• Victoria Beckham reportedly owns 100 Birkins, with a $2 million value. Although Posh's penchant for the carryalls isn't in question, we do nonetheless note this story has two pictures of her holding Kellys. [Daily Mail]

• Right after settling the lawsuit brought against it by Woody Allen to the tune of a cool $5 mil, American Apparel released its quarterly results. And they were less than glowing. In the period ended March 31, the fashion giant lost $9 million, as operating costs rose 21%, to $69.3 million, and sales grew only 2.4%, to $114.3 million. Company stock fell by 20% during yesterday's trading. Because of the classification of its revolving credit facility as a long-term obligation, American Apparel may also be obligated to restate its previous financial statements. It has already reduced its full-year sales forecast by $25-$50 million. [Reuters]
• Michelle Obama cut the ribbon on the renovated American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wearing a purple Isaac Mizrahi sheath. Oscar de la Renta was heard to sob quietly into his pocket square. [WWD]
• Then, she went to the American Ballet Theatre's spring gala at the Metropolitan Opera House, where she wore an Azzedine Alaïa dress and a Thakoon jacket. Earlier, at the museum, she said: "The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation." [AP]
• Anna Wintour's office chairs, glimpsed briefly in the 60 Minutes segment that aired Sunday, have been ID'd: they are classics of Art Deco design, and cost $250 apiece. [UnBeige]
• Brüno has a Twitter account, and you can expect Tweets in the character's voice until the movie hits theaters on July 10 (it is, naturally, a marketing effort). For now, enjoy witticisms such as: "Am I ze most gifted Austrian ever? Let's just say zat at 14 ich could play Rock Me Amadeus on ze flute. Falco didn't write it til he vas 29." And: "Ze vorld ist zo screwed up - vhy do zey give out Nobel Prizes for physics, medicine und svimming, but not for fashion?" [Brüno's Twitter]
• Isabel and Ruben Toledo, fashion designer and fashion illustrator, respectively, were honored with the André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award at the Savannah College of Art and Design's annual fashion show. Talley told the crowd, "The Toledos represent a quarter century of love and brand building. They're like two oaks, branches intertwined forever." [Reuters]
• In other awards-show effusions, Betsey Johnson compared New York Fashion Week head Fern Mallis to David Bowie and Mick Jagger as she presented her with Parsons' AAS Icon Award. When students in the Associates in Applied Science fashion marketing program got a little rowdy, Johnson quieted them with four words: "I'm looking to hire." [WWD]
• For a taste of how the Valentino half lives, imagine this: fireplaces ablaze out of season, air conditioners running, and uniformed manservants depositing cool glasses of water onto linen napkins. Also: secret buttons inside the bookshelves. [Guardian]
• Marc Ecko has announced he'll be doing co-branded collections with DC Comics, incorporating the characters of Batman and the Rogues Gallery. Perhaps the superheroes can save his troubled business? [WWD]
• Burberry, in the year ended March 31, lost $9 million. Its core earnings fell 13%, but annual sales rose 21%. The main reason for the loss was a company write-down that cost £116 million. The brand, which has already laid off 800 workers, still expects to open 10-15 stores this year. [WSJ]
• Yesterday, we included a Rag Trade item, sourced to WWD, about designer Erin Fetherston. Fetherston was reported to be making a short film about her fall collection in New York's West Village, starring Juliette Lewis with music by Damon Dash, and her husband, the artist Hedi Firjani, told WWD that Fetherston was looking to launch a line with QVC, probably timed to coincide with New York Fashion Week this September. Both are untrue, according to Fetherston's PR rep, who contacted us shortly after we published. Fetherston is making a film, with director Marisa Crawford, but Juliette Lewis isn't the star. And the deal with QVC is not confirmed.

• Naomi Campbell stalked the runway like a thoroughbred in Mumbai for a charity show. Last time Campbell blended fashion and philanthropy, the supermodel raised over $1 million for Hurricane Katrina survivors. [Daily Mail]

