In April, a French Vogue shoot featured a "pregnant" model smoking and tossing a baby doll over her shoulder.

As Tatiana pointed out, if American Vogue were to portray the concept of motherhood, you'd get models holding babies and looking serene — "the mother of all clichés." She added: "French Vogue found the tenderness in mothering, but also the humor, the wackiness, the suggestion that it isn't perhaps natural to all women, and the surprise."

Additionally, in the July issue of Bazaar, MIlla Jovovich played a distracted working mom.





Obviously these shots differ in that there is a man present, but they certainly don't evoke the beaming, wholesome, Norman Rockwell concept of motherhood.

The new Italian Vogue shots include alcohol and cigarettes:






…As well as just plain-old avoidance:

There are a few ways to look at these images. Blogger Gwen from Sociological Images notes,

…Most countries don't share the American middle-class demonization of smoking or our concerns about the effects of second-hand smoke on children, or the idea that drinking cocktails around the kids is problematic (and remember, we used to give kids alcoholic drinks and Marlboros were marketed to moms). And many people don't believe that children need to be tended to every time they cry or look unhappy–that's a culturally and historically specific parenting ideal.

But a reader named Claire points out:

The message that motherhood might produce boredom, irritation, irreverence, and drive one to consume massive quantities of alcohol is one that I find refreshing, rather than appalling. Although this spread glamorizes the condition of being trapped within the confines of domesticity, can we not also interpret it as depicting the failure of domesticity and motherhood as a norm? And isn't the critique of a norm a productive act?

Good point. And here some more questions: Do these magazine editors want to start a dialogue about deconstructing the visual clichés of motherhood? Or do they just want edgy photoshoots? Does it matter? And even if they're not neglecting the kids — why all the bored, distracted moms?

Rich Moms Are Bad Moms: Vogue Italia's "Vagaries of Fashion" [Sociological Images]

Earlier: French Vogue And Ambivalent Modern Motherhood
Mr. Big Plays Housewife? How Bazaar

• Filling Lily Donaldson's shoes, Emma Watson, 19, will be the face of Burberry. Said designer Christopher Bailey: "Her charm and intellect and brilliant sense of fun made the whole shoot feel like a picnic on the Thames." [Telegraph]

• Celebrities: They're Better Than Us! Their World Environment Day parties may be sponsored by Lexus and hosted by Stella McCartney's West Hollywood store, but when it gets down to it, their commitment to the greening of the planet is breathtaking: "I grow my own food and I'm trying to figure out how to make my own fuel," remarked Darryl Hannah. Emily Deschanel said she celebrated the day as follows: "I ate vegan meals. I drove my hybrid. I used environmentally efficient lightbulbs. The list is endless." Endless. (What's on your list, huh?) Rosario Dawson, for her part, "didn't use plastic bags at the farmers' market." There are levels of virtue to which we, mere mortals, cannot aspire. [Style.com]
• British accessories designer Lulu Guinness wore a purple dress with googly eyes on it to the 20th anniversary party of her label. We're still waiting to see her make the Hamburgler look hot. [The Cut]
• Elle MacPherson, whose Notting Hill home has been on the market for more than a year without attracting a buyer, has slashed its price by £2 million. The seven-story house is now available at the bargain price of £7.5 million. [Daily Mail]
• Peaches Geldof was apparently having a sleepover with Courtney Love, and decided to Twitter their little tête-à-tête. Including a reference to Love's rumored new clothing line, which, and we repeat the source here is Peaches Geldof's Twitter, supposedly includes such touches as "cotton ribbed body suits," "cashmere harem pants" and "stitching a ruby into every outfit." [Grazia]
• Naming your label "Comme des Garçons" ("Like boys") is one thing, but we never thought that actually meant Rei Kawakubo had anything against women per se. And yet: "I never felt my work had anything to do with being a woman," said the designer. "I am not a feminist. I was never interested in any movement as such. I just decided to make a company built around creation, and with creation as my sword, I could fight the battles I wanted to fight." [IHT]
• Christian Lacroix, who has been designing for the bankrupt fashion house that bears his name without pay for months now, has made the sad announcement that when the company leaves bankruptcy court, all that may remain is a licensing operation. With no couture. (This despite the fact that the lower-priced lines Christian Lacroix Jeans and Bazar were hemorrhaging money, and have already been shut down.) Couture is so much the essence of the Lacroix fashion identity that we shudder to think of the name existing only to brand sunglasses and perfumes, like a revenant. One of his couture clients offered to buy the company and its debts, but Lacroix turned her down. [WWD]
• In a step towards vertical integration, Hermès C.E.O. Patrick Thomas announced the company is now breeding its own crocodiles. Not to release upon its enemies — one chomp and you're dead meat, Prada It-bag — but to speed up their production of exotic skin bags, which fetch up to $48,000, or some of the highest prices of any of their accessories. How are crocodiles farmed, you ask? Very carefully! In separate crates, to stop them biting each other and damaging their hides. "It can take three to four crocodiles to make one of our bags so we are now breeding our own crocodiles on our own farms, mainly in Australia," said Thomas. Hermès' leather goods division has continued to see robust demand for its products during the downturn. The company even added another 50-100 leather workers to its staff of 2,000 France-based craftspeople so far this year. [Reuters]
• Also chasing the tippety-top of the market: Saks Fifth Avenue. The troubled retailer is set to open its $30 million designer showcase floor, which will be filled with the likes of Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, and Armani. No doubt the pieces will be chosen very carefully, to avoid a repeat of last Fall's debacle. [WWD]
• What does an American Apparel store in China look like, you wonder? Just like one in SoHo, only empty. [Racked]
• Starting July 5, Neiman Marcus will shorten the opening hours of half of its 40 stores. [WWD]
• Even after offloading J. Jill to a private equity fund for a quick $75 mill, all is far from well at Talbots. The retailer just announced its quarterly results, and it lost $23.6 million, on the back of same-store sales that fell by 26.9%, during the period ended May 2. It plans to eliminate a full 20% of its workforce. Three hundred and seventy corporate-level workers were already laid off in February. [Forbes]

