• Before digesting the latest round of layoffs, garment worker intimidation, stupidly expensive luxury crap, and magazine turmoil, say a hearty Good mornin' to David Beckham in his fancy new Armani underwear ad. Hello David. [People]

• Fans crowded Oxford St. in London to get a glimpse of Beckham. He was making a promotional appearance at Selfridges to unveil a billboard of the new ad. [Sky]
• Glenn O'Brien, who recently left the troubled Interview magazine, says he just couldn't take it anymore. "It's like a Greek tragedy. Like watching a company going insane, instead of a person," said the media veteran. He also admitted he's not even on speaking terms with his former editorial co-director, Fabien Baron. When Baron was fired five months ago, O'Brien took over his job. And now that O'Brien is gone, Baron is back in. Meanwhile, Brant Publications owes freelancers and photographers (including such names as Inez & Vinoodh) for work dating back to last August. [FWD]
• Unions say the economy is making conditions worse for garment workers worldwide. Workers face unfair dismissal, the threat of relocation, abuse, long hours, and even worse pay. In the countries with the largest apparel industries, like China and Bangladesh, workers do not have the right to unionize or strike for better conditions. Seventy-six trade unionists were killed around the world last year, and 49 of those were in Columbia. [WWD]
• Lauren Bush has a new "FEED" bag in aid of the UN's World Food Program. This one is hand-beaded over the course of a day and a half by women from a Kenyan school for the deaf. In exchange, $100 of the $195 purchase price goes to feed two Kenyan school children for a year. [WWD]
• In other expensive bag news, Takashi Murakami released an updated version of his 2003 Louis Vuitton ad. The little girl he animated back then is all grown up, and, get this, still loves Louis Vuitton! [Racked]
• For the 2009 Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards on Monday, host Tracey Ullman will wear: a dress by Claire McCardell, a dress by Donna Karan (whom she recently lampooned), and a dress by Doo-Ri Chung, who wrote her Parsons thesis on McCardell. And the ouroboros of fashion is complete. [WWD]
• Natalia Vodianova will be the guest designer for Lutz & Patmos' pre-Spring line. [WWD]
• Ben Sherman is discontinuing its children's line, because, said chairman J. Hicks Lanier, "In this environment, we didn't have the luxury of ‘fun and cute' without the financial reward." It's a cold, cold economic reality that separates a child from his stripy t-shirt and mini suspenders. Also gone will be the men's and women's footwear lines. [WWD]
• Remember how Sean John went online looking for regular guys to model in its fall campaign? They found two hot dudes, and bookended them around a male model anyway. [WWD]
• Some luxury companies are pulling out all the stops to reach that tiny slice of the population that can still afford their wares. Hermès, whose overall sales rose 3.2%, to $603 million, and whose leather goods division grew 21.7% in the first quarter of this year, is increasing its annual marketing budget by nearly 10%, but two thirds of that $141 million will not be spent on advertising. Instead, the brand is pushing marketing events that garner publicity and make its best customers feel special — like extra trunk shows and store opening parties. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy says its putting more of its marketing budget online, which explains the online-only Marion Cotillard series of film clips for Dior. [Reuters]
• The above moves aside, most experts are not expecting the high-end retail market to make its recovery any time soon. May same-store sales were typically dismal across most stores — Saks Fifth Avenue was down 26.2%, Nordstrom fell 13.1% — and luxury spending is falling faster than other retail spending. Some analysts say a full recovery may not happen until 2012. [TS]
• The C.E.O. of Liz Claiborne said the words "the new normal." [Reuters]
• Frederick's of Hollywood isn't doing so well, either. Maybe offerings like this are part of the problem? [WWD]
• Gap is also investing in online retail — it's adding 50 labels to Piperlime. Fifty Old Navy stores across the country are also due for a redesign, presumably to make them less like dingy warehouses. Old Navy has seen an increase in custom because of the recession. Its same-store sales for the first quarter of this year were only down 3%, compared with 18% a year ago. Still a ways to go, then. [TS]
• The judge overseeing the Filene's Basement bankruptcy has ordered that the auction for the company be re-opened. An affiliate of Men's Wearhouse won the nine-hour auction, bidding $67 million for Filene's trading name, inventory, 17-20 stores, and an all-important super-cheap 15-year lease for its downtown Boston flagship — but two other bidders complained that the proceedings were "a sham" because Men's Wearhouse didn't follow court-ordered auction procedures. The judge agreed, and there is to be a new auction today. [BH]

