [FWD]
• French street style photographer Garance Doré has a new gig expanding her blogging coverage for Paris Vogue. [WWD]
• Balenciaga returned to Jennifer Connelly for its fall ads — and then had Steven Meisel photograph her very awkwardly. [SassyBella]
• Jean-Paul Gaultier, for his part, booked Raquel Zimmerman and Raquel Zimmerman for his fall campaign. Raquel Zimmerman plays the girl role and the boy role and looks mighty good doing it. [FWD]
• Gaultier's collaboration with Doc Martens — available only in France, hélas — features boots with perforated leather in a grid. And, as Fashionista points out, you could totally make a DIY version. [Fashionista]
• Roberto Cavalli's house involves significantly less leopard print than we might have imagined. [The Moment]
• Naomi Campbell may have attacked a paparazzo with her handbag on holiday in Sicily. [Daily Mail]
• Designer Paul Smith, on photographing his own ad campaigns: "The whole idea of a designer doing photographs is sort of pretentious: ‘I do everything, you know.' Like Karl whatshisname. I'm a snapper, not a photographer. I'm not Mario Testino. But my lot have been saying, ‘You take pictures; you do it.' So I thought, ‘Let's have a go.' My creative director and the marketing guy and the press people are all pleased with them." [ToL]
• Amber le Bon is to be featured in an upcoming issue of (British?) Vogue wearing her mother Yasmin's vintage clothes. [Daily Mail]
• Late on Friday, fashion writer Diane Pernet published an e-mail exchange between the stylist for "a well-known singer of color" and a PR representative for designer Alexander Wang; the PR was denying the singer's request to wear Alexander Wang clothing, and when the stylist wrote back intimating that the denial was based on her client's race, the PR seemed to agree, and said she was quitting her job. Although Blackbook originally reported on the story, both it and Pernet have pulled their posts about it — did Wang threaten legal action? — but Blackbook's Facebook note publicizing its post is still visible, and Homo Neurotic has reprinted the full text of the e-mails. [Facebook and Homo Neurotic]
• You can now count Yves Saint Laurent designer Stefano Pilati among the thundering horde descending on London Fashion Week in September. Pilati will be in attendance because of his mentor relationship with the label Veryta. [Vogue UK]
• The fashion industry's huge waste is a serious environmental hazard in the third world countries where most of our clothing is made. [UPI]
• A particular jean factory in Lesotho, which produces denim items for the Gap and Levi's, exposed locals to burns and chest infections because of its toxic fumes. [CBS]
• Juicy Couture's higher-priced line, Bird, is now hitting stores. Anyone who had her eye on Rachel Zoe's recommended leather leggings, now is your time. [LATimes]
• Emma Watson, despite her professed abhorrence of celebrity clothing lines, is rumored to be in the process of launching one with the London fair trade organic brand People Tree. There's a Mischa Barton coke joke in here somewhere. [Daily Mail]
• New York is still an attractive place for overseas tourists to go shopping, since the dollar is slightly lower again. London, where the exchange rate has only recently become more favorable, has seen a 4.7% increase in retail sales over last year for the month of June. [WWD]
• Astoundingly, teenagers in America are spending on average 14% less on clothes than they were last year. [NYTimes]
• Christian Dior's profits were down 27%, to $943 million, in the first six months of this year. [WWD]
• A collage of snippets of fabric used in the late Princess Diana's wedding dress is available on eBay for £15,500, if anyone wants it. [Daily Express]
• 13,300 Burlington Coat Factory boys' hooded sweatshirts are being recalled because their cords pose a strangulation risk. [UPI]

• This speaks for itself: Win A Chance To Design Lindsay Lohan's Leggings. [FabSugar]
• Similarly exciting is news that Juicy Couture is launching a perfume called "Couture Couture." At a certain frequency of repetition, "couture" actually loses all meaning! [WWD]

• Selena Gomez is a new face of Sears. [UPI]
• Mike Dirnt of Green Day has a vegan shoe out — and all of the proceeds will go to the charity Soles4Soles. [WWD]
• Director R.J. Cutler says that larger-than-life Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley almost didn't make the final cut of The September Issue. "The process of boiling down the enormous amount of footage was so complicated that one late-stage cut of the film actually eliminated Editor At Large André Leon Talley entirely! Clearly a huge mistake, Talley was abundantly re-inserted into the next cut." [Racked]
• We demand to eat Isaac Mizrahi's strawberry-rhubarb pie RIGHT NOW. [W]
• If we were Isaac's interns, we'd probably have achieved that life goal already. [Fashionista]
• Le Bon Marché, the Paris department store, is selling a limited number of archival Balenciaga clothing and jewelry items reissued from the period 1932-67. Doubtless for thousands and thousands of dollars. Sigh. [WWD]
• Givenchy is adding another collection, to be called Redux. It'll be the house's signature looks, presented twice annually, and it'll hit stores just before its existing pre-season collections do. Ranya Mordanova looks pretty ballin' in this blouse and pants, and Redux pieces will start at around $340, this might be worth watching. [Vogue UK]
• Ever go looking for a reason to not give a shit about fashion designers going out of business? $395 Alexander Wang bike shorts might be that reason for today. [Cheap JAP]
• If you loved Missy Rayder's spread from the August issue of Dazed & Confused, or if you just love Missy Rayder, you should check out this mesmerizing behind-the-scenes video of the Wisconsin-born model going through her paces in an insane black leather corset. [DazedDigital]
• Looks like Marco Zanini's current position at Rochas is more secure than his last. (The designer was fired from Halston in the blink of an eye.) Zanini will open Paris Fashion Week, a tremendous show of support from Rochas' backers. [FWD]
• Hussein Chalayan, who just released a denim collaboration with J Brand, actually only wears A.P.C. jeans. Details, details! [Style.com]
• Lucky Brand underwear and sleep wear will be in stores next spring. [WWD]
• In case you need some leather booty shorts, Chloé Sevigny's fall collection for Opening Ceremony is starting to reach stores. [ONTD]
• Sorry, Fort Greene. That random rumor that you were getting a Topshop was...just a random rumor. [Racked]
• Although revenues dipped 2.1% in the last quarter at L'Oréal, sales rose 2.6%. [WWD]
• Steve Madden increased its quarterly profits by 59% over last year, to $12.1 million. [WWD]
• As a sector, retail stocks gained 1.4% yesterday, achieving a new high for the year despite some poor quarterly results and weak consumer spending. [WWD]
• A new state law in Minnesota requires state colleges to sell American-made apparel whenever possible. So those Gophers t-shirts might not actually come from China anymore. [NPR]

• Christian Siriano is collaborating secretly with Starbucks. He won't say on what, but isn't speculation fun? Maybe he's changing the uniform to something fierce, with ruffles. [The Cut]

