Nine (which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and everywhere on December 25) was adapted from the 1982 musical of the same name, so the movie is actually a film based on a musical based on a film. All three are set in Italy in the 1960s and follow director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he tries to come up with an idea for his next project and deal with his messy personal life. He reflects on the women in his life, including his wife, (Marion Cotillard), mistress (Penelope Cruz), best friend (Judi Dench), muse (Nicole Kidman), mother (Sophia Loren), a prostitute (Fergie), and (in a role invented for the film) an American Vogue reporter (Kate Hudson).

All the lead actors have won an Oscars (except Kate Hudson, who was nominated), but reviewers say their musical theater abilities are lacking. They criticize the way director Rob Marshall, who previously directed the Oscar-winning musical Chicago, handles the dance numbers, calling the staging unimaginative and that Marshall and his editors use quick cuts meant to obscure the fact that many of the actresses simply cannot dance. Critics also trash the film's pacing: each actress is given a scene or two and a musical number, then it's onto the next star.

Other complaints: The songs, which were written for the musical, aren't particularly catchy, don't move the plot forward, and aren't integrated well into the film's narrative. Fergie and Marion Cotillard escape the critics' wrath for the most part, but Nicole Kidman "looks parched, stretched, and uncomfortable," Penelope Cruz is "alarmingly unsensual," Kate Hudson "may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious 'Cinema Italiano,'" and Daniel Day-Lewis "sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street" when he sings. The New York Times calls the whole thing a "travesty," and though the basic theme is the same in Nine and Fellini's original, the New Yorker says, "One is forced to ask: who wants to make, or watch, a major Hollywood musical about mental block?" Below, the reviews.

Reel Views

Nine represents director Rob Marshall's second big-screen musical spectacle. His previous effort, Chicago, won an Oscar; although Nine is likely to win its share of praise, it probably won't come close to achieving the same level of acclaim. Although the production numbers are equally impressive, this film is neither as inspired nor as rousing. Part of the problem may be that there are too many high profile actresses vying for the spotlight and each has to be given her moment to shine. Also, despite following its stage inspiration and bringing structure to Fellini's 8 1/2 (the ultimate source material), Nine still suffers at times from a lack of narrative drive and it doesn't have the surreal, dreamlike quality of 8 1/2 to fall back upon.

The New York Daily News

Unfortunately, each interaction feels like the quickest of flings, allowing us a brief flirtation with a superstar before we move on to the next affair. Everybody gets one or two big scenes, interrupted by an awkwardly-inserted musical number. Some of the actresses are more successful than others - Cruz is playfully sexy, Cotillard soulful, and Fergie impressively earthy - but for the most part, neither the songs nor the choreography are especially memorable. And because the music isn't integrated into the drama, the staging often feels not just theatrical but false.

The Wall Street Journal

The film's most remarkable performance is given by Marion Cotillard as Luisa, Guido's long-suffering wife. Her musical number, "My Husband Makes Movies," has more range than any of the others, from coiled calm to unchained ferocity. And Ms. Cotillard's gift for mystery-the art of doing much while seeming to do almost nothing-serves her brilliantly in the movie's best scene, which couples humiliation with insight.

Rolling Stone

By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses. Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here. He errs by cutting three great songs ("Getting Tall," "Be On Your Own," "The Bells of St. Sebastian") for three inferior ones. "Cinema Italiano," sung by Hudson, is a tacky, overproduced misfire. He also shortchanges the influence of Catholicism on this man-child, and keeps Guido's nine-year-old alter ego too much in the shadows. Otherwise, his work is visionary and electric. And the script, by Michael Tolkin and the late, much missed Anthony Minghella, is uncommonly witty. Guido begins the film at a press conference telling reporters that to talk about a movie is to spoil its mystery. So I won't intrude except to say that Day-Lewis (who replaced an exhausted Javier Bardem) handles his two songs in high style and acts the role like the maestro he is, even if he looks as Italian as Big Ben.

Salon

Kidman — so appealing in Moulin Rouge, despite her hardly being a perfect fit for musicals — just looks parched, stretched and uncomfortable. There's no sensuousness about her; the best she can muster is a kind of shellacked glamour. Cotillard and Fergie give the finest performances here. Cotillard, done up as an Audrey Hepburn-style minx in bangs, makes demureness sexy, and although her musical number may not be the smoothest of the lot, she still brings the right amount of fire to it. Fergie, on the other hand, practically stops the movie. She's fortunate enough to have the show's finest and catchiest number, Be Italian, and after I watched her slink her way through it, I wished — even though I'm an adamant nonsmoker — there was a bed around so I could flop back on it and have a cigarette. Fergie, who gained some weight for this role, is a voluptuous, purely sexual presence, and a deliciously lethal-looking one: She looks as if she could crush boulders between those thighs. Imagine what she could do to Day-Lewis!

USA Today

The cast members' musical talents are markedly uneven. Day-Lewis' Italian accent works in speech, but when he sings, he sounds strangely like the Count from Sesame Street. The best performers are Cotillard (who won an Oscar portraying Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose) and Stacy Ferguson (aka Fergie ), whose powerful voice works well in a small but distinctive part as sensuous Saraghina. Judi Dench, as Contini's costume designer, sings capably in a French accent in her Folies Bergere-inspired number. Cruz does a steamy song and dance, but her acting is strangely caricatured. Kate Hudson appears in over her head in her extravagant musical sequence, and Sophia Loren talk-sings her role.

The A.V. Club

True, Fellini provides a tough point of comparison for anyone, but maybe Nine should have stayed on the stage, where it could benefit from having a medium all to itself. In Nine, director Rob Marshall, who fared much better with Chicago, does a pretty good job of aping the look and feel of the film's inspiration in the non-musical sequences, but comes up curiously short in the largely imaginative musical numbers. No scene in which Penélope Cruz writhes around in her underwear can be called unsexy, but Cruz's big number remains alarmingly unsensual in spite of all the flesh on display. That Maury Yeston's songs simply aren't that memorable doesn't help.

The New Yorker

To follow in the footsteps of Mastroianni is no enviable task, and Daniel Day-Lewis, adroit as ever, approaches it by changing the steps. Where his predecessor lounged and strolled, or dipped into a clownish stagger, we find Day-Lewis, leaner in physique, forever on the fast and wolfish prowl-hands in pockets, shoulders forward, not pushing his sunglasses cutely up and down his nose, as Mastroianni did, but keeping them on full beam, like the Devil's headlights. He belongs, however, in a more focussed movie; this one feels too sluggish for his predations...

Entertainment Weekly

The women, however, are spirited and sexy. Cruz performs a mock bump-and-grind with real heat, and Fergie, as an oh-so-Fellini-esque beach drifter, turns herself into a wild electric siren. If only the lyrics weren't so awful! Cotillard, a lovely presence, is martyred by having to sing such gems as ''My husband makes movies/To make them he lives a kind of dream/In which his actions aren't always what they seem!'' No wonder Day-Lewis looks like he's having stomach trouble. He spends most of Nine as a haunted spectator, and you want to tell the guy to lighten up. The 
movie Guido is trying to dream doesn't look like much fun, and neither is Nine.

