• Colin Firth won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in former Gucci designer Tom Ford's directorial debut, A Single Man. [Vogue UK]
• Did Louis Vuitton make a $590 knock off of this New Balance sneaker? [WWD]

• If anyone had told me Courtney Love was going to perform at the Alexander Wang after party — held at a gas station in Chelsea — I would have totally stayed up, if only because last year I found a copy of Celebrity Skin in someone's back seat and started listening to it (and really enjoying feeling 15) again, instead of hauling my tired carcass to bed at 9:30. [DazedDigital]
• Audrey Tautou wore Lanvin to the Los Angeles premiere of Coco Before Chanel. [People]
• French actress Emanuelle Béart is rumored to be presenting her own clothing line at Paris fashion week next month. [WWD]
• Robert Verdi — sometime stylist to celebrities like Eva Longoria — can't get an invitation to Jason Wu or Marc Jacobs by hook or by crook. He suspects it's because fashion is "ignoring the gay people." [The Cut]
• Marc Jacobs publicist Timothy Mark Garcia is wearing an electronic monitoring device because of his house arrest. Garcia's father, a former Major General of the Philippines, is accused of paying for his son's Trump Plaza apartment with funds he stole from the Filipino people; the entire family is facing extradition. Garcia fils, who has a curfew of 9 p.m. — 1 a.m. during fashion week, with a 30-minute grace period for lateness — has been reduced to wearing his Cartier Tank watch and $1,000 Hermès bracelets in the privacy of his own home, and ordering take-out from the restaurant at Barneys. He says the ankle bracelet is uncomfortable, and "I can't even wear my knee high croc boots by Sergio Rossi for the fall." [TDB]
• Victoria Beckham says she's happy to have earned real fashion credibility. Victoria Beckham has earned real fashion credibility? [Telegraph]
• The pop-star-turned-designer missed her youngest son's first day of school to present her dress collection in New York. "I told them, 'Mommy's going to New York to do a test, you know, you have math tests. Well, Mommy has a fashion test.'" [WWD]
• For the first time in 12 seasons, Tim Gunn was not invited to Diane Von Furstenberg. Which gives us one more thing in common. [NYPost]
• Gunn, on Lindsay Lohan's appointment as Emanuel Ungaro's "artistic adviser": "It's got to be a publicity stunt. Or a crack-smoking board of directors!" [The Cut]
• Lohan kept an entire photo crew waiting for 10 hours at what was supposed to be a shoot for her own leggings line. [WWD]
• Diane Von Furstenberg says Fashion's Night Out was such a success she would love to see it become an annual event. [The Cut]
• Vince Shlomi, the ShamWow guy who allegedly beat a woman in Florida, has been seen around fashion week. Naturally, he's designing a swimwear line. [NYDN]
• Fashion periodically tends to reference homeless "style," and it stands to reason that the industry might do so particularly now, in the midst of a recession. A W editorial, a Sartorialist snap, and some year-old comments by Erin "Homeless People Have The Best Style" Wasson, does not a trend make, New York Times. (Wasson, for her part, feels that those comments were misunderstood. But perhaps the model should avoid making references to "people that you couldn't label and put in a box," when she is in fact talking about people who live in boxes.) [NYTimes]
• "Russian women are treated in a very Arabic way in our country," says supermodel Natalia Vodianova. "You are expected to give birth to children, look pretty and shut up. But we are very strong and intelligent people: there are a few of us out there. My whole life is breaking the stereotype of typical Russian women looking for money." [Telegraph]
• 1970s supermodel Robyn Peterson, once a favorite of Helmut Newton and now a successful actress, says "Fashion is a savage business — an industry that eats people up. Modelling is like being an athlete. It's a young person's game, but similarly no life for a young girl." She's probably just bitter. [Telegraph]
• Lesley Hornby — better known by her industry alias, Twiggy — turned 60 over the weekend. [Daily Mail]
• In other model news, if you want to know what Sessilee Lopez eats for breakfast, now's your chance. (Bodega croissant egg-and-bacon sandwich with coffee.) [Grub Street]
• Once in Milan, Miranda Kerr was walking on the catwalk when her shoe flew off into the audience. Nobody was hurt. [JustJared]
• America's Next Top Model's Danielle Evans made an appearance at the Leifsdottir presentation at New York fashion week. [Racked]
• Actual top models Anja Rubik, Lara Stone, and Raquel Zimmerman have all been absent from fashion week, so far. Although Raquel isn't in her agency's show package for the season, she is in New York, having attended Fashion's Night Out. Lara and Anja, who are in their respective agencies' show packages, aren't in town, having done Fashion's Night Out duty in London. So will we see them at all? It's been an unusually supermodel-light season, so far: even catwalk regular Natasha Poly has only walked Altuzarra and Alexander Wang, so far. [Fashionologie]
• Maybe the absence of so many top girls is due to an economic environment that means many designers cannot afford their rates? Agencies and models say that competition is high, pay is low — with payment in trade being more common than usual — and even Alice Gibb, normally a favorite of Rodarte and Marc Jacobs, says she's been un-booked from shows at the last minute. [Reuters]
• For all the models working for free, of course, there are any number of professionals who eschew such generosity. Forbes has a breakdown of who puts what into a fashion show, and who gets what out of it, from the producers to the stylists to the venue operators. [Forbes]
• The fashion industry in New York City generates about $1.5 billion in tax income, but the garment district is facing a re-zoning plan that could force the displacement of sample houses and manufacturers. [Reuters]
• The normally disapproving Daily Mail takes some time out of its busy day to celebrate girls in lingerie. Agent Provocateur's cheesy new superhero-themed ad campaign is the occasion. [Daily Mail]
• Mario Grauso is indeed leaving Puig. [WWD]
• Keith Pollock, the executive online editor for Brant Publications, says: "There are very respected fashion journalists that can evaluate the state of the market. However I don't see how a fashion editor's perspective on a Prada shoe is more valid than that of a teen blogger in Evanston, Illinois." This worries me very much. [NYTimes]
• Howard Socol, who resigned as Barneys New York C.E.O. in May of 2008, attended the 3.1 Philip Lim men's presentation at New York fashion week because Socol has been mentoring Lim. Socol took the time to count his blessings as one who is no longer running a high-end department store during a global recession; Barneys has yet to replace him. [WSJ]
• JC Penney has launched a new women's clothing brand, She Said, that will cater to the needs of working women. [Breitbart]
• The Colombian company that supplies the Body Shop with 90% of its palm oil successfully sued to have peasant farmers removed from a ranch north of Bogotá. Now 123 of the farmers are appealing the decision, and the ethics of the Body Shop's decision to buy palm oil from the company are being called into question. [Guardian]
• One of the more ridiculous reactions to the release of the Lockerbie bomber: Iconic Scottish company Harris Tweeds is "de-Scottish-ifying" its image in the U.S. in anticipation of a backlash against soft-on-terrorism Scots. [NPR]

