As I said, it was ridiculously complicated.

The Art Of Confusing Children: Paula Abdul Edition [Fourfour]

• Diane Kruger nabbed a L'Oréal contract. [Elle UK]
• And yes, Siriano provides the contractually-obligated fierceness. [Racked]

• Asked to nominated a 21st Century "heroine" by Harper's Bazaar magazine, Sarah Brown chose Naomi Campbell, for her work with women's charities. Brown calls the supermodel "impatient in a good way." [Guardian]
• Iman says David Bowie loves SoHo. "It's a perfect place for my husband," says the cosmetics company owner/legendary model. "Everyone's dressed better than he is, and they all think they're stars — so no one bothers him!" [TheMoment]
• The Stockholm department store that was set to carry NoKo jeans — the only jeans made in North Korea, by a trio of Swedish entrepreneurs who convinced the communist regime to allow production of its $215 jeans — decided at the last minute to back out. [AP]
• "Chanel in Shanghai: China goes from Mao to wow." No, that's the headline, really. [Telegraph]
• "Within East Africa, Kenyans are renowned for being the worst dressed." And, sadly, the photos accompanying this story are not helping. [BBC]
• Christopher Bailey, the Burberry creative director, went to Buckingham Palace to pick up his MBE for services to the fashion industry. [Elle UK]
• Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons — the label White House social secretary Desiree Rogers wore to the state dinner — has designed a limited edition Barbie dress. Comme des Garçons Barbie looks surprisingly normal, and costs £225. [DazedDigital]
• Christian Louboutin's Barbie, and her four not-sold-separately plastic Louboutin shoes, goes for a mere $150. That would be the Barbie Louboutin redesigned to eliminate her cankles. [People]
• Oh, look: Someone from the Daily Mail went to cover the Elite Model Look competition and forgot to Google Gérald Marie. [Daily Mail]
• Gucci is opening its third Indian store, in New Delhi, through a company the brand owns in partnership with two local entrepreneurs. Previous stores in India were franchises. [WWD]
• Vans and Robert Crumb are doing a collaboration. Two of Crumb's legendarily skeevy cartoon characters will adorn Vans sneakers, for $52-$60. [Independent]
• The Australian wool industry was supposed to end the practice of mulesing — amputating excess skin from lambs' hindquarters to prevent painful and life-threatening maggot infestations — by 2010. Having failed to do so, the Gap has bowed to PETA's pressure and announced it will stop sourcing wool from Australia. [PETA]
• Lord & Taylor has agreed to ban raccoon dog fur from its stores after the Humane Society filed a lawsuit against the company for mislabeling some fur garments. [WWD]
• Ksubi is in trouble over allegations of animal cruelty at one of its events in Sydney. Forty white homing pigeons were hired by the brand as live party props, and at least one died. [DailyTelegraph]
• What what what? Zappos is launching a printed catalog. Isn't that like going back in time? [NYTimes]
• Macy's will roughly triple the number of Sunglass Hut outposts in its department stores over the next year. [Crains]

The Wall Street Journal article documents the various critiques the dolls have attracted since they hit toy story shelves. Everything from the hair texture of the dolls to their features to their packaging has come under harsh scrutiny.

While the piece is pretty standard fare, one sentence in particular stands out as if it were surrounded by neon lights:

The criticism over Mattel's new black fashion dolls underscores how difficult it is for large commercial companies to please a widely diverse black community with a single image or two depicting young African-Americans.

This is where discussions of representation, politics, and commerce get thorny. One of the reasons that the So In Style Dolls are attracting so much attention is because there isn't an endless fountain of African American images to choose from. It is costly to create customized dolls for every variance in skin tone, facial structure, and hair style. My Twinn dolls, which are created in the image of the child who plays with the doll, retail for close to $150 dollar a piece.

For the toy maker seeking to turn a profit, mass production is generally the way to go. However, due to costs, these designs are limited. So from a business perspective, it would make sense for Mattel to drive money into a few different designs that will hopefully appeal to a broad range of people.

However, a market-based explanation does not take into consideration the long history of exclusion of African-Americans (and other minorities) from other aspects of the American cultural landscape. This exclusion, often intentional, was often rectified by making token gestures - like making sure that there might be one black friend, but ONLY one. As a result, because these opportunities for representation are so few and far between, the reactions come quickly.

