• Fran Drescher is launching a skincare line — called FranBrand — this fall on HSN. The products are organic and paraben-free, because, as Drescher puts it, "Women are schmearing stuff on their décolleté, wondering why we're all getting breast cancer..."

• "...Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep. So I'm sounding the alarm." Drescher, a survivor of uterine cancer, founded the organization Cancer Schmancer. (And she also taught us to love Loehmann's.) [The Cut]
• As we learned yesterday, London Fog confirmed Gisele Bundchen's pregnancy by the roundabout way of announcing it had airbrushed her 5-6 month belly out of its latest campaign "to protect her privacy." But the outerwear brand also released a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot, which includes footage of the raw, unretouched shots as they appear on the computer monitor. A side-by-side comparison reveals exactly what London Fog thought wouldn't move units this fall. [SassyBella]
• Bar Refaeli is allegedly seeing Israeli multi-millionaire Teddy Sagi. Sagi owns a company that makes software for Internet gambling sites, and the nicest thing the Daily Mail can say about him is that he "has a lovely smile." The supermodel's relationship with Leonardo Di Caprio ended earlier this year. [Daily Mail]
• Liya Kebede addressed the UN Secretary-General's Forum on the topic of maternal health. Writes the supermodel, "In times of economic crisis, it is tempting to turn inward, to ignore or postpone the problems of the outside world and focus on ourselves. But, if we hope to thrive once again, we must realize that there are no outside problems in today's interwoven, globalized world. Each mother who dies leaves behind a devastated family and weakened community that will eventually, somehow, affect each of us. Each mother who dies deepens the financial and social strain on our world and puts economic recovery further away. Mothers are our best stimulus package because they invest in their families and in our collective future." [HuffPo]
• SassyBella unearthed footage of Karen Mulder hosting an E! special in 1999. The Dutch model encounters a new girl, who, when she introduces herself, turns out to be an 18-year-old Adriana Lima. [SassyBella]
• The first pictures of Rad by Rad Hourani, the Canadian designer's diffusion line, are looking pretty good, at least for those who were already fans of Hourani's unisex, pared-down rocker aesthetic. "This is exactly the same thing," as his main line, Hourani confirmed. Only instead of costing thousands of dollars it costs hundreds. We need more of this. [WWD]
• The writer of the sometimes entertaining, sometimes savage, always fascinating fashion blog The Emperor's Old Clothes has revealed himself — as New York designer Eric Gaskins. Gaskins, after 22 years in business, was this week forced to close his doors because of the economy. [NYTimes]
• And in September, Daphne Guinness is releasing a signature scent with Comme des Garçons. Only unlike most celebrity perfumes lines, this is actually the distinctive fragrance Guinness has, herself, been mixing for years. "I'll be in airports or in a taxi and the driver will say, ‘What are you wearing?'" reports the heiress. [WWD]
• Designer Hussein Chalayan is "weirded out" by models with clothing lines, like Kate Moss, Amber Valetta, Erin Wasson, and Elle MacPherson: "If you have a really strong sense of style and people want to aspire to being like you, I can understand that. But if you really are doing it just because you think of yourself as a brand and you haven't had the training and you know nothing about clothes, it kind of demeans all the training that designers have had." Chalayan thought Kate Moss's line for Topshop was a poor effort. "I don't think it represented her, and I didn't think she worked hard enough. I even told her to her face." How did la Moss respond? "She said, ‘Oh, I'm just trying to do a light thing; I'm not trying to do anything serious.' But I said, ‘That's not the point.'" [WWD]
