• The Olsen twins are launching a new juniors' collection for JC Penney, home of the brands Kimora Lee Simmons, Bisou Bisou, and Charlotte Ronson. It'll be called Olsenboye and is expected in stores this spring. [The Cut]

• The Olsens, plus Alexander Wang, Erin Fetherston, Jenna Lyons of J. Crew, Maria Pinto, and several others were officially inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America — "the Kiwanis Club of our business," as David Rees put it — on Wednesday night. After someone explained to Mary-Kate what the save the garment center campaign was about — the lax enforcement of existing zoning laws has allowed landlords in the area supposedly reserved for apparel companies to lease instead to higher-paying kinds of commercial tenants, driving up rents — she said she was totally for it. "We need it, as well. I hope we can save it," she said. [WWD]
• "As a child, I never saw a confident woman — I only saw women being abused," says Mary J. Blige. The singer has just opened the new Mary J. Blige Center for Women in the city of Yonkers, where she grew up. It's intended to educate, empower, and encourage women. "I want every girl and woman who walks through this door to know that she is loved — no matter who is telling her she isn't loved," says the singer. Gucci's Frida Giannini turned up to the opening, and an unspecified portion of the profit from sales of a Gucci women's watch costing $1,895 will be donated to Blige's charity. Giannini was also in town to open Gucci's pop-up shop in SoHo, which will showcase Mark Ronson's alleged "sneaker" for the brand. [WWD]
• First, there was the Sportiletto. And now, behold: The Lamborghini Heel. [FWD]
• From former New York Times food critic and memoirist Frank Bruni's Twitter: "Anna Wintour comes to Marea, orders chicken, with avocado salad, neither on menu. What's the point?" [Twitter]
• Tom Ford says the process of directing A Single Man, his adaptation of the Isherwood novel, has been about "coming to terms with the fact that I do spend so much of my life working in the material world. But as long as you keep it in perspective and don't take it too seriously, I think fashion is a great thing that adds quality to our lives. It doesn't mean that a beautiful pair of shoes isn't still beautiful. But if you lose them, big deal, because they don't really mean anything other than to be able to say, 'Wow, look at my feet. Aren't they pretty?'" [Out]
• Christian Louboutin has created a special carrier bag that includes a bottle of champers and a crystal champagne flute shaped like a stiletto. The package, known as Le Rituel, costs $500, and you can watch a 3-minute film about it here. [WWD]
• He made this bubbly slipper-sipper instead of doing a diffusion line for H&M. That sound just then was our hearts breaking. [The Cut]
• Burberry is getting into the cosmetics business. It won't happen till next summer, but expect a full line — about 100 products for face, lips, and eyes — when it does. [WWD]
• Manolo Blahnik does not want to talk about platforms, which he is relieved to note are finally falling from prominence. "Don't talk to me about platforms. I've done it all before. It bores me now. I want shoes to be beautiful, so women walk beautifully. Shoes should be beautiful — Oh, and of course, a little fun also." [Telegraph]
• Project Runway's Kit Scarbo, who does not skate, is doing a women's line with the skateboard brand Etnies. [The Cut]
• According to one student who took notes on Amy Astley's recent talk at FIDM, Teen Vogue is working on a new TV show. The mag's last dalliance with the medium resulted in The Hills. [Jazzi McG]
• Someone who is a really big fan of Hedi Slimane made this claymation video of an imaginary rock band, clad entirely in Slimane's Dior collections. [YoungestIndie]
• A kind of full-length women's chenille robe marketed by Pennsylvania company Blair is being recalled. The highly flammable robes have been linked to nine deaths so far. [NBC]

Rumors have been swirling that Margiela the individual — who sold his business to Diesel in 2002 — would step down since at least last October. They intensified when the label showed its fall/winter collection in Paris this March, which critics roundly panned. "Just about everything at the show tonight — the hokey starlight projections on the ceiling, the empty design techniques, the use of beautiful young models instead of older, interesting-looking chicks — said that Mr. Margiela is no longer involved in his label, as editors have speculated for some time," wrote Cathy Horyn, before calling the actual clothes "home-lab stuff." Style.com's Sarah Mower said, "In the absence of any definitive corporate statement, the only test of whether Margiela is still in the house must be down to whether the inimitable dialogue of excellence, intellectual challenge, and wit is still there in his show. Safe, yet very sad to say, this time it was gone." (Margiela has the lucky distinction, I suppose, of being the only designer who can never make a bad collection, at least as long as the top taste influencers are willing to generously assume the off seasons are not his work.)

But in fact there was a definitive corporate statement. The executives at Diesel have flatly denied the rumors, Renzo Rosso saying last year that he "cannot imagine" Margiela leaving, and Giovanni Pungetti assuring us all this spring that "he's still in position." Pungetti confirmed, however, that the designer spends increasingly little time at the company's headquarters. "He's concentrating on more strategic projects. He's still working with us in the key decisions of the company. This is the spirit [Martin] wanted to create; that's his philosophy. He's more consulting with us than designing every product. The team is more Margiela than him."