Photo illustration images from Amazon and Louis Vuitton

Lebanese poet and provocateuse Joumana Haddad's eroto-anatomical-literary magazine, whose focus is the human body, has been making waves since before it launched, prompting charges of "blatant vulgarity and obscenity." As the Washington Post's update tells us, since the magazine's launch, blogger reactions have run the gamut from "God bless her, there must be some angels protecting her," to the chilling, "She is the perfect model of a person who has to be stoned to death."

But the proof, as anyone at 4 Times Square can tell you, is in the sales. Now in its second issue, the quarterly is selling like gangbusters, not just in secular Lebanon - a traditional center of liberal thought with relatively loose censorship laws - but in surrounding regions, especially Saudi Arabia. Haddad has always cited the venerable tradition of erotic writing as an impetus for launching Jasad, and is proud that her magazine doesn't have a Western equivalent - although she acknowledges that it's less needed in more sexually open societies. Of course, one could easily argue that the publication wouldn't exactly hack it here, especially in such a challenging print marketplace. The current issue contains "themes" like "The Penis - between His and Hers," "The ABC of plucking pussy hair," and an essay titled "My First Time" as well as regular features "Eros in the Kitchen" and "The Voyeur's Corner." Art ranges from (naked) Egon Schiele portraits to (naked) 18th century tableaux. Truthfully, it feels more like an enthusiastically-executed, Anais-Nin-worshiping, vaguely-conceived college publication than a ready-for-prime-time glossy.

But as reaction shows, the stakes are much higher, and whatever one thinks of the content, the magazine's existence shows a lot of courage on Haddad's part. But does the publication's obvious desire to shock and enrage do its purpose a disservice? Haddad must be aware that a good part of her readership isn't exactly reading it for the articles - although, like Playboy, I guess it's got that pretext on its side. But in a region where, just a border away, some women are disenfranchised, can such blatant provocation really do anything other than strengthen walls, rather than make hairline cracks? Haddad would say yes.

Jasad [Official Site]
Beirut's 'Body' Language Pioneer [Washington Post]

Earlier: Lebanese Magazine Advocates Nudity, Change

Take half-sisters Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who sport the criminally underrepresented body type known as "thin." They even speculate as to how they got this way — "family rumor is that there was so much tuberculosis from generation to generation that maybe there's something in our blood." So that's the secret. Then there's Victoria's Secret model and unconventional beauty Doutzen Kroes, whose body type is listed as "athletic" because her thighs are just a smidge too muscular for her to get a lot of editorial work. The stigma! Seriously, all of these are gorgeous women, but their stories just demonstrate the fact that even when Vogue sets aside just one issue a year for "Size 0 to Size 20," they still really mean a couple size 4s and a weirdly posed Adele.

In addition to some quotes about her body mentioned in this morning's Dirt Bag ("Baby, if I could get a gastric band I would! I’ve heard it’s a lot of vomiting and a pain in the ass, but it’s still easier than a diet,") here are some gems:
On her past:

"I had a long, hard fall. I set the stage for Britney to crash and burn. I went through it all first."

On karma:

"Let me tell you a story. On Sofia Coppola’s 16th birthday, way back in 1987, I stole a Chanel lip gloss from her Sistine Chapel of a bedroom. I’d never seen Chanel make-up before that. Years later, I left a Chanel lip gloss in the reception of The Mercer hotel for her. You know why? I believe that you’ve got to fix your karma. That’s why it’s so important not to be a victim. I made myself vulnerable. I’m the one who took those drugs."

On fashion:

"In 2004, no designer would lend me an outfit for the Grammys. So I wore a $32 vintage dress in defiance. I was so upset that even my friend Donatella Versace wouldn’t dress me that I called up the photographer David LaChapelle, crying. He said, 'When did you buy into all this? When did you start caring?' And I thought, you are so right. Go to a vintage store and make your own style from now on."

On Frances Bean:

"My daughter knows I did drugs in my first trimester of pregnancy. She weighed 7lb 6oz when she was born and she was healthy. We were excellent parents and I say that despite pretty much always having an edge on. Frances bonded very well with her father, at least in the first year and a half of her life."

Elle UK [Official Site]