• Mikhail Gorbachev is not enough for some people. The rapacious machine of Louis Vuitton's advertising, which most people don't realize actually sucks its subjects' dignity through the lens of Annie Liebovitz's Canon, has claimed more victims: Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and fellow astronaut Jim Lovell. That's right: men and women who could withstand the g-forces of extraterrestrial flight could not say 'no' to LVMH. [WWD]
• British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman says her biggest concern about taking the position back in 1992 was that it would involve a lot of flying. "I hadn't been on a plane in 10 years," she said at an event in England. "How could I accept a job that would mean that I had to fly all the time? I'm still very nervous on a plane." [Vogue UK]
• More bad news for Halston: the oft-revived label, left semi-conscious as of late following the firing of its latest creative director, Marco Zanini, is now down one vice-president of marketing. Atul Pathak resigned two weeks ago, just after the Paris shows. [WWD]
• Los Angeles fashion week happened recently. Don't feel too badly if you missed it: the LA Times itself called proceedings "more than an exercise in futility." [LA Times]
• Vera Wang's Lavender line is in trouble. Hitting the high end of the price range for a contemporary line is causing some grief, and Saks has dropped it. Neiman Marcus will carry Vera Wang Lavender in only ten stores this season, and drop it for fall. Wang says she's mulling over lowering the pricing, or spinning it off into a license. [WWD]
• Lanvin's London flagship store is now open. I suppose that means Alber Elbaz's long contretemps with the architects, related by Ariel Levy in her recent New Yorker profile of the designer, was happily resolved. [FWD]
• Kira Plastinina's still got stores a-plenty, too. (Albeit not in the US, where her eponymous pink-themed clothing chain went bust less than a year after her entry into the market.) As soon as she finishes high school in Moscow this spring, the fruit juice heiress intends to take a step that most designers tackle before launching international retail chains — going to fashion school. Since Kira Plastinina rather strikes one as the kind of person whose life is the sustained experience of getting what she wants, without regard for talent or even passion, she's expecting acceptance at Parsons in New York and Central St. Martins in London, the Yale and Oxford of fashion design, respectively. [FWD]
• Fiona Ellis, who scouts models for the London agency Independent, thinks Tyra's shorties-only season of America's Next Top Model is dumb. The woman who found Alek Wek and Erin O'Connor, among many others, would know. [Vogue UK]
• Net profits at Versace fell 30.7% in 2008, but it was largely due to the softening of the Euro against the Dollar. Without the hard shift in the rate of exchange, their profits would have grown by 10%. [WWD]
• "Heavy black lines and crisp, grid-like patterns created an Op Art effect in Dries Van Noten's spring collection," says the LA Times. Which is why you should...wear a plaid shirt from Express. [LA Times]
• The top 10 new models of the Fall/Winter 09 show season: 90% white, 10% Japanese, 50% not actually "new." [Style.com]
• Do. Not. Want. Spanx clothing. No, just...no. [Glamour]
• Christian Siriano has picked up one hell of a stockist for his line: Saks Fifth Avenue. The department store will sell his fall collection in a new store-within-a-store for emerging talents. [WWD]
• Iekeliene Stange, the quirky Dutch supermodel/photographer, has an exhibition opening in London this Wednesday, following a successful show in Berlin. [The Horse Hospital]

Just this past February, the company's stock fell 18% in a day, proving that Gunn's name was not enough to translate into action at the cash register. Even Gunn's attempts to up the company's fame factor — Isaac Mizrahi was hired to be creative director of the Claiborne womenswear line and John Bartlett hired to oversee menswear soon afterwards — haven't helped. (Sure, the day Mizrahi's new role at the company was announced the company's stock was up 25%, but "much of that evaporated within a few weeks.") It remains unclear on how this acquisition, helmed by Gunn, has done anything to get Claiborne out of the red and into the realm wildly popular. Says Gunn: "I honestly think that in the not-too-distant future, this company will establish new paradigms of operations, the likes of which I don't think this industry has ever seen. I think we're going to be a Harvard Business School case study." Sorry, Tim: I'm a major fan, and I know that your new starpower designers' stuff won't be seen until next spring, but I remain unsold on your products and verbiage, both.

Project Rehab [Fast Money]

Earlier: How Tim Gunn Is Connected To J. Edgar Hoover, And Other Surprises About Project Runway's Favorite Father-Hen

Childhood: Gunn, raised by a career FBI agent father and a homemaker mother, admits that his parents weren't always sure what to do with their first-born, a boy with a "debilitating" stutter who was painfully shy and preferred the company of adults to his peers. "I became an avid reader, was obsessed with Lego — which was my passion, studied piano and wrote lots," he said. His father, interestingly, worked directly under J. Edgar Hoover as the director's second-in-command.

I don't even know if you need to know this, but here's this FBI guy and here's his first born who is building fantasy buildings in Legos, playing "Mr. Frog Hops" on the piano, and when I got the build-your-own castle for my birthday, I started designing outfits for the soldiers — you know what I'm saying? He coached all of the neighborhood sports teams, none of which his son played on. My father and I had a difficult relationship, but he was always there for me in a crisis. And believe me, I gave him plenty of crises.

