Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me."

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile.

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.

Supermodel Karen Mulder Arrested For Threatening To Attack Plastic Surgeon
"We Need To See You Without Your Bra, He Told Me. I Was 14. I Didn't Even Have Breasts Yet."

Earlier: The Not-Rape Epidemic: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune
Suicide And Abuse In Fashion's Top Echelon
Ruslana Korshynova, No Longer Anonymous

Maureen Orth's excellent Vanity Fair piece from September, 1996, just went online as part of that magazine's ongoing desultory digitization of its archives. It's a fascinating, sad story of an abused woman's life and eventual suicide, and of the ways in which the fashion industry does and does not change.

Wallis Franken was a Westchester County girl whose once-wealthy family of retailers was, by the time she reached high school, barely holding onto their home. Modeling, which she began doing when Eileen Ford signed her at 16, seemed like an easy way to financial security, travel, and independence. And, for a while, it more or less was: after her father died when she was 19, and her mother finally did lose the house, Wallis supported her and kept her in a spacious apartment. Although her look had worked well enough in New York, in Paris, her Louise Brooks bob and angular, androgynous body ignited something in the clients' imagination. This was the 70s, the era of cocaine and disco and sexual exploration, and Wallis seemed to embody the zeitgeist. She became a vegetarian, she married a Scientologist racecar driver, she partied with Anjelica Huston, she was snapped in her street clothes for Women's Wear Daily.

But most of all, she accustomed herself to the unfortunate kind of lassitude that often goes with having a job whose main requirement is to have a pulse and be agreeable. Franken learned to let her agencies, or her husband, handle her affairs, to be engaging, solicitous, and on time, and to never worry about the future because the present is its own bewildering curlicue of moments. As her friend and fellow top model Tracey Weed puts it to Orth,

Our bond was that we were survivors together, pampered and catered to but worked like horses...Wallis was a master of fitting in. We didn’t learn any of the things that people who grew up more normally learned, like who you are, what you want, what is good for you and what is bad. Everybody smooches up to you so you’ll perform that day.… We did not learn how to shoulder responsibility for our behavior and our choices...The message is that glamour is not what people make it out to be. It’s a sick world where awful things go on. Think of a young girl not yet 20 showing up and being talked about as if she could not hear — spoken of as an object, criticized physically. This sort of orientation robs you of yourself."

In modeling, you may sometimes have too much unstructured time, but always very little actual time to yourself — because at any moment a call might come and you might have to be across town or on your way to the airport in 20 minutes. There's no point thinking about the future, because your career unfolds bite by bite, casting by casting, job by job, and time telescopes down to a few more or less solidly scheduled days, and the week of dimly limned job options beyond. Anything at all could happen, or it could not, and what's next year when you don't even know about next week? Such is the curious logic of fashion's perpetual liminal stage, its cocoon, and for a model of Franken's status — her showlist in 1978 was longer than anyone's, she was a veritable Karlie Kloss of her age — it could be a comfortable enough cocoon indeed. And exhilerating: as the French nightclub owner and DJ Guy Cuevas reminisces, “Ah, those says were the oldies-but-goodies times. One night a new club was opening in the north of France — we all went on a private railcar, and Wallis wore this feather, and we were screaming, laughing.… Then came the punk, then came the sad.” And, interjects Orth, there was cocaine: "Yes," agrees Cuevas. "It made for too lax a culture."

There were even worse times. The racecar driver, for instance, had the bright idea of packing off to Morocco when Franken was seven months pregnant with their third child:

She and Philippe and the two little girls drove a specially converted Land Rover into the desert of Morocco and ended up living for three months in a primitive Berber village. The adventure provided Philippe with an opportunity to shoot stunning pictures and write articles about the daring young couple living off the land. Wallis went right along, and, for the centerpiece of one glowing article, described what she later told friends was the horrendous birth of their third daughter, Fatima, as Philippe snapped pictures. 'One of the women clasped me round the bosom, another kicked me into a squatting position, and it all happened very fast, very easily. Then someone pushed a long braid of her hair down my throat. The idea was to produce dry contractions, like retching, to force out the placenta, and it worked. Next they stepped all over me — massage, you see, and very effective, I’m sure, except that a few days before, I’d fallen out of the car and injured my ankle. That was the first thing they trod on. Agony.'

Fatima died of sudden infant death syndrome back in Paris, aged 3 months.