• Kanye West and Amber Rose hit up the American Apparel in NoHo for hoodies and sunglasses. "He was really nice about getting his photo taken for our blog," said the store manager. Doesn't he look it! [AmApp]

• Last week, Kanye apparently stood up Agyness Deyn. [Mirror]
• Uh oh. Tim Gunn's Tide commercials were truth-squadded by Consumer Reports, who found that not only was his claim that Tide Total Care doesn't fade clothes after 30 washes untrue, but that another Tide product, Tide 2x Ultra Coldwater, performed just as well as Total Care, for half the price. [CR]
• Stephen Colbert's camouflage suit: custom made by Brooks Brothers. [The Cut]
• Is Vera Wang really going to Dancing With The Stars? [E!]
• Recent Columbia grad Bee "fashion is a really weird industry" Shaffer, everybody: "Right now I am looking for a job, but I also want to study acting." Because if there's one industry where all the people are well-adjusted and normal, it's acting! [FWD]
• Stella McCartney has announced a new partnership to create one-off collections for Gap Kids and Baby Gap. It's the first time the designer has ever done children's wear, and the clothing will hit stores late this year. [WWD]
• Clairol's Nice 'n' Easy at-home hair color is apparently in for a big relaunch, with The Office's Angela Kinsey. In the year to March, Procter & Gamble already spent 97 million on Nice 'n' Easy ads, almost double what it spent on advertising for the brand in the whole of 2008. As for Kinsey, it sounds like she'll play a sort of underminey girlfriend who tells women things like, "Remember when your friend Kelly said she liked your hair color? She lied!" [AW]
• Well, somebody must still have money: Stefano Pilati's "New vintage" collection for Yves Saint Laurent is all but sold out after one day on Barneys' sales floor. [WWD]
• New Yorkers stuck for Father's Day gift ideas, take note: designer John Bartlett's first collection with Liz Claiborne will be sold for four days starting June 18th at a pop-up store at 143 Seventh Avenue South. Shorts will be $55, polos $39.50, and sport coats $89.50. We imagine there'll be some nice socks and hankies, too. [The Cut]
• Pieces from Yigal Azrouël's current Spring/Summer collection, along with Alternative Apparel t-shirts hand-screened with woodblock-esque prints by the designer, are currently for sale on eBay. The items are offered at fixed prices, and while they are below retail ($215 for a cardigan), they're not exactly sample-sale affordable. But all proceeds go to the Natural Resources Defense Council. [eBay]
• Fashion blind item: "Which design collaboration's not actually going so smoothly? Major licensing and financial problems mean the summer-turned-fall launch is now looking like late winter. And if that's not enough drama the designer now 'despises' the collaborator." We'd say famously difficult Jil Sander and Uniqlo fit the bill here, except that line was always supposed to launch this Fall. [Fashionista]
• Net-a-Porter increased its sales by 47.8% in the year to January 31, to a volume of £81.5 million. [FT]
• Versace has named a new chief executive after the hasty departure of Giancarlo di Risio following tensions with the Versace family: the new guy is Gian Giacomo Ferraris, who led Jil Sander since 2004 (the year Sander herself was finally forced out of her design position by owners Prada). [WSJ]
• Jewelry can be a notoriously unethical business — and we don't just mean blood diamonds. Conditions in gold mines are often unsafe for workers, the chemicals used in mining, such as cyanide, can wreak havoc on local ecosystems, and the trade in precious gems like rubies and emeralds is often under the control of third-world strongmen. "Most gems are found in the poor parts of the world and they end up on very rich people's fingers and it's complicated," says jeweler Stephen Webster. The industry is taking a variety of voluntary measures to change its ways. [Telegraph]
• Things are head-spinningly complicated at Interview magazine — still. Fabien Baron and Glenn O'Brien used to be co-editorial directors; then, five months ago, Baron was fired, and O'Brien retained his position while a new creative team was brought in by Brant publications. Now, as of Friday, O'Brien is out — and Baron is back in his old job. [WWD]
• Shares in Men's Wearhouse gained 16% to $20.70 in trading on Tuesday, after the announcement that an affiliate of the company would buy the bankrupt Filene's Basement discount department store chain. Despite same-store sales that fell 5%, Men's Wearhouse still posted a first-quarter profit, and expects earnings of 50 to 60 cents a share in the next quarter. [TS]
• But another bidder in the Filene's auctions says the Men's Wearhouse bid should be invalidated because the auction was "a sham." [Crain's]
• Eddie Bauer might declare its bankruptcy as soon as the end of this week. [WSJ]

