• Victoria Beckham's team always denies the best rumors. Blake Lively, apparently, will not be the face of her next campaign for the dress line. [UK Vogue]
• Helena Christensen's photographs of climate change in Peru are being exhibited in London. [BBC]

• The sheikh who had such grand plans for Christian Lacroix when he bid for the company has failed to file key financing guarantees with the bankruptcy judge on time. This jeopardizes the sale of Lacroix, since all the other would-be bidders for the troubled company have dropped out. The sheikh, or anyone else interested in buying the brand, has until December 1 to prove they have the financial wherewithal and the business plans to relaunch the brand. [WWD]
• Lauren Conrad is authoring a book on style. Most astoundingly, it'll feature "new and never seen before photos" of the "style icon" — we assumed between the camera crews and the tabloids, her every style move was amply documented. [People]
• Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein dressed Penelope Cruz for the New York premiere of Pedro Almodovar's new movie, Broken Embraces. Says Costa, "I wasn't in the last fitting, and I got pictures of her in the clothes at the hotel room. And they looked like movie stills. She was just wearing the clothes in the hotel room, but it almost felt like Helmut Newton pictures, there was so much of her in the photos." [People]
• Rachel Zoe is hiring. She wants an L.A.-based ad sales exec to "evangelize The Zoe Report as being a leader in the fashion publication/newsletter space." Must have "an entrepreneurial attitude - overcome any obstacle, creative, willing to be an evangelist for a new product." Is she starting a business or founding a cult? [Fashionista]
• Leighton Meester, on the cover of UK Glamour this month, has some fashion advice for Blair Waldorf. We hate when actors do that; can you imagine Leonard Nimoy telling Spock to, you know, loosen up a little? Why must actors constantly remind us that they are acting? It's so meta. Anyway, she'd like her to put her hairbands on differently. Meester also says, "I actually think I'm prettier without makeup." Which puts her in the solid majority of women. [People]
• J.C. Penney is going to stop printing such big catalogs, because most people shop online now. [NBC]
• Russell Athletic closed a factory in Honduras when its 1,200 workers voted to unionize in 2008. Now, because of pressure from college anti-sweatshop groups that persuaded universities to drop Russell products, the company has announced that the employees will be rehired. The new Honduras factory where they will work will be unionized, and Russell has agreed not to fight unionization at its seven other plants in the country. [NYTimes]
• Model Karlie Kloss played ping pong against pro Wally Green. And won. The girl is unstoppable. [Style.com]
• After hearing that Gemma Ward planned to return to modeling in the new year, FrostFrench — Sadie Frost and Jemima French's London-based label — has announced it would like her to be the face of their next campaign. Right now, before she (presumably) gets down to her fighting weight again. This is like when a boy asks you out in front of the whole school, only FrostFrench is doing it in front of the whole Internet, and it smacks of a publicity stunt. Just, no. [Fashionista]
• Chanel Iman suggested to the Victoria's Secret stylist that they bedazzle her name on the back of the t-shirt she wears in one look for the show. [InStyle]
• Former Abercrombie & Fitch model Brad Greiner confirmed that the company recompenses its models pretty terribly: although Bruce Weber's images of Greiner were splashed all over national billboards, in-store displays, and even shopping bags, he made only $500 a day. The shoot lasted two days. That's not quite American Apparel-bad, but it's close. With runway work already pro bono, lookbook bookings suddenly a status symbol, and editorial work also unpaid, will campaigns be next to tell models it's worth it for the 'exposure'? Abercrombie has underpaid its campaign models for years, but other successful fashion companies might, in these straitened times, try applying its business model. [StyleSectionLA]
• An Australian fashion editor who bought a pair of Versace sandals and then had the heel quickly break off of one is pissed because when she sent the shoes to Milan for repair, they were returned with instructions for her to deal with the Australian Versace stores. There are no longer any Australian Versace stores, because the company closed them. [News.com.au]
• The U.S. Polo Association is suing Polo Ralph Lauren for allegedly blocking its efforts to license its trademarks for a line of fragrances. [WWD]
• Burberry is looking to open 21 stores in India through a partnership deal with a local company. Indians spent about £2 billion on luxury goods last year. [ToL]

The tag line is — of course — "Be caught dead in it." But this is far from the first time fashion has sought to draw female customers with images of dead women.

Back in 2007, for "cycle" 8 of America's Next Top Model, Tyra Banks had the cast pose as murder victims for a shoot. You can see the whole series of images here, should you want to.

