• Madonna goes all Italian neorealist for spring's Dolce & Gabbana campaign. You'd almost swear these images were by Vittorio de Sica, not Steven Klein. The advertising shots ran as editorial content "previewed" in Italian Vanity Fair. [Swide]

• If you believe TMZ, Elin Nordegren might get back at Tiger in a way that would really hurt: by signing an endorsement deal with Puma. [TMZ]
• Well, that's a twist: Ungaro's C.E.O. is resigning, while Lindsay Lohan will remain with the house that so controversially benefited from her pasty-designing prowess. [WWD]
• Kimora Lee Simmons is not judging America's Next Top Model, not even as a guest, says her rep. [The Cut]
• Saks informed 116 employees at its cosmetics and fragrance counters that the company is eliminating their jobs as soon as the holidays are over. The move comes just weeks after the employees had voted to unionize. Merry Christmas! [NYPost]
• Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy just won the same $50,000 grant as Sapphire, author of Push. [WWD]
• Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady have yet to settle on a name for their week-old baby. Gisele vetoed the one they had picked out two days before giving birth, and they haven't been together long enough since then to really talk about it, says Brady. His only conditions are that it be "a traditional name" and something he can pronounce. [People]
• Zac Posen's collaboration with Target includes an actual gown that can be worn three ways, a tuxedo, and a red leather jacket. The print-heavy capsule collection will get the widest distribution of any Target designer collab yet. [Racked]
• Draw on your clothes lots as a kid? A dress designed by Berber Soepboer and Michiel Schuurman comes with fabric markers so the owner can add color to the eye-catching black and white print. [Daily Mail]
• Advertisements for Olay Definity eye cream featuring Twiggy were the subject of more than 700 public complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K., and yesterday, those complaints were upheld. The government watchdog found the heavily retouched advertisement was "misleading." Proctor & Gamble, which owns the Olay brand, voluntarily withdrew the offending ad and replaced it with one they claim has had no post-production in the eye area. [BBC]
• Biba is being revived. Again. [WWD]
• American Apparel is getting into the nail polish business. "We think this nail polish captures what American Apparel is all about — a Made in the USA, high-quality product in a beautiful range of colors. It's a venture of families in manufacturing, from the factory in which the polish is made to the Nail Lacquer logo created by Dov's uncle, the noted graphic designer Israel Charney," says a spokesperson. The 18 shades are named things like "Factory Grey" and "Hassid" and, naturally, "Downtown LA," and they cost $6 a bottle. Expect memos from Dov about appropriate nail and toenail styles imminently, retail drones. [Blackbook]
• Or you could buy this darling new shade of teal, called "Dickweed." [Refinery29]
• Grace Coddington granted a surprisingly revealing interview to the Times of London — and lets slip that she originally proposed Susan Boyle to play the wicked witch in her recent Hansel and Gretel shoot. Anna Wintour nixed the idea and favored Lady Gaga, whom Coddington describes thusly: "She turned up in a white rubber coat, stark naked underneath. No buttons, nothing — and completely you know, shaved." That's right, we just read about Lady Gaga's pubic hair in the pages of a daily paper! Coddington discusses Wintour (they can't fight "like a married couple," Coddington says, because "my marriages haven't been that successful"), front-row fashion week punditry ("I'm not prepared to crush some poor designer who's just spent six months slaving over a collection. I think it's horrible and they all talk about themselves. Plus, the questions are so stupid"), and the car crash that happened in her early 20s ("I remember bleeding all over a policeman and apologising for the mess. I had this driving mirror sticking in my head. I got to the hospital and they started sewing me up. Then someone said, what do you do and I said I'm a model and they said, hang on a minute. They took out all the stitches and made them more fine. Isn't that terrible? Because as a young girl, wouldn't I want the best anyway?"). Coddington admits to favoring British models — Lily Cole, Karen Elson — and says that models these days become successful so early that she sometimes thinks they have "no personality." Then she alludes to working with Karlie Kloss: "I was working with a very successful one the other day and she told me her parents were coming to take her on a trip to the place she loved best. I thought, where's she going — Africa? It was Disney World. And I thought, ‘Good for you. You're still a child'." (Kloss went to Disney World with her parents for her 17th birthday.) Erin O'Connor chimes in to praise Coddington for her work, and for "getting it past the censors." [ToL]
• Lacoste, via a new partnership, is planning to launch high-end handbags and accessories. [WWD]
• Hermès and Gucci each hosted their own name-brand equestrian competitions in the same week. Can you say, "Attempt to appeal to some kind of presumably authentic brand heritage?" [IHT]

