• Snoop Dogg takes cross-marketing to a whole new level: He's promoting his clothing line, Rich and Infamous, via his reality TV series Snoop Dogg's Father Hood, on his concert tour, through placement in movies and videos, on iTunes, through a Web series, and, natch, on the packaging of his new CD. [Variety]
• It's easy to believe Kate Moss is a crappy neighbor, but it does seem like this would be the least of the problems: "Neighbors at her Oxfordshire summer home have complained to the local planning authority about Moss’ two 15 feet teepees erected in her backyard. Their complaints are that the tents are an eye sore on the 17th Centrury home... and also obscure the view of the Cotswold hills." [Sassybella]
• Albert Hammond, Jr. is going into menswear. The Strokes guitarist, solo artist and Agyness Deyn fiance explains: “A lot of people hate suits, because when they fit terribly, they feel strange inside, like they’re going to a bar mitzvah and they’re 30,” [NY]
• Rememeber those Russian faux-lesbian school girl sorta-pop singers who were big for like two seconds five years ago, t.A.T.u ? Yeah. For some reason Marc Jacobs is featuring them in an ad. [Perez Hilton]

• Screw the conventions: it's official. Obama and McCain are now paper dolls. They've been drawn by renowned artist Tom Tierney, "who casts the candidates and their spouses as ready-to-dress paper people, each with about half a dozen wardrobe changes (oddly, Barack Obama's daughters Malia and Natasha are included — each with a single cold-weather outfit — but John McCain's brood of seven is absent)." And yes, they're in undies. [LAT]
• New Rachel Zoe line will, apparently, contain everything plus kitchen sink: "We're doing accessories, clothes, everything — we're going across the board. I always have a lot I want to say, and I think there's a gap in certain areas [of the fashion market]. I'm thinking it will launch sometime in 2009. It will be very accessible. I want people to have access to fashion fantasy all the time. I also want the person who's spending $500 on a purse to want to buy it. It will be a mix of lower-tier and midrange prices — maybe with some limited-edition items." [LAT]
• "Nike Sportswear" opens its first boutique. [WWD]
• Heidi Klum has designed a butterfly/tennis ball tee shirt that we wouldn't wear if our lives depended on it. [Sassybella]
• Why do celebs think hawking T-shirts is the answer to all the world's problems? Elettra Wiedemann. Isabella Rossellini's moddle daughter, "is more than just a pretty face - she's trying to save the world one T-shirt at a time. The Italian stunner is working with the Solar Electric Life Fund to equip a failing hospital in Kigutu, Burundi, with solar power. To raise $450,000, Wiedemann enlisted the help of fashion-industry friends to design limited-edition, Africa-inspired T-shirts to be sold via JOFD.org." [Page Six]
• New J. Crew accessories catalogue is ridiculously high-end. And no mittens! [WWD]
• You can thank this woman for Rachel Zoe: "Founder of the Margaret Maldonado Agency, one of a dozen or so offices that place stylists with high-profile clients, she's the image maker behind the image makers." [LAT]
• Honeymoon's over: more fast fashion condemnation. [Guardian]
• "Brazilian design and designers are spearheading a new look that is increasingly taking over in Europe and the US." The nature of "the look" is vague. [Independent]
• Is Madonna going to pioneer a "hosiery trend?" We're gonna go with "Winter" on that one. [The Sun]
• Rumor has it that American Apparel is extending its evil, vertically-integrated empire to shoes. [Fashionista]
• Tyra claims she was Kimora's modeling mentor: "She didn't have rhythm … I'd teach her how to roll her hips sexy," says the modeling mogul. [NY Mag]
• Horseshoe boots, anyone? The top five strangest Japanese fashion trends. Just look at it, okay? [Inventor Spot]

What exactly is the New York Times' problem? The paper describes young Yves Saint Laurent as a sensitive boy "who avoided all sports but swimming and developed a love for fashion and the theater at an early age...As a teen-ager, he designed clothes for his mother, who had them whipped up by a local seamstress."

In other cliched words: three-dollar bill.

Contrast this with Agence France Press: "A shy lonely child born to a well-off family, he was taunted over his homosexuality."

Ditto the Telegraph: "At school he was beaten up by the other boys for his obvious homosexual leanings. He was so nervous that he was sick every day; he found solace in a land populated by elaborate cut-out paper dolls."

Sometimes The Times is like my mom: in an attempt to avoid anything remotely impolite, or imply that it's not totally cool with his being gay, it just obfuscates to the point of making everyone uncomfortable, and here it succeeds in making his sexuality something tacitly indelicate by implication. (Then it kind of slips his "partner" in as a matter of course later, which somehow makes the whole thing worse.)

Rant over.

Anyway, you obviously don't need me to tell you that YSL was the reigning roi of fashion: wunderkind, visionary, radical, elder statesman — you name it. He single-handedly popularized trousers, trenches and parkas - to say nothing of the iconic smoking - and pushed fashion from couture into ready-to-wear. He was behind essentially every trend of the latter-20th century and defined the template of luxe, casual sexiness to which we still adhere today. Like all the best designers, he seemed to genuinely love women (skeletal muses notwithstanding) and his clothes showed it.

But beyond any of this, he defined the designer as the romantic: a reclusive, Proust-reading, depression-suffering, fabulously wealthy, tortured genius, shadowed by vague tragedy — and a stone-cold bespectacled fox.

Perhaps a lot of the romance that clings to this mysterious figure and other 'icons' of his stripe is the sense of lost possibility. In our world, where we can only hope to 'reference' and 'allude' and recycle with varying degrees of irony and homage, it seems incredible to think of a time when one man could create so much — when there was so much left to be created. Maybe that's why his death makes me extra-sad — it's not like I'm decked out in vintage safari here, after all.

Yves Saint Laurent Funeral Set for Thursday[WWD]
Yves Saint Laurent, Fashion Icon, Dies at 71[New York Times]
Fashion Icon Yves Saint Laurent Dies at 71 [AFP]
Obituary: Yves Saint Laurent [Telegraph]

• We are apparently the only people who were moved to buy Gap's skinny pants by those Audrey Hepburn TV commercials because, this year, the retailer's campaign is print-only, featuring famous and semi-famous people in black and white magazine spreads. [We saw it in 'Vanity Fair' and it is soooooo alluring. -Ed] [NYT]
  
• Unacceptable Marc Jacobs item of the day: Happy Meal-inspired boxed-sets of baby items. [Vogue UK]
  
• Kate Moss's new fragrance is a floral musk, which expresses "the personality of Kate Moss in this duality." We assume her Pete Doherty-shagging side is represented in the "musk", which is, ahem, a kind way of describing the scent of cold sweat and junkie toilet. [WWD, sub req'd]

• Oh thank goodness! It's been at least a week since we wrote anything about Valentino! And their net profits for the quarter are up 18.3%. In other news, Valentino: still not retired! [WWD, sub req'd]
• Liberace paper dolls! We are desperate enough to have these we might have some sexual favors up our sleeve.. [WWD, 3rd item]
• Giorgio Armani's avatar on the virtual reality escapism website "world" thingy is... himself. Ha! [Portfolio.com]
• Japanese couples spend a third of what Americans do on engagement rings despite having higher median incomes and what sounds like a pragmatic reality-driven culture to us sounds like a huge opportunity to DeBeers. [WSJ]