And, in light of the societal preference for light skin/long hair, an unintended side effect of doll play is that young girls learn that the features and traits their dolls possess are pretty or beautiful, and often seek to emulate them. Irby-McBride acknowledges this dynamic in a video on the Mattel site, explaining that dolls do influence the behavior of young girls. She made a conscious decision to provide the dolls with younger sisters to encourage mentoring, and had the girls interested in science, math, and music to promote school engagement. However, she did not extend her concern to the physical cues that the girls may get from the So In Style line:

[Irby-McBride] also wanted them to be fun. She loved playing with Barbie's long hair as a child, she says, and Mattel's extensive research repeatedly shows that young girls want their dolls to have long hair they can brush and style. The So in Style dolls also have a hair-styling kit to curl and straighten the hair.

The black women recruited by Mattel to give input during the dolls' production had extensive discussions with the company about giving at least some of the dolls varied and representative hairstyles, says Ms. Johnson, the mother of a 14-year-old girl. Mattel's concession was to make one doll's hair wavy and give one of the little sisters short puffy pigtails.

For a lot of people, particularly those of us who want our children to love and embrace the hair that grows out of their heads before they start making any changes, this kind of oversight undermines what we are trying to teach. If we teach that long, straight hair is beautiful and fun to play with, and there are no representations of short hair, cropped hair, or kinky hair, what kind of message does that send to a child?

In an interesting twist, the WSJ asked doll modification expert Loanne Hizo Ostile (whose work we have featured before) for comment:

Loanne Hizo Ostlie says she also likes the dolls, but thinks Mattel did black girls a disservice by not giving them a more varied, representative look. For more than 10 years, she has been customizing dolls, specializing in creating black dolls from Kelly dolls, Barbie's little sister, and selling them on the Internet.

In the past, she also customized Barbies, but the field got increasingly crowded, she says. Now, she's turned to the So In Style little-sister dolls, painting their eyes brown and giving them "dreadlocks, Afros, cornrows and kinks."

Amazing.

Perhaps full and equitable representation is a bit much to ask from profit-driven enterprises, like Mattel. However, I am encouraged to see doll makers like Stacey Irby-McBride and Loanne Hizo Ostlie, each doing a small part to correct representations that they see as problematic.

Are Mattel's New Dolls Black Enough? [Wall Street Journal]
So In Style [Barbie.com]

Earlier: Dear Mattel: This Is How How You Make Barbie More Diverse

The "burka Barbie" in question is one of 500 dolls, many dressed by Italian designer Eliana Lorena, currently on display at Florence's Salone dei Cinquecento and to be auctioned off for Save the Children in association with Sotheby's. The exhibition, in concert with Barbie's 50th anniversary, has Mattel's blessing.

Anna advised me not to do the show. Not only is she unimpressed by previous segments in which Jezebel was mentioned, she was pretty sure they'd "play the concerned "feminist" card" while in fact getting in more sweeping digs at the pernicious influence of Islam. Indeed, although the doll hasn't generated a ton of media attention, it's been enough to prompt both reflexive anti-Islam rhetoric (ahem, Daily Mail commenters!) and feminist outrage. NOW's Marcia Pappas has apparently released the statement,

As feminists we believe that women must be able to make their own choices and that includes choices about the clothing they wear. But the burka is more than a choice. Women are forced to wear the burka or risk being murdered. Mattel should be ashamed. Making a profit by selling a doll that is clearly wearing a symbol of violence is not acceptable and there should be a public outcry to take this doll off the market.

But there were other reasons that dressing Barbie in a burka wasn't exactly the cause I wanted to get behind, especially on Fox News. A non-Muslim dressing a non-Muslim doll in a burka trivializes it and reduces it to a costume as surely as Barbie's Mackies and bikinis and doctors' coats. Also, the burka in question is scaled strangely - not to mention lime green and vermillion. Perhaps more problematically, the doll is dressed in a burka "or" a hijab, and the two are not the same thing.

