• Bono's wife Ali Hewson is suing Stella McCartney over the title of her unreleased perfume, "Nude." Hewson, who also has a sustainable fashion brand, oversees Nude Skincare, and feels that McCartney's brand is too close to her own. [Daily Mail]

• More than 100 garment workers protested two New York apparel companies in support of six workers who allege they are owed over $500,000 in back pay, and that they were wrongfully fired. Union organizer Jei Fong said, "Long Island City is a sweatshop zone; these conditions are rampant and have only gotten worse through the years. Today we really want to make a stand. People need to demand better conditions; it's the only way for the garment industry to improve." The six workers allege that they were paid minimum wage, but that their employers deducted 5% from their pay, and failed to pay any overtime despite the fact that they often worked 100 hour weeks. All the workers were fired shortly after complaining about the pay and conditions to the National Labor Relations Board. [Crain's]
• Harper's Bazaar decided to rush out a Michael Jackson-themed fashion shoot in time for the current issue — and the model they picked was Agyness Deyn? There is also a monkey. Who's bad, indeed. [ONTD]
• It took Nicole Richie less than half of the actual human gestational period to conceive of and birth her maternity wear line for A Pea In The Pod. [WWD]
• Pierre Cardin owns the Marquis de Sade's castle. [NYTimes]
• We doubt that anyone is copying P.C. from NYC Prep's style. A white t-shirt, scarf and a cardigan is something he has a copyright on? Give us a fucking break, Paper magazine. [Stylelist]
• Jason Wu has announced the location of his Spring 2010 show — the opulent St. Regis hotel. [WWD]
• Why is it that every time one or two designers cycle through to something different than previous prevailing tastes — long skirts after a few seasons of minis, or in this case, flats after a few seasons of skyscraper 7" heels — fashion writers have to act as though it's tabula rasa time and WE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN? The heel is not "dead" just because Christopher Kane now things "boyish" flats are nice. Most women will continue wearing heels sometimes, and flats other times, depending on their mood, where they are going, and the rest of their outfit. [ToL]
• Leonardo DiCaprio is apparently smitten with model Anne Vyalitsyna. Meanwhile, recent ex Bar Refaeli has been spotted with polo player Ricardo Mansur, who happens to be an ex of Gisele Bundchen, who also dated Leo. And the circle is complete. [Sun]
• Because of a write-in campaign, Men's Wearhouse is canceling its advertising on the Glenn Beck program. [MediaMatters]
• Bloomingdale's is launching a major ad campaign highlighting its links to classic films. [NYTimes]
• Last month, Kelly Bensimon told the W magazine editors' blog, of her jewelry line, "I love Navajo and I love the idea of taking Pocahontas out of the kayak and putting her into the disco. Everyone knows that she's had enough in her little canoe and now she's out and having fun in the disco." Yesterday, Kelly Bensimon told StyleList "exclusively," of her jewelry line, "The bad thing about Pocahontas is that she's, like, in the kayaks. So I took her out of the kayak and into the disco so she could have a little fun." Conclusions: Nobody reads anymore, and the Internet will eventually eat itself. And Kelly Bensimon still does not apparently realize that Pocahontas lived her entire life without ever meeting any Navajo people, because they lived thousands upon thousands of miles apart. [StyleList]
• Molly Sims now has a jewelry line. (At this point, who doesn't?) [WWD]