Sischy and Brant, who spent 18 and 23 years with Interview, respectively, struck out for other pastures at Condé Nast last year, becoming international editors at Italian Vanity Fair and Spanish Vanity Fair. Now, according to a press release for Condé Nast, they are taking on the same positions at German Vogue and Russian Vogue.

Fabien Baron, who replaced Sischy as co-editorial director of Interview (along with Glenn O'Brien), was pushed out of his position after less than a year at the magazine. Baron, an accomplished fashion photographer in his own right, and creative director Karl Templer had revamped Interview and focused on better photography and more fashion content. The April issue is the first Interview produced under the leadership of the creative team M/M Paris, who put teen star Zac Efron on the cover.

Related:
Breaking News: Ingrid Sischy and Sandra Brant Resign [FWD]
The Interview Backstory [WWD]

Earlier:
Interview Magazine Cover Sparks Existential Crisis
Calvin Klein, TSE & Originality In Fashion : Not So Black & White

The abstracted, angled black shadows on the white background, the strong, slanting light that hit the model just so, the black-and-white photography, and the simple lines of the featured clothes, all made one clear announcement: the cashmere brand pointed to the latest Calvin Klein campaign with Suvi Koponen, and told its creative team to copy like their lives depended on it. But then I got to thinking, haven’t I seen the architectural black and white theme elsewhere in fashion photography this season? In a business as crowd-sourced and trend-based as fashion, how can you tell the difference between recycling an aesthetic and taking inspiration from an old idea, anyway?

Suvi Koponen — Finland’s next top model, would you believe — has been favored for Calvin Klein Collection campaigns for the past few seasons. This fall, she was shot by Fabien Baron for a series of images that took dramatic delight in the lines of Francisco Costa’s garments, which this season were a little like 90s minimalism gone very good. Dodai is on record calling this campaign one of fall's worst ads, but I gasped when I first saw it. Working with so little — no props to create an atmosphere, no other models to generate charisma — could easily result in a tedious set of images. Sure, Suvi looks a little like a robot (an awe-inspiring fashion robot). And I don’t love the Stepford coiffure, which seems to unhelpfully contrast in era with the clothes. But I think these pictures are unmistakably beautiful. And I prefer their flirtation with high-concept self-serious absurdity to a million here’s-a-pretty-girl-now-buy-our-product luxury campaigns any day.

So clearly any images that distinctive were going to get knocked off. TSE photographed both its men’s and women’s lines in a style that looks like a dumbed-down retread of Baron and Koponen's Calvin Klein campaign.

The buttons on this coat don’t lie flat down the front, and the shadows cast by the lapels make the man’s chest look hollow. The coat hangs like it’s too big and nobody cared to pin it. Whereas in Baron's images, the bare-bones minimalism worked, here the same aesthetic looks under-thought and under-inspired. The result is boring.

Another fashion personage supping from the black-and-white cup this season? Patrick Demarchelier. The iconic photographer had an editorial in November’s Italian Vogue with models Mariacarla Boscono and Anja Rubik where the nearly all-black styling, plain white studio set with angled walls, and dramatic spot lighting all point to the same originating idea as the Calvin Klein campaign. But Demarchelier is enough of a creative mind to push the edges of the concept just enough to spread it over some different ground.