But as in most things, Banks was just taking inspiration from a long-established fashion trend. Plenty of photographers have aestheticized violence. While this model in Steven Meisel's September, 2007, "Make Love Not War" spread for Vogue Italia might not be dead — yet — she's clearly pictured in the midst of a violent attack.

Is it better or worse that Steven Klein, for his part, spreads his depictions of violent death across gender lines? That's Kevin Federline, by the way.

Copyranter points to this Fall, 2006, Jimmy Choo campaign as another antecedent for the Superette images.

Not to mention this Duncan Quinn ad, which practically approaches snuff film territory.

Then there was this August, 2007, spread in W magazine, featuring model Doutzen Kroes.

Photographers Mart Alas & Marcus Piggott captured Kroes in a variety of poses that all strongly implied she had recently been the victim of violence.

You can see the rest of the creepy story at Glossed Over. So if this troubling theme isn't even original or "edgy," why are we still creating and consuming these images?

This is a Helmut Newton photograph from the early 90s.

How, as women's rights have increased and progress has been made in the West across every rubric of measurement, have we moved from fashion photography that, while still glamorizing violence, at least showed us as the ones with the guns, to an aesthetic that promotes death as the ultimate symbol of female subservience?

Dead Is The New Black, Again [Copyranter]

This October, 1943, cover, was Penn's first work for Vogue. He had only recently begun to work as an assistant to Alex Liberman, after failing to find himself as a painter. (Women's Wear Daily reports that when Penn gave up on his artist dreams, he "washed the paint from his canvases and kept them as table linens.") Liberman liked Penn, despite his lack of photographic experience, so he asked him to start suggesting cover concepts; Penn shot this with borrowed equipment. It's almost impossible to imagine a Vogue cover of today coming out of such spontaneity of talent.

Penn's best photographs have a timeless quality. There is a deep stillness in this 1949 image, "Summer Sleep," and an abstracted intimacy. Some of the photographer's best work was only published decades after he shot it.

His nude series is a perfect example. Penn wanted to step away from fashion, so in 1949, he went to Port-au-Prince, and started taking pictures of artists' models, instead of fashion models. "Nude 70" was shot during this period, and exhibited at the Met in 2002. Penn's work was, more than anything else, always about light and space, which he used as uncanny tools for describing the relationships between things.

Whereas Newton was raunchy and dark, and Avedon was frothy and light, Penn was more intensely interested in his subjects; he could even humanize the gaze of a dismembered turkey's eye. You can trace a fairly direct line of influence from Helmut Newton to Steven Klein, and from Richard Avedon to Stephen Meisel. If you're looking for echoes of Penn in contemporary fashion photography, you can often find the same sense of stillness, of precision, and of beauty rather than prettiness, in the work of Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon.

And unlike a lot of artists, Irving Penn kept producing good work into his old age. This still life was published in 1999; while his exacting photos were seen less and less frequently in the pages of Vogue over the last few years, the ones that were published — like that anthropomorphized bird — were stop-in-your-tracks beautiful.

He may never have made it as a painter. But he did become an artist.

Photos:

Photography Now [Official Site]
Metropolitan Musem of Art [Official Site]
UK Vogue Cover Archive [Official Site]
Style.com [Official Site]

• Colin Firth won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in former Gucci designer Tom Ford's directorial debut, A Single Man. [Vogue UK]
• Did Louis Vuitton make a $590 knock off of this New Balance sneaker? [WWD]