• Christian Lacroix might have found a buyer. The firm Bernard Krief Consultants has announced its intention to bid for the bankrupt French fashion house. Krief has apparently been treating the recession as a chance to buy up properties on the cheap: it recently bid for the distressed French fast fashion chain Morgan, and successfully took over the textiles company DMC. No dollar value for Krief's proposed bid was mentioned, and Christian Lacroix had no comment. [WWD]
• Marc Jacobs' menswear division publicist Tim Mark Garcia is wearing an ankle bracelet and facing extradition to the Philippines on charges of "plunder." Garcia's father, former major general Carlos F. Garcia, allegedly stole $6.2 million from the Filipino people, and then used it to buy New York real estate — like the publicist's Trump Park Avenue condo — in his children's names. [P6]
• Three of the six nominees for this year's Swiss Textile Awards are Americans: Alexander Wang, Thakoon Panichgul, and Ohne Titel. Also in the running are Erdem, Alexis Mabille, and Peter Pilotto. Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, who won last year, were the first U.S. designers to ever nab the prestigious award. [FWD]
• The Guardian compiled some of Vivienne Westwood's wisest words from over the years, including, "Fashion is about eventually becoming naked." Makes for an interesting read. [Guardian]
• Photos of Betsey Johnson's reissued vintage collection for boutique Opening Ceremony show it to be dark and punky and '80s, not pink and frilly and '80s. Johnson says, "There was always this harder side to me but it was hard to see it through the prints and ruffles." [Racked]
• Charlotte Gainsbourg says she wasn't much of a perfume wearer, you know, before she became the face of Balenciaga's new scent. [Style.com]
• Erin Wasson will be showing her Rvca collection at New York Fashion Week in September. [UK Elle]
• Kat Von D has created a line of tattoo concealers for her Sephora line, because she's realized that some people don't want all their tattoos to be visible all of the time. (Maybe a conservative cousin's wedding isn't the best time to show off your ink Barbarella.) She says the concealer is waterproof and won't smudge or transfer to clothing, and it is kind of strange seeing her entire torso without any tattoos for the ad shoot. [People]
• British tabloid the Sun is reporting that model Daisy Lowe fell into a month-long depression after surgery to remove a pre-cancerous growth from her cervix in May. [The Sun]
• Lowe's first campaign for Anna Sui just leaked to the Internet. [Sassybella]
• Chris Benz, Alex Wang, Maria Pinto, and Jason Wu are all newly minted members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Oh, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of The Row got in, too. [WWD]
• Model Sigrid Agren — face of the Stella McCartney campaign we posted yesterday — has summer plans that include fishing in a lake and looking for berries with her brother, Quentin, in Sweden. [W]
• Wow, Avril Lavigne really hasn't changed her makeup since 2002. (This story is about her kids' line, which includes, wait for it...hoodies.) [Budget Fashionista]
• Hermès' sales grew by 12% in the second quarter. As had been previously reported, the super-expensive leather goods division led the increase. Its sales were up by 33.4%. [WWD]

• Nicolas Ghesquière picked the intolerably cool Charlotte Gainsbourg to advertise Balenciaga's perfume. Ghesquière calls his friend "one of the most inspiring girls in the world." Gainsbourg said, "I was secretly hoping to be the face of Nicolas' first perfume." [WWD]

• Sources are saying Rihanna has an editorial, shot by Steven Klein, in Italian Vogue's September issue. [Fashionologie]
• Julia Restoin-Roitfelt, French Vogue editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld's daughter, is the face of a new perfume by Jil Sander. [NowSmellThis]
• Hold onto your quirky hats, everybody! There's going to be a new hour-long television drama set in the New York fashion world. Because it's going to star a lady, it'll be just like the new Sex And The City! Isn't that exciting? [Variety]
• The ten finalists in this year's CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund are: Flora Gill and Alexa Adams of Ohne Titel; Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin; Patrik Ervell, Sophie Theallet, Waris Ahluwalia of House of Waris, Wayne Lee of Wayne, George Esquivel of Esquivel Shoes, Gary Graham, Monique Péan, and Simon Spurr of Spurr. Congratulations to them all! The winners of the six-year-old cash and mentorship award will be announced on November 16; past honorees include Proenza Schouler, Alexander Wang, and Doo-Ri Chung. [WWD]
• Doo-Ri Chung is just one of many designers whose business has been hurt by the economic downturn. Chung is owed more than $60,000 by the owners of Jake, a small, independent Chicago boutique. Specialty retailers have been among the hardest-hit in the whole retail sector, but the two men behind Jake, Jim Wetzel and Lance Lawson, actually managed to reorganize their company when it went bankrupt, and continue on as employees of a new entity, the Jake Retail Group. Except that Jake Retail Group did not assume liability for any of the store's debts — meaning that Chung, plus other young designers like Brian Réyes, Tina Lutz and Marsha Patmos of Lutz & Patmos, and Emma Fletcher of Lyell, are out tens of thousands of dollars each for clothes they made and shipped, and Jake sold, but which haven't been paid for. [NYTimes]
• Lyle Lodwick, brother of fameballer Jakob, is a male model. He says that male models take their jobs less seriously than women models do — which is generally true — but also that women models are, naturally, bitchier. "I've heard horror stories of girls putting needles in a girl's shoes so when she's on the runway she'll fall over." Lodwick: Whichever sweet model lady told you that is pulling your leg. [TDB]
• Ossie Clark, the iconic British label that was briefly revived by private investors, is closing again. [WWD]
• The occasion of Berlin designer Patrick Mohr's recent homelessness-themed collection, where he had homeless people walk his runway caked in mud, is used to peg a list of other politically edgy collections of varying levels of success — like John Galliano's own Spring 2000 homelessness-themed couture work, Rei Kawakubo's 1995 Comme des Garçons collection that looked like concentration camp victim uniforms, and Karl Lagerfeld's 1994 appropriation of verses from the Koran. Somehow, the list ends with nary a mention of Miguel Adrover's 2001 MeetEast collection, which was so widely panned it drove the talented designer out of business. [TDB]
• Alber Elbaz: ""The people I chose to run my new store in London are nice. I cannot work with bitches, I can't, I can't. Maybe I am too sensitive, I get blocked. There are some people who don't give a damn. With me, I find that if there is no energy flowing or no connection, I can't think. Talent is amazing - I love it, appreciate it. I respect talent a lot. But if you ask me, ‘Talent and bitch, or less talent and good?' I'll go with less talent." [MyFashionLife]
• New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo caught the firm behind the "Lifestyle Lift" cosmetic surgery procedure posting fake customer reviews and testimonials on the Internet — and won a $300,000 settlement for the astroturfing. [Clickz]
• U.K. lingerie maker Intimas is in bankruptcy administration. Around 200 jobs are at risk. [ToL]
• Liz Claiborne, which has been struggling in the recession, renewed its C.E.O. William McComb's contract, but didn't give him a raise — just a bigger bonus. [WSJ]
• That story about how Crocs are going bust is getting written again, this time kind of artlessly. [WaPo]
• In the second quarter, net income at Joe's Jeans fell 17.8%, on a same-store sales decline of 4.3% [WWD]
• Chemists have traditionally been unable to produce fabrics that are reliably water-repellent when doused with hot, instead of cold, water. Which is why the development of a hydrophobic fabric coating that can repel hot water is potentially exciting news. Scientists think it could have applications in protective clothing, for instance for people who are at risk of scalding burns. [NS]

This is a "Parrot" jacket, by East West Musical Instruments, the misleadingly-named San Francisco-based specialty leather goods company that operated in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Notice how the patchwork leather on the shoulders and collar almost looks like two parrots in profile, their heads bent around the wearer's neck.