Gevinson's meteoric rise — she made the cover of Pop magazine, and became a darling of Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind Rodarte, all before apparently graduating middle school — has culminated, for now, with a column in this month's Harper's Bazaar magazine. (Gevinson also blogs for Pop.) Yesterday, there was a flurry of Tavi-related news, with the announcement of the Harper's Bazaar column, and the release of a video about the Rodarte for Target collection that Gevinson had been working on since August.

Apparently, not everyone is enamored of this precocious 13-year-old's considerable talents. The Tavi Gevinson backlash has officially begun, with big-name editors like Elle's Anne Slowey and prominent fashion writer Lesley M. M. Blume leading the charge.

Gevinson's magazine piece is a pretty self-assured piece of work — and not even necessarily "for a 13-year-old." Her writerly voice is striking: school hallways have "berainbowed motivational posters" and the Mulleavy sisters sent "California condors, draped in burnt cheesecloths and distorted leather" down the runway. The column is a short, considered wrap-up of a fashion season for a general audience. Which means, apparently, that there's no way she could have written it.

Blume writes off Harper's Bazaar's hiring of the adolescent as "a smart marketing move" while Slowey characterizes it as "a bit gimmicky." Blume — who would no doubt prefer that Tavi were reading her young adult novels, rather than competing with her for freelance gigs — then refers to Tavi three times as "a novelty."

Slowey also dismisses Gevinson's writing, saying that the voice of the Harper's Bazaar story "doesn't sync up with" the way Gevinson talks about fashion in the Rodarte video. (This isn't exactly a fair comparison, since the Rodarte video is mostly off-the-cuff, and very few people talk the same way they sound in a piece of writing that they have the chance to revise and edit.) Bizarrely, Slowey says the video clip had "this vacantlike quality where it was like everyone was on Vicodin. Like everyone was uncomfortably dumb except for me."

"Will she end up on morning shows? Yes she will," Blume says. "I don't think she's a fashion sage, I think she's a novelty and I think she's going to be used as a marketing device as a novelty." Slowey doubts she writes her own work at all. "She's either a tween savant or she's got a Tavi team," notes the editor.

Ever since Gevinson's blog first was noticed by the mainstream press — beginning with another post on The Cut last July, followed by a rote online safety trend piece by the AP, and coverage in the New York Times Style Magazine — questions have been raised about Gevinson's involvement in the site that bears her name. "We're not sure if a 12-year-old is actually doing all this or if she's getting some help from a mom or older sister (some of the photos of her were definitely not self-shot)," wrote The Cut. (It turns out Gevinson sometimes uses — wait for it — a digital camera on a tripod with a timer to take pictures without encountering the dreaded self-taken arm-in-shot problem.) Steve Gevinson, her father, says he was only dimly aware of his daughter's blog before the media coverage. "I may have known, but to me it was a kind of a non-thing to know," says Gevinson père, a high school English teacher. "I didn't look at it. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing it."