Career: When Gunn arrived in New York City in 1983 "running from a crisis," he was still wearing his "D.C. uniform" of "boxy, ample suits." Once in New York, he had "an outer-body experience and realized that no two people on any given street corner are dressed the same. This is a city that accepts you for however you choose to present yourself." (He insists that he didn't have his "real fashion epiphany" until he became the chair of the fashion department at Parsons: "I was 18-months into my time as chair when I had a meeting with Diane von Furstenberg, I'm sure she doesn't even remember this meeting, but I could tell by her quivering eye [that she thought of me] 'I don't know if this is going to work for you in this industry, this particular look.' And I thought to myself, I can't disappoint Diane! So I got a black leather blazer tailored like a suit jacket. That was my solution.") As for how he became chair, well, Gunn, had a bit of a Dick Cheney moment. Tapped to head up the search committee for the top position, he realized that an outsider wouldn't be able to do the job and promoted himself from associate dean.. "The program at Parsons was suffering from dormancy," he said. "The curriculum had been unchanged for 15 years. This was a department in need of love and care." After taking over, he threw out the department's entire curriculum, including its cornerstone program wherein groups of seniors apprenticed to different New York-based American fashion designers and replaced it with a program in which each senior was responsible for creating a collection that would later be presented in a runway show. He says he was vilified for doing so. "I was told by the designers who had worked with students in this program that I was driving the American fashion industry into the ground," he explains. "'Get rid of this man!'," he says the design community exhorted. "He's a bad man! He's a bad influence on the industry!" But the dean at Parsons stood by Gunn — and the very first senior final runway presentation under Gunn's reign, in the spring of 2002, produced the Proenza Schouler debut collection. Julie Gilhart, women's fashion director at Barneys, bought their entire senior project for the department store.

Project Runway: In 2004, Gunn was approached by producers at Bravo about an idea they had to do a reality show about the fashion industry. "I was horrified when they told me what they wanted to do," he said. "I told them, 'This industry is in enough trouble without this!'" But after many assurances, Gunn signed on. As an off-camera consultant. "My having a role on the show wasn't even in the ether" during these early meetings, he recalled. "They said to me, What if we told you we want them to make a wedding dress in two days? And I said to them, So they make a wedding dress in two days! As I tell my students, it will just have to be a make it work moment! But then I qualified my statement and said to them, 'But you should know — [if they make a wedding dress in two days] it's not going to be a Vera Wang.'" Gunn did put his foot down however, when producers broached the idea of hiring a full crew of pattern-makers and seamstresses who would actually make the clothes the contestants sketched. "But who is Heidi going to off then? The seamstress? Oh no," was his response.

The producers worried that the designers wouldn't talk while in the work room, so they asked Gunn to go in there and critique their work and offer advice.

I thought while taping season 1, 'No one needs me. No one needs to see me, hear my voice.' I thought I would going to be cut during edited, that they would just show the designers reacting to whatever I had said. I was too embarrassed to go to the premiere party because I thought for sure they were going to cut me... I watched the season 1 premiere from home the same way I watched The Wizard of Oz as a child: curled up in my bed with a blanket over my head.

As for the shot of energy Project Runway seems to have given to the fashion industry? He's happy. "I'd much rather have people attracted to the industry because of [Project Runway] than because of Sex and the City, which was also a phenomenon," he said of the fact that enrollment in fashion design programs has spiked since Project Runway's debut. And yet he hopes that people realize it's not an easy industry. "Ulli [Herzner, from season 3] called me to lament" the fact that buyers were calling but she couldn't match the demand because, in Gunn's words, "she still insists in having her hand in every part of production. I told her, 'Ulli — let go!' She needs to let go while her name is still on people's mind." Conversely, of season 2 winner Chloe Dao he says: "I have the utmost respect for Chloe. She expanded her business in Houston and did a diffusion line for QVC. It's success, but in her own way." And yet he realizes the limits of his own success garnered from the show: "I was at the Au Bon Pain by where we were doing casting for season 4 and when I walked in, the woman working there screamed, 'Oh my God! You're on TV! You're that guy from Project Runway!' And I said, 'Yes, yes I am.' And then she screamed, 'Everyone look — it's Michael Kors!"