• If anyone had told me Courtney Love was going to perform at the Alexander Wang after party — held at a gas station in Chelsea — I would have totally stayed up, if only because last year I found a copy of Celebrity Skin in someone's back seat and started listening to it (and really enjoying feeling 15) again, instead of hauling my tired carcass to bed at 9:30. [DazedDigital]
• Audrey Tautou wore Lanvin to the Los Angeles premiere of Coco Before Chanel. [People]
• French actress Emanuelle Béart is rumored to be presenting her own clothing line at Paris fashion week next month. [WWD]
• Robert Verdi — sometime stylist to celebrities like Eva Longoria — can't get an invitation to Jason Wu or Marc Jacobs by hook or by crook. He suspects it's because fashion is "ignoring the gay people." [The Cut]
• Marc Jacobs publicist Timothy Mark Garcia is wearing an electronic monitoring device because of his house arrest. Garcia's father, a former Major General of the Philippines, is accused of paying for his son's Trump Plaza apartment with funds he stole from the Filipino people; the entire family is facing extradition. Garcia fils, who has a curfew of 9 p.m. — 1 a.m. during fashion week, with a 30-minute grace period for lateness — has been reduced to wearing his Cartier Tank watch and $1,000 Hermès bracelets in the privacy of his own home, and ordering take-out from the restaurant at Barneys. He says the ankle bracelet is uncomfortable, and "I can't even wear my knee high croc boots by Sergio Rossi for the fall." [TDB]
• Victoria Beckham says she's happy to have earned real fashion credibility. Victoria Beckham has earned real fashion credibility? [Telegraph]
• The pop-star-turned-designer missed her youngest son's first day of school to present her dress collection in New York. "I told them, 'Mommy's going to New York to do a test, you know, you have math tests. Well, Mommy has a fashion test.'" [WWD]
• For the first time in 12 seasons, Tim Gunn was not invited to Diane Von Furstenberg. Which gives us one more thing in common. [NYPost]
• Gunn, on Lindsay Lohan's appointment as Emanuel Ungaro's "artistic adviser": "It's got to be a publicity stunt. Or a crack-smoking board of directors!" [The Cut]
• Lohan kept an entire photo crew waiting for 10 hours at what was supposed to be a shoot for her own leggings line. [WWD]
• Diane Von Furstenberg says Fashion's Night Out was such a success she would love to see it become an annual event. [The Cut]
• Vince Shlomi, the ShamWow guy who allegedly beat a woman in Florida, has been seen around fashion week. Naturally, he's designing a swimwear line. [NYDN]
• Fashion periodically tends to reference homeless "style," and it stands to reason that the industry might do so particularly now, in the midst of a recession. A W editorial, a Sartorialist snap, and some year-old comments by Erin "Homeless People Have The Best Style" Wasson, does not a trend make, New York Times. (Wasson, for her part, feels that those comments were misunderstood. But perhaps the model should avoid making references to "people that you couldn't label and put in a box," when she is in fact talking about people who live in boxes.) [NYTimes]
• "Russian women are treated in a very Arabic way in our country," says supermodel Natalia Vodianova. "You are expected to give birth to children, look pretty and shut up. But we are very strong and intelligent people: there are a few of us out there. My whole life is breaking the stereotype of typical Russian women looking for money." [Telegraph]
• 1970s supermodel Robyn Peterson, once a favorite of Helmut Newton and now a successful actress, says "Fashion is a savage business — an industry that eats people up. Modelling is like being an athlete. It's a young person's game, but similarly no life for a young girl." She's probably just bitter. [Telegraph]
• Lesley Hornby — better known by her industry alias, Twiggy — turned 60 over the weekend. [Daily Mail]
• In other model news, if you want to know what Sessilee Lopez eats for breakfast, now's your chance. (Bodega croissant egg-and-bacon sandwich with coffee.) [Grub Street]
• Once in Milan, Miranda Kerr was walking on the catwalk when her shoe flew off into the audience. Nobody was hurt. [JustJared]
• America's Next Top Model's Danielle Evans made an appearance at the Leifsdottir presentation at New York fashion week. [Racked]
• Actual top models Anja Rubik, Lara Stone, and Raquel Zimmerman have all been absent from fashion week, so far. Although Raquel isn't in her agency's show package for the season, she is in New York, having attended Fashion's Night Out. Lara and Anja, who are in their respective agencies' show packages, aren't in town, having done Fashion's Night Out duty in London. So will we see them at all? It's been an unusually supermodel-light season, so far: even catwalk regular Natasha Poly has only walked Altuzarra and Alexander Wang, so far. [Fashionologie]
• Maybe the absence of so many top girls is due to an economic environment that means many designers cannot afford their rates? Agencies and models say that competition is high, pay is low — with payment in trade being more common than usual — and even Alice Gibb, normally a favorite of Rodarte and Marc Jacobs, says she's been un-booked from shows at the last minute. [Reuters]
• For all the models working for free, of course, there are any number of professionals who eschew such generosity. Forbes has a breakdown of who puts what into a fashion show, and who gets what out of it, from the producers to the stylists to the venue operators. [Forbes]
• The fashion industry in New York City generates about $1.5 billion in tax income, but the garment district is facing a re-zoning plan that could force the displacement of sample houses and manufacturers. [Reuters]
• The normally disapproving Daily Mail takes some time out of its busy day to celebrate girls in lingerie. Agent Provocateur's cheesy new superhero-themed ad campaign is the occasion. [Daily Mail]
• Mario Grauso is indeed leaving Puig. [WWD]
• Keith Pollock, the executive online editor for Brant Publications, says: "There are very respected fashion journalists that can evaluate the state of the market. However I don't see how a fashion editor's perspective on a Prada shoe is more valid than that of a teen blogger in Evanston, Illinois." This worries me very much. [NYTimes]
• Howard Socol, who resigned as Barneys New York C.E.O. in May of 2008, attended the 3.1 Philip Lim men's presentation at New York fashion week because Socol has been mentoring Lim. Socol took the time to count his blessings as one who is no longer running a high-end department store during a global recession; Barneys has yet to replace him. [WSJ]
• JC Penney has launched a new women's clothing brand, She Said, that will cater to the needs of working women. [Breitbart]
• The Colombian company that supplies the Body Shop with 90% of its palm oil successfully sued to have peasant farmers removed from a ranch north of Bogotá. Now 123 of the farmers are appealing the decision, and the ethics of the Body Shop's decision to buy palm oil from the company are being called into question. [Guardian]
• One of the more ridiculous reactions to the release of the Lockerbie bomber: Iconic Scottish company Harris Tweeds is "de-Scottish-ifying" its image in the U.S. in anticipation of a backlash against soft-on-terrorism Scots. [NPR]