East West Musical Instruments specialized in intricately pieced jackets, and sold to the likes of Janis Joplin, Iggy Pop, and John Bonham; New York's hipster mayor, John Lindsay, even had one. These days, an East West jacket can sell for $1,000-$5,000 on eBay or at auction.

Which brings us to this jacket, presented this Monday in New York as part of Balenciaga's 2010 Resort collection.

Other bloggers have already taken note of this jacket's strong resemblance to the East West offering above.

It's not the first time Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar of 70s American rock 'n' roll style. In Ghesquière's Spring, 2002, ready-to-wear collection, then Hintmag intern (and current anti-comfort activist) Sameer Reddy noticed striking similarities between Ghesquière's patchwork collection and the work of San Francisco designer Kaisik Wong, because he just happened to be looking through a book of Wong's work at the right moment. Similarities down to the placement of tassels and the shape of the patches.




Balenciaga Spring 2002



Kaisik Wong

Ghesquière admitted his pilfering to Cathy Horyn at the New York Times, telling her "I did it — yes." Unabashed, the designer even said, "I'm very flattered that people are looking at my sources of inspiration."

In this case, Ghesquière is not the only person looking to East West Musical Instruments for "inspiration." Urban Outfitters' Pins & Needles brand, which states clearly on its website that it "takes inspiration from a broad range of exquisite vintage and costume pieces, dating from early 19th to mid 20th century," copied the "Parrot" jacket earlier this year. (Its $298 version is now sold out.)



But Balenciaga, a high-fashion brand currently owned by the multinational PPR, and which acts swiftly when its own copyrights are infringed (for example with the much-copied Balenciaga "Motorcycle" bag), makes no such admission. Balenciaga posits itself as far more than mere knock-offs of vintage items; it's a fashion house that makes some claim to the originality of its designs — "inspiration" aside, when a designer of Ghesquière's talents is involved, you expect him to do his own work.

Or do you? Some would argue that, in our post-modern, post-Warhol, post-Grey Album age, that copying is no big deal. (This is not the view Balenciaga takes as regards its purses, but it is what some people say. Harold Koda, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said Ghesquière's copy of Wong's work was an example of the Belgian "just rummaging through extant material culture and juxtaposing it with other things to create something different.") Some even argue that knock-offs force source designers to design more, and design better. And the fact that the East West Musical Instruments is extinct could, to some, seem like an excuse for the copy — and the Balenciaga jacket, with its only slightly adapted collar, is certainly a copy. If a book is out of print and unable to be obtained, in a way it seems only fair for someone else to republish it. But that person really ought, in good conscience, to leave the original author's name on the manuscript.

American fashion designers are currently pushing, via the Design Piracy Act, for the inclusion of their intellectual property under the umbrella of copyright law. They argue that their original ideas are currently too easy fodder for knock-off artists like Forever 21 (who had a very near miss, via hung jury, on a copyright case brought by Trovata earlier this year) and the many, many other brands who take prints, patterns, and other design features directly from the runway without acknowledgment or apology. A high-end designer getting caught stealing from someone else's archives — again — can't but hurt that case.

Balenciaga's Nicholas Ghesquire Copies Again [Addicted to YSL]
East West Musical Instruments Parrot Jacket XS [Goodbyeheart]
Is Copying Really a Part of the Creative Process? [NYTimes]

Jones got his start in hat making simultaneously in two very different venues: at the venerable English couture house Lachasse, where he trained while studying at Central St. Martins, and in his flat, where he'd fashion creations for the New Romantic London club kids of the late 70s. His work shows the mark of that very wide set of influences. Jones is responsible for everything from the headwear that marches down the runway at all of Dior's couture shows to the human-hair caps from Nicolas Ghesquière's first season at Balenciaga. His designs vary from Surrealist-inflected doll-part deconstructions (the "Myra", from Jones' Fall/Winter 03 collection, shown below) to showgirl showpieces (see Kylie Minogue's last tour) to things made out of popsicle sticks: if you buy Jones' millinery-as-escape-of-self bit, you might say his work contains multitudes of people you can be. (Perhaps "people" is too generic — characters, then, for sure.)

Solve Sundsbo shot this story, for Another Magazine, and it's beautiful. (It is also available for free online.) The directional lighting, the clinical atmosphere, the cool, desaturated tones, the lines of Guinevere Van Seenus's barely made-up face are all so perfect. (And that's saying something, given I normally can't even stand to look at Van Seenus, a Steven Meisel favorite who once told The Face that the Holocaust could be interpreted as karmic retribution for something really bad the Jews must have done.)

Hats are costume, no matter how many times that trend piece gets written. But they aren't any more costume-y than most of the other looks in fashion magazines; many of us would no sooner wear a felt galleon perched atop our heads than we would a pair of Balenciaga armored leggings or a deconstructed Comme des Garçons cape (Rei Kawakubo is another designer for whom Jones frequently works). I manage to keep a hat or two in my suitcase, and whenever I put them on, they change the tenor of any outfit — definitely moreso than any other accessory — precisely because of this touch of the pure editorial sublime they provide. Once I walked into a designer's showroom wearing a floppy 60s-style hat with an extravagant brim and a scarf for a band, and she booked me on the spot. It was definitely because of the hat.

Continued Jones, to Another Magazine's Susannah Frankel, "Especially if people are coming to me, they're looking for a costume, a way into becoming someone else. Whether you're becoming a lady going to Ascot, or you've got a soft felt on and you're becoming Garbo, or you're putting on a baseball cap and you're becoming 50 Cent but really you're a nice boy from Winchester. The self-expression for the milliner is about creating something that is dynamic and can be an expression of themselves. For the person wearing the hat, it's about expression too, not necessarily of yourself, but of another self."

You could say that's the project of fashion in general — the expression of another self.