Gone is any attempt to make the models look 'natural': their poses are exaggerated, their torsos and legs twist and weave to bizarre effect. The shadows they throw are occasionally grotesque, and the weird black shapes on the walls play with the same ideas of scale as the built-up shoulders, jutting collars, and rigid teacup peplums of the clothes.

Hair is a frizzed bowl cut in bleach blonde (Rubik) or jet black (Boscono); makeup an ungodly pallor etched with mannequinish black lines at the jaw and lips. It all feels a little stagey, but that is the point: Demarchelier is reminding us that everything we see in the pages of a fashion magazine is artifice. Any magazine is an experience engineered by the conscious aesthetic choices of hundreds of individuals, and the same hours of of styling, hair, makeup, and post-production go into a 'natural' Steven Meisel editorial as into one where the models look like aliens experienced in posing. There is nothing natural about it. I think Demarchelier’s adjusted reflection of Fabien Baron’s campaign is a welcome contribution to the fashion discourse.

To me, this is a perfect example of fashion's hot-house idea-sharing — how an idea as old as the sun (black and white) is made to seem new again in an ad with weird styling and solid photography, inspires an old hand to take up the idea and add something new to it outside the realm of advertising, all while other brands move to piggyback and do so with less skill than the original. That's the fashion cycle, right there.

• "With so many magazine images that are so completely retouched, we've gone in the opposite direction, showing the soul of a woman." That's artist Francois-Marie Banier, on this Diane von Furstenberg ad starring Natalia Vodianova. Which makes us wonder, if that is the "opposite direction" of the retouching trend, we sort of wonder what that trend would look like "taken to its hyperbolic extreme." [Vogue UK]
  
• And in other DVF news, Diane is suing Target over a wrapdress. Wait, you're telling us Target didn't invent the wrapdress? [Reuters]
  
• Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell are appearing on the February cover of French Vogue together — with Naomi appearing sans hair extensions. What would Tyra say? [Fashion Week Daily]

• Fashion PR guru Kelly Cutrone on her blog on Fashion Week Daily: "I woke up this morning and thought, 'I wonder if, when you die, is there a fashion section in heaven?' I also wondered if you had spent a great portion of your life working in fashion if you would be mandated there. Next I asked, 'Is there anyway I could avoid going to the fashion section of heaven?'" Oh Kelly, don't worry, you're all going to hell anyway! [Fashion Week Daily]
• Stella McCartney for LeSportsac! [Sassybella]
• Stella McCartney lingerie! [Nylon]
• Quote of the day, from WWD: "SAGGING ECONOMY BE DAMNED. Plenty of women are spending the equivalent of nearly two barrels of oil — or more — to slather themselves in luxury body creams." [WWD]
• Famous recluse/corset-maker Mr. Pearl on his wares: "To me, a corseted body, with the shape of the indentation at the waist, is beauty in extreme; it represents absolute femininity....Breathing does become a problem, but it does not affect digestion....It would be interesting if people would consider [corsets], since I believe liposuction and plastic surgery are quite ugly acts by comparison, and the results are not quite as becoming. What a corset lace can do is much more attractive." Spoken like a true man. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Prada made some animated sort film inspired by wallpaper called Trembled Blossoms, and it's showing at Fashion Week. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Rachel Roy is designing a capsule collection for Manolo Blahnik. Moe can tell you that Roy is Damon Dash's wife, but you're going to have to google the meaning of "capsule collection" yourself. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Former supermodel Eva Herzigova on Valentino: "Do you remember how we would always have to be in full hair and makeup before Valentino would even look at us?" Yeah, we'll miss him. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Still not quite ready to say goodbye to Valentino? Here's how to get the makeup look from his couture show. [BellaSugar]
• The new Versace shoes have red soles. We're assuming Mr. Louboutin is going to be less than thrilled. [Ugh. Because, you know, manufacturing red soles is practically MAPPING THE HUMAN GENOME in the fashion industry. -Moe] [Chic Report]
• English designer Christopher Kane is doing a limited edition lip gloss for Lancome. The packaging is extra-pretty. [Nylon]