• Point the first: We have not heard anything of Nia Long since her immortal turn as Lisa on Fresh Prince, so her inclusion in PETA's ancient "Rather Go Naked" campaign proves the animal rights organization is scraping the very bottom of the barrel. Point the second: We get that Nia Long doesn't much care for the fur, but she seems to have no problem with gasp-inducingly unrealistic media images of women. The Photoshop job on her ad is eye-popping. Point the third: This quote speaks for itself: "There's no difference, in my opinion, [between fur and] slavery or the Holocaust." [DListed]
• Twiggy is releasing an album of pop songs on September 14. [Modelinia]
• Amber Rose posed for a series of racy photos in Complex magazine. She also told the mag: "I always looked up to Slash from Guns N' Roses. I had every single poster of Slash in my room. It was crazy because I grew up in an all-black neighborhood and everybody I went to school with was black. I was the only biracial looking girl in my school, and Slash was biracial too, he was just a fucking rock star. I always wanted to play the guitar. I've tried, but other things came up." [ONTD]
• In yet another high-yield jewelry heist, two armed robbers hit up the Graff store on New Bond St. in London for $65 million worth of baubles. Forty-three items were stolen, and while the suited robbers fired two shots and briefly took a Graff worker hostage, nobody was injured. [NYTimes]
• For reasons unknown, Maybelline has made a calendar. [Fashionista]
• The "moderately priced" designer "bridge" category — home of labels like Tory Burch, Elie Tahari, and Eileen Fisher — is losing one of its biggest players, Ellen Tracy. Starting next spring, the brand is down-shifting to concentrate on lower-priced sportswear, where it'll roll with labels like Lauren by Ralph Lauren and Michael by Michael Kors. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, members-only online sample sale site Gilt today is launching a website where it will host sales of lower-priced lines, called Gilt Fuse. In running Gilt, chief executive Susan Lyne says, "What we discovered was that, one, even though we discount significantly on the brands we carry on Gilt [up to 70 percent], it's still expensive for [our customers]. A $200 or $150 dress is still a big purchase for them." So Gilt Fuse will exert similar discounts on merchandise that was a little cheaper to begin with. Revolutionary concept, really. [NYObs]
• Escada's proposed fund-raising bond exchange has failed because fewer than 80 percent of investors approved it within the given time frame. The company plans to file for bankruptcy this week. [WWD]
• Pakistan's textile industry is suffering because of the twin ills of political instability — even consistent electrical power is not assured — and the global credit crunch. An estimated 200,000 people have lost their jobs in the textiles sector during the past year. [Reuters]
• After cutting $70 million worth of costs from its balance sheet in the first quarter, Liz Claiborne's losses still increased during the second quarter of this year — so a second, $100 million, cost-cutting plan is to be put in place. [WSJ]
• Although the sale of bankrupt men's clothier Hartmarx to Emerisque Brands and SKNL North America has managed to save 2,400 jobs that otherwise might have been lost, three plants which were not part of the sale, finalized last week, are shuttered. About 525 employees at factories in Rock Island, Illinois, Anniston, Alabama, and Hamilton, Ontario have lost their jobs. Hartmarx owns the brands Hart Shaffner Marx and Hickey Freeman. [WWD]

