• 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 abstracted, angled black shadows on the white background, the strong, slanting light that hit the model just so, the black-and-white photography, and the simple lines of the featured clothes, all made one clear announcement: the cashmere brand pointed to the latest Calvin Klein campaign with Suvi Koponen, and told its creative team to copy like their lives depended on it. But then I got to thinking, haven’t I seen the architectural black and white theme elsewhere in fashion photography this season? In a business as crowd-sourced and trend-based as fashion, how can you tell the difference between recycling an aesthetic and taking inspiration from an old idea, anyway?

Suvi Koponen — Finland’s next top model, would you believe — has been favored for Calvin Klein Collection campaigns for the past few seasons. This fall, she was shot by Fabien Baron for a series of images that took dramatic delight in the lines of Francisco Costa’s garments, which this season were a little like 90s minimalism gone very good. Dodai is on record calling this campaign one of fall's worst ads, but I gasped when I first saw it. Working with so little — no props to create an atmosphere, no other models to generate charisma — could easily result in a tedious set of images. Sure, Suvi looks a little like a robot (an awe-inspiring fashion robot). And I don’t love the Stepford coiffure, which seems to unhelpfully contrast in era with the clothes. But I think these pictures are unmistakably beautiful. And I prefer their flirtation with high-concept self-serious absurdity to a million here’s-a-pretty-girl-now-buy-our-product luxury campaigns any day.

So clearly any images that distinctive were going to get knocked off. TSE photographed both its men’s and women’s lines in a style that looks like a dumbed-down retread of Baron and Koponen's Calvin Klein campaign.

The buttons on this coat don’t lie flat down the front, and the shadows cast by the lapels make the man’s chest look hollow. The coat hangs like it’s too big and nobody cared to pin it. Whereas in Baron's images, the bare-bones minimalism worked, here the same aesthetic looks under-thought and under-inspired. The result is boring.

Another fashion personage supping from the black-and-white cup this season? Patrick Demarchelier. The iconic photographer had an editorial in November’s Italian Vogue with models Mariacarla Boscono and Anja Rubik where the nearly all-black styling, plain white studio set with angled walls, and dramatic spot lighting all point to the same originating idea as the Calvin Klein campaign. But Demarchelier is enough of a creative mind to push the edges of the concept just enough to spread it over some different ground.

Gone is any attempt to make the models look 'natural': their poses are exaggerated, their torsos and legs twist and weave to bizarre effect. The shadows they throw are occasionally grotesque, and the weird black shapes on the walls play with the same ideas of scale as the built-up shoulders, jutting collars, and rigid teacup peplums of the clothes.

Hair is a frizzed bowl cut in bleach blonde (Rubik) or jet black (Boscono); makeup an ungodly pallor etched with mannequinish black lines at the jaw and lips. It all feels a little stagey, but that is the point: Demarchelier is reminding us that everything we see in the pages of a fashion magazine is artifice. Any magazine is an experience engineered by the conscious aesthetic choices of hundreds of individuals, and the same hours of of styling, hair, makeup, and post-production go into a 'natural' Steven Meisel editorial as into one where the models look like aliens experienced in posing. There is nothing natural about it. I think Demarchelier’s adjusted reflection of Fabien Baron’s campaign is a welcome contribution to the fashion discourse.

To me, this is a perfect example of fashion's hot-house idea-sharing — how an idea as old as the sun (black and white) is made to seem new again in an ad with weird styling and solid photography, inspires an old hand to take up the idea and add something new to it outside the realm of advertising, all while other brands move to piggyback and do so with less skill than the original. That's the fashion cycle, right there.