• Stella McCartney's fall ad campaign makes a Bambijoke out of all that nature imagery that suddenly became hip over the past few years. For everyone who's ever considered an ironic taxidermy at a bar and concluded, "Why?" [WWD]

• Joshua Walter, the 20-year-old male model whose clients included Hugo Boss, has confessed to a series of armed robberies in Queens, and is currently being held in a prison barge moored off the Bronx. Walter, who pistol-whipped one victim during a heist, last came to police attention in May, when he pleaded guilty to punching and choking his girlfriend, 37-year-old former teacher Gina Salamino. (Salamino, who taught second grade, was fired after her relationship with Walter, by whom she has a child, was discovered.) Walter insisted to a New York Post reporter that he is still modeling — how he's doing that from behind bars, after failing to make $550,000 in bail, is unclear. [Gothamist]
• Naomi Campbell is one of the celebrities donating a Birkin for charity to Hermès' annual vintage auction. Campbell's green alligator Birkin will be sold to raise money for the White Ribbon Alliance, which works to reduce the number of women who suffer preventable pregnancy complications every year worldwide. Also for sale on November 10 will be one of Grace Kelly's handbags, donated by her daughter, Princess Stephanie of Monaco. [UK Elle]
• WWD is already referring to the Beatrice Inn as "the former hipster hotspot." Ouch. Also, Lissy Trullie is going to be the fall face of Hervé Leger by Max Azria. [WWD]
• Prada's Seoul building, the Rem Koolhaas-designed Transformer, is changing its appearance once again. The elements of the structure, which are covered in a membrane, are designed to be shifted around to accommodate entirely different uses for the interior space. Opening in April to house a fashion exhibition before becoming a temporary movie theater, the Transformer is now becoming a contemporary art museum. "I want fashion for fashion and art for art," says Miuccia Prada. "So the Transformer concept was not for a generic space, but to be very specific, with all things separate in one building." [NYTimes]
• Meanwhile in Paris, Prada opened a more traditional kind of temporary structure: a pop-up store. Naturally, among the items sold will be an "exclusive," "limited-edition" gray handbag. Uniqlo also just opened a pop-up in Paris, intended to operate until its flagship in the city opens this fall, and Comme des Garçons' Black line currently has a pop-up in the Marais. [WWD]
• Perhaps not realizing that the coal mining scene in Zoolander was a parody, cult Paris shop Colette is releasing a limited edition collaboration with Timberland boots. Forty pairs of pre-distressed Timbs with blue trim will go on sale at the boutique this September, for 235 Euros. [Refinery 29]
• Some designers support the proposed Design Piracy Protection Act, which would offer limited copyright protection to fashion designers, while others either don't mind the knock-offs, or think the DPPA's proposed solution unwieldy. Maria Cornejo, who designs Zero +Maria Cornejo and has had her work ripped off, thinks the proposed law is a sound one. Makers of knock offs are "basically putting their hand in my head, which is my bank, and stealing ideas. It's basically robbery." Isabel and Ruben Toledo, fashion designer and illustrator, respectively, disagree strongly. "The American fashion system is all levels of value," says Ruben. "A woman knows when she's buying champagne and when she's buying soda-pop. It's two different markets. But why shouldn't a woman have the right to drink Coca-Cola when she feels like it and champagne when she wants to? That's the American way." Europe and Japan already extend copyright protection to clothing designs, but in the U.S., only a graphic of print used for a piece of clothing can be copyrighted, not the garment as a whole. [Reuters]
• Jason Wu covers some familiar territory — Michelle Obama, the loveliness of having pet cats — and some that's out of left field — sleeping pills! — in this sweet diary for the Times of London. The designer complimented a woman he saw wearing his clothes on the street, and, like a sartorial Secret Santa, didn't even tell her he had made it. [ToL]
• Some designers had standard-issue summer jobs for the fashionably-inclined, like working at a fabric store or a vintage shop, or being a doorman at a hip Manhattan club. (Wu, for his part, was a waiter at a BBQ restaurant in Taiwan during the summers when he was growing up.) Angela Donhauser and Adi Gil of Threeasfour worked for Buena Vista, touring Germany dressed as characters from the Lion King. [Style.com]
• Diane von Furstenberg hangs upside down from a swing in her Meatpacking District office. Diane von Furstenberg runs a business with 155 employees, 97% of whom are women. Diane von Furstenberg is 62, and she looks like a minx, like a dangerous, business-minded, fashionable minx, when photographed curled up elegantly on her desk. Diane von Furstenberg compares staying solvent in this economy to being "on a surfing board in the middle of a tsunami," and, if there were one woman who could pull off that totally sick stand up barrel, by God, after reading this profile, we believe it to be her. [NYTimes]
• Italian Vogue is re-releasing last July's iconic issue, which featured only black models. Because it's Barbie's 50th birthday year, the re-released magazine will come with a supplement dedicated to black Barbie. [British Vogue]
• Karl Lagerfeld shot press images for his pre-spring collection on the Rue Royale with Lara Stone and Baptiste Giabiconi — and a customized low rider motorcycle, which Chanel will, remarkably, not sell. [WWD]
• London's Estorick Gallery is holding an exhibition that pairs Italian Futurist paintings with the clothes designed by Ottavio and Rosita Missoni in the 1960s and 70s. Looks like a perfect match. [NYTimes]
• Celebrity hairstylist Ted Gibson is replacing Nick Arrojo, the hair makeover consultant on What Not To Wear. Arrojo, said network executives, was not "fresh" anymore, after six seasons. [WWD]
• There have been numerous stories about the possibility that the company that makes Crocs might go bankrupt — including one in the Washington Post last week. Even the company's auditor has raised doubts about its ability to meet its debt obligations. Unsurprisingly, the C.E.O. says everything's fine and dandy. [WWD]
• The new owners of the bankrupt Eddie Bauer brand say that most of its 370 stores will remain open. San Francisco investment firm Golden Gate Capital Management bought Eddie Bauer at auction for some $286 million. [UPI]

