• Here we have it, the first official glimpse of Kanye West's Louis Vuitton sneakers, aka THE BEST SNEAKERS KNOWN TO MANKIND EVER. The $700+ kicks were inspired by the movie Dune, and Kanye's own mind-blowing genius. [Racked]

• Former supermodel Karen Mulder has been arrested in Paris for allegedly making death threats to her plastic surgeon. When she quit modeling, Mulder alleged that executives at Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves offered to politicians, influential media figures, and other officials. Mulder then was admitted into a psychiatric facility; Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men she accused of abusing her, paid for her treatment. Marie was earlier the focus of a BBC sting operation that filmed him offering a woman posing as a 15-year-old model 300 pounds for sex, and talking of his desire to seduce as many of the teenaged contestants in the Elite Model Look competition, which was how Mulder originally shot to fame, as he could. Marie remains the head of Elite Paris. [Telegraph]
• Twiggy is back as the face of Olay — a company she first modeled for in 1985. [Daily Mail]
• Blake Lively would like you all to know that getting dressed is something she manages to do all by herself. "It would probably help if I had a stylist, but I don't," the actress said. Taking sole responsibility for that Met Ball monstrosity really is kind of ballsy. [WWD]
• Levi's is touting its button-fly 501s with a new America-themed, Ryan McGinley-shot advertising campaign. [NYTimes]
• Man cleavage: Is there a limit to how much you can take? Glamour wants to know. [Glamour]
• Lovebirds Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone have had to push their nuptials back to August, because of the former's work schedule. They still plan to tie the knot in Provincetown, where Robert Duffy has a home. [WWD]
• Rejoice, "older" women, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Herein we dispense with the notion that women of a certain age "can't" wear florals, short skirts, bikinis, dresses that show cleavage, especially "pufftastic" cleavage such as older woman Liz Hurley's, and tops that reveal bare arms, and then we append a series of limits and guidelines on how, precisely, such items should be worn. The rules to dressing are dead. Long live the rules to dressing! [ToL]
• Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell was seen on the premises of Topshop HQ, and that must mean she is in talks to design a namesake clothing line with the British retailer. [Mirror]
• Bulgari's new scent, Blu II, is inspired by "a modern vision of the color blue" and advertised by Laetitia Casta. [NST]
• Michael Kors' Fall 2009 ad campaign stars...Carmen Kass and Noah Mills. Add Kors to the list of designers sticking with the tried-and-true this recession, then. [WWD]
• Hartmarx has lost three top executives. The bankrupt company, which was just bought by the private equity fund Emerisque, just had its senior vice president and CFO, the president of its women's wear division, and the group president of luxury. Emerisque takes control of the company on July 7. [ChicagoSunTimes]
• Johan Lindeberg, the founder of J. Lindeberg, has reluctantly left his label over creative differences with Proventus, the Swedish investment firm which has owned the business since 2007. Proventus hired a new design director without seeking Lindeberg's input, and the women's wear line which was supposed to relaunch under the direction of his wife, Marcella, never materialized. The partners have designed Justin Timberlake's William Rast line for the past three seasons and earned plaudits for it from the fashion press — but rather than make William Rast their sole creative outlet, the Lindebergs plan to launch a new line, called Paris68. It'll feature made-to-measure tailoring for men, dresses for women, and high-end denim and leather jackets for both sexes. [WWD]
• Children's wear retailer Best & Co. has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. [Crain's]
• The Met is screening three fashion-themed movies as part of its "Model as Muse" exhibit. And even better than the films are the people the museum has arranged to discuss them: model Carmen Dell'Orefice will be on hand for Funny Face on July 10, Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? will be discussed by its title actress, Dorothy McGowan, and Isaac Mizrahi will talk about the 1995 documentary that features him, Unzipped. Tickets are just $10. [Met]
• Mizrahi is also curating an art exhibit at Manhattan's Julie Saul gallery. The summer group show features works from Maira Kalman, Julia Sherman, Wayne Thiebaud, Donna Chung and Jane Freilicher, and it's open until September 12. [WWD]

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]

[New York, May 4. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - MAY 4: A view of 'The Model As Muse: Embodying Fashion' Costume Institute Gala preview at The Metropolitan Museum of Art May 4, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

• Confirmed: Madonna will do the Louis Vuitton fall campaign. With Jesus Luz? I imagine LVMH execs did a pro/con weighing the headline value against the risk that Madge would dump her boytoy ere September. [Grazia]

• No pesky swine flu pandemic threat level five business will put the fear into superstylist/downtown savant/Socrates afficionado Pat Field. When asked if she was afraid of the illness, she replied, "No. We're in America and we don't give a shit about anything." [The Cut]
• Frenchie actress and hobbyist 9/11 conspiracy theorist Marion Cotillard, new face of Lady Dior, will, unsurprisingly, wear Dior to the Met ball on Monday. [WWD]
• Fashionologie has an excellent roundup of the Met ball news, from which designers are sitting this year out due to the cost, to who's taking whom as a date. [Fashionologie]
• Michelle Obama's March Vogue cover was a top-selling issue, moving 560,000 copies on the newsstand, which is 1,000 more than 2008's best-seller, the September issue. [WWD]
• Elle MacPherson designed a cashmere sweater for her sister-in-law's line, Banjo & Matilda. It costs $499 Australian. [British Vogue]
• Behnaz Sarafpour went to Saudi Arabia to show her line in a trunk show (organized by a princess and attended by women only, naturally) and the designer reports that it is totally an underrated holiday destination. "I even got to ride a camel for the first time!!! Very Lawrence of Arabia!!!" [WWD]
• The launch party for Matthew Williamson's H&M line doubled as a booze cruise. Only unlike your pre-recession enforced-jollity work do, his had Grace Jones performing. [Style.com]
• And a pants-less Chanel Iman. [The Cut]
• Sophie Dahl: "When you've got big bosoms and a really big bottom it's difficult to get dressed. You end up looking slightly pornographic in everything. But it's nice to be able to get into jeans and a T-shirt and not have your breasts do the talking." [Daily Express]
• V's take on a swimsuit issue looks like a winner. Six different models on the cover, including a sizzling Naomi Campbell, shot against a yellow background. Campbell marks her 25th year in the industry this year, so naturally, she's hinting about a retirement. That'll never stick. [Daily Mail]
• Francisco Costa is going to be on Martha Stewart's show tomorrow. [WWD]
• Kenneth Cole is going to be a commencement speaker at Northeastern University. Wanna take odds on 30 continuous minutes of puns? [FWD]
• A collection of Christian Lacroix's couture theater and opera costumes is being shown in Singapore — the first exhibition of the French designer's work outside France. Patsy would just die to be there. [Dazed Digital]
• Under Armour is recalling 211,000 athletic cups. Because they come from a batch that "can break if hit, posing a serious injury hazard to athletes." [BlackBook]
• An awful lot of Isaac Mizrahi's recently-released first collection for mass-market retailer Liz Claiborne has already been discounted, notes Racked. [Racked ]
• Hugo Boss's net profits shrank by 2% in the first quarter of 2009. [WWD]
• Men's Wearhouse just discovered its own long-existing Prom Rep program — a kind of Tupperware Party of tux rental, with "referrals" and "rewards" for customers willing to transform themselves into vectors of corporate marketing with a target lock on their friends — is perfect for the Twittered, Facebooked, atomized high school world of now. Isn't that nice. [BrandWeek]