But most of all... I don't think it is really that big a deal: it's a single doll. It's not mass-produced. It's presumably not intended for any children, Muslim or otherwise, and doesn't seem to involve any more social commentary than Malibu Barbie does on Proposition 8. That said, whether the designer intended it to be or otherwise, it's obviously a loaded choice: Saudi Arabia outlawed Barbie in 2003, and as the Christian Science Monitor reminds us, "in April 2008, Iranian prosecutor Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi warned in that Barbie dolls are 'destructive culturally and a social danger,'" prompting attempts to ban them from stores, although several Barbie-substitutes have failed to catch on. (Fulla, a more naturalistic fashion doll from the United Arab Emirates, has been successful across the Middle East.) And for many, Barbie can never be de-sexualized.

In the end, I spent so much time debating and deciding that by the time I'd made my decision, the Fox segment had already aired. Too bad: I'd arrived at what I thought was an inarguable thesis: at the end of the day, all Barbies are going to end up in the same place - naked and spread-eagle on the floor.

It's Barbie In A Burkha [Daily Mail]
Burka Barbie To Raise Funds For Save The Children [Christian Science Monitor]
Boycott Burqa Barbie [PajamasMedia]
Burqa Barbie [Fox News]

Barbie has been stumbling over the past few years, her once powerful pink plastic empire taking a hit as Bratz, tarted-up sass-pots your daughter could love, stole much of her thunder and a great deal of her business. Like many other competitors, however, the Bratz were eventually taken out by Barbie and her crack team of lawyers, leaving the blonde pilot/doctor/astronaut/beauty queen shaken but once again at the top of her game.

The cracks in Barbie's armor, however, are providing opportunities for new challengers to slip in and try to take her broken-like-two-seconds-after-you-get-it-out-of-that-dumb-plastic-tie-thing-in-the-box crown. Two "fashion doll" lines, the "Liv" dolls and the "Moxie Girlz" (we're still doing the "z" for s thing, eh?) are currently the biggest threats to Barbie's reign in the doll aisle, offering girls dolls that celebrate the fun of fashion over the cost of fashion.

According to Ruth La Ferla of the New York Times, the Liv and Moxie lines (along with Barbie's new "Fashionista" line) veer from the limousines and bling of the Bratz era. The Liv dolls, she notes, are "positioned as the anti-Bratz, decked out in denim jackets and tooling around on tiny motor scooters," and the dolls are geared toward "pint-size consumers who mimic girls in their teens," which I take to mean that the dolls are more representative of young girls wanting their dolls to dress like cool teen idols Demi Lovato or Miley Cyrus as opposed to wanting their dolls to look like billionaire whores in their 30s, as the Bratz line often did.

The Liv line, La Ferla notes, is also specifically designed to veer from Barbie's oft-bemoaned appearance, as the dolls have "plump facial features and contours softer than Barbie's," as well as wigs that can be interchanged to allow girls to have more options with styling, a great idea, in my opinion, as I ruined at least 5 Barbies as a child by trying to "style" her hair. Of course, the new dolls are not without criticisms; there are still several accessories to "collect" and, as child psychologist Susan Linn tells La Ferla, "These girls remain immersed in a world obsessed primarily with looks and clothes."

Whether or not the Liv dolls or the Moxie Girlz will eventually overtake Barbie is yet to be seen, and I suppose the new lines are a step up from the horrendous Bratz line. But still, it's hard to get excited about another "fashionista" product aimed at little girls. Yes, the limo may be gone, and the clothes may be more age-appropriate, but I'm so tired of the message being sent to little girls that fashion is the most important thing on earth (somehow, "fashion designer" has become the be-all-end-all job for kids), and that even their dolls have to keep up. I suppose in the end it comes down to a balance; there's nothing wrong with having fun with dolls or fashion, as long as parents remind their kids that it's more about having fun than having all the right things.

Losing The Limo [NYTimes]

[Image via New York Times.]

Okay, that's a trick question. It's hard to make an adequate representation of anything, and have it appeal to a mass market. Interestingly, creator Stacy McBride-Irby came up with the doll redesign out of a desire to have a doll that reflected what her daughter looks like

"They mean so much to me because they did come from a positive place," McBride-Irby said. "My daughter loves the dolls. I've had dads thank me for creating this line of dolls that represent their little girls. These dolls are for girls all over the world."

Over at Racialicious, I had two separate submissions, begging to disagree.

Seattle Slim wrote:

Mattel, you disappoint me. What was wrong with giving these dolls from your S.I.S line natural hair, dark brown eyes, and features that fit with most of the particular demographic, black girls, that you are looking to cater to?

