[Melbourne, October 27. Image via Getty]

Ballet dancer Chase Johnsey of 'Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo' or 'The Trocks' as they are affectionately known, leaves after having his tutu fitted as the ballet company prepares for the opening of their Melbourne season on October 27, 2009. An all-male ballet, 'The Trocks' combine the physical capabilities of male dancers with the grace and grandeur of ballerinas with a layer of expert clowning, creating a company of dancers that lovingly lampoons the conventions of ballet. AFP PHOTO/William WEST (Photo credit should read WILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images)

[Madrid, September 8. Image via Getty]

Dancers of Cuba national ballet perform during the rehearsal of 'Swan Lake' in Madrid on September 8, 2009. AFP PHOTO/PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU (Photo credit should read PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images)

[Havana, August 26. Image via Getty]

Cuban National Ballet Director Alicia Alonso speaks during a press conference to announce the recent promotions in the company and details of the upcoming European tour, in Havana August 26, 2009. Alonso also expressed her willingness for the Cuban Ballet to perform in the United States. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

[Dresden, August 23. Image via Getty]

DRESDEN, GERMANY - AUGUST 23: One of the first of may guests arrives for a performance of the ballet 'Giselle' at the Semper Oper opera house on August 23, 2009 in Dresden, Germany. Dresden is becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

[Szeged, Hungary; July 16. Image via Getty]

Dancers from 'Bejart Ballet Lausanne' of Switzerland present thier dress rehearsal performance on the stage of Szeged open-air festival in front of Szeged's main cathedral, late on July 16, 2009. Their gala will be held tonight coreographed by Maurice Bejart and Gil Roman. AFP PHOTO / ATTILA KISBENEDEK (Photo credit should read ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty Images)

[Montpellier, France; June 18. Image via Getty]

Dancers perform during a rehearsal of the 'Le jardin des delices' (The delight gardens) ballet by Spanish dancer and choreographer Bianca Li on June 18, 2009 at the Opera Berlioz in Montpellier on the eve of the opening of the Montpellier dance festival. Bianca Li's ballet will be shown on June 19 and 20, 2009 during the festival to be held from June 19 to July 4, 2009. AFP PHOTO PASCAL GUYOT (Photo credit should read PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty Images)

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]

[New York, May 18. Image via Getty]

While many industries are feeling the pinch, ballet dancers are taking the recession especially hard. Says the Washington Post,

Among the larger companies, New York City Ballet has let 11 dancers go, Miami City Ballet has laid off seven dancers in addition to getting rid of live music, and San Francisco Ballet has laid off six dancers. American Ballet Theatre is not laying off dancers; instead, its dancers union agreed to substantial contract concessions.

Of course, cultural institutions across the country are suffering, largely because donations are down, with many big spenders presumably in extremis. The Metropolitan Opera's once-healthy endowment is down by two thirds, and the company's cutting salaries and productions. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is operating on a shoestring budget and a skeletal schedule. Opera companies and orchestras around the world are employing new tactics and cuts to keep their heads above water in a time when entertainment is often one of the first luxuries people cut.

Ballet dancers are at even greater risk, however, because the windows of their careers are shorter to begin with. It's a youth-oriented profession in which dancers are recruited right out of their teens and a young performer can't afford to lose the most fruitful years of a career in which she and her family have invested thousands of hours and dollars. Like professional athletes, dancers are at the whims of health and luck, and must balance a single-minded focus with the ever-present knowledge of the profession's precarious nature. Unlike athletes, though, professional dancers don't pull down an enormous salary, and except in the case of real stars, don't have the same kind of economic safety net.

But the jobs just aren't there. Unless one's at an institution like the School of American Ballet, the job market is as bleak as in any profession going, leading many of them, as the article states, to turn to whatever freelance dance work they can pick up - or another career path altogether. One imagines that along with physical discipline, dancers are tacitly taught to accept the pain, rejection and vagaries of the job. But usually there's an expectation that this will at least come from dancing. It is either heartening or depressing, then, to know that a ballerina just won Australia's So You Think You Can Dance.

Dancers Face A Tough Time to Land On Their Feet [Washington Post]
Board Eats Endowment, Gloom Deepens At City Opera [Bloomberg]
Royal Opera Recruits Domingo To Ride Out Recession [Reuters]
Metropolitan Opera Faces Cuts, Its Leader Says [NY Times]
Talia Fowler Wins So You Think You Can Dance Australia [News.com.au]

Today 24 boys and girls attend the school, dancing to donated CDs. Their teacher says "when they dance for two or three hours they forget all about the war." Clip at left.

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]