Peter Lindbergh shot an entire editorial without recourse to that particular computer program, except for minor color-correction. Kristen McMenamy, Tatjana Patitz, Nadja Auermann, Claudia Schiffer, et. al., also posed without any hair products or makeup.

And they predictably look fantastic. Does this spread in any way address the constant barrage of unrealistically altered images of women in the fashion media? Only obliquely, at best. And the skincare peg — all the models are shilling their supposed favorite spas and products — is a little annoying. I worry sometimes that these non-Photoshopped editorials are becoming more of a stunt than a corrective; French Elle had one, also shot by Lindbergh, and even Life & Style ran a Photoshop-free cover, of Kim Kardashian. How awesome would it be for a fashion magazine to state, as a matter of editorial policy, that excessive and unrealistic retouching will never find a home in its pages? That adjusting the white balance in post-production is fine, but that rhinoplasty-by-liquify-tool and 80 gazillion layers of changes are not? That would be a magazine worth buying.

Which is not to say that it isn't still wonderful to see images of real women at a variety of ages, images that haven't been "fixed" beyond recognition, even if these spreads are annoyingly presented as the fashion equivalent of Very Special Episodes. Shalom Harlow, pictured here, has always been one of my favorite models, and shots like this prove she of all people doesn't need post-production smoothing and sculpting to look bewitchingly beautiful.

Karl Lagerfeld shot this editorial, notionally inspired by Peggy Guggenheim, in Venice with Lara Stone and his latest boytoy, Baptiste Giabiconi. (Baptiste gets to wear boy clothes in this one, amazingly: Lagerfeld has a habit of styling his favorite hot young thing in women's wear and heels.)

Lara often looks kind of severe and disapproving — Cathy Horyn once compared her to Lurch — but the Gugg-inspired blonde clown hair in this spread sure isn't helping her.

These sunglasses, which if you look closely you can see are the shape of a bat spreading its wings, belonged to La Dogaressa (real, and awesome, nickname) herself.

It wouldn't be fall without some kind of a generalist "New Shapes" spread. This one, shot by Camilla Akrans, stars Kendra Spears and Katie Fogarty, who are aged 20 and 17, respectively, and accompanies text by Suzy Menkes. Representative quote: "THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: It could be time to go green. Rethink jade."

Of course, Madonna's bunny ears get a shot.

It also wouldn't be fall without a long, studio-shot editorial of a model — Karmen Pedaru — jumping dazedly.

There is, however, a beautifully shot Glen Luchford editorial, starring the spooky Eniko Mihalik.

And Siri Tollerod turns up with Richard Burbridge to do one of those perennial accessories editorials where the fashion magazines try and convince their readers that even when it's fall and the mind turns to tweed, we will still somehow feel like wearing acid brights and neon and "pops of color."

Oh, look: Our old friend Jean-Paul "I have jungle fever" Goude. Styling Naomi Campbell in leopard print, racing a cheetah across the serengeti, really is daring and original.

Naomi rides an elephant. Like a real African Queen.

She jumps rope. With monkeys. Monkeys.

We all know that black models have been lamentably absent from mainstream fashion magazines and runways. But all that shoots like these do is draw offensive similarities between black women and wild animals, and reiterate, in pictures, the old colonialist assumption that black people are savage and uncivilizable. Naomi Campbell isn't from Tanzania, she's from Streatham; at what point does having a British woman wander around the African wilderness, performing truly awful received ideas of how African women behave, for a publication with a majority white audience, verge on minstrelsy? Having no black models represented in magazines is a problem. But is this kind of representation actually worse than being totally ignored?

Then, Naomi perched on the back of a crocodile — this shoot was obviously not Photoshop-free — while wearing a Dior haute couture crocodile jacket and pants.

Interestingly, the Jean-Paul Goude shoot is followed in the magazine by a 14-page Peter Lindbergh editorial starring Chanel Iman and Arlenis Sosa. The theme? The Harlem Renaissance. This shot of Chanel was taken just outside the iconic Lenox Lounge, on Lenox just south of 125th Street.

Chanel and Arlenis, who are photographed carrying trumpet cases and singing into old-fashioned microphones, make pretty great foxy jazz musician dames. And while the Harlem Renaissance is kind of a cliché — and the period doesn't really have much discernible connection with life in the Harlem of today — it's nice to see a period with a black cast mined for interest in a fashion magazine, rather than just another all-white editorial about the Summer of Love or Studio 54.

Besides, the setting is the perfect way to set off the 1940s looks so many designers have turned out for this coming fall.