"Hats: An Anthology," the show co-curated by Stephen Jones and Oriole Cullen, closes at the Victoria and Albert museum on May 31.

Stephen Jones [Another Magazine]
Hats: An Antholoy [Victoria and Albert Museum]

I so wanted to love this exhibit. I'll admit that bias right from the start. I know first-hand what goes into a shoot, and the crucial animating energy of modeling — the performance that is part mute, still-frame acting, part own-stunt cojones (who do you think climbs South American rock faces without ropes, in couture? Lily Donaldson's double?), part pure, inexplicable presence — and I feel, frankly, that our contributions to the fashion industry and the discourse of images that the industry uses to represent itself to the world are often underreported and undersold. Getting up in the morning and transforming, convincingly, into the apotheosis of a photographer, designer, and stylist's only partly shared creative vision isn't easy.

And just now, after season upon season of most designers choosing to make their models look as inconspicuous, anonymous, and blandly interchangeable as possible on the runway and in advertising, after years in which the model has shrunk before our very eyes, the culture seems ripe for some kind of redress: a resurgence of individuality, a reassertion of personality. A return to the days when the casual fashionista — as opposed to only the dedicated indexer of Internet-derived fashion arcana — could at least tell us all apart. The theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's brand-new and infinitely hyped "Model as Muse" exhibit, with its privileged understanding of the lowly clotheshorse's role in advancing fashion, seemed to promise a move in that direction.

What a terrible disappointment, then, to walk through the Tisch gallery on opening day and find an exhibit that was seemingly laid out with the goal of inspiring the utmost tedium in the viewer. I should have known as soon as I passed that terrible bit of tat with creepy Robo-Dovima in the entryway: the first corridor of photographs is lit with softboxes suspended from the ceiling. Softboxes. Photographic equipment illuminating exemplars of fashion photography! The single-entendre curation never lets up; the viewer is also subjected to such cheesy gestures as stepping literally through a velvet rope in order to enter the 1970s gallery. (Done up, naturally, to look like the basement of Studio 54, complete with unlit cigarettes.) It is difficult to concentrate on the beauty that surrounds when your ears are being assaulted with Alicia Bridges' "I Love The Nightlife" and your eyes with a tawdry-looking spread of yet more blank-faced mannequins, all decked out in truly atrocious wigs by fashion hairstylist Julien d'Ys.

I suspect even the curators, led by Costume Institute head Harold Koda, found their vision a little less than compelling: the exhibit often seems like the product of minds that occasionally wandered. In the wall copy, I spied the former model Anjelica Huston's name mis-spelled with a 'g', and I read twice within 30 seconds the phrase "attenuated limbs." (British model Karen Elson, in the 90s room, has "elegantly attenuated limbs," while American Stephanie Seymour, who closes out the 80s gallery, has "gracefully attenuated limbs.")

This Avedon photo of Lauren Hutton is what every American Apparel ad wants to be. And never will.

The exhibit proceeds dully, chronologically, through roughly the past 60 years of fashion history. The galleries dealing with each decade are separated by lines as clear as they are arbitrary; the Fifties, you see, was the decade of the Continent and Dior and Balenciaga, but then once the clock struck 12:01 on January 1, 1960, nobody made couture anymore, and Rudi Gernreich immediately put the obliging Peggy Moffitt in his monokini. Cue mod! (Cue the Who! On repeat!)

Veruschka, shot here for the August, 1968, issue of French Vogue by her then-lover, Franco Rubartelli, played a role in her shoots that today would be highly unusual for a model. She had significant input into, or sometimes even sole control, of the styling, the makeup, and the hair, and the images produced were generally collaborations between herself and the photographer.

It's hard to screw up showing quality fashion photography, framed on a wall. (Even the various viewer-insulting "contextual" gestures, like blaring pop music and the intrusive graffiti in the 90s room — perpetrated by hairdresser d'Ys, at Anna Wintour's instruction, which goes to show just how much control the noted museum patron has over the arts on display — do not entirely manage to quash the timeless beauty of, for example, Irving Penn's June 1950 Vogue cover shot of Jean Patchett. The presentation of the artifacts on the walls is fine. What I am still unclear about is the value of seeing the mannequin'd tableaux-morts featuring the actual designer clothes; if the point of this show is to celebrate models and their animating contributions to fashion and fashion photography, then, after seeing Veruschka in Yves Saint Laurent's safari collection, or Bert Stern's astonishing studio shot of Twiggy in the same designer's beaded midriff-dress, what end is served by seeing these same garments presented in dim exhibition suites, too far away to make out any detail of stitching or cut, on lifeless dummies that bear no resemblance to the women who once illuminated their beauty as articles of clothing? The safari dress as it hangs in the show isn't even styled properly. It lacks, in addition to Veruschka's firepower, its ring belt.

Even back in 1967, sample shoes didn't fit. Twiggy poses here, on her first trip to the U.S., for Vogue photographer Bert Stern.

If "Model as Muse" serves any useful purpose, it is to remind the viewer of fashion's headwaters, and of just how derivative fashion photography has become. In the first hall of the exhibit is Richard Avedon's iconic image of Sunny Harnett at the roulette table; in the last, is Stephen Meisel's 1998 version, with Carolyn Murphy. The elements are so much the same — blonde, cream dress, tuxedo'd gent, roulette — that the latter scrambles to rise to meet the criteria of "homage."

Sunny Harnett by Richard Avedon, for U.S. Harper's Bazaar, September, 1954.

In the 1960s suite, somewhere under the blaring of "My Generation" and the projected Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Magoo clip on repeat that overwhelms the room, there's a single page from the September, 1965 Harper's Bazaar.

Jean Shrimpton, by Richard Avedon.

It served to remind me of nothing so much as this Patrick Demarchelier image from last September's Vogue.

Catherine McNeil, by Patrick Demarchelier.

A picture of Lisa Taylor wearing Calvin Klein, by Helmut Newton for the May, 1975 issue of Vogue, hangs in the 1970s hall, near some mealy wall copy about 1970s gender roles. (A subject which any viewer would learn more about simply by pondering the viewer-viewed dynamic here between the languid, powerful-looking Taylor and the foregrounded male model, whose ass looks so unusually objectified.)

Lisa Taylor, by Helmut Newton.

Of course, as commenter LittleNemo pointed out last year when I posted a spread, Glen Luchford's September, 2008, Harper's Bazaar photo of Freja Beha Erichsen owes a debt to Newton.

Freja Beha Erichsen, by Glen Luchford.

This Demarchelier and the Luchford were not in the Met's show — the post-grunge years seem to be a curatorial afterthought, as they are represented in main by two outfits from a recent Louis Vuitton collection by principal exhibit sponsor Marc Jacobs and a bunch of pictures of Gisele Bundchen. But, whether all these archetypal images' latter-day derivations are physically present or not, you can only wander through these corridors for a matter of seconds before phrases like "anxiety of influence" come irrepressibly to mind.