Photo illustration images from Amazon and Louis Vuitton

In an interview with Anthem magazine, stylist B. Akerlund (wife of Jonas) — who is Lady GaGa's "first official stylist," talks about the intricate, bizarre and, frankly, gorgeous ensembles created for "Paparazzi."

The beginning of the video shows Ms. GaGa in a torrid embrace with a man, who ends up manipulating, dominating and manhandling her — trying to make sure their kisses are snapped by a hidden photographer — and he eventually throws her over a balcony. After her fall, GaGa returns home in a stylish neckbrace and wheelchair. B. Akerlund explains:

Gaga called me and said she wanted to be in a wheel chair. She wanted me to design it and not the prop department. I took it upon myself to drive to East L.A. and exchange the wheels for some low rider ones. I ordered some Gucci fabric and handed it over to my genius friend/designer Michael Schmidt so he could embellish it with Swarovski crystals. Originally, we made a metal logo that read "Gaga" on the wheels, but she disliked the font and we ended up exchanging it for the Chanel logo.

Once out of the wheelchair, GaGa wears a metal corset and walks with crutches.



B Akerlund says:

This is a very famous Thierry Mugler robot that was my biggest dream for GaGa. We made it happen and it arrived in a huge metal box with padlocks on it-very exciting! It's not the most comfortable thing to wear and very cold on the body, but a true work of art. The crutches were custom-made by Michael Schmidt with Swarovski chain and punk studs.

While the image is reminiscent of some famous Helmut Newton photographs —

— especially the two above, from a 1995 Vogue spread titled "The Empowered Woman" — do they make some kind of statement? A critique on literal fashion victims? A comment on the idea that women draw strength from what they wear? Can a victim or survivor find solace in style?

Throughout the video, we see flashes — very quick scenes — of dead (murdered?) women. Is the abusive boyfriend to blame? Later in the video, GaGa is back with man who hurt her, and he's reading a magazine which proclaims her to be "the new it girl." As though her ordeal just made her more famous. But GaGa has a ringful of poison, which she slips into his drink. He promptly dies. In the media blitz which follows, a newspaper headline reads, "We Love Her Again."

Yes, it's just a video. But in a time when the public was privy to a photograph of Rihanna's battered face and intimate details of Britney's breakdowns, isn't it interesting to see the idea of a strong — yet hurt — woman? And what if the "man" in the video is actually a stand-in for fame itself, and what it does to women?

B. Akerlund [Anthem Magazine]
Lady Gaga - Paparazzi [You Tube]

I so wanted to love this exhibit. I'll admit that bias right from the start. I know first-hand what goes into a shoot, and the crucial animating energy of modeling — the performance that is part mute, still-frame acting, part own-stunt cojones (who do you think climbs South American rock faces without ropes, in couture? Lily Donaldson's double?), part pure, inexplicable presence — and I feel, frankly, that our contributions to the fashion industry and the discourse of images that the industry uses to represent itself to the world are often underreported and undersold. Getting up in the morning and transforming, convincingly, into the apotheosis of a photographer, designer, and stylist's only partly shared creative vision isn't easy.