Margiela's work has always played with issues of identity — he traditionally masks his models' faces for shows, and his only label is a numbered white cotton tag attached with pick stitches to his garments. In the mid-90s, Margiela stopped talking to the press and being photographed. The last known picture of him, above, is from 1997. His label has always been the product of a white-lab-coated design team (which Margiela leads — or led). Margiela has never stepped onto his runway to take a bow at the close of a show; all communication with the house is done in writing, and the communiqués are composed in the third-person-plural and signed "Maison Martin Margiela." Until Diesel bought the company, it wasn't even in the phonebook. Margiela has long concentrated on being the invisible designer: now the question, and the headwater of these persistent rumors is, how can we actually tell when someone who for so long has suppressed all the usual outward signs of being a designer stops designing? It's not like he's going to tweet it.

Edward Buchanan at JC Report contends that Margiela is backing away from his label out of a sense of disenchantment with Diesel's marketing of the brand. Diesel widened Margiela's distribution, leveraged the brand-name into arenas like home furnishings, and sales have climbed by double figure percentages even into the recession. But the Italian conglomerate's advertising-drenched culture is at odds with Margiela's studied, blank, anti-individualist ethos. If the design associate quoted by Buchanan as saying that Margiela has "not been present" since last season, that sounds like as definitive a statement as we might expect. (Assuming, of course, that the designer meant "present at the company" and not just "present at the office.") Fashion will miss Margiela's widely influential designs; he was doing the shoulder pads that turned up on Marc Jacobs' Fall/Winter runway three seasons ago, the human-hair wig coats from the last collection which Margiela is widely believed to have had a hand in have spawned a whole slew of furry imitators this season, and every time I see a pair of True Religion jeans, with their wide-set twin needle stitching and oversized rivets, I think of Margiela's playful deconstruction of those details in his collections going back decades.

Rumor has it that Raf Simons — who is safely, and for all appearances, happily — ensconced in a three-year contract at Jil Sander, and former Swiss Textiles Award-winner Haider Ackermann are among the candidates Diesel is considering as a replacement.

More Secrecy At The House Of Margiela [JC Report]
A Master Class With Lanvin And Dior [NY Times]
Maison Martin Margiela FW 2009 Review [Style.com]
Fashion World Studies Margiela's Looks And His Next Move [NY Times]
More Margiela, Less Martin [WWD]

Lilly Pulitzer herself had a textbook background: Chapin, Miss Porter's, marriage to a publishing scion, and a youthful life of wealthy eccentricity (Pulitzer is famous for going without shoes and undies and for keeping a menagerie as a young wife.) Then came anxiety attacks, a stay in what she terms "the nuthouse" - “I can’t really remember how long I was there, but my cousin was there too, so that was nice” - and depression that led to the start of her "hobby," running a juice stand that called for a practical uniform of shift dresses that wouldn't show stains.

The rest is, of course, history: the gaily printed shifts became a sensation with the Palm Beach society set, former classmate Jackie Kennedy wore one in a magazine spread, and Lilly Pulitzer became a household name, selling not just pink and green dresses, but embroidered trousers and capris, sarongs, and all manner of sportswear. Pulitzer is often credited with creating the concept of "resort" - or, as she blithely put it, "it’s always summer somewhere.” Although she closed up shop in the businesslike 80s, she sold the brand in 1993 and has continued as a creative consultant in its new incarnation. The line currently has 20 boutiques, plus department store collections. According to today's WWD, "brand extension is a significant part of the growth strategy for Lilly Pulitzer as it begins its second half-century."

Of course, was Lilly Pulitzer really ever anything but a lifestyle brand? Did people ever really love wearing luridly-colored monkeys and sea-horses? Yes, the prints were cheerful, but when you see a Lilly Pulitzer, you think "Lilly Pulitzer" and that has surely always been the point. To wear one of her dresses was to momentarily be a part of a world where sporting goofy, unflattering clothes is a mark of dashing, privilege-bred confidence, the very definition of the uniform of an insider. Its appeal now is nostalgic. As W puts it, "the Palm Beach social swirl that Rousseau recalls—in which counts sat next to carpenters at her dinner parties and, as she relishes telling, Kennedy spoon-fed John-John on her kitchen floor—has an almost mythic quality, one she laments no longer exists." But to most of us, the nostalgic appeal is at least as much for a character like Pulitzer's as for anachronistic high society. She was, of course, inseparable from that privilege, and hers was a success inexplicably linked with her connections, friends, and lifestyle. But the old-fashioned no-nonsense sense of entitlement is also what allowed Pulitzer to build a successful business in a man's world, divorce her husband and move out on her own, where many women would have been happy to leave dresses as a pleasant sideline to a socialite's life. She took her lifestyle and made it a business. Everything about her story — from the world that inspired it, to the entitlement that encouraged it, to the scope of the achievement — is part of a long-gone world. This, as much as the unapologetic silliness of the clothes themselves, is a fascinating glimpse to another time for the rest of us.

Lilly Land [W]
All the Details: The Lilly Lifestyle [WWD]

A Puppytastic Preview Of The New Valentino Documentary [NY Mag]