It is, I am sure, not the reaction Koda, Wintour, Jacobs, and d'Ys would want. But these eminent lightweights, with their spraycans, their predilection for references to fictional movies about the industry, their ugly wigs and their uglier Nirvana soundtrack, their mis-spellings and their children's book fashion history — not to mention their craven elision of designer Azzedine Alaïa — did more than enough to earn it.

Perhaps someday a museum will be equal to mounting an intelligent investigation of the changing roles of fashion models, and fashion photography's relationship to the wider culture — its uneasily shifting placement on the continuum between high art and low commerce, between editorial content in magazines and clothes and makeup as we do them in everyday life. Perhaps someday, we'll see the model as muse. But that museum is not the Met, and that exhibition is not yet come.

The Model As Muse [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Related: Alaïa Pulls His Dresses From The Met Gala [On The Runway]
Model As Veteran [NY Times]

• Thierry Mugler meets Sasha Fierce: a match made in shoulderpad superhero sparkle heaven. Mugler says he was exploring "The duality between being a woman and a warrior." [WWD]

• Working in the same vein, or perhaps just remembering last year's Met Ball, Marvel comics is planning a major move into women's apparel, jewelry, and cosmetics in 2009. Since what Marvel owns are characters — more than 5,000 in total — the design options are almost limitless. This deal could be great news for women who already feel like part-time superheroes; unfortunately, the t-shirt illustrating this story has an image of the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, the Flash, and Thor playing in a band, with the slogan "I Heart Boys That Rock!" Weaksauce, Marvel. [WWD]
• Lauren Bush's clothing line, which is sold under her middle name, Lauren Pierce, hits Barneys today. The line is mostly day and cocktail dresses and pretty skirts — with a few reversible capes thrown in for good measure — but with a twist: the classic, vaguely preppy silhouettes are constructed out of eco-friendly fabrics hand-dyed by women with a sustainable business plan in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ten per cent of profits from the line go to charities in the source country. [VF]
• Ladies of a certain age, rejoice: Teri Agins says it's A-okay for you all to be wearing animal print. In fact, the suggestions she has are exactly the same for women of all ages — go for small-scale prints, buy garments with classic lines, and wear only one or two printed items at a time. [WSJ]
• It's campaign season, and the rumors are a-swirlin'. YSL is said to be choosing Christy Turlington for its fall ads, Balenciaga has opted for a group of celebrities, shot by Stephen Meisel, and word is Calvin Klein is using Monika "Jac" Jagaciak, one of the brand's exclusives from the fall show. All scuttlebutt, of course, so make allowances for salt, etc. [Fashionologie]
• Hong Kong-based sourcing behemoth Li & Fung (who recently paid Liz Claiborne $83 million for a long term exclusive sourcing agreement) says its net income has fallen 21%. [WWD]
• Widely influential men's wear designer Thom Browne's namesake line is said to be facing bankruptcy. Browne has been looking for a financial backer for over a year, despite his lucrative sideline deals with Brooks Brothers Black Fleece — which runs through 2011 — and Harry Winston and Moncler. [NY Post]
• Swarovski is cutting an additional 600 production jobs at its Austrian headquarters. The move follows 700 layoffs last year, and another round of 500 job cuts is being pondered. [WWD]
• J. Crew, following a fourth quarter loss of $13.5 million, is trying to adjust to recession-altered patterns of consumer spending. Accordingly, it will continue the expansion of its lower-priced Madewell line. There are presently 12 Madewell stores, and the company plans to open eight more in 2009. [Mediapost via Teenfashionista]
• Which is funny, because Fergie has the same idea. She's coming out with not one but two lines of footwear. "Fergie" will sell for $89-129, and "Fergalicious" will be $39-69. Which still frankly seems like a lot to pay to look like a pop star's feet. [NY Post]
• Gwyneth Paltrow will be "designing" a range for the French label ZOETees this fall. I wonder if they'll let her do $400 cashmere socks? [Sassybella]
• One good deal in any economy: free shit! Topshop, which is promising cross its fingers hope to die that the store at Broadway and Broome St. will finally open this April 2nd, has a van circling downtown New York as a promotional stunt. Which would be crass and silly and unworthy of coverage if it weren't for the fact that Topshop's clothes are generally amazing. The van is giving away goodie bags and gift cards of varying amounts, and you can follow it online. [Topshop]

See, fashion is an industry based on image. Do you follow? Because, W has noticed, one of the effects of this is that people who work in fashion tend to be judged on how they dress. Kind of a lot, even. So many of them take the question of what to wear very seriously! And journalists, well, they find it interesting to write about in great detail without even a hint of the broader economic outlook or the narrowness of the audience that regularly wears $300 t-shirts from The Row and Lanvin flats.

Journalist Vanessa Lawrence's premise is almost too simple to be believed. "Working in fashion," she writes, "necessitates being fashionable from the moment you leave the house. And it is an implicit requirement that can prove exhausting for even the most passionate of clotheshorses....But when the weekend rolls around, they are faced with a dilemma: how to keep up appearances while giving their Yves Saint Laurent Tributes and Balenciaga sheaths a breather-if they choose to do so. Between trips to the gym, brunch dates and grocery store excursions, that 48-hour stretch is hardly a time for hibernation."

That's right. When you work in fashion, in addition to needing always to look your best, you might need to dress differently on different occasions. For instance, the weekend. Or the Hamptons! And any forays to distant nations — like the Upper East Side of New York, also known as "10021 land," where people wear these things called "blazers" and look "decked." What's a fashion worker bee to do?

Weirdly enough, everyone Lawrence quotes still seems to dress really well on the weekends. "When I'm in the Hamptons getting stuff at Citarella on the weekends, I'll see fashion girls who are in Marni and Lanvin in the daytime and I'm in a Tracy Feith cotton dress, Jack Rogers sandals and a ponytail," says designer Shoshanna Gruss, whose idea of 'weekend casual' is wholly relative. Others seem not to grasp Lawrence's issue: "French people don't really ‘underdress' on the weekends," remarks a confused Julia Restoin-Roitfeld.

There are plenty of moments of hilarity as the reporter valiantly tries to get a handle on the problem of what to wear in one's off hours. "Gruss's appropriately pulled-together look extends beyond Long Island summers to her Upper East Side residence," writes Lawrence; what range.