Hollywood Reporter

Nicole Kidman as Guido's "muse" and Kate Hudson as an on-the-make American journalist get to do little. Judi Dench is wonderful and wise as Guido's costume designer-cum-therapist and, fortunately, is not asked to do much in terms of singing and dancing. Fergie is kind of fun as a childhood fantasy of sexuality — in the original film, the whore is fat and slovenly. Cruz and Cotillard get real characters to play, but they're the stuff of bad soap opera. Then there's Day-Lewis. He is an incredibly sexy man and performs all the right moves. The problem is, he keeps performing those same moves over and over, so one experiences not so much artistic angst but a guy trying to sober up from a two-week binge. Sporting a scruffy beard and running a hand through long hair only goes so far.

The Los Angeles Times

And while we're filling the suggestion box. . . . Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not.

Nine is one of those films that couldn't look better on paper — so many Oscar, Tony and Grammy winners involved that the production should have literally glittered with all that gold. But in the end, nothing adds up. Perhaps "Zero" would have been a better name.

The Village Voice

Nine might at least have been a guiltily pleasurable burlesque, were Marshall not so intent on turning all his grande dames into vamped-up grotesques. While Fergie emerges relatively unscathed, in part because her role-the feral prostitute Saraghina, from whom the chaste young Guido learns the facts of life-is meant to be a vamped-up grotesque, poor Hudson (as an enterprising Vogue reporter, dumbed down from the play's Cahiers du cinéma film critic) may never recover from gyrating her way through the atrocious "Cinema Italiano," a number that Marshall stages as something like Night of the Living Versace Runway Show. Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity.

The New York Post

Penelope Cruz wriggling around in her underwear - the heavily edited result cannot quite be called dancing - in the best number, "A Call From the Vatican," is about as good as it's going to get in this faux-Fosse eyesore. Maury Yeston's mediocre, imitation-Kander-and-Ebb 1982 Broadway musical has been further edited and updated to suit the vocal limitations of its Weinstein-gerrymandered cast. Or, in the case of Kate Hudson as a journalist for American Vogue who vaguely tries to seduce our hero, the character and her awful number "Cinema Italiano" (in badly lit black-and-white) are interpolations that could be cut without changing the movie one whit.

The New York Times

Stacy Ferguson, known to pop-music fans as Fergie, is Saraghina, the village prostitute who provides the boy Guido with a glimpse of forbidden pleasures. Nice for him. The rest of us watch Ms. Ferguson stomp and gyrate through a number called "Be Italian," which, like so much else in Nine, resembles a spread in a Victoria's Secret catalog, only less tasteful. Ms. Hudson, for her part, struts through an embarrassing hymn to "Cinema Italiano" - with inane lyrics about "hip coffee bars" and Guido's "neo-realism" - that recalls not Visconti or Antonioni (or even the Italian sex farces of the 1970s) but rather those lubricious Berlusconi-esque variety shows that baffle and titillate visitors from other countries who turn on their hotel-room television sets. Those spectacles at least come by their sleaze honestly. "Nine" dresses up its coarseness in bogus prestige, which both kills the fun and exposes an emptiness at the project's heart - a fatal lack of inspiration. The fear of such a void is what animates the Guido character played by Marcello Mastroianni in 8 ½, a man whose vanity, tenderness and narcissism mirrored Fellini's own, and whose anxiety at the prospect of failing as an artist and a man made him a vivid and credible hero. That psychological dimension is missing from Nine, which never finds a way to communicate either the romantic ardor or the artistic passion that would make Mr. Day-Lewis's Guido interesting.

15. Russian Glamour, June 2009
Beyoncé's skin looked digitally darkened on the cover of Russian Glamour — and the editors had a guide! A magazine called Joy used the same shot in December 2007. Was something lost in translation? Save your "black Russian" jokes until the end.

14. L'Oreal, August 2008
Beyoncé's skin seemed very light in ads for Feria haircolor. One theory: she was washed out by the strong lighting usually used in shooting hair.

13. Vogue, November 2009
The cast of Nine is chock-full of gorgeous women, but this shot is a mindscramble of random rays of sunlight in hair and dresses with edges so sharp they look like they're for paper dolls. As I wrote in October: "I'm guessing [Annie] Leibovitz shot them each separately and then did a composite, but when you have a person who doesn't cast a shadow on the lady next to her, then that person is a vampire." Poor Kate Hudson looks like she was slapped on as an afterthought.

12. Complex, April/May 2009
Kim Kardashian's waist was cinched, her thighs were slimmed, her skin skin smoothed out and her hairline was cleaned up. Plus, her head appears to be a different shape in the "after" image. Who would have thought a skull could be made "sexier"?

11. Self, September 2009
Kelly Clarkson's "Total Body Confidence" came from digitally slimming her waist and behind. Two Self editors explained that the cover: "is not, as in a news photograph, journalism. It is, however, meant to inspire women to want to be their best."

10. King Arthur poster, 2004
Movie marketers felt they must, they must, they must increase the bust. Ironically, Keira Knightley told the Guardian that she lost her chest, doing archery and preparing for the role:

To fight, convincingly, shoulder to shoulder, she had to do that thing that is so de rigueur, which is totally to change your body shape. "I was about three times the size I am now. It worried me, but it was cool, it was a body that was doing what it should do. I haven't got a clue because I don't weigh myself, but it was all muscle and I was big. My neck disappeared. My chest flattened even more. It wasn't the most feminine thing in the world, but it worked for the part, because there was strength there, and it was needed."

Of course, Hollywood can't imagine a world in which people would see a movie starring an athletic, flat-chested woman. So a digital boob job followed.

9. Redbook, July 2007
The crazy thing about the Faith Hill Redbook cover is not that it was Photoshopped — it's that this is the standard amount of digital altering that goes into a cover. Unlike some true Photoshop disasters, there are no alarming mistakes here to tip you off. That makes it easy to accept the retouched image without even blinking. Faith Hill is a beautiful woman. But she needed 11 different kinds of alterations before she could be on the cover of Redbook. What a world.

8. Campari calendar, 2008
Jessica Alba: Just another woman whose real body wasn't good enough. In this case, her waist needed to be nipped in so she could shill liquor.

7. Vogue, May 2008
RoboGwyneth looks like a robot, or an alien, depending on whom you ask. One thing is for sure: Her head and neck are not in the same space-time continuum.

6. Redbook, June 2003
Jennifer Aniston's head was placed on to Jennifer Aniston's body — from another photo shoot. At the time, her publicist, Steven Huvane, said: "It's a combination of three pictures. If you're going to do it, then at least match her head up to her body, and make the neck look like it belongs to her. I still can't figure out which exact picture the face came from." A Redbook spokeswoman downplayed the changes: "The only things that were altered in the cover photo were the color of her shirt and the length of her hair, very slightly, in order to reflect her current length."

