Collins is ready with examples:

"Do you want me to hold something?" he will inquire. "Are you cold?" "Would you like a biscuit?" Adrian Hallewell, a chauffeur in Yorkshire, who has known Bailey since he was a boy, told me, "He keeps a low profile, does he, Christopher."

It's interesting that Burberry chose Bailey — whose father was a carpenter, and whose mother worked as a window-dresser at Marks & Spencer — as its new creative director in 2001, at a time when the venerable English house was trying, artfully and carefully, to distance itself from the appropriation of its brand by a distinctly lower-class kind of customer.

In order to revive Burberry from a beside-the-point position as a legacy brand, then-C.E.O. Rose Marie Bravo made Burberry and its distinctive beige-and-red check ubiquitous — but the paradox of an upscale-but-instantly-recognizable brand is that if it becomes too popular, or suffers from the wrong kind of exposure, the hard-won "upscale" image can evaporate. (Louis Vuitton waged a long-term fight to win back its identification with exclusivity by ending department store sales in favor of only own-store retail in the 1980s, but some would argue that the company's famous monogram — or imitations of it — metastasized to a brand-harming extent during the recent economic boom.)

In England, Burberry had gone from outfitting royalty, military top brass, and explorers to being worn by reality television personalities and second-rate soap opera stars making their first public appearances following septum-repair surgeries. (That would be Danniella Westbrook, of EastEnders, pictured above in 2002 with her daughter.) It used to count Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Sir Ernest Shackleton as customers; by 2002, it had Jade Goody and a contingent of xenophobic soccer hooligans who were particularly fond of a $90 plaid hat.

Burberry stopped making the hat. It also began to devote much of its energies to policing its brand — no more pet products "in the famous Burberry design," or "Chavalier" Vauxhall Chevaliers with customized Burberry paint jobs. (Incidentally, virtually every tacky-Burberry example Collins offers up, including the "Chavalier," Westbrook, and a photo of a woman with Burberry-check acrylic nails, was highlighted in a thoughtful post about the history of the brand and its increasing identification with "chav" and football culture on the blog Finally Woken last November.) After new C.E.O. Angela Ahrendts took over in 2006, she discontinued many licenses and product lines she felt did not represent that brand well, or distracted from its core luxury image: "Burberry used to do little bottles of whiskey," said Bailey, "We're not experts on whiskey, so why the hell would we do whiskey?" Burberry Prorsum, the high-end line founded under Bravo's watch, is now the company's moody torch-bearer. But Bailey, who is understandably sensitive to any accusation of classism in the company's repositioning, especially in the class-fraught British context, is hesitant to cast the change in terms of sidelining "undesirable" customers. "I think that probably a lot of it was counterfeit," says Bailey, of the various Burberry-ish clothing items the paparazzi snapped in the early 2000s. In fact, the designer counts spotting one of his authentic designs in "a kind of skanky pub" as a highlight of his career, so far:

Few things please Bailey more than encountering his work in the nooks and crannies of the British experience — a trenchcoat draped over a Westminster politician's arm, lining out; a checked scarf, worn as a hijab, in the immigration queue at Gatwick. A small triumph of his career was spotting a checked purse that he had designed tucked under a table at a bar in Yorkshire. "It was this kind of skanky pub, and all of a sudden I was like, 'It's actually amazing that this little baby thing that I work on with my gang goes out into the world and then finds its way back to my home town,' " he said. "You want to know the story behind it."

Before coming to Burberry, Bailey worked at Donna Karan, and for another great recent fashion revival case, Gucci under Tom Ford. Although he didn't take much from Ford's sexy Cosmo-cover-line aesthetic, Bailey undoubtedly experienced an object lesson in how to design a venerable house away from the brink of irrelevancy.

Like almost every luxury company known to man, Burberry is facing hard times right now because of the economic crisis; since last fall, the company has laid off employees, closed factories, and still saw a 2008 loss of $8 million. (Perhaps partly because, as Collins notes, the company moved into expensive new purpose-built headquarters in London last November.) Nonetheless, Burberry has fared well enough since listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2004. Today, the company made the news when it was forecast to crack the FTSE 100 by the end of this week. With the news that Jaeger-reviver Harold Tillman is buying the fusty, bankrupt British classic outerwear label Aquascutum — with plans for a grand shake-up in place, according to British Vogue — it's clear that there are plenty of others seeking to meet the same challenges Burberry faced so recently.