And just now, after season upon season of most designers choosing to make their models look as inconspicuous, anonymous, and blandly interchangeable as possible on the runway and in advertising, after years in which the model has shrunk before our very eyes, the culture seems ripe for some kind of redress: a resurgence of individuality, a reassertion of personality. A return to the days when the casual fashionista — as opposed to only the dedicated indexer of Internet-derived fashion arcana — could at least tell us all apart. The theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's brand-new and infinitely hyped "Model as Muse" exhibit, with its privileged understanding of the lowly clotheshorse's role in advancing fashion, seemed to promise a move in that direction.

What a terrible disappointment, then, to walk through the Tisch gallery on opening day and find an exhibit that was seemingly laid out with the goal of inspiring the utmost tedium in the viewer. I should have known as soon as I passed that terrible bit of tat with creepy Robo-Dovima in the entryway: the first corridor of photographs is lit with softboxes suspended from the ceiling. Softboxes. Photographic equipment illuminating exemplars of fashion photography! The single-entendre curation never lets up; the viewer is also subjected to such cheesy gestures as stepping literally through a velvet rope in order to enter the 1970s gallery. (Done up, naturally, to look like the basement of Studio 54, complete with unlit cigarettes.) It is difficult to concentrate on the beauty that surrounds when your ears are being assaulted with Alicia Bridges' "I Love The Nightlife" and your eyes with a tawdry-looking spread of yet more blank-faced mannequins, all decked out in truly atrocious wigs by fashion hairstylist Julien d'Ys.

I suspect even the curators, led by Costume Institute head Harold Koda, found their vision a little less than compelling: the exhibit often seems like the product of minds that occasionally wandered. In the wall copy, I spied the former model Anjelica Huston's name mis-spelled with a 'g', and I read twice within 30 seconds the phrase "attenuated limbs." (British model Karen Elson, in the 90s room, has "elegantly attenuated limbs," while American Stephanie Seymour, who closes out the 80s gallery, has "gracefully attenuated limbs.")

This Avedon photo of Lauren Hutton is what every American Apparel ad wants to be. And never will.

The exhibit proceeds dully, chronologically, through roughly the past 60 years of fashion history. The galleries dealing with each decade are separated by lines as clear as they are arbitrary; the Fifties, you see, was the decade of the Continent and Dior and Balenciaga, but then once the clock struck 12:01 on January 1, 1960, nobody made couture anymore, and Rudi Gernreich immediately put the obliging Peggy Moffitt in his monokini. Cue mod! (Cue the Who! On repeat!)

Veruschka, shot here for the August, 1968, issue of French Vogue by her then-lover, Franco Rubartelli, played a role in her shoots that today would be highly unusual for a model. She had significant input into, or sometimes even sole control, of the styling, the makeup, and the hair, and the images produced were generally collaborations between herself and the photographer.

It's hard to screw up showing quality fashion photography, framed on a wall. (Even the various viewer-insulting "contextual" gestures, like blaring pop music and the intrusive graffiti in the 90s room — perpetrated by hairdresser d'Ys, at Anna Wintour's instruction, which goes to show just how much control the noted museum patron has over the arts on display — do not entirely manage to quash the timeless beauty of, for example, Irving Penn's June 1950 Vogue cover shot of Jean Patchett. The presentation of the artifacts on the walls is fine. What I am still unclear about is the value of seeing the mannequin'd tableaux-morts featuring the actual designer clothes; if the point of this show is to celebrate models and their animating contributions to fashion and fashion photography, then, after seeing Veruschka in Yves Saint Laurent's safari collection, or Bert Stern's astonishing studio shot of Twiggy in the same designer's beaded midriff-dress, what end is served by seeing these same garments presented in dim exhibition suites, too far away to make out any detail of stitching or cut, on lifeless dummies that bear no resemblance to the women who once illuminated their beauty as articles of clothing? The safari dress as it hangs in the show isn't even styled properly. It lacks, in addition to Veruschka's firepower, its ring belt.

Even back in 1967, sample shoes didn't fit. Twiggy poses here, on her first trip to the U.S., for Vogue photographer Bert Stern.