The neck does look alarmingly unreal, and her head and waist are out of sync somehow. Angelina is surely to blame.

5.Redbook, July 2003
The month after the Aniston debacle, Redbook was at it again: According to USA Today, "[Julia's] head comes from a paparazzi shot taken at the 2002 People's Choice awards. Her body, meanwhile, is from the Notting Hill movie premiere [in 1999]." Julia's publicist, Marcy Engelman, said, at the time: "It's a shame they didn't use the body that went with the head, because it was a great Giorgio Armani pantsuit (that she wore to the People's Choice awards)."

4. Newsweek, March 2005
The editors used Martha's head and a model's body, because Ms. Stewart was still in jail when the issue was being put together. It wasn't supposed to be a photograph, anyway, it was art: "The piece that we commissioned was intended to show Martha as she would be, not necessarily as she is,'' Lynn Staley, assistant managing editor at Newsweek, told The New York Times. Staley acknowledged that the cover carried a disclaimer: ''In this case, we identified this piece as a photo illustration." As Martha would say, it's a "good thing" you did.

3. Seventeen, May 2003
Think about all the Buffy plots which could have been orchestrated around Sarah Michelle Gellar's weird wrist appendage over there on the left, if her arm actually looked like that.

2. GQ, February 2003.
Some people saw Titanic over and over again — but they never saw those legs, on the left. Kate Winslet was pissed about being trimmed down on this cover, saying:

"The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that. I actually have a Polaroid that the photographer gave me on the day of the shoot… I can tell you they've reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money it looks pretty good the way it was taken."

1. Ralph Lauren Blue Label ad, October 2009
In which model Filippa Hamilton was turned into a string of spaghetti.

Loving the Iris Apfel thing that both Mary-Kate (L) and Ashley are rocking here!


Would it be a New York red carpet without Rachel Roy's sleek separates? No, it would not.


It's gotta be hard if, like Fergie, you spend hours on a full-out Aphrodite...


...only to find Marion Cotillard doing this far more elegant version of white...


And Penelope Cruz just doing "goddess" better than anyone else in the history of the world.


I'm guessing Kimora Lee Simmons (with Djimon Hounsou) has no moral qualms about fur. Just a guess.


Is the bandage still fresh? Maybe not, but as Emmanuelle Chriqui shows, it can still be sleek, sexy and very festive.


Melania Trump's bitch-face says, "that's right, I'm not wearing pants. And you'll take it and like it."


If you gotta ride the DeLorean, Naomi Watts shows what to wear.


It's gotta be hard to have a mom who can say, "Oh yeah, I invented that. 1984. Feel free to raid the closet!"


Nicole Kidman channels the original Barbie. I wouldn't be shocked if there's a striped bathing suit underneath.


"Honey, I thought we agreed "Ascotte Gavotte," not "Truman Capote's Black and White Ball!""


Judi Dench: what, it's cold.

[Images via Getty]

[Paris, December 13. Image via Pacific Coast News]

• Julia Roberts will become a face of Lancôme, appearing in ads beginning early next year. Roberts earns up to $20 million per film, and could realize a similar amount from her first major beauty contract; the company won't say. [WWD]

• Kate Moss so admired a fellow wedding guest's bracelet that her friend, Topshop owner Sir Philip Green, bought it off the woman's wrist. [P6]
• David Lynch is directing the next Marion Cotillard Dior handbag ad, and he's filming her in Shanghai right now. The video is intended to continue the story of the noirish, Hitchcockian ad by Olivier Dahan the company released in May. [Elle UK]
• Christian Lacroix has announced that he will not be involved with any of parent company the Falic Group's future projects for his namesake label, which was this week allowed to be reduced to a licensing operation by a Paris bankruptcy court. Lacroix had not been paid by Falic since the fall of 2008. The French minister of industry thinks the closure of the house of Lacroix is a travesty. He is trying to use diplomatic networks to contact the most interested-seeming buyer, an Emirate sheikh, "to alert him of the urgency of the situation." [WWD]
• Police acting on a tip raided two Detroit area stores selling counterfeit Gucci, Coach, and Polo clothing and accessories. (One had what it claimed was a $4,000 jacket on sale for $700.) The seized goods would have retailed for about $800,000, had they been genuine. [UPI]
• Silvia Fendi — the lady behind the baguette and the spy and the B Fendi bags — designed new guitars for OK Go to take on tour. The tricked-out Gibsons feature white leather, rivets, and goat fur, and, for that extra special touch, a red-and-green LED panel that flashes with the band's lyrics. "Any time an ‘F' appears in their lyrics, it's our double-F logo," says the bag lady. We need a picture of these guitars pronto. [WWD]
• Proenza Schouler has added e-commerce to its website, Proenzaschouler.com. [Vogue UK]
• Sephora is going to roll out 20 cosmetics vending machines to small J.C. Penney stores that lack full-service Sephora counters. Each machine will offer 50 of the makeup retailer's most popular products. How space-age. [WWD]
• Bottega Veneta is getting into the fragrance game. Expect the first perfume to launch in 2011. [WWD]
• André Leon Talley re-arranged a trip to China to attend the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's opening night. Though in his words he would not presume to dance, Talley did express a willingness to go horse riding, some day: "Because the man and the horse are ballet. The communication between the man and the horse in a race, that's sort of a little dance." [The Cut]
• For some reason, it is considered news that Marc Jacobs gave Will Smith a bunch of free clothes to wear during the presentation of the Nobel Prizes in Oslo. You'd almost think Smith was the laureate. [WWD]
• Aw, watching Oprah can make Chris Benz cry. [TFI]

Earlier: Oprah's Favorite Things 2007: The Audience Freaks Out!

Julianne Moore channels either a giant clam or a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Same diff, really.


Actress Madeleine Martin is 16, going on 17. Innocent as a rose. Eager young lads and grueways and cads will offer her fruit and wine.


It's simply not fair that Blake Lively should be able to pull off embellished Gibson Girl with short-shorts.


Keanu Reeves needs a shoe-shine. That is all.


Shannon Elizabeth: take from her, her lace.


Robin Wright Penn continues the CPR-couture trend.


I guess this is what theatrical royalty like auteur Rebecca Miller wears. Traditional imperial garments for state occasions are allowed to be over-the-top, to our modern eyes.


Olivia Palermo, as a ladymag would have it, "models this season's trends." Perhaps with a random male model.


Helen Lee Schifter, a Best-Dresses List fixture, clearly likes the "statement necklace." What say you?


Zoe Kazan rocks my favorite frock of the evening. That's right: frock.


Although Marion Cotillard (quel surprise) is a serious contender, too! Avert your eyes - although from the combined force of the beauty or the sheen of Penelope Cruz's boots, is open to interpretation!