Check Mate: Burberry's Working-Class Hero [New Yorker]
Harold Tillman Acquires Acquascutum [Vogue UK]
Burberry To Check In To FTSE 100 [FT]
Thinking About Buying Burberry? [Finally Woken]

• How cool are these Charlie Brown New Balance sneakers? Cool enough that we wish they weren't just for kids. [WWD]
• A London artist has created Kate Moss and Agyness Deyn paper dolls which look frighteningly like the real thing. [Pipeline.Refinery29]

• Your daily dose of the horrible: American Apparel shiny leggings for children. [Fashionista]
• Police in France have arrested 25 suspects in relation to last December's $118 million jewel heist at Harry Winston. Members of the alleged ring had been under police surveillance for months, and when arrangements had been made between the gang and some prospective buyers, the authorities swooped in. In addition to the 25 arrests, police found weapons and $345,000 in cash. [AP]
• Nicole Richie swears that her next collection for her House of Harlow 1960 jewelry line will be completely different than the first. In fact, it'll be "focusing more on old English, equestrian and more sophisticated looks" than the flea-market-inspired first trip out the gate. Richie's shoe and accessory lines, meanwhile, will be ready for Spring 2010. [People]
• Dolce & Gabbana, newly internet-savvy, uploaded Fall 2009 Dolce & Gabbana and D&G campaigns to its just-launched website. Steven Klein shot Mariacarla Boscono, Edita Vilkeviciute, and Heidi Mount at a casino for Dolce & Gabbana, and Mario Testino shot Katie Fogarty, Sara Blomqvist, Stephanie Rad, Hanna Rundlof, and Ragnhild Jevne for D&G. Heidi Mount also wears a giant pink Margiela-inspired fur and poses like an ape in one. [Fashionologie]
• The New Yorker sure knows how to give a bad restaurant review. Taking in the "sterile" and "unexuberant" fare at Armani's restaurant-within-a-store on Fifth Avenue, Lauren Collins writes: "At the bar, a manager and a bartender argued, loudly. The dispute seemed to be about a pen. Their passion did not extend to a pair of women who were waiting for a table, or, once the women were seated, to their full glasses of wine, paid for and awaiting transferral." [NYr]
• A historic Christian Science church on Park Avenue took a look at its dwindling congregation and finances, and its stellar real estate, and do the obvious thing: allow a catering company to use its building to host events, in return for necessary repairs, money, and continued access for regularly scheduled services. Even though the kind of events we're talking about here — shindigs with Sir Paul McCartney, Oscar de la Renta runway shows — are hardly Bushwick artist loft keggers, the Park Avenue set has gone all guerrilla in its opposition to the church's activities. One neighbour even parked her car in the middle of the avenue to block the access of de la Renta's show's guests. Is it too much to hope she was towed? [NYTimes]
• A maker of hypoallergenic beauty products has decided to associate its line with the 11th birthday of Malia Obama. Tacky. [US News]
• Natural cosmetics purveyor Dr. Hauschka is apparently swamped by demand — but, because of quality control concerns and its business philosophy based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner (no, really), it's unwilling to expand too quickly. [Reuters]
• The website for MDLR, Moises de la Renta's fashion line, is now live. [MDLR]
• French documentarian Loïc Prigent, who made the excellent Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton and Signé Chanel, about the putting together of a Chanel couture collection, has a new series showing on Sundance starting September 10. Prigent's camera follows Sonia Rykiel, Proenza Schouler, Karl Lagerfeld, and Jean-Paul Gaultier in the last 36 hours before their respective runway shows. (It's a good thing Prigent is sensitive to the dramatic tension of a smoke break, because there'll be a lot of them.) Rykiel's show is her 40th anniversary extravaganza in Paris last October, Prigent finds Proenza Schouler and Fendi, designed by Lagerfeld, at the Fall/Winter 2009 collections of this Spring, and he'll catch up with Gaultier at couture week in Paris next month. I'm marking my freaking calendar. [Glamour]
• Looks like there's been a breakdown at Alessandro Dell'Acqua. The designer, whose namesake label has been owned since 2003 by Cherry Grove, an Italian corporation that produces high-end clothing, released an open letter informing the fashion world that he, Alessandro Dell'Acqua, would like to publicly distance himself from the Alessandra Dell'Acqua men's Spring/Summer or women's Pre-Spring collections, the former of which is about to walk in Milan, because he hasn't been given the opportunity to do anything beyond submit sketches to Cherry Grove. Alessandro Dell'Acqua lost his job with the Italian house Malo after holding it for less than a year following Itierre's bankruptcy; this angry letter reads like a gold-plated invitation to be fired from his own label, too. [FWD]
• Once every media outlet had dutifully covered the "outrage" over the Steven Meisel-shot Calvin Klein "foursome" billboard in SoHo, the brand replaced it with a tamer shot of a girl in a red bikini. Racked has a picture. [GoG]
• Well, lookie here: a male model who admits to having to maintain a diet to be catwalk skinny. [NYTimes]
• Everyone knows Abercrombie & Fitch has been struggling in the recession, and losing market share to lower-priced competitors like Aéropostale and The Buckle. Besides quietly breaking its rule against discounting its own stock and closing its Ruehl chain, the company hadn't exactly said what it was planning to do to reverse the tide that saw its May same-store sales slide a whopping 28% — until now. The proffered solution? Two hundred and ten store leases, which comprise some 20% of the chain's total, are up for renewal over the next two years. Abercrombie thinks it might save money by not renewing all of them. Revolutionary. [TS]
• A three-story Adidas factory in India was engulfed by flames on Tuesday night. There were no casualties. [HindustanTimes]
• Talbots may have had to cut 370 jobs, eliminate its 401(k) matching contributions, and suspend its quarterly stock dividend, but that won't stop it paying CEO Trudy Sullivan $1.2 million this year. Richard O'Connell, the struggling company's real estate and legal executive, will also get a 23% raise, to $500,000. [TS]
• Gen Art, an organization which supports emerging fashion talent in the U.S. and has helped launch the careers of such names as Vena Cava and Zac Posen, is in a bad spot financially. Already reeling from layoffs, the founders hope to raise $250,000 in ticket sales and donations for their 15th anniversary party tomorrow night. Gen Art needs another $500,000 after that to continue its operations. [WWD]