[New York, June 22. Image via WENN]

• The first pictures of Lindsay Lohan's foray into cosmetics have been released: at left, the often-orange starlet shilling for a spray tan called Sevin Nyne. [People]

• Sojin Lee, formerly of online pioneers Net-a-porter.com, and Simon Fuller, the man who gave you the Spice Girls and Roland Mouret, are starting an internet fashion business together. [WWD]
• Times critic Cathy Horyn went to a Chanel party, found Olivier Zahm and Stefano Pilati and no champagne. So she had a Bud. [The Moment]
• "When I'm wearing a hoodie, it looks like I just threw a hoodie on. I'm wearing what I discovered and figured out is the best hoodie I can find. And I'll tell you, if you ever want to know the best hoodie, I know the best hoodie." Whatever you say, John Mayer. [FabSugar]
• Editors are picking designers instead of models for their covers lately. Diane von Furstenberg graced Purple (and the issue promptly sold out) last month. Perhaps noting their success, this month i-D has Miuccia Prada on the front. [Fashionista]
• In case you need to be reminded why models can make great cover choices (perhaps your name is Anna Wintour?), the Times' "The Moment" blog has this neat feature where you can slide your cursor over a photo of Kasia Struss or Jourdan Dunn to see how the makeup and hair looks at the shows come together. Latest additions: Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior. [The Moment]
• And, on balance, why they might not: "I'm not your cheesy girl that's going to dress up in a hokey outfit and say all the sound bites that you want me to say," says Erin Wasson. No, Erin, you're certainly not! [Daily Beast]
• Sean Avery's fashion friends came out to support him at his first Rangers game since that internship at Vogue. Even the guy who works the door at the Beatrice showed up. Who says this business doesn't foster loyal and real connections? [Observer]
• There are pictures of Roberto Cavalli's new Cavalli Pets dog clothing line. The line includes a satin trimmed bath robe. For your dog. And leopard-printed shearling jackets. For your dog. [The Cut]
• Roberto Cavalli also sells sex toys. The inimitable New York drag queen Lady Bunny mentioned them to Fashion Week Daily, although she does say they're kinda small. [Racked]
• Model blind item: "Whicih two veteran models got into a "full-on serious fistfight" in a Paris nightclub this Fashion Week? The fight was so démodé, Uncle Karl himself had to break it up." Invitations to name the offenders or improvise the Kaiser's dialogue in the comments. [Fashionista]
• Freida Pinto says the news she is going to be a face of Estée Lauder is "but a lovely rumor." [WWD]
• "Beauty, economy, and usefulness are the best rules for the well-dressed woman," said Depression-era American fashion designer Muriel King. It's sound advice for today. If you're in New York City, you'd do well to check out the new exhibit of King's work at the Museum at FIT. King was a painter who got into fashion when she became an illustrator for publications like Vogue and Women's Wear Daily — eventually she hired patternmakers and garment workers to turn her original sketches into reality. [Style.com]
• And laundry detergent is the new fashion must-have. Tim Gunn says so. (And we can all agree with lower drycleaning bills.) [WSJ]
• Although J. Crew recently instituted cost-cutting measures including layoffs, a wage freeze, and suspending company matching of 401(k) contributions, the retailer's fourth quarter losses still reached $13.5 million, because of weak sales. However, because analysts had expected even bigger losses, their stock price rose. [Crain's]
• Interestingly, they still have plans to open more stores. [WWD]
• Liz Claiborne CEO Bill McComb lives in New Jersey. His misfortune is lessened by the fact that his company pays $10,500 in monthly rent to maintain a New York apartment for his occasional overnight stays in the city. Liz Claiborne's revenues shrank 10% last year, as same-store sales at Claiborne-owned Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand, Kate Spade, and Mexx all dropped by over 12%. The company announced its plays to lay off 8% of its workforce in February. [Crain's]
• Charlotte Russe is offering itself up for sale. [Dealbook]
• Neiman Marcus's quarterly loss: $509.2 million. Sales in the three months ended January 31 fell by over 20%. [WSJ]
• Comparatively speaking, American Eagle's modest fourth quarter profit of $32.7 million is a relief, in that it's not a loss. Revenue fell 9% on a year ago, and the company says the results are disappointing overall. [The Street]
• That L'Oreal/eBay legal wrangle over the sale of counterfeit goods online has been delayed in the French courts. [WWD]
• In honor of Young Buck's announcement that his clothing line, David Brown, is no more, Complex magazine has a look back at the top ten failed rapper clothing lines, including Master P's No Limit Clothing, and Fat Joe's FJ560. [Complex]
• Who else but Heidi Klum drove the Barbie dream car to the Barbie dream house in Malibu. [FWD]