• In which case, add Jessica Stam to the list of models who've raised Chalayan's ire. The Canadian just announced a collaboration with Rag & Bone. [Style.com]
• Vogue's Lauren Santo Domingo, on being told her boss Anna Wintour had worn flats to a party in the Hamptons: "I wonder if that means we can wear flats to the office now?" [The Cut]
• Fashion blind item: "Which fantastical designer has a new man? She's ditched her long term fiance for an artist with prime real estate." We're with the commenters on this: signs point to Erin Fetherston, who hasn't been photographed in public with her longtime fiancé, Hedi Ferjani, since late April. [Fashionista]
• Ali Wise, the Dolce & Gabbana publicist who was arrested for hacking into the voicemail of a woman who was dating Wise's ex boyfriend, is no longer a Dolce & Gabbana employee. Which must seem like the least of her problems: Wise is facing felony charges of computer trespass and eavesdropping. [WWD]
• A well-written parsing of W magazine's cover story on model Lara Stone: "The fashion industry — and, in turn, the fashion media — have such a warped concept of slimness that a model like Lara Stone is so much larger than her contemporaries that they feel the need to explain her presence. If Stone's body is such an outlier, what does that say about the rest of us? Worse, the magazine saw fit to issue the disclaimer that Stone 'is, it should be noted, a very lithe five foot ten.' Why, yes, do note that! As if there's the slightest chance someone is going to look at these photos and think Stone needs to, like, slow down on the Cheetos." [GlossedOver]
• Lagardère, the French publishing company that owns Hachette Filipacchi Media, which owns the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, has denied that it is in talks to sell the title to rival Hearst, as had been reported in yesterday's New York Post. [WWD]
• Scott Nylund, Beyoncé's design director, comes from Owatonna, Minnesota. Which is where you can see an exhibit that spans his earliest childhood sketches of women in dresses, to his college fashion collection, to his creations for Beyoncé. [StarTrib]
• Freja Beha Erichsen says Karl Lagerfeld's house in Vermont — which recently served as the setting for the fall Chanel campaign she starred in with Heidi Mount — is a serious farm. With horses and chickens and — spitting llamas. Erichsen also praised Chanel for providing food backstage at its runway shows, which a lot of brands don't manage to do. [W]
• Fashion Meets Finance, the terrible event for douchebags and gold-diggers, is back. It's happening August 6th in — where else? — Murray Hill. [FMF]
• Will Ferrell has a Nike sneaker coming out in Japan. It's inspired by Anchorman's Ron Burgundy, that lovable asshole we met, uh, five years ago. [HighSnobiety]
• Timberland lost $19.2 million in the last quarter, a worse-than-expected result that came off the back of a 14% drop in sales, to $179.7 million. [WWD]
• Shiseido was even worse off — its profits declined 57.8%. [WWD]
• Likewise Hugo Boss, which lost $21.17 million in the last quarter. [WWD]
• Bare Escentuals profits also slid 20% in the same period. [WWD]
• Competitor Avon's profits fell 64.3% on revenues that shrank by 9.7%. Revlon's sales fell 12.2%, and its total profits declined to just $200,000, from $19.9 million one year earlier. [WWD]
• Bucking this downward trend is Tod's — the Italian leather brand reported a 3.4% increase in sales for this first six months of this year. [WWD]
• Ann Taylor wants to cut $30 to $40 million in costs by "right-sizing" its organization. No word yet on the number of people who will be laid off. [WWD]
• Three members of a multi-million-dollar New York counterfeiting ring received prison sentences, and a fourth was sentenced to probation by a federal judge. Michael Chu, the group's leader, was in 2005 ordered to pay $7 million in damages stemming from an unrelated counterfeiting case involving North Face jackets. This time, Chu, who imported fake Nike, Chanel and Burberry products, was sentenced to prison for just over 8 years. [WWD]

Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me."

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile.

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.

Supermodel Karen Mulder Arrested For Threatening To Attack Plastic Surgeon
"We Need To See You Without Your Bra, He Told Me. I Was 14. I Didn't Even Have Breasts Yet."

Earlier: The Not-Rape Epidemic: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune
Suicide And Abuse In Fashion's Top Echelon
Ruslana Korshynova, No Longer Anonymous

• Here we have it, the first official glimpse of Kanye West's Louis Vuitton sneakers, aka THE BEST SNEAKERS KNOWN TO MANKIND EVER. The $700+ kicks were inspired by the movie Dune, and Kanye's own mind-blowing genius. [Racked]

• Former supermodel Karen Mulder has been arrested in Paris for allegedly making death threats to her plastic surgeon. When she quit modeling, Mulder alleged that executives at Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves offered to politicians, influential media figures, and other officials. Mulder then was admitted into a psychiatric facility; Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men she accused of abusing her, paid for her treatment. Marie was earlier the focus of a BBC sting operation that filmed him offering a woman posing as a 15-year-old model 300 pounds for sex, and talking of his desire to seduce as many of the teenaged contestants in the Elite Model Look competition, which was how Mulder originally shot to fame, as he could. Marie remains the head of Elite Paris. [Telegraph]
• Twiggy is back as the face of Olay — a company she first modeled for in 1985. [Daily Mail]
• Blake Lively would like you all to know that getting dressed is something she manages to do all by herself. "It would probably help if I had a stylist, but I don't," the actress said. Taking sole responsibility for that Met Ball monstrosity really is kind of ballsy. [WWD]
• Levi's is touting its button-fly 501s with a new America-themed, Ryan McGinley-shot advertising campaign. [NYTimes]
• Man cleavage: Is there a limit to how much you can take? Glamour wants to know. [Glamour]
• Lovebirds Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone have had to push their nuptials back to August, because of the former's work schedule. They still plan to tie the knot in Provincetown, where Robert Duffy has a home. [WWD]
• Rejoice, "older" women, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Herein we dispense with the notion that women of a certain age "can't" wear florals, short skirts, bikinis, dresses that show cleavage, especially "pufftastic" cleavage such as older woman Liz Hurley's, and tops that reveal bare arms, and then we append a series of limits and guidelines on how, precisely, such items should be worn. The rules to dressing are dead. Long live the rules to dressing! [ToL]
• Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell was seen on the premises of Topshop HQ, and that must mean she is in talks to design a namesake clothing line with the British retailer. [Mirror]
• Bulgari's new scent, Blu II, is inspired by "a modern vision of the color blue" and advertised by Laetitia Casta. [NST]
• Michael Kors' Fall 2009 ad campaign stars...Carmen Kass and Noah Mills. Add Kors to the list of designers sticking with the tried-and-true this recession, then. [WWD]
• Hartmarx has lost three top executives. The bankrupt company, which was just bought by the private equity fund Emerisque, just had its senior vice president and CFO, the president of its women's wear division, and the group president of luxury. Emerisque takes control of the company on July 7. [ChicagoSunTimes]
• Johan Lindeberg, the founder of J. Lindeberg, has reluctantly left his label over creative differences with Proventus, the Swedish investment firm which has owned the business since 2007. Proventus hired a new design director without seeking Lindeberg's input, and the women's wear line which was supposed to relaunch under the direction of his wife, Marcella, never materialized. The partners have designed Justin Timberlake's William Rast line for the past three seasons and earned plaudits for it from the fashion press — but rather than make William Rast their sole creative outlet, the Lindebergs plan to launch a new line, called Paris68. It'll feature made-to-measure tailoring for men, dresses for women, and high-end denim and leather jackets for both sexes. [WWD]
• Children's wear retailer Best & Co. has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. [Crain's]
• The Met is screening three fashion-themed movies as part of its "Model as Muse" exhibit. And even better than the films are the people the museum has arranged to discuss them: model Carmen Dell'Orefice will be on hand for Funny Face on July 10, Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? will be discussed by its title actress, Dorothy McGowan, and Isaac Mizrahi will talk about the 1995 documentary that features him, Unzipped. Tickets are just $10. [Met]
• Mizrahi is also curating an art exhibit at Manhattan's Julie Saul gallery. The summer group show features works from Maira Kalman, Julia Sherman, Wayne Thiebaud, Donna Chung and Jane Freilicher, and it's open until September 12. [WWD]