If you guys think that these dolls don't mean shit, might I kindly ask you to check out the Doll test?

You should not be lauded for this, Mattel. I appreciate you thinking of us and all, but you dropped the ball on this.

Even if you wanted to keep these dolls, that's fine. I've already described my grandfather and family history here. Where is MY doll? Where is the doll with the Afro? Where is the doll with twists? Where's the doll with the lowboy? Where's the doll with the dark brown eyes, and the flatter nose, and the voluptuous lips? Where's the doll that has all of those things, not just some? Where's the doll for little girls that look like me?

Let me be more clear, these dolls (except for Kara's crazy lace front) are not terrible. I think they are actually perfect for little girls who have a mixed background. These pretty much cover a broad aesthetic and look like plausibly like someone with mixed heritage. In that respect, these dolls are perfect!

However, for the little black girls that look just like ME with unmistakably Afrocentric features, these dolls appeal to the tried and totally untrue, but respected, hip-hop beauty ideal that has become an "exotic girls only" industrial complex. So not only are young girls bombarded with those images on television, if their parents aren't careful, they are basically kicked while they're down walking through the toy store.

Tami, the editor of Love Isn't Enough, opened by explaining what she likes about the dolls. However, she still had heavy reservations:

Like a lot of women, I am uncomfortable with Barbie and her role in the development of young girls. It's not all Barbie's fault. It is the space she occupies in the universe of things that influence how girls grow up to be women: what goals they ultimately have, how they see themselves, how they judge their self worth and how they define womanhood.

I also have a beef with the word "authentic" to describe the three acceptably "blackified" dolls. Let's face it, these dolls don't represent any sort of break-through in representation of black faces. The skin tones and facial features fall within a narrow range that is acceptable within Eurocentric beauty standards. And to say that their hair is "curly" like that of most black women (as McBride-Irby does in this video on the consumer page for the new dolls) is being a wee bit disingenuous. Most black women have hair that is more kinky than curly in its natural state. (These dolls ain't no nappy heads.) Of course, most black women chemically straighten or weave up, which makes the dolls an accurate representation. Fine, but don't try to market them as some representation of "authentic" black physicality.

I also note, in the linked Mattel page above, the use of vaguely "urban" music, a gold, blingy necklace and a backstory that involves Barbie's friend Grace moving from California to Chicago, where she hooks up with Kara and Trishelle. The story and associated imagery is relatable for many black girls, but not all. What about the many, little black girls who live in the burbs? Of course, these dolls can't be everything to every child. But again, the use of "authentic" is a marketing fail. The urban experience is no more "authentic" to black folks than the rural experience.

This idea of authenticity permeates the whole line - each of the dolls has an optional hair styling kit, which includes a curl spray, clip in extensions, and a curling iron.

(Pause here for a second. The dolls come with activator and a weave. Both! Even Régine on Living Single didn't go this deep and she was checking for a Chocolate Ken!)

The reactions to both the pieces raged back and forth - some people thought we should appreciate the effort, the steps taken, and the fact that a black designer created and conceived the S.I.S. project. Others thought that anything that reinforces eurocentric beauty standards is still damaging, even if it is created by another women of color.

But the strength of the reactions - both for and against the dolls - showed what's really at stake here. While some people might say that all of this attention toward Barbie is silly and misplaced, the fact is Barbie still occupies a certain, exalted place in the cultural consciousness. Even as the Barbie brand is falling out of favor, she remains a symbol of (white) femininity and desirably, and unreachable ideal that far too many girls still find imprinted on their psyches.

The truth is, we don't want to change Barbie, or Trichelle, Kara, and Grace. We want to change the culture that says we must look a certain way in order to be beautiful.

But changing a culture is difficult. And even as we grow up, and leave our Barbies behind (or decided we never liked them in the first place), the painful truth remains: we all want our beauty to be validated.

And in our own, individual way, we're trying to influence the world to do just that.