[Images via Getty]

I guess when you have a posse of gorgeous, iconic ladies — Nine's Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz and Kate Hudson — you feel obliged to make them look as good as possible. But for the love of natural lighting: Why so much Photoshop?

Sassybella asks, "Did Annie Leibovitz or Vogue go a little airbrush crazy?" The answer is a resounding YES. I can't wait to see this cover in person, to try and figure out what how someone cobbled these women into an image. I'm guessing Leibovitz shot them each separately and then did a composite, but when you have a person who doesn't cast a shadow on the lady next to her, then that person is a vampire.

Leibovitz makes composite images quite often; take this photograph of Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, for instance:

Blogger Jeffrey Saddoris has read Leibovitz's book, At Work, in which she writes:

"The picture of Hellen Mirren and Judi Dench in the car was made in two different places. It was fun directing Judi Dench to act like she was talking to someone who wasn't actually there. She was saying, 'You bitch. How could you have done this to me? Why did you do that to me?' And she had that look. If we had been using film, we would have to stitch two frames together, but since we were shooting digitally, we built the final picture in the computer."

On another forum, a poster dissects the Leibovitz Mad Men shoot:

The commenter writes:

It appears that Annie shot the scene in separate composites. She took a shot of January Jones from where she is standing in the video still, THEN after she got what she wanted she moved to the left and shot Jon Hamm exactly positioned and lit how she wanted. Then I would assume she stood back and took some overall shots of the room that would later be stitched together to form the overall piece.

NOW, from an overall look the photograph appears classy and fit to the time piece and most people would walk away from it without any negativity, and I still think its a great shot... but the perspective now just bothers me. It appears as though she isn't even looking directly at him. Her overall size appears smaller than him. Also, if you look near his ass the straight line that runs on the wall... isn't so straight, its very apparent that was a poor clone job.

Even though the cover is a nightmare, there's a gorgeous shot of the ladies on the inside:

Instead of looking like a hallucinatory vision or Hollywood interpretation of the "Footprints" poem, this actually looks like a photograph of women, sitting on a couch — next to each other and existing in the same time-space continuum. What a concept.

Prima Time [Vogue]
Yay Or Nay? Annie Leibovitz Over Airbrushes Another US Vogue Cover [Sassybella]
Photo139 – Week 2 [Saddoris]
Annie Leibovitz thread [Nature Forum]

Earlier: Nine Throws Down The Oscar Gauntlet
Other Ladies Agree: Annie Leibovitz's Latest Is Painfully Lame
Photo Finish: (Annie Leibovitz & People Of Color)

[Paris, October 6. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

• Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel: Photographed holding hands on Monday. A source says they've been vacationing together in Santa Barbara; As for Justin and Rihanna?

They're just "working on a track together." [Page Six]

• Mariah Carey stumbled coming out of a restaurant late at night, but was she drunk? Or just wearing 7-inch Louboutins? [Page Six]
• Harvard kids: Stalked Emma Watson when she came for a football game; thought it was hilarious. [Page Six]
• A whole column of unsolicited uterus updates! Kate Hudson: Not pregnant. Halle Berry: Not pregnant ("I've got to stop with the burgers or something!"). Penelope Cruz: asked if she was pregnant, but "answered no — in a rather baroque, roundabout way." [Gatecrasher]
• This column calls Britney Spears' new track, "3," "maddeningly repetitive." [NY Daily News]
• Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson keep being seen in public together, because ZOMG Twilight is real. [People]
• Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil have been writing cutesy notes to each other on Facebook. A sample: "Love you too innit and vairvair proud of youse, know dis lioness civilishous. X" [The Sun]
• Add Penelope Cruz, Harrison Ford, Gael Garcia Bernal and Natalie Portman to the list of people crying "Free Roman Polanski." [Shakesville]
• "John Travolta testified Wednesday that would-be extortionists threatened to go the media with stories implying 'the death of my son was intentional and I was culpable somehow.'" [CNN]
• Kate Gosselin thinks Jon Gosselin's divorce delay is a publicity stunt; I think it has to do with making sure any TLC cash gets split up properly. [MSNBC via Radar Online]
• Wait, what?!?! "Jon Gosselin has put TLC, the cable network behind Jon & Kate Plus 8, on notice to 'cease and desist' any television production of the show and leave his property." [ET]
• Miley Cyrus has a sore throat. Will she be able to do her concert dates? [Mirror]
• Randy and Evi Quaid — who were accused of ditching a $10,000 bill at the San Ysidro Ranch — claim they never got the bill because they moved. They have now paid. [TMZ]
• Kevin Federline: Gaining weight on purpose, so he can get ready for Celebrity Fit Club. A source says: "He thinks that if he goes on the show, loses a ton of weight, and seems really likeable, he'll get more deals afterward." Probably true. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Melissa Ethereridge played on an airplane — 10,000 feet in the air — to help raise money for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Looks like he peeps in her audience were wearing pink! [People]
• GLAAD likes Glee. So do I! [NY Daily News]
• Jermaine Jackson is going to judge a new BBC talent show called Move Like Michael Jackson. Too soon? [Reuters]
• Joe Francis might lose his house — over a gambling debt. YAWN. [TMZ]
• Alyssa Milano thinks $3 is too much to pay for a Twitter iPhone app; the "iPhone developer community" is amused, yet angry. [Business Insider]
• In a battle between Jay-Z and Fat Joe, Jigga wins. [Page Six]
• Conan O'Brien is sorta banned from Newark Airport. [NY Daily News]
• Two weeks after giving birth, Ellen Pompeo hit a sneaker party in L.A. and announced: "I feel great." [People]
• Congrats to Will Ferrell and his wife, who are expecting their third child. [People]
• Mindy McCready, who was on Celebrity Rehab with Mackenzie Phillips, says she "absolutely" believes that Phillips had an incestuous relationship with her father and "Nobody has the right to say what they do or don't believe unless they know her." [UPI]
• Kevin Dillon: Seen flirting with women who were not his wife. [Page Six]
• Pete Doherty will be on trial in December after being charged with driving a car erratically over the summer. This story notes: "He has yet to plead to a charge of being over the legal alcohol limit while at the wheel." [Reuters]
• Male model Jamie Burke, Mark Ronson, Milla Jovovich, Simon Le Bon and Marion Cotillard are covering the song "Beds Are Burning"for the Time for Climate Justice campaign. [Page Six]
• "Former INXS and Noiseworks frontman Jon Stevens' condition has "deteriorated" nearly three weeks after emergency heart surgery." [News.com.au]
• Get well soon, Dennis Hopper. [Page Six]
• "It drives me crazy… It's just very hard to get a day's work done and concentrate." — Sarah Jessica Parker, on filming SATC on the streets of NYC with mobs of fans. [NY Daily News]
• "Honestly, I never thought I'd live this long. I always thought that I wouldn't be here at this point. I was thinking, 'Okay, I've got another year of my life left. This has got to be the end of it. Finally, [Nick] was like, "Stop talking like that." — Mariah Carey. [NY Daily News via In Touch]
• "I mean, a zombie movie? Come on. There are good zombie movies -I Am Legend and 28 Days Later- but those are the exceptions. Then I read it and I was absolutely knocked out. I thought it was just so funny and compelling." —Woody Harrelson, on Zombieland. [USA Today]
• "I always sort of cringe when people say, you're that creepy guy. Sinister I can live with, that's fine. But creepy is like someone you wouldn't sit next to at a diner. I'm probably being sensitive about it." — Michael Emerson, aka Lost's Ben Linus. [MSNBC via PopEater]
• "I'm a parent, but I always considered that slightly separate from my work. And, suddenly, I'm reading this script that really explores parenting. I felt very involved with it, because I've got two young girls and I could relate to an awful lot of it. Often, I find family movies a little cute and not very real. This felt honest." — Clive Owen on new film The Boys Are Back. [USA Today]
• TOC: You've also said, "I related to a girl who, against all odds, finds her inner strength and believes she can do what boys do." Have you felt yourself working against the odds in a Hollywood boys' club? "No, I really don't, and I actually find those women-I'm like, get that bitter, ugly, unattractive chip off your shoulder. I'm doing what any guy could be doing, and I don't do it by needing to wear a power suit. Women have made incredible strides; we're in a really balanced or better-balanced culture, and we should be celebrating that…rather than, like, 'Oh, men have all the power.' I'm like, 'Oh, boo-hoo, shut up, make it happen for yourself and get over it.'" — Drew Barrymore. [Time Out Chicago]