Can anyone identify this block? I want to say it's one of those gorgeous brownstone streets south of Marcus Garvey Park, but it also could be Strivers' Row. Either way, it's gorgeous.

The commitment to period realism does falter slightly in places: Sylvia's restaurant was founded in 1962.

And if you look really closely in the magazine, you can see the Fairway supermarket, just under the elevated rail line. In all, though, it's a beautiful shoot.

I don't think I even want to investigate the subtext of Harper's Bazaar using a milk-pale blonde British model as a stand-in for a black American pop megastar; let's just reiterate that this spread, which was obviously thrown together at the last minute, unfolds like an uninspired afterthought. And also the clothes suck.

Jessica Stam and Benjamin Alexander Huseby pop in for an editorial all about gardening, and fall tweeds of the sort that Little Edie would have loved.

Nobody does sublime eccentricity like Stam.

And Magdalena Frackowiak has an editorial all about shopping, photographed by Terry Richardson. Seeing her play a ditzy society lady with more credit than sense would be funny, if the photos weren't desperately captioned things like "SHOP: SAVE JOBS!"

In an accompanying article, by Derek Blasberg, about the macroeconomic imperative of increasing consumer spending, Margherita Missoni says: "It was cool to talk about the recession — which I found extremely annoying. But it seems not that people are no longer embarrassed to have good things." Thank god that recession thing is so over! God, that was such a drag!

I will leave you with images from Harper's Bazaar's Sesame Street-themed shoot, which features models Sessilee Lopez and Tao Okamoto. It's Sesame Street's 40th anniversary this year, so the magazine sent designers down to where the air is sweet.

This shot of Oscar de la Renta with Oscar the Grouch might actually top Harper's Bazaar's awesome The Simpsons fashion spread. Maybe.

Almost everything uttered by the mother and daughter in the Maysles' 1975 documentary, on which HBO's film is based, is quotable, but much of it came off as the delusional ramblings of two women suffering from folie à deux. But by digging into their backgrounds in the new film (starring Jessica Lange and a lispless Drew Barrymore), their motivations and bon mots become much clearer, and often brilliant. Like when Little Edie said, "The hallmark of aristocracy is responsibility." Her parents were pressuring her to get married, as soon as she turned 18, to a man who could secure her future and provide her with the same kind of lifestyle in which she'd been raised. Her father Phelan told her mother that marrying off Little Edie was her job and her "sole responsibility."

Little Edie had a pipe dream of entering show business and didn't want her ambitions to be stifled by marriage and children, the way that her mother's were. However, Big Edie's philosophy on life was a little shrewder, essentially telling Little Edie to marry for money, which will give her the freedom to do whatever she wants. This shed a whole new light on the conversation the two had in the documentary, in which Big Edie told her daughter that she's "not free if [she's] being supported, to which Little Edie replied, "I thought you said you're not free when you're not being supported."

The film shows how and why Little Edie gave up her life in Manhattan (which included an affair with married man Julius Krug, Secretary of the Interior, played by an aptly cast, bloated Daniel Baldwin) to live with her mother at Grey Gardens, as well as the breakup of Phelan and Big Edie's marriage of convenience, a situation that became increasingly inconvenient for Big Edie when she refused to scale back her lifestyle and burned through her Bouvier inheritance. She and Phelan never legally divorced — although he did eventually get a "fake Mexican divorce" — and Big Edie lived off the meager $150 allowance her ex-husband provided for her until his death, when all of his money was left to his "new fake wife."

The Beales' lack of financial stability was evident in the documentary, but no one really knew why they didn't just sell their massive East Hampton estate, as the land alone would've provided plenty of money for them to live comfortably. Here, Big Edie explains her reasoning, when her sons are pleading with her to be more financially responsible in the wake of Phelan's death.

After the county raided their home, Jackie O (Little Edie's first cousin and Big Edie's niece) finally stepped up to the plate and paid for cleanup and renovations to the dilapidated mansion. The relationship between Jackie and Little Edie was a tense one, due to Edie's jealousy over Jackie's celebrity. Her acrimony toward Jackie (played by dead-ringer Jeanne Tripplehorn) is seen here:

Perhaps the biggest question fans of the documentary have had is "What the fuck happened to Little Edie's hair?" It turns out that she had some kind of anxiety condition since she was young, which caused her hair to fall out. After her father died, she was left bald.

The best part about HBO's Grey Gardens is that — like the documentary — it shows these women to be nonconformists who would rather cut themselves off from society, than have to give in to its rules. They'd rather forfeit luxury than their dreams, even if it meant that they were just dreamers living in squalor. Finally getting to see the limited choices that life presented to them, their eccentricities now seem seem relatively sane.

