• The inevitable happened and TopShop gave model Agyness Deyn her own clothing line, because she dresses totally '80s and that is so edgy! [Vogue UK]
  
• Designer Yves Saint Laurent is very sick. Pray for him. [NY Post]
  
• No one can pronounce Badgley Mischka correctly, which would give us pause about the future of American civilization if half the country wasn't still saying "nuclear" wrong. [NY Post]
  
• Former Jane editor-in-chief Brandon Holley is spending her unemployment mentoring underprivileged girls and teaching them photography, which, if you'll excuse us, is just "So Brandon!" [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• Oh Hova: House of Dereon does prom-wear. This would be a clothing line affiliated with Beyonce's family. [WWD, sub req'd]

• Our favorite least-favorite fashion blogger Lauren Goldstein Crowe - gasp! - agrees with us. The new Louis Vuitton bags are dumb. And she points out that she only saw 3 people the whole time she was in Paris sporting their freebies: Elle editor-in-chief Roberta Myers, The Guardian's Jess-Carter Morley (who 'dat?), and Vuitton stylist Katie Grand, which we're pretty sure doesn't count. Draw your own conclusions. [Portfolio]
• Levi's profits jumped by 23.6% in the second quarter. They say it's because of low interest rates. OMG, you mean it wasn't that groundbreaking collaboration with Damien Hirst? [WWD, sub req'd]
• So our pals across the pond are doing this crazy gala performance thingy for the Prince's Trust which is matching different musicians with different fashion houses, yielding the following pairings: Lily Allen - Chanel, Alicia Keys - Armani, Joss Stone - Calvin Klein, Timbaland - Dolce & Gabbana, Shirley Bassey - Marchesa, and Iggy Pop - Versace. [Vogue UK]
• Owns Gucci, knocked up Salma Hayek, and now owns a big ol' apartment in a former "women's hotel": Francois Pinault has it all! [NY Mag]
• Preview the David Lynch-shot Gucci fragrance commercial! [Sassybella]
• The interim president of Banana Republic is going to be named as the full-time president of the company. Making him, uh, the Dick Cheney of fashion? [WSJ]

"Glamour is not at all like Jane," says Holley. "It's the exact opposite. They preach fake empowerment of 'loving your flaws.' Jane doesn't point out flaws."

The only Conde publication worth reading is the New Yorker, but it comes out every week and your leftover Jane dollars won't go that far. Vanity Fair and GQ are okay, and saving trees is even better, but the true Jane devotee will call up Conde now and demand a subscription to its ill-fated, ill-advised business magazine Portfolio, because it will be really fun to be able to have this conversation again in six months when Conde shutters that, and it will be soooo much less emotionally fraught parting with them on eBay for birth control money on eBay in five years. (And then you get to say, I paid for that abortion with my Portfolio holdings!)

Glamour Is Sooooo Not Jane [Jossip]

Earlier: http://jezebel.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=285771&view=rss&microfeed=true The esteemed writers of the Sassy book have finally eulogized, all gravitas-y and "dying publications are like leaking balloons" and shit, the magazine we once called Jane. Marisa Meltzer and Kara Jesella subscribe, as a lot of Janeeologists have, to the notion that Jane was the casualty of readers' love-hate relationship with it, which we don't really get because, duh, love-hate relationships are sort of the engine of late capitalism. (Or wait, are we the only ones conflicted about refreshing TMZ 69 times a day?) Anyhow, then we came upon this.

The sassy youthful readers Jane meant to address are still out there. Some have gravitated to blogs like Feministing and Jezebel...

I am dorky enough to have gone to one of the "dinners with Jane!" things at their offices just when Brandon [Holley] took over.

When I got the invite, I assumed we'd be going out to dinner. Instead I arrived at their messy office and was offered shitty pizza and my choice of canned soda. There were as many Jane staffers as there were dinner attendees, and they hovered around us not eating and looking freaked out. Then they asked us for story ideas for about an hour. Brandon came in trying to look in touch and cool but she looked old-ish and uncool.

All the readers who turned up were big dorks and blog-obsessed. I think this was the first of these "dinners" - could this have been where things went wrong? It seemed to me they got that we all love celebrity gossip but what they didn't get was that no one wants to read month old celebrity gossip. The funniest thing was about a week later I got an email from a Jane staffer asking me for info on the location of some all boys ranch college thing-y that another girl at the dinner had mentioned. She thought I had suggested a story about it, and was asking me further details about its location. A Google search of about three words would have turned up the same info. Excellent reporting skills!

Heh, "some."

I feel like I abandoned that baby and it went off and got on drugs or something.

Jane Pratt On The End Of Jane [Ad Age]

So, I propose we get away from these hateful comments and toxic blogging and just enjoy the summer.

The truth is, a lot of the ladies at whom Jane was initially targeted are maybe not the biggest fans of life. Not that we're living on the streets of Bombay or anything, just that it's not exactly like it was for our um parents. Some of them are the people whom Redbook is now exhorting to love their lives despite the countless reasons there are to hate them. Some of them are secretly mourning the fact they're too old to read Vice. A lot of them are probably uninsured. Brandon Holley once told me (full disclosure: I wrote a story for Jane once) that readers always told her they liked the magazine's funny features on personal finance: the one about different desperate ways to make $1000 in a week; the one about lucrative side jobs i.e. stripping; this month's about acing your credit check. (Ughhhh.)