The Boston-born Cunningham started shooting street fashion in 1966, when a photographer friend of the young fashion journalist gave him a $35 camera and advised him to use it like a notebook. Captivated by the New York's clothing soup him ever since, Cunningham has photographed a weekly "On The Street" fashion column for the Sunday Styles section ever since a couple good shots of Greta Garbo's nutria coat caught the section editor's eye in 1978. Cunningham has a passionate, discriminating, but stubbornly democratic love of fashion. He's as likely to be captivated by the turn of a workman's trouser cuffs as he is by the twist of a Balenciaga heel; despite a lifetime spent working in the industry, starting off as a stocker at Bonwit Teller, Cunningham retains an outsider's eye. He loves shooting on 5th Ave., where he says you can see the whole world go by, if you're patient enough. But he's been known to get on trains to go clear across the city if he thinks he's missed a shot that'll fit with his week's theme.

Lauren Collins, who profiled Cunningham in this week's Style issue of the New Yorker, reveals that the photographer, who turns 80 this month, lives alone in the Carnegie Hall Tower. He sleeps on a piece of foam that tops a board propped up by milk crates, and has access to a shared bathroom and kitchen. He is most often dressed in a utilitarian blue cotton smock — like those some garment workers still wear, with thimbles and embroidery scissors in the pockets and needles holding many colored threads in a row down one sleeve — and he generally gets around town on his red bicycle. When he travels to Paris, his editor at the Times, Trip Gabriel, reports that Cunningham "insists on staying at a cheapo hotel that has no phones in the rooms." He takes all his pictures with a well-used Nikon; in the years since the Times photojournalism department went digital, Cunningham has processed his film at a 1-hour photo lab on 43rd St.

Cunningham is a quiet man who works in the loud, twinned industries of fashion and media. But what captivates him is still the simple aesthetic joy of noticing what people wear, and identifying commonalities. "I don't really see people — I see clothes," he says. And he has little patience for the sky-is-falling rhetoric of America's allegedly faltering style. "People say everybody's a slob. Ridiculous! There are marvelously dressed women you see at a quarter to eight, going to business. When people say fashion is no more, they're ridiculous! It's as good as it ever was."