It was also fun to see recreations of how the infamous estate looked before they let it go to pot.

And of course, there are plenty of Little Edie's fashions on display. (A gallery of Grey Gardens fashion is coming tomorrow.) And while this isn't the most revolutionary costume, I think it's the best costume for the day, you understand.

Jerry, who once lived with the Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in their dilapidated East Hampton mansion for four years, now drives a cab in New York City. In Maysles' new documentary, Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway, which aired last week, Jerry speaks fondly about his experiences with the women and expresses amazement at the success of the original film and its adaptation on Broadway. Grey Gardens: From East Hampton to Broadway also includes the 82-year-old Mayles discussing how Grey Gardens the movie was originally panned in the New York Times as being exploitative of two mentally ill women. In the clip below, Albert explains how offended the Beales were at that summation, and produces a letter that Little Edie wrote to the New York Times — which was never published — defending herself, her mother, the Maysles brothers, and the film itself.

No, the importance of Little Edie is that her variation on a towel dress is representative of the can-do spirit that we're all being urged to adopt now that we're in a Recession. What she wore — the countless bizarre "costumes" and outfits and mix-and-matched pieces — was cool, yes, but what made her a true Recessionista (as it should be used) was that she used limitation as a jumping-off point and did more with that than had she had a huge clothing budget. Did she sew? Re-use? Reinvent? Yes! But even more important, she dressed without fear, for self-expression. She reminded us of the redemptive powers of clothing and how little they have to do with frivolity. There is nothing of the clotheshorse in Grey Gardens: the point is never acquisition, but the actual purpose of the clothes themselves. When designers took inspiration, it was literal: replicating a bejeweled sweater turban or a skirt made from safety pin trousers. But it was the spirit of her dressing that's a help to the rest of us. Nowadays we're inundated with tips for essentially how to manufacture the illusion of an unchanged lifestyle, and that's not tenable. Little Edie, from madness or wisdom, didn't do that. She created a new reality for a new set of circumstances.

It's easy to see why fashion types are enchanted with the famous eccentric, but still a bit jarring. When the Grey Gardens musical first hit the stage, suddenly Little Edie wasn't just the property of those of us who'd long loved the cult Maysles documentary — and maybe wrapped sweaters around our heads in high school: everyone loved her! A film of cut scenes was released. Philip Lim's 2007 show, Marc Jacobs, the Olsen Twins and Italian Vogue were all competing for her favors. Rhapsodized Isaac Mizrahi in 2006: "The way that we now make mistakes on purpose comes from Edie Beale. I'm still and always trying to match her sense of the absurd, her playfulness, her sense of the drama of clothing." The stylesmith for the newest Grey Gardens stage production, Alex Jaeger, had this to say in Sunday's Washington Post:

Her fashion sense comes out of a deep need to be creative. And she was fabulously creative. These outfits, she made them out of whatever she had. As strange as they may be, there was a lot of thought put into them, and she would make 10 or 12 a day. She would change her clothes all day long.

But all of this is really beside the point: Little Edie was poor — very poor — and she was obviously not well. Said Simon Doonan, seldom a slave to fashionable bromides, in May: "[Said my friend Deb] who works in a psychiatric hospital and has a front-row seat at the unwitting fashion show that is mental illness. 'Walk around any in-patient unit: Lots of people are sitting around with things tied around their heads, just like Little Edie. They are not making a fashion statement; they are trying to block out the voices in their heads.'"

It should be said that Little Edie was probably more concerned with covering a bald pate, but there is something exploitative about mining what is essentially tragedy for inspiration (while crying homage), but whereas the Little Edie fashion moment of the past two years had me cringing, I feel like now her true fashion moment has come. Because the times in which we live are unprecedented, an unprecedented role model is called for; we're left not with a scant pile of threadbare basics that need to see us through the next half-decade, but, rather, the detritus of petty decadence: trendy, cheaply-made things never intended to last, that now reproach us from our overflowing closets. In this, Little Edie is a great help. She made the clothes work for her, remembered that they were nothing more than fabric — not a season, not a style, only raw material. She had nothing to do with Fashion, but a lot to do with everyday clothes and the people who wear them. People embraced her a few years ago because they were jaded, hungry for novelty, and sick of perfection. We can embrace her now not ironically, not patronizingly, but as a true role-model, and a boon for our times.

Standing on Fertile Ground for Creative Expression [Washington Post]

Related:
One Flew Over the Couture's Nest[New York Observer]
Little Edie, Big Style [New York Daily News]