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]

Ah, yes. Smoking is one of Carine Roitfeld's Favorite Things; she once told the Guardian she wouldn't want Anna Wintour's job because in America, you can't put a smoking model on your cover. So it comes as little surprise that she'd find an excuse to show pregnancy clope à bec.

Is this an editorial about the tribulations, joys and ambiguities of contemporary motherhood? It certainly recognizes that we all have to juggle a lot of roles.

Feeding baby can be such a chore.

Adding another layer of weirdness to this shoot? The fact that Lily Donaldson dates Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, Carine Roitfeld's son.

Those Prada shoes are not recommended past the first trimester.

Chanel, on the other hand, is forever.

I love that this editorial isn't Lily Donaldson's usual prettified English-rose thing. Plus, it's cracking me up. But I'm a little bent. If American Vogue themed a shoot around "motherhood", all we'd get would be posed portraits of Liya Kebede with her baby, looking angelic, Natalia Vodianova with her baby, looking beatific, Milla Jovovich with her baby, looking serene — it'd be a 10-page snoozefest, the mother of all clichés. French Vogue found the tenderness in mothering, but also the humor, the wackiness, the suggestion that it isn't perhaps natural to all women, and the surprise.

You just know Patrick Demarchelier was snapping away when Carine said, in her smoky French Barbara Walters diction, "Leelee? Now we do somesing a leedle osé. Shoot up widt zee bottul. Pretend shoot up. Peuhfect. Yes."

Can you imagine the reader outrage if a similarly unsentimental editorial take on motherhood ever slipped past the censors at Condé Nast USA? Sometimes it's like Carine Roitfeld's sense of glee at not having to edit for American Vogue's outsized sense of propriety just seeps through the page.

• Madonna's the new face of Vuitton. Do we sense a French accent in the making? [Style.com]
• Wait, isn't Lagerfeld on a low-carb diet? Apparently not in Vermont. Says one lackey, "He requested seven loaves of Pennsylvania Wheat Bread and a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter to be brought directly from New York to the set...My only job was bringing him the bread and the fake butter. Karl paid me $500 to do it, plus he paid off my $200 speeding ticket." [New York Post]
• Hillary Clinton buys three coats, a sweater at Burberry. Glad we're respecting her privacy. [New York Daily News]