Cunningham has perfect recall of individual ensembles — what they were, when they were worn, what the person was doing — that were of particular interest to him, going all the way back to the 1960s. "I'm looking for something that has beauty," he says, simply. And he hasn't the heart for criticizing the sartorial choices of private citizens. "Dos and Don'ts? I don't think there are any don'ts! What right does one have?"

In the profile, Collins mentions that Cunningham has often been called a "fashion monk" — but instead classifies him as an oblate, "a layperson who has dedicated his life to the tribe without becoming a part of it." And it's this crucial distinction that sets him apart from the current popular crop of street style bloggers, whose work Cunningham's pioneering in many ways made possible. There's often a mind-numbing sameness to the outfits recorded on various of the well-read blogs that chronicle the styles of the world's cities; it's the young, good-looking subject, wearing the cool outfit with the 80s thrift-store touches, shooting a doleful look down the camera's lens. Reading their offerings, the overwhelming impression is one of a flattened world where all the hip young things have the same ideas about how to dress, whether they happen to live in Mexico City or Berlin. The stylistic tranche being diaried is limited. You can't imagine Jak & Jil finding anything of interest at the Puerto Rican Day Parade or in the outfits of tourists — two things Cunningham loves.

Although a few street style blogs, like Garance Doré's, seem to share Cunningham's enthusiasm for fashion as it's worn by real people — and his knack for identifying unthought-of trends — a lot of street style photobloggers behave as though they're (im)patiently waiting for their place at the fashion table. And why shouldn't they? Scott Schuman, aka the Sartorialist, has been featured in a Gap campaign and himself photographed the new DKNY Jeans campaign. Jak & Jil's Tommy Ton (who says of Doré and Schuman, "They're interested in taking a beautiful photograph. I'm just a freak for the Balmain and the Balenciaga!") nonetheless attracted the attention of the Asian retailer Lane Crawford, who asked Ton to step into Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's shoes and shoot, presumably at least somewhat beautiful, images for its next campaign.

Cunningham eschews such trappings of the profession. He lives for the next great shot, the next strange confluence of colors and shapes, the next windstorm that turns umbrellas into spiny exoskeletons, the next rainstorm that shows the wealthy that the waters don't magically part. "Oh, it's marvelous — it just rearranges the whole fashion scene when the wind blows down from the top of the Avenue," says Cunningham. "Six-, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and they're all in the slush — hey, it's pretty peculiar! Nothing like a good blizzard, kid, and you get pictures."

Which is not to say that Cunningham doesn't speak fluent couture — he can spot a Dior or a Chanel at fifty paces, and he has a particular love of the more eccentric labels, like Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela. (In 2000, when hip-hop fans started wearing their sweatshirts "abstractly, with the neck hole on the shoulder, or with the sleeves dangling down the back," Collins writes, Cunningham compared the look to the Japanese avant-garde deconstructionist designers.) But despite his depth of insider knowledge, or perhaps because of it, it's fashion qua fashion that interests him, not the label per se. That might be the biggest difference between Cunningham and Ton.

Cunningham is looking forward to seeing, over the coming months, how people are going to reflect the changing economy in their daily dress. "Fashion, the people wearing it, will do it before they even know what they're doing. You don't know yet, it's just starting to gel, but there will be a style. You watch, you'll see something. There's the old saw about hemlines. Who knows? It's only in the future you can know. You just have to stay out on the street and get it. It's all here."

Man On The Street [New Yorker — sub req'd]
Bill Cunningham [NY Times]

Many women are transformed by Dangin's computer stylus, which sits in a basement laboratory at "Box", his four-story, Manhattan Photoshop fortress: In addition to Drew, there is the trophy wife with the "flat" face and "short" legs; the shoulder blade found "in a recent project at W"; the cast of the Sopranos; Prada models; "a famous actress in her late twenties"; a "crunchy"-faced model; "another well known actress"; "an actress with a movie coming out this spring"; Kate Moss; models Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman; Madonna. And then there is model Christy Turlington, who, Collins explains, "needs the least help".