• The new Marc Jacobs ads featuring Victoria Beckham have finally been made public. And they're awesome. Also: We seem to remember a certain Glamour magazine beauty editor who took to doing this with a Gucci bag. [WWD, 1st item]
  
• Madonna swears that the Fox News reports aren't true and that she didn't screw Gucci over and trick them into hosting a fundraiser for the Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles. [WWD, 1st item]
  
• Giles Mendel's thoughts on Project Runway after serving as a guest judge on Wednesday night's episode: "OK...The authority of a TV show might not be good enough at the end to make a successful fashion house. That's a different ball game." Whoah — he didn't just question The Greatest Show on Earth, did he? [WWD, 5th item]

• Donna Karan on her experiences as a fashion student at Parsons: "Failed typing, failed draping, you know. I had a little ADD problem. Sewing? Oh, forget it. I burnt my dress. They told me I would never make it as a fashion designer at all." Oh, kooky Auntie Donna! It all worked out now, didn't it! [Page Six]
• Abercrombie & Fitch is launching a lingerie brand under a separate label, Gilly Hitch, and separate stand-alone stores. Given as A&F catalogs are supposed to be selling clothes and in reality, show models in their underwear, we can only assume that Gilly Hitch catalogs will feature models fucking each other naked. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Is it wrong that we're pulling for the success of the Joan Rivers makeup line? [BellaSugar]
• (Faux) rocker Bryan Adams is everywhere nowadays: He shot Tia Cibani's Ports 1961 presentation at the Chateau Marmont on Wednesday. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Betsey Johnson is starting up a separate line of outerwear. Lots of tulle and a corset on a raincoat, please.
• Narcisco Rodriguez's line is turning 10, and to celebrate ,the designer is doing a limited edition collection featuring 20 pieces celebrating the best of the line's history. [Chic Report]
• Fashion designer Bella Freud will be showing her upcoming collection via a short film. We're sure that great grandpappy Sigmund would have made some joke about screen memory. [Fashion Week Daily]
• Sign that Daria Werbowy is actually a good model: Even looks good in ad campaign for Pepe Jeans! [Vogue UK]
• Phillip Lim: now designing kiddie clothes. Which, to our dismay, makes us like Phillip Lim a tiny bit less. [Fashion Week Daily]
• The Missoni Spring 2008 ads: Scary. [Sassybella]
• Katherine Hamnett's "Clean Up Or Die" bags: Sure to be the next "I'm Not A Plastic Bag" bags. Sadly. [Vogue UK]
• Though it declared bankruptcy in 1999, Fruit of the Loom's insurance company had to cough up $42.5 million after the company got slammed with charges from the Environmental Protection Agency in regards to four of its factories. [UPI]
• Fruit of the Loom may be bankrupt, but the luxury underwear market's never been bigger! [Telegraph]
• St. Ives, they of the dorm-fave Apricot Scrub, has decided that maybe it needs to expand its brand and reach the oldies. Hence it's new line for "aging" women, named "Elements". Aging = women age 29 and up. Ouch. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Armani: now doing a skincare line for men! We wonder if the brand will find a way to tie the face of David Beckham into this one, too. [WWD, sub req'd]
• It saddens our hearts that there's already a waiting list for the Burberry Warrior Bag. Also, if you don't feel like shelling out $23,000 for it in it's croc skin glory, you can get a plain leather one for a mere $3,150. [WWD, 3rd item]

• Indie pop band Tilly and the Wall announces Nebraskan style-revolution from the stage of the Coachella Music Festival, saying of their home state: "...you don't really have anywhere to buy clothes except for thrift stores so you just create it yourself, which has led to a ton of crazy style in Omaha." [WWD]
• Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive re-elected president of American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME); Elle editor-in-chief Robbie Myers transitions from secretary to vice president of the organization. [WWD, 1st item]
• Liz Claiborne has gifted a $350,000 scholarship in honor of their new Chief Creative Officer Tim Gunn to his former employer, Parsons, to help budding designers in their journey to "make it work." [WWD]

• Silvia Venturi Fendi, brand accessories director of the family business, sings "We Are the World," and insists that open office and eschewing of traditional, regimented design process yields more creativity and better products. [WWD]
• TopShop head honcho Sir Philip Green tended to customers and fetched different sizes during Kate Mosspalooza at the TopShop on Oxford Street yesterday. [Vogue UK]
• Furniture makers Kartel teamed up with the best of the best in the world of fashion design to create chairs that are supposed to embody femininity. Or something. The girly chairs will be on view in the windows of Barney's flagship store on Madison Avenue sometime in May. [Fashion Week Daily]