The thing is, anyone who spends a lot of time with magazine editors and stylists and General Fashion Personages knows a few things. For one, most of them do not have a lot of money — certainly not enough to be dropping $800 on stilettos every season. (Whether you've got a friendly quid pro quo going with a label's PR depeartment, or something occasionally goes missing from the styling closet is another issue.) For another, most of these people wear the same things every day. All-black ensembles are the norm, not the exception — because it's easy to look stylish in a dark monochrome, and you can switch out accessories without anything clashing, which is crucial if you spend a lot of time traveling and need to look like you have more outfits than you actually do. There are remarkably few people in fashion who consistently dress in ways that turn heads; pretty much everyone just wants to be stylish and look as nice as they can while they're working.

Which is fine, and normal, and fun — and the total opposite of the sort of sartorial-psychological weekend arms race Lawrence's article conveniently invents and then lavishes with attention, perpetuating the myth that all fashion folk are better-dressed than anyone else, and at all times. The real story is told in the pictures that accompany it: they're little images of the article's subject, photographed going about their daily lives, working in the fashion industry. Nobody looks bad — there's Charlotte Ronson at an event in a white dress and a black cardigan; Restoin-Roitfeld in denim shorts, a blue Oxford, and a blazer; Kate Etter in ballet flats, leggings, a green tunic and a long sweater. But nobody looks "fancy" or as purposefully styled as Lawrence's article implies is the industry norm. These look like outfits that have been doing reliable service in various forms for seasons already, and which will continue to see the light of day for a long time into the future. Bags and shoes might wash over Bryant Park like a tide each season, but a good pair of black pants is for the ages. And even people who work in fashion have enough good sense to know they can be worn on the weekends and to work.

Cartoon illustration via W

Weekend Warriors [W]

• It's too early for this heartbreak. Pixie (Pixie!) Geldof got the March Italian Vogue cover. Have Franca Sozzani and Steven Meisel lost their minds? The cover line is "So young, so cool." So barf. [Telegraph]

• Maria Sharapova for Cole Haan is now a reality. The new campaign looks pretty good, and for fall, Sharapova herself will create a line of shoes and bags for the brand. Assuming, that is, that we've started buying celebrity fashion lines again by fall. [Sassybella]
• Alexander Wang has designed a limited-edition run of condoms called Proper Attire. They're for sale in Thompson hotels, and all the proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood. Wang, whose fall/winter show is, appropriately, on Valentine's Day, said of the collaboration: "I used a spare design that felt sexy, modern and empowering; after all, women should always come first!" Yes. [The Cut]
• Prada, meanwhile is concentrating on objects that are intimate in a different way: The next edition of its LG phone launched last week. "You carry it with you and it tells something about you," said Prada's director of licensing. I'd go through the specs, but if you're buying a Prada phone, you probably don't care about any technical point of difference so much as you do about it being a Prada phone. [Business Week]
• The Paris show schedule was just released. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière is changing his venue, and there's no mention of the troubles at Nina Ricci — Olivier Theyskens is on the calendar. (Allegedly, creative director Theyskens is to be replaced at Nina Ricci before the end of his contract by Marc Jacobs' second-in-command at Louis Vuitton, Peter Copping.) [WWD]
• Manish Arora, a London-based, Indian-born designer who showed last season in Paris (you remember — it was the show both Madeline and Austria booked in Paris) has a Q&A where he discusses his use of color, the influence of his homeland on his designs, and his upcoming projects. Which include a deal with Swatch. [Style.com]
• And Fashionista has a sit-down with Elise Overland. Her fall collection is all about food — sushi, to be exact. "It's very sexual, almost macabre," says Overland, "the way they show all the sushi and how the fish is all cut up, up close. If you look at like it like a small human, kind of." That was not a pleasant image this early in the morning, but, carry on I suppose. [Fashionista]
• New York talked to Jason Wu at his little soiree the other night. Unsurprisingly, still riding the post-inaugural boost, he was upbeat. "You know, you have to give someone a legitimate reason to purchase something," he said, of the current economic climate. "And that can only help the market." [The Cut]
• Which fits right in with Women's Wear Daily's view that young designers should find the brave new economy "invigorating." [WWD]
• The WaPo's Robin Givhan is more sobering. Read her thoughtful and considered expectations for fall/winter 09. "The conversation is focused on survival," Givhan writes. "There's palpable anxiety about the economy and how the fashion industry — the part dominated by razzle-dazzle dresses, hand-stitched embroidery and Italian cashmere — will weather the storm. And there's confusion over what sort of tone the industry should strike as it muddles through the worst of it. Magazine editors are running through their list of synonyms for budget and bargain while trying to maintain the fairy dust of glamour and élan. Big retailers have been discounting everything but the light fixtures." [Washington Post]
• L'Oreal has stopped shipping supplies of its cosmetics — including brands like Lancôme — to a leading Russian retailer. The store L'Etoile has been late on its payments due to the credit crunch. [WSJ]
• A tipster tells Racked.com that Gucci has disbanded its in-house architecture firm, which would normally be responsible for store interiors, and set designs at shows. So, that could be true. Or not. [Racked]
• More news on the potential bankruptcy of the IT Holdings SpA division that owns luxury labels Gianfranco Ferre and Malo, and ready-to-wear licenses from Versace Sport and Just Cavalli, among others. The group hit trouble because of the credit squeeze and falling demand for luxury products (duh), which cause it to run out of money to operate those licenses. The company says it hopes to restructure and come out of bankruptcy. [WSJ]
• A pressure group called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics tested 33 well-known brand-name lipsticks over a year ago to find that 61% had lead levels of 0.01 - 0.65 parts per million, and a third had lead levels that exceeded the FDA's safe lead limit for candy. Twelve months on, the FDA still has not released the results of their own, independent lead tests. Lead is a neurotoxin and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to it. [UPI]
• The 18 million items L.L. Bean ships annually will now go via UPS. FedEx lost its contract with the brand after 12 years as their exclusive shipping agent. [The Street]
• JC Penney is advertising its most "fashion-forward" lines this spring, instead of its basics. Which lines might those be? Kimora Lee Simmons' and Charlotte Ronson's, for example. [WSJ]
• There's a cool-sounding exhibit called "Vreelandesque" up in Rome about Diana Vreeland's connection to Italian fashion. The co-curator says of the magazine spreads from the 40s to the 60s, "What you see nowadays on fashion magazines implicitly references these photo shoots, this is why 'Vreelandesque' should also be conceived as a reflection on yesterday and today's fashion, as the past is of fundamental importance to rethink what is fashionable nowadays." [Dazed Digital]
• Mandy Moore's new album was kind of a co-creation with Coach. She had company president and creative director Reed Krakoff style her cover shoot, and she played a private concert in Tokyo to open a new store there. Moore just closed her fashion line, Mblem, but says "I love the fashion world. I'm fascinated by it. I'm humbled by it." [WWD]