New Black Barbies Get Mixed Reviews [CNN]
Mattel Falls Short With S.I.S (So In Style) Line Black Barbies [Happy Nappy Head]
I'm Saving My Cheers For New, "Authentic" Black Barbie [Love Isn't Enough]
Barbie So In Style Stylin Hair Grace Doll [Amazon]

• Stephanie Seymour's divorce from Peter Brant is getting even uglier. After police were called to the couple's home following Seymour's complaint that Brant's security assaulted her, Brant has accused the model of drug use and is seeking sole child custody:

• Brant alleged in court filings that Seymour sought treatment for Vicodin abuse, and subsequently became addicted to the drug Subutex, which is used to treat opiate addiction. He says Seymour has missed multiple court-required breathalyzer tests, and has twice submitted urine samples that, though clean of Subutex, were too cold to meet the minimum valid temperature. The media mogul also says Seymour "broke in" to the couple's Florida mansion and removed $700,000 worth of items, all while the kids sat in a hotel in Connecticut. [NYP]
• When fashion goes Galt, you know we're in trouble. [TDB]
• Nanette Lepore, Michael Kors, Zac Posen, Anna Sui, Betsey Johnson, and that guy who was just endorsed by Barack Obama, whatsisname, Bill Thompson, will be on Seventh Avenue on Wednesday for a rally to save the New York Garment District. Twenty-five thousand people work in the district, and designers say they need their convenient access to sample houses and manufacturers it provides, but lax enforcement of existing zoning laws and competition from cheaper labor sources overseas have led the zone to dwindle. [NYDN]
• Not to be outdone, Mayor Bloomberg — whom some designers have criticized for failing to do enough to protect the garment district — is launching a fashion incubator program for 12 up-and-coming designers this fall. [NYP]
• Woody Allen is reportedly considering casting Adriana Lima in his new movie, which is set in Rio de Janeiro. Because he's "fascinated" by her beauty. [NYP]
• "My fashion advice is to have a flattering mirror at home and then forget about it," says Vivienne Westwood. The designer lives in Captain Cook's old house, and has never sold out to a larger company or a private investor, despite some offers. And some polite nos: reports Cathy Horyn, one backer in the 90s picked another designer instead. "They could have made money with me. They lost it. I'm a woman," says Westwood. "I'm like household management or whatever it is. I would never spend more than I have." [NYTimes]
• Tim Gunn has a cameo in the Sex And The City sequel. [E!]
• JMS, a brand owned by Hanes, is adding a dedicated plus-size apparel line to its existing plus-size offerings, which were mainly jeans and underwear. It'll be sold at Wal-Mart and the creative director promises "slimming seams, strategically placed pockets, freedom of movement and appropriate-weight materials." [WWD]
• Christian Louboutin, the designer who slimmed down Barbie's ankles when he had the chance to release a line of dolls under his own name, says he never meant to imply her ankles were big before. "Fat ankles she didn't have, she just could have had thinner ankles," explained Louboutin. Still digging, then. [WWD]
• Manolo Blahnik: "I hate celebrities. All those pointless girls — I won't name names, but you know who I mean. They are 'famous'. Ridiculous. I like women with style: actresses like Uma Thurman, icons like Audrey Hepburn. I like women with style to wear my shoes." [Vogue UK]
• Model Selita Ebanks joins Sinbad, Darryl Strawberry, and Cyndi Lauper in the next season of Celebrity Apprentice. [NYDN]
• Pat Field made a tote bag for Diet Coke to give away with purchase, which will be available later this month from Boots stores. [Daily Express]
• Erin Wasson, presumably to avoid her dreaded homelessness, makes an appearance in the fall J. Crew catalog. She eats a necklace in one shot. [Refinery29]
• Something called the Japan Jeans Association given the country's first lady, Miyuki Hatoyama, its Best Jeanist Award. (She shares it with a pop star and an actor.) Pleased, the 66-year-old Hatoyama said, "This is the prize I have long wished to win. I'm a jeans lover. I'm always putting on jeans as they're easy to wear." She also recalled that she and her husband were each wearing jeans when they met. [AFP]
• Gee, we're so glad reporter Giles Hattersley puts that nice boss, successful businesswoman, and maker of lovely shoes Tamara Mellon in her place in this hard-hitting profile. Apparently she smokes, wears "teensy" dresses, and altogether reminds Hattersley of "the heroine of some dicey Danielle Steel bonkathon." Can't have that. [ToL]
• Love Moschino, the Italian company's lower-priced clothing line, is adding accessories to its collection. [WWD]
• Georgia May Jagger, already having nabbed the Hudson Jeans campaign, is now the face of Rimmel cosmetics. [Telegraph]
• Yasmin le Bon's daily life: "If lunch is at home then I tend to eat up leftovers from the fridge. I'm the leftover queen. I can't help it. I might mix them into an omelette or throw them all into a soup. One of the children won't eat soups any more because she's worried what old food I've put in it. Simon's mother, Ann Marie, often comes round with homemade bread and cakes." [ToL]
• Alvin Ailey company dancers will wear Mark & James, Badgley Mischka's just-announced lower-priced line, to their season opening gala on December 2. [WWD]
• Henry Holland kinda maybe sorta wants to move to New York. "Every time I come, the need to live here becomes more and more urgent and I want to go home less and less. I spend my entire time here plotting about how I would do it." But even if he did cross the Atlantic, he says he would still show his line in London. [Grazia]
• The luxury market, once in free-fall, is still declining, just not as steeply as some analysts earlier expected. Instead of the overall 10% drop in luxury sales that had originally been forecast for 2009, analysts say the industry is on track for an 8% decline in sales. [WSJ]