Yesterday morning, the Council of Fashion Designers of America held a private town hall style meeting to discuss the future of fashion week — but the meeting soon mushroomed into a general debate on the serious issues the industry is facing. And nothing is off the table. The entire industry superstructure — how fashion is produced, shown, and sold to the consumer — was hotly debated by everyone from Anna Wintour, to Francisco Costa, to Diane von Furstenberg.

CFDA president von Furstenberg made the case for change by drawing attention to the disconnect between the shows — which receive so much press that customers would probably buy items from the collection then and there — and the actual produced goods, which don't reach stores for another six months. By then, the hype may have gone flat — or as Jack McCollough of Proenza Schouler put it, "It's on blogs; magazines pull straight from the runways; and by the time it's in stores, it feels sort of old." Von Furstenberg ventured a solution in a split fashion week: "Maybe there can be a Fashion Week that says trade and another one that says shop?"

Other designers have decided that sales are the enemy. Donna Karan fingered early delivery dates — the well-known problem of winter coats arriving in stores in July, which is, if we're talking this so-far dreary summer, about the time you might start thinking about buying a new swimsuit — as a motivator for stores to mark down in-season clothing, hurting margins on the items most likely to actually sell. "The consumer has been trained to buy on sale," said Karan.

"Everyone had been too greedy, and everyone thought the party was forever," said von Furstenberg. "We wanted more merchandise, and more of this and more of that, and expect 20 percent increases every month, and at some point it just became too much of everything. I realized that what we all have to do is reduce the offerings and create the demand."

Elie Tahari said his company has seen success since it started making smaller, but more numerous, shipments of in-season goods to retailers. "It's about shipping clothes that you can buy and wear right away," said the designer, who compared discounting to "a virus."

American Vogue's fashion news and features editor, Sally Singer, laid blame at the inelastic production structure. "There's been an overproduction which has led to the 40 and 60 and 80 percent off. If we produce less, the consumer will have more confidence in the product."

But Anna Wintour's proposed solution really takes the cake. The Vogue editor stood up to offer, "Could someone lead a committee that would make ground rules for retailers of when the discounting starts, and then all the retailers can agree to it?" Von Furstenberg interjected that that was illegal — in fact, if the big department stores had any such agreement, it would amount to price-fixing and collusion, an anti-trust lawsuit in the making. "Is that something we can change?" asked Wintour. "We have friends in the White House now!"

Von Furstenberg stressed that none of the proposed ideas will be in effect for the shows this September — she is looking for solutions that can be put in place by September 2010. So which will it be? More frequent deliveries sounds dangerously close to the kind of permanent-new-collection madness that swept us into this mess; some of the big houses already do 12 collections a year. Restricting the volume of clothing produced is a sure-fire way to artificially inflate sell-through rates, but to what end would a successful business actively seek fewer customers when it has enjoyed more in the past? What nobody was apparently willing to address was that fashion became, during the long recent boom, simply too expensive: there are not enough good designers willing to make a beautiful dress that costs not a few thousand dollars but a few hundred dollars. True designer fashion will never be available at Wal-Mart or H&M prices, but why can so few people manage to make a dress that a member of this country's middle-class could actually, in a good month, splurge on and wear with enjoyment? Sales are not the enemy: sales are the message that what designers are doing is not working. And idle talk about lobbying the Obama administration to create loopholes in the nation's competition laws doesn't further anyone's business interests.

Betsey Johnson, for her part, supports von Furstenberg's idea of a more consumer-driven fashion week to vacuum up some of the hype away from the trade shows. "I would love to show at Madison Square Garden!" she said. "I wish Fashion Week for the public can be like Christmas, and maybe we'll put up green and pink lights everywhere. I could completely have my showroom open to the public. I could run around that week. I could celebrate in the stores."

As the New York Observer notes, her statement was met with silence from the room. A pity — I'd go to Johnson's public show in a heartbeat.

CFDA's Forum Debates The Fashion System [WWD]
At CFDA Town Committee, Wintour Proposes Discount By Committee; DVF: "That's Illegal!" [NYObs]

• The UK supermarket chain Asda has knocked off the Fall '09 Balmain dress that Kate Moss wore out dancing — and burst the seams of — two months ago. Asda's version costs just £16. [Telegraph]

