Of the 22 ballerinas studied, 86% had at least one component of the tetrad, and 14% had all four. A disturbing point of comparison — 44% of women who run six days a week are apparently amenorrheic. Athletes and ballerinas who restrict their eating and don't menstruate, says Hoch, have "the cardiovascular and bone density deficits of much older, postmenopausal women." Folic acid Supplements can help prevent vascular problems, but a better solution would be for girls and women to eat enough to support both their active lifestyles and their hearts and skeletons.

Ballerinas And Female Athletes Share Quadruple Health Threats [EurekAlert]

• One of Annie Leibovitz's Louis Vuitton ads with astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell is out. (Gorby was busy that weekend.) [WWD]
• Karl Lagerfeld: "Ballet is an extraordinary art: this torture of the body to make something so graceful. All this hard work, to look effortless."

• "Swans, they are the meanest animals in the world, you know. I had problems with them as a child. They hate children. I was caught by one, so I know. The idea of swans is lovely, and they have a beautiful shape, but they seem more romantic than they in fact are. I don't think really they die like this. They just drop dead, hmm? But who wants to see that?"[Guardian]
• Christian Lacroix has vowed to keep his 22-year-old label alive even as it has declared bankruptcy, but its July couture presentation is in doubt. [WWD]
• Miranda Kerr is nude on the cover of the June Rolling Stone — in Australia. Because she cares about the environment. [News.com.au]
• Whichever "fellow student" told the Daily Mail "The end of year exams are a big deal at Cambridge University and we've all spent weeks revising. I don't know how she has managed to fit any revision into her busy social life," is certainly no "friend" to model/student Lily Cole. But then, if Lily Cole didn't want tabloid attention, she might not walk around London with her boyfriend wearing a gold ring on the ring finger of her left hand. [Daily Mail]
• Everybody you might care slightly about is getting a new fragrance this year. Kate Moss is naming hers "Vintage." [WWD]
• Kind of like the departed Mr. Blackwell — or Republican trickster Roger Stone — but only for hats, Luton, England milliner Philip Wright releases an annual list of the best celebrity hat-wearers. This year, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy topped it, for her "neat, chic, pill box hat" which "was a supreme example of classic simplicity at its best - a stylish understatement which captured the attention of the world's media." She beat the Queen. [Times of London]
• I've always thought that custom-made clothing, at the right price point, could and should be a bigger part of the apparel market than it is. Because all of us have issues with the fit of standardized sizes — who doesn't have a wardrobe half full of shirts that are tight in the shoulders but loose at the waist, pants with the wrong crotch depth, and skirts that don't move quite right when you walk. But all I want to know about this Ryan Taylor, aka "Taylor the Tailor", of Los Angeles, who supposedly takes his clients' measurements and turns out custom-fitted clothing in a couple days at prices "competitive with brand name department stores" is: where does he manufacture? (A question which, funnily enough, CNN seems to have no interest in.) Because everything I know about fashion leads me to suspect that level of service is only possible if you're e-mailing those customer measurements to a guy in Malaysia. Or Hong Kong. [CNN]
• A lone man pulled off an $8.5 million jewelry heist at Chopard in the Place Vendôme in Paris. [CBS]
• A study in the U.K. found that while women make up 52% of the fashion industry's workforce, they are paid 15% less than their male counterparts, and have only 37% of the top jobs. In New York, anecdotally, I've heard from many a design assistant toiling in the trenches of a major brand that, even though here as there the industry is largely female, things like on-site daycare are nonexistent. [Independent]
• Gilt Groupe, the members-only sample sale site, sponsored Zac Posen's resort show, which is happening tonight. Interesting. [WWD]
• Shares in the national mall chain Wet Seal fell 17% in Friday's trading, following the announcement of poor first quarterly results. Same-store sales fell by 7.3%, and even though it beat analysts' expectations by turning a $5 million profit during the quarter, news that the company does not expect to meet profit forecasts in the next quarter was enough to set the stock price sliding. [The Street]
• Lord & Taylor is closing one of its 47 stores nationwide. The Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, will no longer boast a Lord & Taylor as an anchor tenant after July 12. Both Landmark Mall and its parent company, General Growth Properties, have filed for bankruptcy protection. [WSJ]
• The U.S. division of Dutch brand Oilily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed its Madison Avenue store. This follows the bankruptcy of its parent company in Hollard nearly two months ago. [Crain's]
• A statement from Wells Fargo, the principal creditor of the bankrupt Hartmarx company, which owns the menswear brands Hickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner Marx, has put Hartmarx's potential deal with private equity firm Emerisque in doubt. Emerisque's bid of $119 million for the business had been accepted by Hartmarx last week, but Wells Fargo, which is owed $114 million, said that with only $70 million of the bid being cash it "fails to provide adequate value to Hartmarx lenders." Wells Fargo also objects to the bid on the grounds that the offer "does not even ensure that Emerisque will continue running Hartmarx's business operations after the acquisition," something which Emerisque had pledged to do. The bankruptcy court is scheduled to hear objections to the bid today. [Chicago Tribune]
• Mango might do most of its business in Spain, but that won't prevent it from opening a store this September in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and the country's third-largest city. [Times of London]
• Benetton's seven stores in Georgia closed in protest and Georgian politicians voiced thunderous objections to the chain's decision to open an outpost in Sukhumi, the capital of the disputed Black Sea region of Abkhazia. Tbilisi regards Abkhazia as a breakaway province; the EU and NATO concur; Russia recognizes its independence; 1.5 million Russian tourists visit Sukhumi every year. No doubt lured as much by the thought of all those rubles as by the international goodwill it advertises, Benetton has nonetheless been forced to abandon its plans to open the store. [WSJ]

The classically-costumed, tulle-encircled, Degas-immortalized Odette may be on the wane. While the tutu's old-fashioned aesthetic is an obvious bane to the forward-thinking company director, the garment presents practical problems that are a real concern, especially in this strapped economic climate. The tutu started as a means of freeing a dancer's legs from the constrictions of long skirts, and contributed to dancers' reputations as scandalous deminmondaines, but today everything about them feels old-fashioned. Says the Guardian, each custom-made tutu involves

12 layers of net skirt stiffened with steel hoops, panelled overskirts layered with embroidery, sequins and lace, delicately boned and decorated bodices...Too short and tight and the dancer cannot move; too roomy and a ballerina spinning through 32 fouettés may feel as though her tutu is about to orbit around her.

Besides being costly and labor-intensive - it's increasingly difficult to find skilled tutu-makers willing to put in the work - the garment is hard for the dancers to navigate. A ballerina describes it as "It's like wearing a big plate...and sometimes it feels very dangerous — because you can't see your feet" — another remembers catching her tiara in her skirt, while male dancers complain about the difficulties of dancing around the skirt's width and the chafing of harsh tulle against skin when they lift a partner. "It's like dancing with two people," says one.

However, some feel that the iconic garment will always have a place on the stage, as well as our imaginations: says one principle dancer, "Obviously, it makes me feel glamorous and feminine, but it also affects the way I work, the articulation of the port de bras and legs. I like the feeling of being very corseted by the bodice, and being very conscious of the angle of the skirt. When you're on stage with all that sparkle, it heightens everything." Many an aspiring Angelina — who wouldn't be caught dead in anything streamlined or conceptual — would agree.

Here's a great accompanying video: The Trouble With Tutus

'It's Like Wearing A Big Plate' [Guardian]