• Designer Sophie Théallet has won the $200,000 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund Award. "Thank you for making my American dreams come true," said she. [Style.com]
• Skating at an outdoor rink in London, Lily Cole knocked over a small child. [Daily Mail]

• Adriana Lima and Marko Jaric have announced the birth of their baby daughter, Valentina. With Heidi Klum's and Karolina Kurkova's babies, that makes three Victoria's Secret newborns, so far. (Gisele Bundchen is due in December — like Jourdan Dunn, who isn't a Victoria's Secret girl but is a damn awesome model.) So, in about 15 years, maybe we should expect an invasion of new models with perfect pedigrees. [People]
• Here are the first pictures of Comme des Garçons' Beatles collaboration line. We are still not sure why this exists. [Racked]
• Says Rihanna: "In the past few months I've done a lot of research in the fashion world because I wanted to work with a bunch of designers that are kinda underground, people who aren't the obvious...My style is very edgy, very daring. I like to take risks — I hate to do the obvious." [Grazia]
• Pascal Mouawad, who yesterday Lindsay Lohan claimed to be working with on a jewelry line, is today unequivocal: "This is not happening." Sorry, LiLo. [WWD]
• Kate Moss's fourth fragrance, Vintage, is not, we repeat not, coming to the United States. [People]
• Chanel Iman says her one-day "internship" at Teen Vogue "wasn't really planned. I was going in for my fitting for the Teen Vogue cover. I just started helping around the office, organizing the closet. It led from one hour to the next, then it was my fitting and that stopped and I started interning again. I'm a girl that loves to keep busy no matter what it is, being paid or not." Real interns tend to do more than just fill the downtime between fittings — and they also tend to prefer getting paid to not. [NYDN]
• Gemma Ward, in an e-mail to an Australian newspaper, clarified that she has not quit modeling, and that she expects to return to modeling and acting next year. Her mother, meanwhile, says the Aussie supermodel is considering studying drama at Yale. [SB]
• Marc Jacobs, on the differences between Paris and New York: "I'm most at home in New York. I have so many friends and such a large creative community that I feel I'm a part of here. So my work in New York is very influenced by my personal relationships and what I'm doing, and what the people on my team are doing, while Paris is a bit of a bubble, a fantasy. It's almost like I'm pretending to be a designer in Paris. I just think, ‘What would a French designer do?'" [WWD]
• Vivienne Westwood held her spring Anglomania show in a carpark outside a Selfridges in London. [Telegraph]
• Didn't spikes and studs on footwear reach saturation point sometime last winter? Our tolerance is certainly pricked. [The Cut]
• Adidas has announced that in conjunction with Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus, it will manufacture shoes for the developing world in Bangladesh. The target price for the final product, which Adidas is making without profit? €1, or about $1.50 at current exchange rates. [Telegraph]
• In our mixed-up, topsy-turvy modern world, why not buy spring clothes in November? Phoebe Philo's debut collection for Céline is already on sale, in a customized space at Dover Street Market. [Independent]
• Donna Karan would not approve. She thinks shopping for clothes during the season they are intended to be worn makes a certain kind of sense, because otherwise those clothes go on sale during the season they are intended to be worn, which from her perspective is much worse. "We're not talking to the consumer, we're talking to ourselves," says the designer. "When it's cold out, let's warm the customer. When it's hot out, let's be able to the cool the customer. This isn't nuclear science. Don't deliver fall clothes until back-to-school — do you remember that old logo, back-to-school? — [in] September, when the leaves start to change. Now the leaves are changing, but our seasons are changing because we're already shipping resort." [WWD]
• Prada's book party was probably the most fashionable book party, ever. [People]
• Miuccia Prada: "When people think of fashion, they prefer to see the crazy side, the clichéd side, and actually I think that is wrong. Fashion is an important part of a woman's life. It's a question of aesthetics and that is in no way stupid or superficial." Also: those black nylon bags Prada became famous for in the 90s cost more than comparable leather ones because it took her three years to "learn how to work with" nylon, OK? [Independent]
• Stella McCartney says she has felt uncomfortable with the notion of working in fashion, too. "I was a bit embarrassed by the word ‘fashion,'" she said at a summit on luxury hosted by Women's Wear Daily; McCartney calls herself "an infiltrator" of the industry. Working without animal products has caused its own set of problems: when Tom Ford, then at Gucci, initially approached McCartney about her becoming part of the company, he said her working without fur would be no problem, but when she replied that she also works without leather, "his face just went white and his jaw dropped to the ground." And then there's the expense: "t costs us up to 70 percent more to make a pair of shoes than any other brand - we take that on the chin; we don't mark it up for the customer. Coming into the States, we have nearly a 30 percent import duty for nonleather goods, which I think of as kind of medieval." Fifty million animals are killed for leather production every year. [WWD]
• Nintendo DS has a game called Style Savvy, in which you play a store manager helping customers find outfits that suit their style and their budgets. (Nintendo: now preparing children for retail drudgery!) Charlotte Ronson's fall 2009 collection is included as an optional download. [SB]
• Renaud Dutreil, the chairman of LVMH's U.S. arm, bicycles to work every day. [WWD]
• The Gap has come under fire from a Christian group that accuses it of failing to use the word "Christmas" in its holiday advertising and mailings. The Los Angeles Times points out the many layers of hypocrisy present in this argument — and the fact that the Gap, in addition to selling Christmas-themed merchandise, does mention Christmas in its holiday TV spot. [LATimes]
• So Oakley has some top-secret cadre of sunglass engineers who are encouraged to come up with the most technologically advanced sunglasses you have never imagined, with cost no object. This is why $4,000 carbon-fiber sunglasses exist. (Unfortunately, they are still ugly.) [BW]
• Evidently Vanity Fair needs some pageviews. So they went to the drawing board and came back with...sexy pictures of supermodels. That'll work. [VF]
• Burberry reported a 24% decline in its profits for the six months to September 30, compared with the same period last year. This was better than expected. [WSJ]
• Meanwhile, Saks enjoyed a profit during the third quarter. Surprise profits must be the best kind of profits. [TS]
• The "Kardashian KCollection," which the sisters K put together for Virgins, Saints and Angels, is reportedly "inspired by their Armenian heritage." Their forebears seem to have liked spikes. A lot. [Racked]