When she met Claude Montana, her habit of intense, destructive, dependency on unsuitable men was long set. Montana was a flamboyantly gay designer whose star was in the ascendant, largely because he took elements of the late-70s gay subculture, like leather and studs and exaggerated, broad-shouldered silhouettes, and applied them with impeccable tailoring to a woman's body in a way that was then unheard of. His creativity and charisma attracted Franken, and her iconic status — plus the fact that with her short hair and boyish figure she embodied the exact sort of gender plasticity his work explored — drew his eye. They had a close, tempestuous friendship that friends say was marked by periods of physical abuse; over the 18 years they knew each other as friends, Franken retired from modeling and found herself occasionally destitute, while Montana's stature continued to rise through the 1980s. In 1992, however, after two critically well-received but commercially disastrous years at Lanvin, Montana was fired.

It's perhaps not a stretch to say that the two friends finally married in 1993 in the middle of Paris couture week at least partly because that was when all the fashion press was there to see it. It might have paid off, too, when Franken's old friend Stephen Meisel wanted to book her for a 1994 Donna Karan campaign, but Montana refused to let her fly back to New York for the shoot. His control of her was extraordinary, during their long relationship and, especially, after they were married. Once he beat her so badly she was hospitalized. Her friends knew: "I feel that no matter what Claude did, whether his hands were on her or not, the lifestyle he gave her, the way he abused her mentally, emotionally, physically, pushed her over the edge,” says Weed. Her family knew, too: “I have no doubt that he was a contributing factor to my sister’s demise, perhaps a major contributing factor,” says Randy Franken.

'We all have the same idea,' echoes painter Vincent Scali, Wallis’s witness at her marriage to Montana. 'Everybody knew that his part in her death was enormous.' How did Montana contribute? 'By treating her like shit, saying, "You’re no one, you’re nobody, you’re a weight on my life." … He knew Wallis was weak.… We did everything in our power to keep her away from him, and she went back. She was a masochist.'

They all knew, and nobody directly intervened.

Although the police were made aware of the history of abuse, Franken’s death was ruled a suicide, a finding that satisfied her surviving family, because, among other details, the window sill she jumped from was nearly six feet from the floor — it would be hard to imagine the short Montana pushing a tall woman out of it without leaving any sign of a struggle.

There was no music of hymns at her funeral in Paris, and the priest delivered a stern lecture on the evils of drug abuse and the perils of the fashion industry he derided as shallow. Montana did not speak to any other mourners, not even to Franken’s daughters and grandchildren. He has never spoken to the press about his wife's death, even to this day.

Depersonalization and isolation can be the result of a life spent working with an ever-changing cast of characters, in strange corners of the globe. (I think I had about 10 or 11 addresses, as in where I received mail, last year. Counting places I just dropped my suitcases into for a day or two to do a job it might rise to 15, 20. And I’m a relatively underworked model.) I feel like I know what Tracey Weed is talking about when she says modeling does not generally teach what is good for you, what any human being needs to learn: I feel like I’m always meeting girls who maybe should be in school, but who are therefore smart enough to realize they exist in an economic system more willing to monetize their looks than their brains. Modeling is what you know. It’s not easy, but it’s easy enough. It’s easier. It’s familiar, and there are promoters and parties and nice clothes, there are good drugs, and exotic travels. The industry, with its everextending futureless present, can have a certain way of corroding initiative and drive. Everyone has their hobbies, and some (drawing comics, writing on the Internet) are maybe healthier than others (cocaine, musicians) but the longer you stay in the funhouse-mirror world, the less even those things seem like the real you. Sometimes it’s as if every moderately successful girl I meet, to the extent that she thinks of a future at all, thinks in vague terms of becoming a stylist, or working at a store, or marrying someone wealthy. Or putting out an album. Or designing clothing line. Sometimes I catch myself thinking of writing a book in those same, bone idle terms. I think we all know, deep down, that just like Cuevas said, first comes the fun, and then the sad. Nobody leaves this easy industry too easily.

So Wallis Franken, who was beautiful and damaged, killed herself in May of 1996, and you should read about her, because her story is interesting and important. It’s about the agony of aging in an industry that only tolerates youth — now truer than ever — it’s about family and friends who stood by as she deliberately sought out the destructive attentions of a series of men. It’s about isolation and poverty and drugs. But the main thing is, you should read it so you can know Wallis Franken’s name. Because I didn’t, until Maureen Orth’s 13-year-old story popped up in an RSS feed, although I did recognize her pictures. And it’s crucial, I think, in situations like this and in life in general, to at least try to look beyond the image to the woman herself.