Otherwise our favorite moments in Jane usually involved Jeff Johnson's jokes and Claudine Ko's voyeuristic skewerings of Club Med, the Peace Corps and American Apparel — institutions other magazines would never bother investigating.

All this adds up to a fair amount of negativity, which brings us to the subject of "toxic blogs." We're just guessing, but maybe one of the reasons blogs seem toxic sometimes is that some bloggers are embittered people whose fingers go numb too often for anything more sophisticated than another Lindsay Lohan joke. Another reason is that a lot of stuff sucks now, not least the mainstream pop culture fueling the internet misanthropy machine, and Jane appealed to women who medicate with celebrischadenfreude administered so regularly by the likes of TMZ and TheSuperficial and almost as a result, do not have the money or even the desire anymore to consider themselves "aspirational." Maybe Jane appealed to that class of women for whom, the more the stars became like "us", the less we wanted to be like them. Hence the painfully realistic current Jane ad page lineup: vagina medications, Flight of the Conchords, sunglasses. Add Alka-Seltzer, Prilosec and some cigarette ads and you'll have a group of advertisers that starts to represent a lot of the women we know. But you wouldn't call that group "aspirational," and you might not even call it "worth the paper it's printed on." Hence those damned toxic blogs.

• Jane Magazine's Brandon Holley got hitched. Like two weeks ago! [Gawker]
  
• Anna Wintour isn't the only one with a grudge against pachyderms: EBay has got it in for them too. [CNN]
  
• Angelina Jolie says she's going on hiatus. Wee! This might mean that more biological "blobs" are on the way! [USAToday]
  
• Veronica Mars dies a quiet death tonight. [NeptuneSite]
  
• The new, no-period birth control pill gets FDA approval; Tambrands weeps. [WSJ]

• Adam Levine and Zach Braff are probably two of the most intriguing men of our age. One is the frontman for Maroon 5, which some record company executive once told us was basically our generation's heir to The Police, while the other gave us the not-at-all masturbatory Garden State, and a few weeks ago asked had his friend ask our friend, after palming her ass at a party, if she swallowed. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be Ivanka Trump at the precise moment at which both of these young bachelors — let's coin the phrase "emosogynists" here, why don't we? — were courting her. [Rush & Molloy]
  
• Brad (deer) at Cannes press conference (headlights): "Uh, I was just wafting in the words of...what's her name?" Yeah, uh, that would be Shiloh's mom. Also: "I look at my kids and realize they will inherit this world, and we wanna do everything we can throw our weight in and make it a little bit better." Well, apparently A Mighty Heart is a really uplifting movie. Read about how Angelina & Mariane are all besties in Glamour! [Extra]
  
• Like nineteen people, including Kitty Kelly and her dad, are writing books about Oprah. We are soon about to be so overwhelmed with books about Oprah we won't have time to read Oprah's book club! Or, come to think about it, our Arabic classes or the marathon or spiritual growth. Good thing we've made peace with the fact that obsessing over Oprah is a lot easier than actually trying to improve ourselves. [Rush & Molloy]
  
• We wouldn't really care about a porn star naming herself Katee Holmes, but this one claims to be a virgin, so, uh, we guess she needs publicity? [Page Six]

• The Bush twins like their seafood sustainable. We're not sure how that even works — unless it makes you, like, breathe fish eggs back into the ecosystem — but we're sure we ignored many "green issue" stories about it last month! [Washington Post]
• As everyone in America knows, Jessica Simpson's body is truly a Wonderland...the mystic tan...saline implants...don't tell us you actually thought John Mayer could for real leave someone whose mere presence inspires such poetry even from us? [Page Six] [Gatecrasher]
• Britney leaps off a plane upon realizing its seats aren't leather, which is really the sort of highly improbable behavior you should really just read about in The Superficial. [The Superficial]
• Leonardo and Kate in another movie for which we can only pray that Celine Dion takes time away from fucking her husband to perform the soundtrack. [Cindy Adams]
• You might not remember, but last month Paula Abdul allegedly showed up to church drunk two weeks in a row, which is why it makes total sense that she is capable of tripping over a chihuahua and breaking her nose. [Extra]

But bloggers, or, rather, a blogger, isn't having any of it. In her "Dear Brandon" response to Holley's April letter, the women's magazine blogger at Glossed Over takes the Jane editor to task for, among other things, putting Avril Lavigne on the cover, "pandering career advice" and Holley's inclusion of a poll asking L.A. women which celebrities their dogs most closely resemble personality-wise, saying: "...naturally, we thought Jane would seek out opinions on subjects that, oh, actually matter. ...[But the poll] is a terrible trifle to trot out as an example of the 'culture of women' the magazine claims to promote," writes Glossed Over. "Apparently modern women are defined not by their own personalities, but by the traits they conjure for their dogs."