• Lauren Conrad is On The Move, Azlan-style. After a prolonged period of alleged laziness, Conrad is promoting her eponymous clothing line all over our fifty states. [Yahoo]
• According to this Sun columnist's "hunch," Kate Moss is pregnant. Take that for what it's worth. [The Sun]
• According to model Niki Taylor — and her husband, doctor and uterus' hunch — she's pregnant too! [People]
• Fashiongate FAQ. [Washington Post]

• More signs of economic apocalypse: the cancellation of Fashion Rocks, CondeNast's annual fashion-rock concert-magazine. [AdAge]
• Here's how to get those undecided swing voters! "On Thursday morning, (Zac) Posen filmed a 15-second video urging people to vote, to vote for Barack Obama, and to dress for the occasion." [WWD]
• L'Oreal keeps its head above water, but cuts forecasts. [WSJ]
• There's hedging your bets, and then there's...this. In case they don't get Runway back, Bravo's introducing Fashion House, Celebrity Sew-Off and The Fashion Show, which sounds suspiciously like a Project Runway where viewers choose the winner. [Yahoo]
• Kate Moss, friend, rumored to be dressing up as Tina Turner, Cher for Halloween, kicks. [Fashionologie]
• "Where would Moss be without her languidly rockish locks?" Um, I don't know. Anyway, her hairdresser is releasing a budget line of hair products. So that we can continue to look nothing like her, on the cheap! [Guardian]
• Ferragamo does all the beautiful, 40s-style shoes for the epic film Australia. [W]
• As an army of Bettys and Joans can tell you tonight, Mad Men has had a serious influence on fashion. [LA Times]
• Charlotte Ronson for J.C. Penney is predictably darling. [Nylon]
• Speaking of cute fast fashion: Old Navy's latest plus-sized line is really pretty. [Fabsugar]
• On the other side of economic divide, Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquière ditches his celeb moddles. [New York Magazine]
• And the head of Chanel: “Even in tough times, people want to see beautiful and inspirational things." [Economist]
• Rami Kashou lectures at the Phillips Collection. Quoth the master-draper: "I want to talk about what it takes to keep a dream alive...What it's like to be a 5-year-old and have a dream." [Washington Post]
• Bottega Veneta gets into cruisewear. Believe it or not, more frequent collections is actually a Recession-proofing measure. [WWD]

• National tragedy: Heidiwood, Heidi Montag's fashion line, has apparently been discontinued! [Oh No They Didn't]
• Diddy buys Enyce from Liz Claiborne. [WWD]
• Karl Lagerfeld's interview with the Olsen twins is possibly the most awesome thing ever. The Kaiser dishes on his hatred of male models, tall women, men's opinions, and marriage! "Today you can have a baby first. If you want. I never liked the idea of a family at all. If it's a woman — it's more fun for a woman." [New York Mag]
• $700 mink Ric Owens stuffed bunny. You can put your keys in it. And it has "a mean face." [Fashionista]

• "Versatile classics" are the big sellers right now. [WWD]
• Another charming common touch piece from Cathy Horyn: "On Sunday afternoon I received a call from the Barneys women’s buying office saying my black Balenciaga dress was in. It was heartening to know in these difficult times that somebody wanted to make a sale." [NY Times]
• Having already beaten the candidates' neckwear into the ground, let's turn to their financial advisors! "Obama's man, Austan Goolsbee, wore a blue silk necktie with a subtle "neat" pattern—which on closer inspection turned out to be the phrase "Obama '08" repeated multiple times, like a subliminal message. His opponent, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, wore a conservative, law-and-order number: red with small white stars." [US News]
• Bond girls wear rad clothes. This premise serves an excuse for this reporter to try on all their outfits. [Telegraph]
• WWD takes full credit for Rodarte's breakout. [WWD]
• And speaking of Rodarte, the Mulleavy sisters are selling some of their archive online. [BlackBook]
• Although 50% of British women are size 16 and above, German designer Anna Scholz is the only one making high-end plus-sized clothes. "The problem is that other ranges want big women to apologise. It's always about disguising and concealing, never about celebrating. I don't understand it. Why would anyone want to wear a breast minimiser?”[Times Online]
• The Delhi Commission of Women seeks to ban a new film which they feel cruelly exploits the trials of the thinly-disguised model protagonist. [Hindustan Times]
• Zappos bans fur from its site, earning PETA's approval. [PETA]
• Apparently Zara's fall catalogue is good. [Fabsugar]
• Australian swimwear designer wrongly targeted in drug sting. [News.co.au]
• ABC cuts wardrobe budget for Desperate Housewives. [ MSNBC]
• Barneys gets all political, decorating the store with presidential portraits. Coolidge always gets me in a shopping mood! [WWD]
• There's some way you can win a clutch at Anya Hindmarch. It sounds like a raffle but it has something to do with Halloween. [VogueUK]

• In case Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle blog, Goop, wasn't quite irritating enough, now she brings us a breakdown of how to get her look. Apparently Roger Vivier bangles help. And don't think that one Uniqlo skirt fools anyone, Gwynnie; we've been wise to those tricks since Lucky hit newsstands! [Racked]
• Fashionologie claims it's "always a treat" to hear Kate Moss talk. We respectfully disagree. Draw yout own conclusions from this video of her "designing." [Fashionologie]
• Here are La Moss's "10 Style Rules": one of them's "Make It Look Effortless." Another is, "When In Doubt, Buy Diamonds." Oh, okay! Maybe this is Gwyneth's secret? [The Guardian]
• Karl Lagerfeld is now a proper noun in Le Petit Larousse Illustré. He also designed the cover. [WWD]