• Merger costs take a toll on American Apparel's net. [WWD]
• Michael Stipe designs polo shirt for Lacoste. He “created a monumental two tone photographic image depicting a crowd at a stadium concert from the perspective of a performer on the stage.” [Rolling Stone]
• If you feel an overpowering desire to see the behind-the-scenes workings of Nick Knight shooting Lily Donaldson for V Magazine, you're in luck: they're livestreaming it. [Boing Boing]
• If that thrills you, you may well want to add this $750 Steven Meisel puzzle to your Christmas list. [Fashionista]
• Kenneth Cole launching a politically-themed billboard? What a shocker! The latest is Obama-themed: "A precedent we can be proud of." [BrandWeek]
• J. Crew's shares at an all-time low. Is the high-end gamble not paying off? [Crains]
• And yup, Ann Taylor hits 8-year low. [Crains]
• Tommy Hilfiger gets back into children's clothes. [WWD]
• Teen Vogue's Fashion University seems fun, expensive, exhausting. Who needs real college? [Teen Vogue]
• More counterfeits were seized in New York this year than ever before. A crackdown, or an increase in demand? [WWD]
• Here's a recipe for depressing! Lifetime Television + "dress-up online games." [New York Times]
• Did you catch Sofia Coppola's Miss Dior Cherie ad? Yes, it looked cool and had rad music. [Fashionologie]
• This poor British model has threatened suicide. [The Sun]
• Larry Birkhead is auctioning off some of Dannielynn's clothes for charity. Which is laudable and all but...who's gonna buy them? [ET]
• Be vigilant! Apparently lots of department stores are having stealth sales! [WWD]
• Wow! Europe's largest costumer is auctioning off 100+ years worth of vintage! [VogueUK]
• The new Odin website has dangerous time-wasting potential. [Fashionista]

• McCain campaign claims that it didn't keep a lot of those Fashiongate duds: "about a third of it was returned immediately" when they didn't fit. Yes, that'd be $50,000 worth. [AP]
• Roseanne offers a McCain-Palin Hitler smiley-face tee on her website. Genocide sensitivity: ur doin it rong. [Oh No They Didn't]
• Tom Ford makes over 007: “It was time for a change and, whereas Brioni is very polished, this new Bond is edgier and darker...Tom Ford’s tailored suits work better for him.” [FT]
• Sarah Jessica Parker's hard at work on her new fragrances, Lovely Moments. "The collection will include three fragrances based on different expressions of time — Dawn, Endless and Twilight." What? [WWD]

• Moscow Fashion Week is uncharacteristically subdued. [Reuters]
• Because shopping at French Connection is a good indicator of your civic acumen, the chain is offering a 15% discount to those who can prove they voted. Seems ripe for voter fraud to me... [Nylon]
• Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell are co-hosting a Halloween party. What happens when they both come dressed as the Queen? [Fashionista]
• Quoth the creative director of Moschino: "The glossy, glamorous and cool world of fashion have never particularly fascinated me: I adore fashion and many of its representatives not for those aspects but for the creativity, the research and the effort that remains behind every collection." This translates to a front row filled with stuffed animals. [IHT]
• Zara continues to defy the market. In a good way. [Reuters]
• Ditto Avon; a gal still needs her undereye concealer. [Business Week]
• Other stalwarts? Plain white shirts. "Fun" men's shirts are out. [Telegraph]
• Tailoring, however, is in! [NY Times]
• Not to be left behind the, um, phone craze, Ralph Lauren launches an iPhone app, should you wish to gaze at madras at your whim. [MobileCrunch]
• British designer complains she can't find Size 10 (that's a U.S. 6) models to walk in her shows. "I have always been someone who would request that model agencies send me their curviest girls. But this time even they were too tiny to fill a pair of size 10 trousers and make them look great." [Guardian]
• The economy's climate of "retail darwinism" takes its toll on experimental fashion. [Portfolio]
• The carnage continues: although Elle is strong, Elle Accessories is suspended, loses four staffers. [NY Magazine]
• WWD names Natasha Poly and Lily Donaldson "the hottest models of the season." [WWD]
• Twiggy: "Just because you’re middle-aged you don’t have to live in flannel knickers!" It does mean you have to diet, apparently! [Mirror]
• "Sitting at his kitchen table recently, Mr. Siriano mused that he had a few days ahead of him with no bookings. I am like, 'Am I out? Is everyone over me?' That's kind of scary.'" Don't worry, Christian, you're fierce! [Wall Street Journal]
• Clothing line gives 400 poor little babies rashes on their backs! [USA Today]
• Alexander McQueen: "I was thinking of the British Empire...because we don't have one any more. Of course, it's not right for one nation to govern another, but I have no other mentality apart from a British mentality. We've lost our way as a nation at the moment, I think, and I wanted to unify myself with Britain throughout history, and to celebrate any heritage. The idea was to look at tradition as opposed to being anarchic." Translation? Rock necklaces. [Independent]
• Ecko employee sues over sexual harassment after a male colleague allegedly "threw a fistful of coins down into the crack of her buttocks." [NY Post]
• Lagerfeld is lukewarm on the contents of his Chanel pavilion: "The pavilion is the most exciting. Whatever may be in there—that is not my problem.” [The New Yorker]

The Good
I love Joely Richardson in this Beetlejuice-esque number.