[Paris, August 17. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

• Kylie Minogue was in Jean Paul Gaultier's front row yesterday because she's looking for outfits for her American tour, which kicks off in October. Might we suggest this? [Elle UK]

• In the 1930s aesthetic of some of the couture shows — especially Gaultier's — some observers see the influence of our current economic crisis. We'd argue that anyone who saw Jean Paul Gaultier's crocodile overalls and furs and thought "This is the new frugality!" is blind, but whatever. [Reuters]
• Marc Jacobs is extending his reach in the West Village of Manhattan. The designer already has five stores in a radius of as many blocks, but he still expects to open a sixth in the neighborhood next February. The space, at the corner of Bleecker and West 11th Sts., has been occupied by the Biography Book Shop for over 20 years. "The space is now worth eight times what the Biography Book Shop was paying," said building owner Alexander Brodsky, who added that Marc Jacobs would be paying more than $400/sq. ft. The fate of the book store is unknown. [WWD]
• And here's Jacobs on those bunny ears Madonna wore to the Met ball, which she also sports in the fall Louis Vuitton ad campaign: "There's a girl who works for us, Lucy, she's on the design team, and Adrian, one of the boys, was tying a little bit of fabric around and it reminded me of bunny. We were thinking of all these different things like can-can dancers, and I saw this piece of fabric wrapped around Lucy's head and said, 'Bunny ears, that's what we need to finish this look.' So we made all these radzimir bunny ears and that's how it happened. I like the kind of Playboy, French coquette aspect to it." Jacobs also referred obliquely to the extensive use of Photoshop — "The solarization that they're doing to the pictures is going to give a really dramatic effect" — and confirmed that the painter Tamara de Lempicka had been a reference. [Fashionologie]
• Celebrity fashion lines are not faring well in the market downturn. A round-up of those that have closed: Mandy Moore's Mblem, Heidi Montag's Heidiwood, and Jennifer Lopez's Sweetface and JLO by Jennifer Lopez. Paris Hilton also closed her unsuccessful line with Dollhouse, and Lauren Conrad put her clothing line "on hiatus" (although she did hit back with a lower-priced range for Kohl's). Interestingly, lines where the celeb doesn't have the star branding role — Justin Timberlake's William Rast, Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B., Jay-Z's Rocawear — are proving more resilient. [WWD]
• That doesn't mean fashion houses don't still believe celebs can move product. Marion Cotillard is in another new ad for Dior's Lady Dior handbag. [GlamChic]
• Diane von Furstenberg totally wishes Brüno had crashed one of her shows. [WWD]
• New York bumped into prominent couture consumer Daphne Guinness on the street, and asked her about her outfit. Guinness was wearing a fitted black dress by L'Wren Scott, black scarves, asymmetrical cat-eyed sunglasses, and 7" red platform Mary-Jane heels. [The Cut]
• An exhibit at the Museum at FIT, which opened Tuesday, explores fashion's relationship with politics. Included is everything from white suits worn by suffragettes to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's sequined dress with Obama's face. Of course, also still open at the Museum at FIT is the Isabel Toledo retrospective that features Michelle Obama's inauguration day outfit. [WWD]
• We've officially found the limits of Mrs. Obama's fashion appeal: Russia, apparently, is immune to the charms of her sheath dresses and belts. "Her clothes are modest and neutral," said local designer Denis Simachev. A Russian fashion historian attributed the cool reaction to a difference in taste, the Russian being somewhat more outré: "A lot of Russians think that when something shines, it's beautiful." [WWD]
• Meanwhile, the White House is locked in a war of words with an Italian luxury goods brand over a clutch purse. VBH claims that Michelle Obama carried its black crocodile envelope clutch, sticker price $5,950, during a meet-and-greet with President Medvedev and his wife Svetlana. The White House says the purse was a black patent clutch that cost $875. Please let the Obamas not be stupid enough to lie about something so minor and so easily disproven. [NYDN]
• Everybody's favorite pervy photographer, Terry Richardson, is being immortalized in a 7.5" action figure. [Slamxhype]
• The Wall Street Journal road-tested some vegan shoes, and found that faux leather and suede are getting realer looking by the minute. Pity two of their four offerings cost over $150, and one costs over $1,200. [WSJ]
• Isaac Mizrahi curated a summer show at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea, which opens tonight. The busy designer modestly says the principal theme is just "work I like by people I like," but Mizrahi goes on to explain how his famous sense of color has been informed by his favorite artists over the years. "Every time I think about color I refer to Julia Sherman," says Mizrahi. "Those Julia Sherman reds next to pale, pale pink, my Spring collection is going to be all about that. I feel like people are really open to color now. When I launched in ‘87 and I did super-bright colors, they loved it, but they didn't buy it. They'd shoot it, they'd laud it, but they'd wind up buying black. I'm talking about New York, now. The South is a different story-that's always been a haven for me. But here in the city, these days-it's nuts, color is what flies off the rack. My own line, and Liz Claiborne, too. More color sells better."
  [Style.com]
• Shoe designer Jimmy Choo says you should wash your feet in warm, salted water every night before you go to bed. Also he says that Malaysia is beautiful and you should visit. [Daily Mail]
• In case you're not already reading BryanBoy, plus Susie Bubble, the Sartorialist, Jak & Jil, and Fashion Toast, here are a few reasons why you might want to.
  [TDB]
• Once upon a time, Kira Plastinina was just another teenaged Russian orange juice heiress with a love for pink clothes. Then Kira wanted a fashion chain, so her dad bought her one. The stores did well enough in her home country and in Ukraine, but Plastinina had her her eyes set on a higher prize: the American market. So her dad agreed to pay for Kira Plastinina stores all over the East and West coasts, and threw a launch party/16th birthday where he paid Paris Hilton and Usher to show up. Within seven months, the whole hot-pink operation had been shuttered, and Kira's U.S. vehicle, the K.P. Clothing Co., was in Chapter 7 liquidation with debts of over $54 million. Which outcome, one might think, would put paid to little Kira's notions of world chain store domination — but no! Cleverly disguised under a new business name (Pink Square) and a new brand (K. Plastinina), the teenaged tycoon reopened two of her former Los Angeles locations. Which is where protesters from a building company that did $2.5 million worth of unpaid work went to go find her yesterday. "The point of all this is that there are still people suffering because of what [the company] did," says Aaron Rectenwald, who built Kira eight of her original American stores. "We haven't gotten the attention of management yet so we'll be coming back until we do." [WWD]
• The 17 workers suing New York-based retailer Scoop for allegedly giving them bogus promotions to salaried positions to avoid paying them overtime staged a protest outside Scoop's SoHo store yesterday. The former employees, most of whom are from West Africa, also allege that Scoop fired people who were in fact legal residents for supposed immigration violations. Scoop's current owners released a statement that read, "Although these allegations are against Scoop's previous management, we've conducted an internal audit to insure the company is in compliance with local, state and federal wage and hour laws. Scoop's current wage and hour practices are conducted in accordance with all state, local and federal laws." The chain's founding owners had no comment. [WWD]
• Gap Inc. expects to expand into Thailand by next Spring. The company as a whole will, however, close more stores than it will open in the next fiscal year — 100 compared to just 50. [WSJ]
• Over 3,000 pairs of Charles by Charles David high heeled shoes sold at Nordstrom Rack from April to June of this year are being recalled. The recall affects various colors and styles of shoe, and was put into effect because the heels of the shoes can easily detach while the wearer is walking. If you're affected, you can take yours back to the store for a full refund. [UPI]