WWD inferred the worst from Marc Jacobs' decision not to throw one of his typical post-show megabashes, as well as the fact that Zac Posen, Calvin Klein, and Alexander Wang were among those who similarly cancelled their party plans. This week, even the New York Times couldn't seem to resist the convenience of the party-over metaphor, casting a vernissage at the new Diesel store as a gathering of lost souls. Welcome to the brave new fashion, where frivolity is out and celebs don't pack the Beatrice Inn. Except it didn't happen that way.

I'm no gadfly compared to some, but I go to the occasional night spot, and I can't say I've noticed any appreciable difference in the quality or tone of revelry on offer this season. Maybe I wasn't going to the echelon of party that was canceled to begin with. But this week it seemed like there was the same familiar mixture of people in day-glo accessories, fedoras, Derek Blasberg, your boyfriend's also-a-model ex, and cash bars as ever. Perhaps I've always sensed a ticking heart of melancholia at the center of these kinds of gatherings, where the dance floor has air quotes and everyone puts up the tiresome pretense of not mugging for the party photographer, even back when the economy was gaining ground as opposed to ceding it. (But that probably has always said more about me than about my surroundings.)

Earlier this week I actually saw Lara Stone in person, and I couldn't help but unabashedly stare at her while I stood waiting to pay $18 for a martini that proved to taste like it had been mixed inside an empty orange juice carton. I also saw a man dressed in chain mail and a guy who had light-up rods, actual spiny, glowing bones, sewn onto the outside of his black gloves, like an extra from Blade Runner. Alexander Wang was being congratulated on the stairs, and someone wanted to go to the Purple party, but someone else was like, "When is Olivier Zahm ever not at the Beatrice?" and frankly it all felt very September '08, which is to say it felt very much like any other fashion week. It was sniffy noses and ironic flannel and heavy eyeliner. It was Blackberries and coats that looked like muppets killed for a good cause and testing your clout by lighting that cigarette inside. The other night someone who looked about 19 asked Patrick McMullan who he was shooting for. "I would've recognized your son, I think," she said, semi-apologetically.

Every story this season is about how fashion has become such a terrible, morose End Times-y affair. The narrative is that before, shows were always buoyed by the rising tide of economic good fortune and front-row bold-face names and the parties, they were always terribly glamorous and fun. Now shows are always things you sneak into out of the drudgery of obligation, and when you're caught in the act, you give mealy quotes to the press about how sorry you are, how inconsequential even you recognize it all to be, and how attendance at this particular temple of Baal is unfortunately mandated by your job at this little magazine that covers fashion. And the parties that follow the shows, well, nobody who recognizes the seriousness of Our Straitened Circumstances could possibly acknowledge any interest in such frothy frivolity.