That was around the time I started begging my parents for a tree, and the answer was always no. "It's a Christan symbol," they'd tell me. When I was younger, my retort was always, "But...it's pretty!" That didn't really get me far. As I got older I probably responded with, "No, It's a Pagan symbol," but that didn't really work out either."This is a Christian country," my mom would say, "and regardless of its Pagan origins, a tree is for Christians. Case closed."

That twinkling inner desire for a tree never really dissipated, and this year I had an excuse to get one. I moved in with my Episcopalian boyfriend in March, and when December rolled around, I started lobbying for a tree. Dear Mom: Maybe if you had let me have a tree when I was a kid, I wouldn't be forced to date goys all the time. Just sayin'!

The WASPy bf sort of lumped my tree desires in with my other fake whims, like when I ask for a baby panda or say "Why don't we just move to Miami?" When he realized I was actually serious, he wasn't really on the tree train either. "It's messy," he argued. "Our apartment is small." I countered with "But we could keep in the backyard!" And he begrudgingly agreed. One day after work he brought a small fir in through our side door, and I squealed with glee. I didn't even mind that he made me keep it outside like an incontinent old dog. I thought that my childhood holiday dreams had finally come true, but in reality, only kind of.

Last week I went to buy some cheap lights and tinsel across the street. As I approached the checkout counter laden with garish candy cane festooned crap, I started feeling funny. It was just... wrong. Indescribably wrong! Like drawing a fake mustache on Anne Frank. Like taking a dump on the The Wailing Wall. I was somehow turning my back on thousands of years of heritage for some $1.99 ornaments.

I bought the supplies anyway, and walking home I realized that even though the tree has become a Christian symbol, it doesn't have to be one for me. Cheesy as it sounds, having a tree in my own home can just be an expression of warmth and joy. It isn't about wanting to be Christian, it's about wanting to take pleasure in rituals that I've always admired. That's me in the picture after I decorated the gimpy, listing tree with my boyfriend and some other people. I look sort of stoned, and one of my friends was all, "You're just high on Christmas!" I hope you all get high on Christmas, too. Happy Holidays!

Kyle - Just A Jew on Christmas (South Park) [Youtube]

My wife does not play any kind of games. I have tried to make her interested with various games like Tetris, but she has never showed interest, until recently. But we're beginning to tear down the walls... Hopefully women will begin to enjoy games more. I think our target will be mothers.

But the fact is, despite all the shopping we do, sometimes it seems like consumer goods aren't designed to make us happy. Like for instance tampon applicators. And bras! (Maybe Miyamoto can get into making those?) Anyway, maybe that's what we get in a country whose biggest companies by market cap are makers of, um, war and war stuff!

*P.S. ...Morimoto... Brain fart, guys!

Nintendo Now Japan's Second Largest Company [Financial Times]

You might have gathered that we are conflicted about parenting. Whatever our awe-inspiring productivity might suggest bloggers are not cyborgs of snark; we are humans, who were parented once, and who occasionally eat peanut butter straight from the jar, just like you would if you had a job that never actually required you to wear anything higher-end than Bitten By Sarah Jessica Parker. Anyhow, central to our conflict is whether to accept the whole "Moms—they're just like US!" theory they keep foisting upon us like a stroller in a crowded block of midtown when we're ten minutes late to an interview, or to consider them an alien species, as our own moms are. Each day, we will devote this space to examining motherhood, and whether it truly is compatible with regular human existence.

Today's obligatory mommy story, courtesy USA Today, examines the life of Oregon graphic designer we can thank for coining the phrase "Alpha Mom," who happens to be starting a digital on-demand TV channel called Alpha Mom TV. Typical quote:

"I am a complex woman who is unloading a lot of emotional baggage on her motherhood journey," is how Kallman responded in her blog to that article.

More baggage — not just ours this time! — after the jump.

The piece, which by the way is like the longest in the history of USA Today starts with a section on why Alpha Moms are "trendsetters," noting they:

-have money to spend
-influence others' buying decisions ("ignites markets" is the puke-inducing term coined by high-low guru Michael Silverstein. Aren't you glad I read marketing books so you don't have to?)
-they're online an average of 87 minutes away
-they play Nintendo Wii

(none of which really hit home with us).

Then it develops into a profile of Constance Van Flandern, an artist and graphic designer who developed the term "Alpha Mom" because a client of hers, Isabel Kallman, wanted to start a digital cable channel and she "couldn't get behind Mommy Channel."

Kallman was later profiled in New York Magazine in a piece in which she called parenthood "the hardest job I ever tackled" and described her ideal audience member as ""you know, the maven of mommyhood, the leader of the pack."

Then the story turns into an orgy of corporate brandspeak (Nintendo! Cadillac! Swiffer! Sprint!) at which point the only paragraph we could make out read:

She told Cadillac how much she loves the Escalade she bought two years ago, and, for no fee, apeared in a video now on Cadillac's website McPeak says she likes the SUV because it's efficient for hauling volleyballs, groceries or family.

Volleyballs! Groceries! Videogames! Small humans!

All this cargo can be yours!

If your SUV is big enough!

Moms — Just Like Us? Verdict: Not so much.

Alpha Moms Leap to Top of Trendsetters [USA Today]