Collins, interestingly (purposefully?) glosses over Dangin's flaws as adeptly as he reshapes a model's nasiolabial folds. Her interview subjects, she explains, liken him to "a translator, an interpreter, a conductor, a ballet dancer articulating choreographed steps". (She compares his work to that of painters Jasper Johns and John Currin; he is, she later explains solemnly, "savantlike".) Collins also seems almost resolutely disinterested in exploring Dangin's role in perpetuating unrealistic standards of beauty and when a photograph ceases to be a photograph and becomes, what Redbook editor Stacy Morrison once said, "an image": most of the critics and/or experts of photo manipulation Collins quotes are all long-dead; the only living people she does quote are all fans of Dangin; and she all but skips over the news that Dangin retouched Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" advertisements. And when she finally gets around to asking Dangin about the work he does and how it affects and defines those aforementioned standards of beauty, she follows his explanation — "I'm just giving the supply to the demand" — with a cynical parenthetical announcing, "fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements." (Yeah, tell that to Newsweek's Jessica Bennett, who put up this story on Friday, quoting a NYC stylist as saying "those young kids looking at the magazines, they're dreaming of something that doesn't exist.")

The work Dangin does, has, not surprisingly, made him very rich. (He owns homes in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and St. Bart's; in addition to the cover portrait of Barrymore, Dangin, with the help of favorite Photoshop tools as the smudge brush, the warping tool, and the clone stamp, retouched — or "tweaked" — 107 advertisements and 36 fashion photographs in the March 2008 issue of Vogue alone.) It has also, interestingly, made him somewhat of a god among the egotistical, easily-unimpressed bigwigs in the fashion and photography industries, who defer to his whims without a second thought. His list of clients is both impressive and iconic: Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchelier; Annie Leibovitz ("Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you're good"); Inez and Vinoodh; Craig McDean, who says he gives Dangin "carte blanche" to basically do whatever he wants. Whether Dangin enjoys all the adulation and deference that comes his way, Collins does not make clear (nor does she explore the fact that from the photographers to the photo retouchers to the art directors, images of women in fashion magazines are manipulated and decided upon by men before they ever appear before a female fashion editor's eyes.) As for the things Dangin doesn't enjoy — on the women whose photographs he alters, that is — they include the following: ropy blue veins; bony temples; fleshy chins; bumps of all sorts; big knees; "slumpy" legs; bad pores. Oh, and of course, fat asses.

Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

"I like her in this one, because she looks very natural," Dangin said.

"Yes," Demarchelier agreed. "In that other pose, she looks like an actress."

"But she's also very good here," Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

"Yes, she's very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?"

"No, no. I'm going to keep it for the ass," Dangin said.

"Maybe we could redo the ass."

"Yes, the ass is quite heavy."

Related: Picture Perfect [Newsweek]

Earlier: Photoshop of Horrors
Vogue Cover Girl Drew Barrymore Has Been Powerfully Photoshopped
Our Fifteenth Minute: That Faith Hill Photo Wasn't Actually A Photo, Redbook Editor Explains

At twelve, Donatella had her first highlights— "'Lighter and lighter and lighter,' I told them!" she recalled. At fourteen, she was suspended from school for wearing eyeliner to rival Cleopatra's; by sixteen, she was a platinum blonde.

It seems, however, that it is a lifetime of loss as much as a life lived among luxury that created the woman known as Donatella Versace. Collins tells us that Gianni wasn't the only Versace child to have died a premature death: The eldest child, Tina, died before Donatella was even born. (Knee-scrape. Tetanus. Almost-instant death.) Says Donatella on the 10th anniversary of her older, more-famous brother's death:

What happened to him, you know, this is a tragedy. He die, he's not alive anymore. This is really the worst thing that can happen to you, to lose your life. So I say to myself, 'You're going to make it. Grow up, you're a grownup here, you can do it.'

You know, you think you're in control, and you try to stop, but you're not. What happened was I was in a severe depression. I start to isolate myself from everybody, and I would see my children suffer seeing my life that, but I didn't have the strength to talk about it....Elton [John] said, 'Donatella, you know what, we're not forcing you, but you need to go to rehab. There is a plane waiting for you.' But I say yes. I was ready. I had no idea what rehab was, but I left that night.

Mondo Donatella [New Yorker]