[Barcelona, October 15. Image via Getty]

A girl has her face painted in the first Barbie store in Europe after its opening in Barcelona on October 15, 2009. AFP PHOTO / LLUIS GENE (Photo credit should read LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images)

In the clip above, Tina says that while she was doing the Bazaar shoot she thought, "Yeah, I look like this!" ... then they turn the wind machine off.

Below, she explains that her daughter is now old enough to pick her own Halloween costume, so the days of stuffing her in a ham sandwich costume and laughing at her are over. Tina doesn't want her to go as a "Barbie butterfly princess," but at least she doesn't want to be one of the Girls Next Door.

A remote-controlled zombie with a brain-shaped remote makes quite the stocking stuffer.

So many winners on this page, but the golden fertility idol pen holder and the Lost Ark bank are the ones that really caught my eye. The legless Short Round statue is terrifying, and the Delorean is cool, but not super useful.

Ooh — sure to be a hot toy come Christmastime! They made the doll of Tiana from The Princess And The Frog super pretty. The plush frogs are cute too, and there must be someone you know who's dying for a Slimer bank?

Attention Twihards! You can choose from THREE different kinds of Sparkle Vamp. There's the Byronic effete version; the über-pale Barbie version and the "very detailed" sick of Hollywood bullshit model. ZOMGSPARKLEVAMP4EVA! Question: Where is my Buff Werewolf? Team Jacob has been robbed.

In case you didn't believe that Robert Pattinson's glare had been recreated: Believe.

Prefer wizards to sparkle vamps? Draco Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange dolls should satisfy you.

Ben Linus bobblehead: Creeptastic!

Remember when Strawberry Shortcake got a makeover? This is what she looks like now. Shed a tear for your destroyed childhood.

Can we just pretend we didn't see the pages of busty Anime girls with removable clothing? No? Dammit.

When I say I need an R2D2 USB hub, I mean now.

Question: Is the Heidi Klum Barbie supposed to look like Heidi Klum? Because it doesn't. (The legs. So thin. I cry.)

Question: If you purchase a zombie oil painting, have you made an intelligent art-buying decision? As in, the kind that takes BRAINS?

Question: Can you believe that there is a Twilight flash drive — complete with Cullen family crest — and it's actually pretty cool? (ZOMG WHAT AM I SAYING? I HAVE BEEN BRAINWASHED BY THE SPARKLE VAMP)

Question: May I please have life-size versions of the Jonathan Adler Barbie dress — AND LAMP — for my wardrobe and bedroom?