But the main argument for Tavi Gevinson's authorship of her own blog and associated freelance work isn't her parents' proclamations of non-involvement, it's the consistency of her writerly voice, as evidenced by just over 18 months' worth of frequent posts. Whether she's talking about Darfur — her bat mitzvah service project benefited the charity STAND — or drawing connections between collections across seasons, or detailing a school art project that involved making a miniature model of a Jeff Koons dog, Gevinson sounds like nothing more or less than an uncommonly smart 13-year-old. Because that's what being 13 kind of is: you're young enough that having too much free time is still a problem — hence the ability to devote extraordinary levels of concentration to extracurricular obsessions — but old enough to be developing in curiosity and understanding of the grown-up world. Saying that Tavi Gevinson couldn't possibly be authoring her own work because of her age just underlines our society's innate prejudice against adolescents. Why should our expectations be set so low? And, perhaps, it shows just how willing we are to forget our earlier selves.

A quick survey of the writers for this site revealed a raft of early over-achievers. At 13, Latoya Peterson was writing poetry that people assumed she must have plagiarized. Anna North won an essay contest and met the mayor of Los Angeles. I sent a short story in to New Zealand's oldest literary journal, without mentioning my age — and they published it and sent me a check. Anna Holmes was picked by visiting Irish dance experts to perform a complicated jig, in tap shoes. Irin Carmon wrote a novel when she was 12, "which I hoped would be published before I was a teenager and the novelty wore off." Dodai Stewart had been in a commercial, recognized Andy Warhol on the street and took his picture, and got to light the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center one year. Then she wrote a screenplay, which she imagined would star Bruce Willis. Is it really that preposterous to think that Tavi Gevinson's talents and interests are her own?

I've always thought that a lot of Gevinson's appeal to the fashion crowd relies on the fact that she, with her unapologetic bookishness and self-described intense fashion "fangirling", reminds some of the major players of themselves, at her age. Perhaps this backlash is coming from people who remember how they were at 13, too — and recognize that they weren't at Tavi Gevinson's level of proficiency. Not by a long shot.

Editors Like Tavi But Don't Take Her Fashion Advice Seriously [The Cut]
Style Rookie [Official Site]
Exclusive: Rodarte, Tavi, And Target Team Up On Video [Style.com]
Tavi Gevinson Reviews The Collections [Harper's Bazaar]
Meet Tavi, The 12-year-old Fashion Blogger [The Cut]
Young Fashion Bloggers Are Worrisome Trend To Parents [AP]
Post Adolescents [NYT Style Magazine]

• Aw, Lily Cole: So young, so naive. Says the model: "One of the more useful consequences of my role as a model might be to encourage more people to ask questions about the global clothing industry and what we can do to change it... I've long had misgivings about the industry I work in....I could say shop less. I could say shop here. But I would be an annoying hypocrite, since I shop a lot and buy clothes without reading the labels." [Vogue UK]
  
• The ads for Britney's new fragrance, Believe? Yeah, uh, believe it or not, they look pretty altered. [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• Sienna and Savannah Miller's London flagship store for their line Twenty8Twelve is alive at last! It's officially open today. Come on, London ladies, won't you go and scope it out for us and send horror stories? Please? Bonus points if you can snag a pic of Sienna looking "like a Christmas tree." [Vogue UK]
  
• Prepare yourselves: Keira Knightley and her lone fake Chanel boob are going everywhere. [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• When asked by "The Fashion Informer" what trend they're loving right now, the Rodarte Girls replied, "Planting one's own vegetable garden." [Uh, in unison? Or what? Apparently it's unclear. -Moe.] Kate and Laura Mulleavy, one of you just earned a girl crush from us. [The Fashion Informer]

• Christina Ortiz is leaving the house of Brioni to become the chief womenswear designer for Ferragamo, succeeding Graeme Black. Mazel Tov, Christina! [LOL -Moe] Always nice to see a fellow chick assume the position of designing clothes for her fellow chicks — esp. when she's taking the reins from a man! [WSJ]
• Council of Fashion Designers of America president Diane von Furstenberg sent a letter this week to her fellow CFDA members encouraging them to "to promote health as beauty when working with models." LOL! [WWD, 2nd item]
• Matthew Williamson: the latest designer to turn over a large portion of his company to a private equity house AKA sell out for gobs of cash. [Fashion Wire Daily via Sassybella]