Thing is, you could have written that kind of story last season, or any other season for that matter. Models were getting paid in trade last season too, and a great many seasons before. Editors have always been people aware enough to acknowledge some self-doubt on the question of the actual relative importance of this season's heel or bag; the fashion set is not dumb. But nobody in the media would have thought to cast any previous season in any such light. The before/after is a constructed narrative, and it's one I'm just getting a little sick of reading. This industry, which I love, is troubled — nearly 20,000 jobs were lost in textile and apparel manufacturing and retail in the month of January, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and many designers and stores are struggling across the spectrum of price points — but all the deckchairs on the Titanic rhetoric seems like unwarranted melodrama, simultaneously too dire and not serious enough. (The last recession, in the early 1990s, gave us Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Marc Jacobs.) It's too early to write fashion off; and it is, dare I say it, frivolous to do so because of some party that was or wasn't thrown.

As The Economy Goes, So Do The Parties [WWD]
Despite Happy Meals, There Are Troubling Signs Around Fashion Week [NY Times]
At Fashion Week, Everyone Looks Sullen, Not Just The Models [NY Times]

Earlier: Chloé Sevigny Party Made Me Hate Fashion Week, Life
I Think I Hate Fashion Week

He takes a girl home from Beatrice Inn, only to get pissed off the girl is too caught up in the moment's future value as an anecdote to be there, in the present, enjoying it with him.

I think about the show she is putting on, and I get so worked up that when we finally get to bed, I can't get it up.

That's okay, she coos in my ear. That's okay. We have our whole future for that. Just hold me.

This girl in my bed, her body is dynamite, a buttermilk ass that would win an award and a back that arches sweetly against my waist and a torso like a rocking horse. It is a body meant to be fucked, but she doesn't even care that I can't, and wouldn't at this point even if I could. She is not in bed with my soul, she is not even in bed with my body.

She's in bed with my ski mask.

The Last Days Of Heath Ledger [Esquire]

OK, so the party was super fun and the crowd was totally feeling some T.I. "What You Know?" The Beatrice Inn is typically a celeb-heavy environment — apparently, it's Mary-Kate Olsen's jam — but last night, it was a little more intimate than that, and was mainly comprised of friends of the MOB crew. There were a few celebs on hand, however, like these two super skinny models whose names I don't know (and didn't feel like looking up), the dude from Blonde Redhead, and Steve Aoki, if you think he counts. But at least one girl thinks he counts.

I left the party to make my way to another party across town, and looked around for Nikola; I found him outside talking to a girl who was crying pretty hard. Nikola turned to me and said, "She's in love with Steve Aoki." Initially I was like, "Christ, did he not call her back after he fucked her or something?" But then she explained to us that she never even met him before. She came into the city from (I believe) Long Island, is "in love" with Steve, and heard he was gonna be at the party. (Nikola spotted him inside, but I must've missed him.) She was devastated that the doorman wouldn't let her in. Either she left her ID at home, or she wasn't 21 yet...something like that, I don't know. Anyway, she was acting like her life was over.

I was like, "Girl, I thought you were crying 'cause you were pregnant with his baby or something. He is nothing to cry over, trust."

She looked at me in awe, with tears streaming down her face and was like, "You know him. Like in real life?"

"Yeah, so don't cry about it. For real." Then I hailed a cab for myself and Nikola. We had this running thing all night about trying to gross each other out with stories. Hearing about Steve reminded me of probably one of the grossest stories ever, which I of course had to tell Nikola, and don't mind sharing with you right now.

One time I fucked this guy and the condom got stuck up inside me and I didn't know. Then the next night I fucked this other guy, still unaware of that lost condom already there. Two days later, I felt a strange sensation as if there was chewing gum between my legs, and finally the condom tumbled out of me in the bathroom of my old job. I was freaked out but got over it. Anyway, onto Steve.

We'd banged like a month or two before and he was back in town (like over three years ago), so he stayed over. We had some sex in the pitch-black dark in my bedroom and I squirted a bit, so I knew my sheets would be a little messy. The next morning when we woke up, it looked like a murder scene. I didn't have my period, but there was brownish blood that came out from whatever trauma was caused by that lost condom. Steve was totally freaked out and uncomfortable and said that he had to scrub really hard to clean up all the dried blood caked on his cuticles and under his nails. I was like, "Whatever."

The best though was that there was a perfect bloody imprint of his hand on my ass cheek, as well as my bedroom wall. The one on my bedroom wall stayed there for kind of a long time because I'm way lazy.