Earlier: Entertainment Earth: Weird Gifts For The Freaks & Geeks On Your List

• "No one wants to see curvy women," says Karl Lagerfeld, who has struggled with his weight. "You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." [News.com.au]

• Meanwhile, Christian Louboutin gave Barbie a much-needed slimming treatment. The three dolls the designer is releasing will have an all-new morphology, because the shoe man "found her ankles were too fat," reports a spokesperson. [WWD]
• Heidi Klum says becoming a Barbie was "a dream come true." There's a horror movie in that somewhere. [People]
• Tom Cruise says sweet, underminey things to Katie Holmes about her clothes, like, "I think that dress might be wearing you." The only question remaining is: Is he responsible for Suri's clothing choices? [NYDN]
• Trovata and Forever 21 have settled their copyright infringement lawsuit, just days before a second trial was to begin. The terms are confidential. Despite being sued more than 50 times, Forever 21 had never faced a jury prior to the Trovata case; Trovata had sought a multi-million-dollar judgment against Forever 21 for knocking off its shirts, but the first trial in May ended in a mistrial when six jurors sided with Trovata and one sided with Forever 21. [WWD]
• The Daily Mail did a hilarious write-around on Dov Charney, The Sleazy Sexual Predator Behind High Street Store American Apparel. Wait till they realize that the "model" in the lace bodysuit ad they hold up for particular condemnation — "it is the kind of photograph which would send shivers down the spine of anyone with a teenage daughter" — is in fact an actual porn star named Faye Valentine. We can't wait for the blistering, "exclusive" follow-up. [Daily Mail]
• Marc Jacobs: "I think the idea of people being exposed, whether it's stylists who have their reality shows or whatever, is just the way of the world. It's every chef, every stylist, every hairdresser, everybody who's doing plastic surgery. We're in a period where people are entertained by what they consider to be the real lives of people in different professions, etc. And fashion has also reached this kind of proportion like football or sport, you know — a spectator sport." [WWD]
• W magazine is reducing its frequency from 12 to 6 issues per year. This is fueling rumors that Condé Nast might be interested in buying American Elle. [FWD]
• Ugg Australia is releasing a "limited-edition" kids collection as a tie-in for the Where The Wild Things Are movie. Half the proceeds will go to St. Jude's Research Hospital. Which means half will go to making more ugly Uggs. [WWD]
• Levi's is snapping up young(ish), hip(ish) artists of both coasts in the scramble for sales: after having Ryan McGinley shoot its new ad campaign, the company has announced that printmaker extraordinaire Shepard Fairey will have a capsule collection in stores by the end of this month under the label Obey x Levi's. [WWD]
• Turns out that with the move to selling exclusively at J.C. Penney, Liz Claiborne isn't closing the Claiborne by John Bartlett line — it's just firing two-time CFDA-winner John Bartlett less than halfway into his three-year contract. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, the Upper East Side has hatched another fashion label. Two people who really need the money — socialites Gigi Mortimer and Courtney Moss — want us to buy $199 rabbit fur neck warmers and $315 fox fur gloves. Oh, look: Kelly Killoren Bensimon is all over their website! [WWD]
• Women's Wear Daily puts on its thinking cap to investigate this question for the ages: Has fashion lost its mystique? Is it the reality television? Is it the Internet? Is it Marc Jacobs inviting reporters to work out with him? The story quotes an Internet commenter, and Valentino. [WWD]
• Diane von Furstenberg is mounting an exhibition of her life's work in Moscow later this month. It will include garments she designed, artifacts, and portraits of her by artists including Warhol and Horst. [WWD]

"Black or white, they're still anorexic with breast implants," Joy Behar said. Well… It's Barbie. Sherri Shepherd assumed that the hair was supposed to be a weave. The long hair is on purpose, though: In an interview, McBride-Irby says combing her Barbie's long hair when she was a girl was the "highlight of my play experience." And some of the dolls do have curlier hair. But Sheri Parks, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, says: "Black mothers who want their girls to love their natural hair have an uphill battle and these dolls could make it harder."

In any case, now that the dolls are out, it's hard to tell how they are doing: The AP reports that Mattel doesn't release sales figures; I checked Amazon.com and didn't find any customer ratings. Putting the financials aside, these dolls — who come in different skin tones and are sold with little sisters to mentor — do seem like a step in the right direction, even if Whoopi Goldberg and friends don't think they have enough booty.

Mattel Introduces Black Barbies, To Mixed Reviews [Daily Herald]

Earlier: Mattel's New Black Barbie A Step In The Right Direction

[Shanghai, October 7. Image via Getty]

A man and a woman stand in front of a shop showing US toy manufacturer Mattel's Barbie doll in Shanghai on October 7, 2009. Since the US consumer is no longer the main growth engine of the global economy, experts are looking at China but are sceptical the Asian giant can fill that huge role. AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPE LOPEZ (Photo credit should read PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)