• Frederic Bourke, the co-founder of Dooney & Bourke, has been found guilty of conspiracy and faces up to 10 years in prison. Bourke, 63, was part of a group of investors who spent hundreds of millions bribing officials in Azerbaijan during the late 1990s, in order to ensure its bid for the state oil company would be accepted when the asset was privatized. Bourke even arranged for medical treatment in New York City for two corrupt officials from the former Soviet republic. The investment group was run by Viktor Kozeny, a Czech financier who earned the nickname "the Pirate of Prague" for his aggressive, and sometimes illegal, tactics in buying up formerly state-owned assets across the former Soviet Bloc. Kozeny and Bourke were, naturally, neighbors in Aspen. The handbag company executive was acquitted on money-laundering charges but in addition to jail time, he still risks up to $500,000 in fines for the conspiracy conviction. [WWD]
• Convicted rapist designer Anand Jon has fired his attorney and is seeking to represent himself through his appeals process. This should end well. [HindustaniTimes]
• Anna Sui's Target line was set to be featured Gossip Girl, according to sources from the production, but executives at the retailer changed their minds because of the debauched nature of the show. Extras were going to be wearing Sui's Target collection in a scene to be filmed at Sui's store, and there were even going to be Target logos in the background — but no more, since all the characters do drugs and get drunk and Serena killed that dude. [NYDN]
• British Vogue has pictures of all the sumptuous costumes from Coco Avant Chanel. [British Vogue]
• Matt Tyrnauer, the documentarian who spent years making Valentino: The Last Emperor, says the designer was "Difficult." Imagine that. [NYP]
• Elie Tahari and his wife, Rory, were profiled by Town & Country magazine, and said a lot of tone-deaf things about their 9,000 sq. ft. SoHo triplex penthouse. "SoHo is like our Hamptons away from the Hamptons," says Rory. Have a nice recession, reader! Hope you still have a job. [The Awl]
• Not only does everything give you cancer, according to a television doctor, everyone will get cancer. "Cancer has affected my family and me," says a cheerful Patrick Dempsey. "It's going to affect everybody. Its [sic] just a matter of time." Dempsey's new Nike campaign meanwhile features "an innovative technology piece with the Chalkbot, a mobile unit that will receive messages from consumers (via e-mail and text) and transcribe them in yellow chalk along the roads of the Tour de France." We can imagine so many ways that could go wrong, all of them entertaining. [LATimes]
• Richard Tyler's iconic red dress uniform for Delta only goes up to a size 18. [BlackBook]
• The reason Ali Wise, Dolce & Gabbana's New York publicist, hacked into designer Nina Freudenberger's voicemail? A boy. Freudenberger says she dated Downtown Records founder Josh Deutsch two years after Wise did — and five other Deutsch ladyfriends claim the publicist subjected them to harassment and hacking, too. One was so freaked she contacted a private investigator. Wise spent the night in jail after being arrested on felony hacking charges. [Daily Intel]
• Mary Kay is suing Yahoo! for providing keyword-generated ads with links to its products via Yahoo! Mail. Mary Kay only sells directly to consumers, and feels its brand image and trademarks are negatively impacted by unauthorized online sales. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, Maybelline might become the official cosmetics sponsor of New York Fashion Week. [WWD]
• Project Runway's Leanne Marshall talked to Blogging Project Runway about her line for Bluefly (now on sale) and her future plans as a designer. Marshall didn't mention the blog post she wrote last month about her frustrations working with Bluefly, but she did talk about this one time she tried to make shoes with a pair of old flip-flops and a hot glue gun. [BPR]
• Jason Wu's doll business is going gangbusters. The slight designer used to moonlight as a drafter for doll companies, and now that he's made it big, he gets to produce limited-edition dolls in tiny versions of his signature line. In addition to producing dolls for Colette in Paris (215 Euros) and Jeffrey NY (price unavailable), he's also doing a version for Japan that'll cost a cool grand. [Stylefile]
• For 215 Euros, if you were perchance Christian Lacroix, you could have paid the top models Vlada Roslyakova, Hanne Gaby Odiele, Daria Strokous, and Siri Tollerød to walk in your couture show, and still had enough left over to buy lunch. [Imaginary Socialite]
• Jon Gosselin hasn't been wearing all those Ed Hardy shirts out of the goodness of his heart, or the keenness of his fashion sense. [TMZ]
  li>For some reason, the Telegraph decided to run an Anya Hindmarch press release in its style section. The accessories MBE's latest "invention"? The "hands-free handbag," a small handbag with a long, resizable, removable strap. It can be worn across the body "so it becomes part of you, instead of being a nuisance," or, get this, it can be carried inside a larger bag like a pocketbook! Innovative. [Telegraph]
• Giorgio Armani's home division is doing the interiors for a 62-apartment historic redevelopment project in Rome. [Reuters]
• Sounds like Escada's refinancing plan isn't going so well: The German luxury goods company only has enough liquidity to last through August, and it may cease trading. [AFP]
• The September issues of the ladymags are all closing this week, and indications are that they'll be about one third lighter than last year. Cash-strapped retailers and luxury brands have sharply cut their ad spending so far this year, and the September issues, normally the fashion magazine industry's fattest cash cows, will be no exception. [WWD]
• Mickey Drexler, the man who made The Gap what it was in the 90s and J. Crew what it is today, sometimes pedals around the office on his bike. [CBS]
• Or perhaps the credit for the classic brand's rejuvenation should be shared with creative director Jenna Lyons. [LATimes]
• Punky Brewster has a kids clothing line. [People]