We think that's taking it a little far but we also imagine that somewhere, Jane Pratt is grinning just a little bit right now. Although from what we hear, it's more likely that she's thinking about how she fucked Drew Barrymore.

Fresh Jane [WWD]
Dear Brandon: A Response To Jane's Editor [GlossedOver]
Jane Pratt Isn't The Type To Go Around Telling People She Fucked Drew Barrymore [Gawker]

Men's Health editor David Zinczenko is somehow famous, ostensibly for editing a crap magazine that is not only arguably the crappiest magazine of all the major men's magazines, it may be crappier than certain women's magazines. (Yup, that backhanded compliment is ALL YOURS, B-Holley!) Anyway so Zinczenko's claim to fame is editing the Cosmo of middle aged men, and having that name. Oh yes, and he wrote a book, The Abs Diet, lest you thought you could arrive at one of the six-packs featured on the cover of Men's Health simply by reading Zinczenko's magazine. Because customers are so supremely savvy and smart and the market always knows best, men snapped up copies of The Abs Diet like we women would snap up Envigo negative calorie soda if it tasted less like a combination of uric acid and Sparks and more like Girl Scout cookies. Well wait with bated breath no longer; today WWD reports Zinczenko's ghostwriter has upchucked a new Abs Diet for us!

"We refurbished more bodies than the guys on 'Pimp My Ride,'" he wrote in an e-mail. "Now women can cruise the town in low riders, too."

But that's not even the most douchebaggian quote! Check this:

"Though you may associate hot flashes with getting a glimpse of Usher's abs, they're more common in menopausal women for another reason.

Like, not only does the guy believe in the power of diet books to "refurbish bodies," he is incapable of expressing more than one thought without reverting back to the subject of "abs".

OMG, I think I just encountered the Antichrist.

Midsection Obsession [WWD]

It's tough running a magazine, you know, and it appears the strain of it all is getting to Jane Magazine's Brandon Holley.

The poor dear is so out of ideas for her baby, that she's resorted to asking the readers for suggestions, on her weekly Thursday pitch fest.

So far the ideas are pouring in, running the full fascinating gamut from A to B. Oooh, how about some celebrity sex? That's not been done before! Hey! What about personal finance? How come no-one ever covers that? Oh, and there's one request for normal looking models in the fashion spreads. Heh. Good luck with that one, happy reader.

Brandon, sweetie, there's a couple of very good reason why you never ask the readers what they want.

1. They're all fat ugly badly-dressed morons. Remember?

   And

2. If you don't tell them what they want, you'll never shift all that useless fashion and beauty product that your advertizers want you to ram down your readers' passive little throats.

Back to the drawing board for you, young lady!

[Jane Mag's Thursday pitchfest] Jane Magazine

God Almighty, will it ever end?

Ten billion years into her mind-numblingly boring attempt to lose her virginity, and Sarah diMuro over on Jane Magazine has still had not so much as a finger up her hoohaa. It's got so bad that editor Brandon Holley is reduced to getting her staff to phone Sarah and harangue her into a fuck.

"I got a call from my confidante and JANE web editor, Melinda, schooling me on my questionable dating habits. In short she said "You have to give people more of a chance and stop categorizing the date before the date even starts."

She also said, and this is key, "Don't even think about passing ANY judgements on the date or the guy until the meeting has ended and you have had time to think about it." She really put me in my place. Mind you, I kind of wanted to cry, because what she was saying is so, well, true."

When the world is dead, only the cockroaches will remain. And Sarah. Still intact.

Poor Brandon Holley. Having given astoundingly unfunny 'comic' Sarah DiMuro a whole three months in which to lose her virginity and win a book deal after blogging her efforts, the Jane Magazine editor finds herself saddled with someone who couldn't apparently lose her virginity if she laid naked on the cobbles of the Meatpacking district on a Friday night. Worse still, DiMuro is strictly of the 'I had a grilled cheese sandwhich for lunch and gee I hate my mom' species of blogger. Witness:

"Have you ever been so ashamed of yourself you just wanted to die? Well, here is a doozy that'll make you hate me. I went out with a friend of mine last Thursday and while I was sitting at the bar this cute guy started talking to me. He was funny, great smile and we joked around for a bit. Then, THEN I got up to go to the bathroom and discovered he was about 3 inches shorter than me. I couldn't help it; I just lost interest. I know, I know: 'My name is Sarah DiMuro and I've entered Phase: Vain in my dating arc.'"

And so, a month after the deadline that would have provided the only dramatic hook to her now surely never-to-be book deal, Sarah sits there amongst the rolling cyber tumbleweeds, her private parts determinedly un-penetrated, fornlornly blogging into the void.

Brandon, just give the girl a super-absorbent tampon and let nature take its course. For all our sakes.

And speaking of Jane, new editor Brandon Holley startlingly admits to her fetish in this month's readers letter:

"Speaking of piss, have you ever gone into a public bathroom barefoot? Because that I find incredibly fascinating. In fact, email me at janemag.com if you want to get dinner sometime and tell me about it."

After dinner, Brandon will order you to remove your shoes and wade in her fresh urine. Then she will lick in between your toes. Then she'll send you home with a free facepack.