For her first foray into Gwyneth-style celebrity direct marketing, the stylist has footwear on the brain. But, lest ye think that these are but ordinary platform pumps, let it be said first and foremost that these platform pumps are made by her friend, Brian Atwood. That kind of typical favor-calling, back-scratching, co-hyping symbiosis is exactly what can make this industry seem like one enormous daisy chain. (Or circle jerk.) To her credit, at least Zoe is upfront about blending her personal and professional relationships.

The $680 Brian Atwood Lola pump, also known as "my sole fantasy" in Zoespeak, available this fall

Zoe's missive begins seriously:

"In observance of my first official Zoe Report, I set my sights on something truly extraordinary."

Did you hear that? These aren't just any regular platform shoes with elastic laces, these are some extraordinary platform shoes! Zoe goes on to say, "Atwood consistently brings my sole fantasies to life," and calls the opportunities presented by the shoe "endless." And in case you fashion plebs don't know what the celeb stylist is driving at when she calls these magic pumps "shooties," the definition is in the footnotes.

In a nod to the fact that the mass audience she's seeking with this newsletter might have neither the funds nor the inclination to spend $700 on even the most "extraordinary" pair of heels, Zoe includes a fast fashion option — though still a pricey one, at $129.95.

In honor of our increasingly celebrity-addled consumer culture — unsatisfied by appearing in ad campaigns, on television hawking stuff, on television wearing clothes that just happen to be catalogued for sale on said television channels' websites, on billboards, in the mall with their signature lines, in magazine editorials, and generally taking jobs from hard-working Eastern European teenagers, they are now in our computers telling us what to buy — let us now inaugurate a new feature, The Zoe Report, By The Numbers:

"I DIE" count: 1
Footnotes of complicated fashion terms: 1
Total cost of shit: $809.95
Running cost of shit: $809.95
Microsoft Word Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 9.7
Transparent-self-promotion/life-as-branding quotient*: 7/10

Happy shopping, ladies. In the meantime, here's the trailer for the premiere of The Rachel Zoe Project"s second season. It just happened to come out today!

*Grading may be subjective

Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick finds that widely-read obituaries were one of the first ways regular people attained celebrity — albeit posthumously. People's life stories were run as cautionary tales in the 17th century — showing the consequences of wicked or virtuous living — but quickly became a popular human interest read. Initially, the obits featured royalty and other public figures, but the genre grew to include all kinds of people who'd led interesting lives. Says Barry, "Different kinds of deaths came to be commemorated and you didn’t have to be something like a military hero or be a political player or be some sort of high person in society to get public commemoration on your death."

Eventually, the obit-mongers were criticized for catering to low-brow tastes hungry for scandal. But Barry feels the universality of death acted as an equalizer and created the sense of identification that characterizes the modern celeb-public relationship. Of course, by any standard this is a conveniently reductive definition of celebrity - weren't the "military heroes and political players" already kind of celebrities? - but the notion of a fleeting, arbitrary celebrity, manufactured for public entertainment and then discarded, is certainly a unique phenomenon. If Barry's theory holds any water, there's a pleasing neatness to the notion of a life, reduced to a few paragraphs for strangers' delectation, with the veneer of beneficence. Wholly public, yet completely selfish. When Rupert the Baby Deer died last month - only a day after we'd learned about his existence - our shared grief was overwhelming. A friend mused that in a sense this mini emotional roller-coaster was really our celebrity-obsessed age to scale: the emotion is no less real for its lack of depth, but as the stories end, so too does our interest. The tragedy is somehow a neat cap to the narrative. From death cars to autopsies, we feel a right to know how and why things ended - to know if the end was just or tragic. Maybe Barry's onto something.

Dead People In 1700s Were The First Celebrities[Live Science]

We're living in a time in which, it often seems, stars rule. They grace magazine covers, shill products, draw attention to charities, make headlines by getting divorced, giving birth or entering rehab. And yet, as Cochrane writes:

We've seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control… The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart.

Here's a fun exercise: Think of 5 celebrities you love, and 5 celebs you hate. Now: Are all of the stars you despise women? Meanwhile, abortion rights are in trouble, recorded rapes are at an all-time high (though the number rape crisis centers has declined) and the sex industry — hookers, strippers and internet porn — is booming. As long as you're a woman marketing yourself to or serving a man, you're A-OK. So. Are we experiencing a feminism backlash? Does our culture hate, degrade and vilify women? Do we, as women, hate ourselves? And if the answers are all yes, what can we do about it?

Now, The Backlash [Guardian]