If "Model as Muse" serves any useful purpose, it is to remind the viewer of fashion's headwaters, and of just how derivative fashion photography has become. In the first hall of the exhibit is Richard Avedon's iconic image of Sunny Harnett at the roulette table; in the last, is Stephen Meisel's 1998 version, with Carolyn Murphy. The elements are so much the same — blonde, cream dress, tuxedo'd gent, roulette — that the latter scrambles to rise to meet the criteria of "homage."

Sunny Harnett by Richard Avedon, for U.S. Harper's Bazaar, September, 1954.

In the 1960s suite, somewhere under the blaring of "My Generation" and the projected Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Magoo clip on repeat that overwhelms the room, there's a single page from the September, 1965 Harper's Bazaar.

Jean Shrimpton, by Richard Avedon.

It served to remind me of nothing so much as this Patrick Demarchelier image from last September's Vogue.

Catherine McNeil, by Patrick Demarchelier.

A picture of Lisa Taylor wearing Calvin Klein, by Helmut Newton for the May, 1975 issue of Vogue, hangs in the 1970s hall, near some mealy wall copy about 1970s gender roles. (A subject which any viewer would learn more about simply by pondering the viewer-viewed dynamic here between the languid, powerful-looking Taylor and the foregrounded male model, whose ass looks so unusually objectified.)

Lisa Taylor, by Helmut Newton.

Of course, as commenter LittleNemo pointed out last year when I posted a spread, Glen Luchford's September, 2008, Harper's Bazaar photo of Freja Beha Erichsen owes a debt to Newton.

Freja Beha Erichsen, by Glen Luchford.

This Demarchelier and the Luchford were not in the Met's show — the post-grunge years seem to be a curatorial afterthought, as they are represented in main by two outfits from a recent Louis Vuitton collection by principal exhibit sponsor Marc Jacobs and a bunch of pictures of Gisele Bundchen. But, whether all these archetypal images' latter-day derivations are physically present or not, you can only wander through these corridors for a matter of seconds before phrases like "anxiety of influence" come irrepressibly to mind.

It is, I am sure, not the reaction Koda, Wintour, Jacobs, and d'Ys would want. But these eminent lightweights, with their spraycans, their predilection for references to fictional movies about the industry, their ugly wigs and their uglier Nirvana soundtrack, their mis-spellings and their children's book fashion history — not to mention their craven elision of designer Azzedine Alaïa — did more than enough to earn it.

Perhaps someday a museum will be equal to mounting an intelligent investigation of the changing roles of fashion models, and fashion photography's relationship to the wider culture — its uneasily shifting placement on the continuum between high art and low commerce, between editorial content in magazines and clothes and makeup as we do them in everyday life. Perhaps someday, we'll see the model as muse. But that museum is not the Met, and that exhibition is not yet come.

The Model As Muse [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Related: Alaïa Pulls His Dresses From The Met Gala [On The Runway]
Model As Veteran [NY Times]

• Holy fuck: George Clooney, fashion designer?! [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• No: Just a prank pulled by some douchey Italians. [WWD, 1st item]
  
• Says Clooney: "This is a hoax. I have no connection whatsoever with any clothing line bearing my name, and more specifically GC Exclusive by George Clooney." Ok,ay well now we know. [Vogue UK]
  
• And how did Vivienne Westwood celebrate Easter? By marching for nuclear disarmament, of course. [Vogue UK]
  
• Whoah: they serve cake every Friday at the H&M design offices?! [WWD]
  
• The Banana Republic green line is, um, literally green. [Nylon]
  
• Nicole Richie is starting a jewelry line. Which is only a bit less offensive than starting a handbag line. [Off The Rack]

• I can't tell if it makes me happy or sad that Topshop is going to be featuring Helmut Newton photos in their stores. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Mazel tov to Saks Fifth Avenue for having the first-ever video catalog. Because now it's easier and more visually exciting to have expensive shit shilled at you! [MediaPost]
• New York Fashion Week: Moving to to the Port Authority, probs. [NYMag]
• Breaking news: Proctor & Gamble just bought Frederic Fekkai. [WSJ]
• India Fashion Week brought all the boys to the yard. [WWD, sub req'd]
• DSquared2: Doing eyewear. [Vogue UK]
• Perry Ellis: Doing a bed and bath line. [MediaPost]
• Versace helicopters! [Chic Report]
• No money for beauty treatments because of the recession? Just wipe some aspirin across your face. [BellaSugar]
• Leaping lizards, Batman! A smiling model! [Sassybella]
• I would actually wear a bra if I had a Twin Peaks Bra. [UPI]