Was Megan Fox's sexy face out in full force at the Armani Prive show? Oh, yes. Did she look absolutely gorgeous? Yup. Digging this next generation of the dreaded triage chic.


Marion Cotillard is the new face of Dior - hence this LBD, the fact that they had to hold the show until her arrival (Thanks, WWD Twitter!) I've loved other maquillage effects more on her, but hey, whatever floats her bateau.


Despite this guy's best efforts, we can all clearly see that Cate Blanchett's ornate gown at Armani is the trickiest length imaginable, and that somehow she still manages to look regally lovely.


What Say You about Roxane Mesquida's take on the 80s-flirt movement?


Ooh ooh ooh! See, Vahina Giocante's doing Armami! But with a 2009 post-recession, pre-apolcalyptic, Michael-Jackson-just-died-and-Transformers-is-big-at-the-box-office twist!


So, I adore Dior and all that, but once years ago in Vogue I read this story about Galliano in which someone - maybe a Sykes - described him as "a wood sprite," and the evidence seems to have been his applying some kind of expensive mask in an airplane bathroom during descent. What do you think of Tinsley Mortimer's Park Avenue girl gone very slightly downtown?


This dude is really not impressed with Claudia Cardinale's lounging pajamas at Armani.


Clotilde Courau's Dior special makes me want to be born again French, and in 1940, and tall. Wow, talk about confidence!


Images via Getty, WENN]

[Paris, July 6. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

[London, June 29. Image via WENN.]

Death, Taxes, Cotilllard: Marion Cotillard has that kind of chic that actually brings one pleasure to observe it - she pulls everything off with such confidence, even things I normally in themselves could take or leave.


Off-Subject: Does anyone wear red lipstick better than Rosario Dawson? Love the dress, not my fave on her, not that anyone asked.


Sullen with envy over Carey Mulligan's perfect LBD, darling pixie.


Do We Look Like We're About to Go Into a Rant? Christian Bale and Sibi Blazic play it conservative; can't really blame 'em. I kid! She looks very elegant.


Love - love! -Branka Katic's power shoulders. Betcha she's wearing Opium!


Kind of Woman: You know what? Leelee Sobieski can actually pull off Belladonna-era Stevie.


Ascot Gavotte: If VH1 did a remake of My Fair Lady, the iconic Cecil Beaton Ascot dress would probably look exactly like Catt Sadler's. Except they'd be at some kind of secret high-stakes casino, of the kind that only seems to exist on Gossip Girl.


Tiers For Fears: We've seen this before - not that there's anything wrong with that, indeed I like seeing stars wear the same gown like normal people - and know that it takes height like Sabrina Morris' to avoid the wedding cake effect.


What Say You about Amber Heard's square yard of fabric?


Images via Getty

• Looks like Lindsay Lohan's stalking paid off: Her new Twitter message says:

"Leaving London but with my favorite favorite!!!" Then she was photographed at the airport with… Samantha Ronson. And another Tweet from LL reads: "Great news to share!! Maybe .... ;)" [People, The Sun]