This is supposedly Julia Restoin-Roitfeld but she looks different here, right? Whoever it is, she looks stunning.



If I had gams like Lily Donaldson, I'd sleep in this dress.


Dear Madonna, I dare you to be my BFF and give me all your hand-me-downs. (Truth: she wouldn't give me the time of day.)



Mary J. Blige can do no wrong and if you disagree with me, I will cut you.



Margharita Missoni has a great name, a great fortune, and a great dress.



Natalia gets my vote for best dress. She looks like the Chrysler building. That's a good thing!


Petra looks flawless. She was smart not to wear a necklace and direct all eye-contact to her boobs. Thank you pretty lady.


And last but not least, enter my new obsession: this couple. Sam Riley played Ian Curtis in that movie Control (which gave me like, 69 orgasms), and his girlfriend Alexandra Maria Lara was in the movie as well.




The Bad
Amira Casar, aka Frumpy Cold Medina.


Natalie Portman? More like Gnar Gnar Binks.


I love me a Juliette Lewis, but she's working a Miss Hannigan look here. I also love me a Miss Hannigan but that's beside the point.


Cecile Cassel . The hipster headband is soooo yesterday.


Natasha Poly is wearing a dress that's giving me an MC Escher vibe


Zhang Ziyi, step it up for crying out loud! "This isn't a dinner party, honey." (Name that movie)




The Ugly
Rose McGowan is wearing all the Mood leftovers that the Project Runway contestants ended up not using.


Tamara Beckwith looks like every girl who tried to beat me up in high school. In other words, she looks like an asshole from Long Island.


What happens in Vegas is incidentally what also happens to Sharon Stone when she dresses like a cougar.


Samantha Morton. Don't get me wrong, I love a good garbage bag; they're useful and what not! I just wouldn't attach sheer sleeves to mine and wear it a fancy party is all.


Orange you glad I couldn't think of anything better to write for Judith Godreche's big ugly dress?


I find it hard to believe that Milla Jovovitch thinks she looks good in this truly mediocre outfit. Plus, only 7 year olds and most of my friends can get away with wearing their hair like that.


Is it just me, or don't you think it's a little weird how Denise Rich tried this on and was like "This is it! Look out amFAR's here I come!"

[Images via Getty]

• Whoah. Prada Fall 2008 Menswear: Now featuring skirts! Oh yes, this is something guys would totally buy. [Chic Report]
  
• RIP Miu Miu menswear: The line will be discontinued as of the Spring 2008 collection. What, Miuccia just couldn't top skirts for men? [WWD, 1st item]
  
• WWD headline on Isaac Mizrahi's move from Target to Claiborne is: "Will He Hit Or Miz?" [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• And in other Claiborne news, the company is rumored to be in talks to license of its Dana Buchman label to Kohl's. [WSJ]

• Aeropostle, in an attempt to save the world and increase brand awareness, is launching a campaign called Teens for Jeans, encouraging its customers to donate their gently worn jeans at any Aeropostle store, to be given to homeless kids. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Anna Wintour must be a really good American Express customer: The credit card giant has just donated $500,000 to the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which provides cash prizes to those young designers whom La Wintour deems worthy.
• Try to contain your excitement: Rihanna is doing a second umbrella line for Totes. [WWD, 2nd item]
• The after-party alone for Kate Moss's birthday last night cost approx. $40,000. [Vogue UK]
• Designer Charles Nolan on his latest philanthropic endeavors: "In the spring I'm hosting a group that's all about microlending...do you know that if you lend money to people, the 98 percent that pay you back are women? The two percent that don't—men!" His heart is in the right place. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Julia Restoin Roitfeld, Lily Donaldson, and Theodora Richards have been "brought on" by fashion label Joie to host a party for the house during Fashion Week to make the line seem hipper, cooler, younger, etc. Incidentally, Joie hired Vladimir Roitfeld (Julia's bro, Lily's beau) to put the party together. Incesterfuckin marvelous. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Saks Fifth Avenue's spring advertising campaign features not models but illustrations. Didn't Nordstrom just do that? [Sassybella]