• Anya Hindmarch for Target sells out in 2 minutes! [VogueUK]
• PR's Jerrell comes off as a class act. "Who wants drama? That's not what we're there for. This isn't I Love New York; we're not sitting in a hot tub getting drunk. We're here to show the world what we do." [EW]
• Elle teams with Stardoll to make a tween/teen virtual mag. Kids can dress avatars in "high end virtual couture (such as apparel from DKNY). Users can also play virtual dress up with celebrity avatars such as Paris Hilton or Katie Holmes." I'm still holding out for a virtual thrift store! [Media Week]
• Recessions make strange bedfellows: Ann Taylor teams up with Proctor and Gamble to promote cleaning products that cut down on dry-cleaning. [NY Times]
• Zara succeeds by making fashion faster — and paying workers better. [Business Week]
• Bollywood star Kareena Kapoor launches a fashion web site. [UPI]
• We can't really improve upon Mollygood's description of Stylista, the new Devil Wears Prada reality ripoff: "Incompetent people who have no business being involved in the fashion industry? Check. Frightening dictator (fashion news director Anne Slowey)? Check. Inane tasks that have seemingly nothing to do with fashion? Check. The difference: We wanted Anne Hathaway to succeed in the movie; in the reality TV version, we kind of hope everyone fails miserably." [Mollygood]
• Mary McFadden: "When people look back at this period in our civilization, they'll say: This was the beginning of functional clothes ... I'm sorry, in a way people's lifestyles have become very utilitarian." Well, that explains sparkly leggings! [BlackBook]
• Not shockingly, discounters keeping their heads above retailers'. Does anyone else think those TJ Maxx ads where they explain how they keep their prices so low are completely genius? [NY Times]
• And, yes, LVMH is finally feeling the pinch. [WSJ]
• Louis Vuitton keeping them afloat. [WWD]
• That said, Armani is still really confident about opening shop in India. [Hindustan Times]
• Liz Hurley's Versace safety-pin dress has been named "The Greatest Red Carpet Gown of All Time." "Greatest" is apparently open to interpretation. [Mirror]
• Pixie Geldof takes on human trafficking. Via a tee shirt, obvs! [ElleUK]
• Ethical knitwear label Izzy Lane has won the RSPCA Good Business Award for its sheep-friendly practices. [Guardian]
• Leona Lewis snubs Harrods because of their continuing sales of fur. [Peta2]
• Someone's plastering Rachel Zoe's face all over New York. [Fashionista]
• Taylor Momsen's first modeling shots! Based on our newfound Top Model expertise, we'd say Little J is still looking for her signature pose. [Fabsugar]
• Balenciaga launches new frangrance, hopes to "renew Balenciaga's image as a serious fragrance contender." [ElleUK]

• Would Rachel Zoe support Code Pink? Here's her response: "I’m embarking on a big initiative this year for ovarian cancer—that’s next. But if I lived in the ’70s, I would have been right in John Lennon’s bed with him and Yoko. God, I wish he were alive." We'll take that as a...maybe? [BlackBook]
• Anand Jon: Rapist, or simply a creep? [Radar]
• Despite rumors, Pixie Geldof isn't designing for New Look. She's modeling for them! [ElleUK]
• Finnish designer Ivana Helsinki based her knits line for Topshop on "the champagne state of drunkenness." Sign us up! [VogueUK]

• H&M feels the pinch. Don't we all. [WWD]
• Is Alessandra Facchinetti getting the pink slip at Valentino? [Fashion Week Daily]
• At the end of the day, fashion's a business. Albeit a ridiculous one. [Independent]
• Which is why Lanvin might be selling a stake to a Qatar investor. [IHT]
• Posh's new boots: ugly, of course, but are they equally uncomfortable?! [Guardian]
• Apparently Paris fashion week is sucking far less than did New York's. [Fashionista]
• This new hand-held scanner can tell if a garment's a fake -so you don't have to send your clothes to a lab, like you were doing before! [IHT]
• Foot Locker's buying skateboard apparel maker CCS. It's currently owned by Delia's. [WSJ]
• Model Sarah Murdoch says "In fashion ... there is an unhealthy body image for young women." No shit. [News.com.au]
• Balenciaga show apparently bites. [NYT]

• Sacha Baron Cohen's fashionisto alter ego, the fey Austrian Bruno, stormed the catwalk in layers of schmatte during Agatha Ruiz de la Prada's runway show, setting off a security panic. Ultimately they had to call the police; all this will obvs end up in the upcoming Bruno movie. [Perez Hilton]
• Responding to the extreme shortage of celeb fashion lines, Rihanna confirms that she's launching one: “I can’t say when it will be released, but it’s definitely going to happen.” [WWD]
• Naomi Campbell loses her shit at D&G. [WWD]
• Model Lily Cole gives us conservation advice in the intro to eco tome Green is the New Black: “I would encourage sewing together your own stuff, and keeping that stuff even as it falls apart (a good look, I really believe). I would also encourage a change in attitude… what’s a good sweater without a hole?... Please remember, or at least consider, that holes are beautiful, too!” [Nylon]

• The words "complete creative control" should give Adidas pause; they've given it to Jeremy Scott for his new line. [WWD]
• Responding to the needs of a rapidly aging population, Japanese adult diaper designers hold a "fashion show." [CBS]
• Tommy Hilfiger and Peggy Noonan apparently didn't really hit it off. [BlackBook]
• Apparently, in addition to being hideous and ludicrous, the Comme des Garcons for for H&M line is really expensive. [Fashionista]
• With usually dependable Russian and Asian buyers in abeyance, Milan's designers are in a panic. [FT]
• Well, some of them. "In the current climate, at the end of a long week, there's something reassuring about designers who are unashamedly getting on with business as usual. Credit crunch? What credit crunch?" [ElleUK]
• At least Cavalli takes the pulse of the times: "In possibly the most inexplicable collection so far, transparent pastel Wedgwood print chiffon milkmaid dresses were followed by Marie Antoinette peony-posied minis complete with thigh-grazing bustle, which were followed by black Studio 54 jersey slithers, which were followed by neon yellow and chartreuse graphic balloon dresses, which were followed by see-through long white lace governess dresses with little black bows at the neck and pigeon-tail lace tiers at the back, which were followed by marabou-trimmed gold scripted chiffon pyjamas." [FT]
• With peeps cutting back on dry-cleaning, wash and wear fashion is big business. [Reuters]
• In a triumph of frugality, people drop a bundle at Hermes sample sale. [NY Times]
• Balenciaga's casting male models, which means either menswear or drag, and can we just say we're over drag? Can these designers at least pretend they're designing for women's bodies?! [Fashionista]
• Re-usable shopping bags aren't really all that green. Wah-wah. [WSJ]
• Typically generous British journalism: "The encouraging truth is that Twiggy does not look nearly as young in the flesh as she does in most of the photographs in her new book about how to look fabulous over 40. She has, I am heartened to observe when we meet in a London hotel, a slight tummy, jowly bits and a light craquelure of wrinkles." [Telegraph]
• The much-reviled lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow's new Tod's commercial: "The full length commercial, which was modeled after "La Dolce Vita" and featured Gwynnie being chased by papparazzi, losing her bag and having it returned to her by a charming reporter...There were lots of close-ups of the bag, of course. Loving, glorious close-ups." [Washington Post]
• Rebellious Belgian designers want to be business iconoclasts, too. [WSJ]
• The unrest at Pucci as loud as its patterns! [NY Mag]
• Manolo Blahnik turns on the heel! "It's much more difficult to be beautiful and walk femininely in flats...Bardot in France did it and Audrey Hepburn in America. They looked fantastic and walked like tigers, beautiful and graceful, but you can walk like a beach bum in them - then they don't look so good." [VogueUK]
• Why don't we get awesome free stuff with American fashion mags? [Fashionista]
• Michael Kors opens first Euro boutique. [Fashion Week Daily]