• Lindsay and Sam were seen holding hands while walking into the first class lounge. [Daily Mail]
• Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green are finito, which means Megan will have to get that tattoo removed. And! Megan may have hooked up with sparkle vamp Robert Pattinson, after which he blew her off. Dramz! [E!]
• Madonna may be able to adopt Mercy after all?!?! A source says: "The paperwork is being typed up now." [Mirror]
• A "friend" of Madonna's says: "She made a promise that she wouldn't give up on Mercy and, believe me, she could move mountains when she's this determined." [Telegraph]
• By the by, someone has paid more than £15,000 for that lovely Peter Howson painting of naked Madonna and thuggish-looking Guy Ritchie. [The Star]
• Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy: Definitely engaged. [Page Six]
• Hold on to your panties, here are ten life-changing words: Simon Cowell remake of Saturday Night Fever starring Zac Efron. [Telegraph]
• What is Chris Brown afraid of? He's been seen "surrounded by bodyguards" at all times lately — as many as five. [Page Six]
• Miley Cyrus had to say goodbye to her main man, Justin Gaston, because she's heading off to Georgia to film a Nicholas Sparks movie. A post on the 16-year-old's Twitter read: "'my heart is in two... and its all because of you.' a song i am starting to write :)" As for 20-year-old Justin, his Twitter says: "Haven't been this miserable in a looong time." Remember, kids: Absence makes the heart go wander! [Us Magazine]
• What a difference a day makes! Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt now claim that the reports of torture are "false and inaccurate." One thing is for sure: These people know how to get their names in the paper every damn day. [People]
• Oh, God: When the show is over, Heidi Montag will launch a dry-shampoo line. [JustJared]
• A Yankee insider bitches: "First we dealt with all the Madonna mayhem, now we're on to Kate [Hudson]. It's distracting." [MSNBC Sccop]
• Kate Hudson and A-Rod left a club separately so no one would think they'd been together. [Page Six]
• Today in "crazy cat lady" news: Susan Boyle will take her beloved kitty Pebbles with her on tour. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Ugh, if you're interested in this, it's here: David Carradine's ex-wife reveals his "shocking" sex secrets — tying himself up, drowning himself and tattoos and piercings. [Radar Online]
• Kelly Bensimon is off the hook regarding that assault case in which she allegedly hit ex-boyfriend Nicolas Stefanov in the face: the case was dismissed when Stefanov didn't show up to court. [E!]
• More Real Housewife gossip: Countess LuAnn de Lesseps was seen making out wit h a guy in his 20s; Kelly Bensimon was seen nuzzling with Gerard Butler. [Gatecrasher]
• After getting hit by scenery on stage at the Tonys, Bret Michaels suffered a fractured nose and had to have three stitches in his lip. [Gatecrasher]
• Congrats to Gossip Girl's Kelly Rutherford, who gave birth to a baby girl last night. [Radar Online]
• Olympic gymnast and Dancing With the Stars champ Shawn Johnson is mulling an offer to star in a film for kids. [E!]
• David Letterman: About to sign a deal to continue hosting the Late Show for 3 more years. [Reuters]
• On the movie Nine: "'It was an amazing experience,' says Fergie, who plays a prostitute. 'It was all about the character, not about me, so I could gain weight and not be self-conscious about it.'" [USA Today]
• Prince Harry is supposedly dating TV presenter Caroline Flack, and she supposedly calls him by the codeword "Jam," because he's got jam-coloured hair and he's sweet." [The Sun]
• Gossip and rumors from the set of the Robin Hood movie: Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott are "squabbling," ; Crowe had to go on a crash diet to lose 35 lbs because a producer said "We can't have Robin Hood looking more like Friar Tuck" ; they're totally not singing that oo-de-lally song. Boo. [Page Six]
• Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas will leave their home on Bermuda to work on projects: He's starring in a movie about Liberace (?!?!) as well as the Wall Street sequel. [Telegraph]
• Last week, Nadya Suleman bashed Kate Gosselin; this week, she feels bad about it. "I kind of self-reflected on why I did that, and I felt really guilty," Suleman says. "I was annoyed. I was fed up. I was probably misplacing my frustration about all of this invasive media crap onto her." Or: You missed the attention. Just a thought! [MSNBC]
• Canceled NBC show My Name Is Earl might live on — with new episodes on TBS, the network which airs its repeats. [Reuters]
• Househunting in London: Sacha Baron Cohen. [The Sun]
• A hearing date has been set for Howard K. Stern — to determine if he must stand trial for illegally supplying Anna Nicole Smith with prescription drugs. Things begin in August. [Reuters]
• Twilight author Stephenie Meyer has ditched her MySpace account. "It was a lot of fun while it lasted," she wrote on her official website. "With MySpace no longer in existence, I can now clearly state that...there is no other outlet where I communicate with people online," Meyer continued. "I do not have a Facebook page, and I have never had one. I don't do Twitter. So if you're communicating with someone online that you think is me, it's not." [E!]
• Additional Twilight news: Disney star Selena Gomez and hunky native werewolf Taylor Launter: Splitsville. [UPI]
• TV chef Gordon Ramsay called Aussie TV journalist Tracy Grimshaw a pig and a lesbian; she's calling him an "arrogant narcissist." It's a mess. [News.com.au]
• Gordon Ramsay says the insults he made were "blown out of context." [Mirror]
• Kelly Clarkson says she sympathizes with Susan Boyle: "She's from a small town, I'm from a smaller town. You have to focus on the people that are really positive around you. It takes time." [The Sun]
• Liam Neeson is in talks to play Hannibal in the big-screen adaptation of A-team. Bradley Cooper might play Faceman. No word on Mr. T's involvement, but I pity the fool who thinks he can replace him. [Variety]
• Bryce Dallas Howard has written a drama called The Originals, "an ensemble film about a group of twentysomethings who reconvene for a weekend in New York after learning that the teacher who shaped their childhoods has fallen into a mysterious coma." [The Hollywood Reporter]
• The wife of baseball player Barry Bonds has filed for legal separation. [TMZ]
• Phil Spector's wife says he is being treated "worse than an animal" in jail. It's not supposed to be enjoyable… [NME]
• Uh, what? "Children as young as five were 'confused and worried' after teachers played them a recording of Elton John's 'Your Song' in an effort to explain homosexuality." [Mirror]
• A silver menorah which once belonged to Sammy Davis Jr. failed to sell for $9,000 at auction. The Candy Man can't generate cash? [NY Times]
• Blind item! "Which dreamy-eyed actor is embarrassed to admit he's hooking up with a hard-partying starlet?" [Gatecrasher]
• "They wouldn't have my character back on the show. My character was born out of the '90s. It's a different era now." — Andrew Shue won't be on the new Melrose Place. [Gatecrasher]
• "I think I'm either naive or insane to play her - maybe a little bit of both!" — Anne Hathaway on playing Judy Garland on Broadway. [Gatecrasher]
• "Kids are not to be used as weapons. Deadbeat moms that sleep all day, seeking money, attention like 2 do so. Just hurts the kids in the end. Giving birth 2 a child doesn't make u a good mom. Taking care of them, loving them, waking up with them, spending time with them does." — Travis Barker's been Twittering not-so-subtle hints about his feelings towards Shanna Moakler. [Perez]
• "She would have a plan on arrival anywhere and would be carving the best out of life and every situation and every person. She wasn't as much a passenger as I am, which made us great companions in life... because every driver needs a passenger and every passenger needs a driver. So it's a big loss in my life." — Uma Thurman on Natasha Richardson, to Harper's Bazaar UK. [Daily Express]
• "Everybody's making it like there's all this tension, you know, like I stepped away from the band and now they're jealous of me, and look, maybe there is a little bit of that. But some fights aren't really what they seem." — Gwen Stefani on reuniting with No Doubt. [Mirror]
• "It's one thing when you have an infant. But when you have this three-year-old going, 'Mommy, what's the deal?' it's harder. Kingston's whole thing is, 'I need, I need.' He is insane right now. We're just hoping for the best and that he's not going to turn out to be a freak, but we'll see." — Gwen Stefani, on being a working mom. [Mirror]
• "Gwyneth is one of the most intelligent people I know. So motivating her to do something is not the issue. Learning to dance and get that lung capacity and endurance was the hardest part for her. She (complained) about the cardio. To this day, if she at all has had filming days, she'll always do it, but it's like, 'Ugh, we have to do the cardio.'" — trainer Tracy Anderson. [USA Today]
• "I have always carried around in my mind, that he would ultimately be seen as a heroic figure. But I'm maybe kidding myself." — Michael Emerson, aka Ben Linus on Lost. [Mirror]
• "Yes, she's never played a mother and she's playing a mother of three in this movie but that didn't scare me. I knew she was up for it. I'm more proud of her performance in the film than I am proud of things in my life." — Nick Cassavetes on Cameron Diaz in My Sister's Keeper. [Daily Express]
• "Lately, I've been in meetings regarding a new script idea I have. A studio executive asked me to change the female lead to a male, because... 'women don't go to movies.' Really? When I pointed out the box office successes of Sex and The City, Mamma Mia, and Obsessed, he called them 'flukes.' He said 'don't quote me on this.' So, I'm telling everybody." — Nia Vardalos. [HuffPo]
• ''People see me and they're like, 'Oh, you're so much prettier in real life!' And I'm like, 'Well, thanks.' It's definitely narrowed the opportunities, which is a bummer because... I want a job! I didn't enter this biz because I thought I was a supermodel. I entered because I liked finding out what makes people laugh.'' — Rachel Dratch, who doesn't exactly deny the rumor that she was supposed to be on 30 Rock, but the network wanted ''hotter'' actress Jane Krakowski instead. [EW]
• It's hard to believe you're still on the D-list. "I have proof although I'm flattered at the suggestion that I could even be a C-minus. Recently, I was on tour and they delivered me a sandwich and it said Taffy Griffin. Now, I'd like to think that's maybe what they thought my stripper name was, but no. My name was on the marquee. Sold-out show. Taffy Griffin. I'm on the D-list where I belong… What is tough for me as a D-list celebrity is that kind of puts Speidi and me in the same category and that hurts. That's a bitter pill for me to swallow." — Kathy Griffin. [AP]
• "I don't have to defend myself. What can you do against something that is totally different from what you really think? It was hard to live with that, because I'm not the person described in that ridiculous story. I was not happy that this story could hurt people. But I felt sorry for those French journalists-that was the thing. I felt sorry for journalism, in general. We live in a world where there is so much information, but what I said was taken out of context. It's so common for someone who gives interviews to say that, but a cliché becomes a cliché because it's true. Some of it was funny: the part where I thought that man didn't walk on the moon? Man, please! It's so ridiculous… I talked about being fascinated by Internet conspiracies, because they are fascinating. And I asked a question like that: 'Did man walk on the moon?' Because the conspiracies are out there, not because it's a question I believed." — Marion Cotillard, on the statements she made about September 11. [BlackBook]