• Breaking: Kate Moss is wearing a turban of her own creation to the Met Ball. [Fashionista]
• Did DVF rip off this jacket from an indie designer? [National Post]

• Meet the world's most expensive suit! [The Life Files]
• Dries Van Noten, intellectual designer extraordinaire, will be honored by FIT. [WWD]
• Elie Tahari has designed a "Michelle dress." Of his muse, the designer says, "She has a great style, and what's great about her is she is dressing like everybody else can dress." [WWD]
• Ooh, preview of Leanne Marshall's Bluefly line! It's gonna be green. [New York]
• Chanel opens a super-luxe beauty parlor in Tokyo. Recession fab! [WWD]
• Marc Jacobs is squiring both Madonna and Courtney Love to the Met ball! [New York]
• Good news? LVMH is (slightly) up. [WSJ]
• Rachel Zoe's reality show, going to England. Well, she's a good representative. [AP]
• Now prospective Carries have options for a jilting dress: Dame Viv has added five new wedding gowns to her range. [Fashionista]
• Uggs, the comfort food of the apparel world, continues to keep its parent co. afloat. [WWD]
• Workhorse Steve Madden is also posting strong returns. [Crains]
• Stella McCartney: "People are always trying to pull me in different directions, but I get a huge satisfaction from being able to say no! I like to do one thing properly, not lots of things quite well." [Style.com]
• Zeng Jing, a Chinese plus-sized model, invited only other plus-sized models to her engagement party, to, as she said, "highlight the concerns of larger people." Okay. [UPI]
• Speaking of modeling, Joe's Jeans wants you! "Joe wants real people with funk, spunk, and personality." [FabSugar]
• Perhaps on the strength of her Lagerfeld campaign, Jerry Hall has been re-signed by Ford. [Fashionista]
• The Avon lady is coming to TV! The struggling cosmetics veteran is branching into infomercials; we're guessing Lauren Conrad will be involved. [AP]
• Designers push for tighter regulations on piracy. Of the fashion, not naval, kind. [WWD]

• Who is Tory Burch's elusive 23-year old stepdaughter Pookie? On Mondays, Pookie interns for Bruce Weber, and the rest of the week she works as the assistant to the president of Carolina Herrera, and she was (allegedly) responsible for the magical pairing of New York's leading faux-WASP ice princess with Princess Coldstare, but alas, we have scoured the Google and cannot find a picture of her. So this will have to do. [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• M.I.A has designed her own eponymous clothing line, which is really brightly colored so that, "if you lose it or someone steals it, you can see it from miles away and you can be like, 'Oy! Give me my shirt back!'" Oy is right! [WWD, 3rd item]
  
• Tinsley Mortimer, you see, is not a bad designer of handbags, it's just that she made the mistake of trying to sell them in Japan. "Japanese girls have no use for clutches because they just go to the clubs right after work. They are so different from New York. Stylewise, colorwise, stylewise. It's very youth-oriented. I'm designing for women between the ages of 20 and 40... But in Japan, after 25, it's like, basically, you're dead." [NYMag]