[New York, June 4. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

[New York, June 2. Image via INF]

• Hilary Rhoda: Estée Lauder spokesmodel with a thing for drugstore makeup. A woman after our own hearts. [Daily Beast]
• In other news from model-land, Adriana Lima might be pregnant. [NYDN]
• Also said to be expecting: Gisele Bundchen. [NYDN]
• And sources say Kate Moss could be birthing a "novel." [Sun]

• Givenchy's Fall/Winter campaign, shot this time by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott after nine seasons in the hands of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, features newcomer model Ranya Mordanova and her distinctive bowl cut. [WWD]
• Stefan Persson, the Swedish owner of H&M, is in the final stages of a $40 million deal to buy an entire village in Britain. Linkenholt, its manor estate, cricket grounds, town hall, forest, surrounding farm land, and all 21 current residents' homes, will become Persson's. Curiously, the neighboring town of Andover was the site, in 994, of the confirmation of Viking King Olaf Tryggvason, who, in following the religious ceremony and the receipt of other gifts, promised King Ethelred the Unready that he would stop raiding England. (The Viking king was technically Norwegian, not Swedish, but it's still an odd coincidence.) [UPI]
• Another country estate, this one in Scotland, with a fashion connection, is to be restored by its owner. Rundown Rosehall House, which was decorated by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, is going to be turned into a luxury country club under a £3 million renovation plan. [Daily Express]
• At Dior's party for Marion Cotillard at Cannes, Alex de Betak, who produces shows for the major houses, revealed that he's curating an exhibition dedicated to fashion shows that will unfurl in 3-D at the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf in July. Expect references to the now in-again late 80s/early 90s: "There are shows that made a big impression on me before I even started out, like the Thierry Mugler with the motorbike and George Michael or Gaultier's shows at the Villette where girls were coming out of the floor. Those were so memorable." [WWD]
• Cartier filed and withdrew a lawsuit against Apple in the same day. The jewelry house alleged that two iPhone applications infringed on its trademark Tank watches; Apple removed the apps from its online store. [WSJ]
• John Duerden, the new CEO of Crocs, a company which was supposed to be bankrupt already after losing $22.4 million in the first quarter of this year alone, thinks the company can be saved with aggressive cost-cutting and a thorough pruning of its inventory. [WWD]
• The rejected Aquascutum buyout may have been the company's last chance for survival. Former chief executive Kim Winser, who transformed Pringle into a fashion brand before taking over Aquascutum three years ago, had wanted to buy the venerable English house from its current Japanese owners, Renown, which is looking to spin off the brand as part of company-wide restructuring. Now, 400 jobs and the company's pension obligations are in jeopardy. [FT]
• Fellow iconic British label Burberry Prorsum will show in London, not Milan, this September, to mark the 25th anniversary of London Fashion Week and the British Fashion Council. [WWD]
• Rumors of a rift between Donatella Versace, creative director, and Giancarlo di Risio, chief executive, over Versace's falling fortunes and recession strategy have been denied "unanimously and categorically" by the company board. Di Risio was said to be on the point of leaving the company. Versace has so far refused to adapt much to the new patterns of consumer spending, emphatically not lowering its prices. The company believes that discounting would harm its luxury brand identity in the long term; sales have plummeted, even relative to the overall troubled high-end fashion market, with revenue falling 13.4% in the first quarter of 2009. [FT]
• Saks's CEO has pledged to offer more low-priced items following a 27% decline in sales in the first quarter. Lanvin, meanwhile, has just announced that it made $9.9 million in profits during 2008, a year for which sales grew 29%. [WWD]
• Nordstrom's prices are already an average of 10% lower than they were one year ago. [WWD]
• For his part, John Varvatos has one question he'd like to ask God, assuming s/he exists: "When is the economy going to turn around?" [The Fashion Informer]
• Sergio Rossi has a new president and CEO: Christophe Mélard. [WWD]
• Guthy Renker Australia, which, there as here, sells skincare products, including Proactiv and Principal Secret, via infomercial, lost AU$15 million last year. The American parent company has had to guarantee its debts. [News.com.au]
• Ittierre, the troubled Italian fashion company that Roberto Cavalli blamed for the cancellation of his Fall/Winter Just Cavalli show this February, has renewed its licensing deal not only with Cavalli, but with C'N'C, Costume National's diffusion brand. [WWD]