• "Now that I've been modeling some, I can actually stand in high heels—at least for a night." Oh, Hagyness. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Meanwhile, poor Erin Wasson broke her foot running in stilettos while shooting the ad campaign for Justin Timberlake's clothing line, William Rast. Doctors say her bones were fragile due to the amount of time she has spent in her life in heels. Ouch. [NYMag]
• Are you ready for Tuesday night's Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala? [Is that a trick question? -Moe] The theme is superheroes because "the superhero is the overarching metaphor for fashion, because both share this obsession with the body, identity and transformation." [WWD, sub req'd]
• No actually, explains Diane Von Furstenberg, superheroes are just super-trendy right now. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Poor Nicole Fahri was mugged at knifepoint outside her home! [Mirror UK]
• "My wife and I had a great time just sitting and going through things and working on what we liked the best...I would love to see her have a fragrance, and us to have one together — a unisex fragrance. That would be wonderful. She's a lot more expensive than I am." Tim McGraw on his new eponymous fragrance and his oft-PhotoShopped wife, Faith Hill. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Virtual Christian Siriano prom dresses? We're confused. Explain this to us, please. [Gaia]
• Oscar de la Renta shot his Fall/WInter 2008 ad campaign at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. Which is, um, really random and has nothing to do with polio? [WWD, sub req'd]
• Is former Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane doing a line for Diesel? Eh, probs. [WWD, 3rd item]
• Naomi Watts is the new face of Thierry Mugler's Angel fragrance. We are so happy for her. [WWD, 2nd item]
• Martin Margiela is trying to go mainstream. Have you never heard of him? Well, that's cause he's so not mainstream. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Marilyn Minter, Kiki Smith, Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger, Ashley Bickerton, Kenny Scharf, Glenn Ligon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kerry James Marshall, Hanna Liden and Sarah Sze are all collaborating with the Gap on a series of t-shirts. [WWD, sub req'd]
• And Elie Tahari is collaborating with artist Kenny Scharf, too. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Alice Temperely: Showing in London come September for the first time in six seasons. Buh-bye, New York. [Vogue UK]
• Colin McDowell, fashion editor of The Sunday Times of London, is leaving the paper to become creative editor-at-large of Net-a-Porter and spearhead its original editorial content. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Revlon: In debt. But less so now than before. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Elizabeth Arden: Profits are down. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Same goes for Bebe. [WWD, sub req'd]
• And Steve Madden! Hmmm, I wonder what it all means? [Crain's]

• Poor Valentino! After watching various private equity firms duke it out for control of the fashion house he founded; telling the media over and over again that he is totally 100% absolutely not retiring; announcing his retirement; and then naming his successor, the guy finally manages to score the lifetime achievement award at the Fashion Rocks event in London last week... only to lose the statuette. (And then find it!) [I wonder if he prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of ignoring me. -Moe] [NY Post]
  
• LOLNaomi! Mlle. Campbell is to lecture to students at the Trinity College Philosophical Society in Dublin. Perhaps she will explain the finer points of resorting to physical violence to the world's oldest debate society? [Sassybella]
  
• Requisite retarded Karl Lagerfeld design du jour: a Chanel bicycle, complete with Chanel's signature quilting. [Vogue UK]

• Veronica Mars star Kristen Bell on designer Elie Tahari: "I have recently been exposed to Elie Tahari. His stuff is really classic, but at the same time he has gotten hipper." Spoken like a fashion critic! [WWD, 1st item]
• Model Watch update! Jessica Stam, Coco Rochas, and Kasia Struss will co-star in the Dior spring 2008 campaign together, combining the power of their incredibly well-remunerated faces to try and justify the cost of even more expensive shit. [WWD, 1st item]
• We are sorry to inform you that Dallas Fashion Week has been canceled. [WWD, 2nd item]
• Shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who would actually know what he's talking about, on Mary Kate & Ashley's new clothing line: "When I started my line, I did it little by little. But [Elizabeth and James is] very, very well-managed. More than anything else, it's very good." Go figure. [WWD, 2nd item]
• Kate Bosworth is the new face of Coach in China. [Fashion Week Daily]