Death By Design [Vanity Fair]

Earlier:
Ruslana Korshunova, No Longer Anonymous

• Secret Englishman and Strokes friend Ed Westwick — yeah, Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl — is apparently in talks to design a line of clothing. [Fashionista]
• The "Heidi Klum Index": "Klum's income for last year is estimated at $15 million for the year, making her the second-richest model, behind Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen but well ahead of Kate Moss." [The Street]
• The presumably anti-pope NoToPope Coalition is holding an "annoying fashion parade" outside an Australian parliament building, sporting shirts with slogans like "Pope Go Homo" and "The Pope Is Wrong - Put a Condom On." The parade is a run-through for the Annoying Fashions' official premier, on World Youth Day. Oh yeah, the pope's coming. [Sydney Morning Herald]
• Milla Jovovich on whose wardrobes she'd steal: "Marianne Faithfull's and Bianca Jagger's. And I'd also steal Isabel Archer's from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I'd steal everything from Edith Wharton's heroines, and from the little chimney sweeps from Dickens's novels. I'd love to go into David Bowie's wardrobe. I'd mix all the clothes from these wardrobes into one of my own." She'd also get neck-extension. And "knee-shrinkers." [Times Online]

• Ruslana Korshunova's friends and family insist her apparent suicide is suspicious. "She didn't have a single reason to do this and 1,001 reasons to live," said her mother, calling on the NYPD to reopen the case. [Daily News]
• Economic hardships cause "mainstream moms" to spend less on clothes. [WWD]
• Style.com to launch a beauty offshoot. [Fashionista]
• In a sorta cringe-worthy attempt to keep up with the kids, warhorse Lord & Taylor is putting graffiti artists in their windows. "The stunt is part of Art in Action, a program that brings the visual arts to unexpected locations and people, and features five artists from TATS CRU, the Bronx-based graffiti collective most famous (maybe) for a giant mural of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen that inexplicably showed up on Avenue A last year (it turned out to be a PR hype for E! television)."
  [Nylon]
• Gap clothes-folding tutorial! [Wall Street Journal.]
• Levis profits drop sharply. [Reuters]
• 40's cover girl Dorian Leigh dies at 91. The model, "who combined pristine blue eyes, curling eyelashes, an arresting intelligence and intoxicating sexuality to become one of history’s most photographed models — perhaps the first to truly merit the adjective super — died Monday." [New York Times]
• British retailer Mango to expand...to Iraq. [WWD]
• Takeshi Kaneshiro, who will be the first Asian model to appear in an Armani campaigns. [VogueUK]
• The Steve & Barry's death watch continues: the retailer chain is expected to file Chapter 11 any minute. [Reuters]
• Wall-E producer takes fashion inspiration from animated robot. "Inspired by the sleek, white form of Eve, Ms. Collins wore a flowing white Oscar de la Renta gown to the film's wrap party." [Wall Street Journal]
• "This morning 'Fashion DJ's' kicks off at Abbey Road studios, a star-studded, three day music event of musical performance and fashion exhibitionism." Basically, this seems to translate to Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss's baby daddy - DJ-ing. [ElleUK]
• Cruise lines becoming an important market for fashion houses. "Gucci is one of a growing line of fashion houses showing off a "cruise wear" or pre-spring collection in addition to summer and winter wear, eyeing the line as an important niche to keep customer interest in a global economic downturn." [Reuters]
• "When you figure out your suitcase, you figure out your life." (DVF, given to trite sartorial axioms. Wait, didn't she give this same quote to Harper's Bazaar earlier this year?) [Telegraph]
• Australian Merino Woolmark Prize designed to aid wool producers, is way too hot to think about. [Fashion Week Daily]
• A former Vogue writer dishes on Anna Wintour Sort of. "She came to represent a new archetype for a fashion editor: a master of the universe who wears her power as comfortably and impeccably as Chanel couture. It's an intimidating combination because it implies that she is a woman who is accomplished in the so-called masculine art of war and still knows how to use all the stereotypically feminine wiles. She is a double threat." [Washington Post]

• We learned that dressing for success means always wearing a muumuu.
• We debuted a new feature called Shelf Pleasuring wherein we read 70s books full of sexytimes.
• You guys, friends don't make friends get boob jobs.
• They also don't let you board planes with a ton of weed in your suitcase

• Friends do, however, allow you to develop girl crushes on femi-friendly Current TV hosts.
• Also girl crush material: sofa king gorgeous Indian models<
• Speaking of models, Kazakh model Ruslana Korshunova jumped from her apartment building on Sunday night and died. Our Tatiana weighed in on the depersonalization and loneliness rampant in the modeling business.
• But hey! It's not all a bummer this week: we discussed the swoony fanmail we wrote as wee ones.
• So enjoy the long weekend, bitches! This bitch will be celebrating her tail off for the fourth and so should you.

Over the weekend a successful young fashion model touched off a minor media circus by killing herself. Almost immediately, details of the beautiful life cut tragically short swooped in to fill blanks; the apocryphal tale of her "discovery" by benevolent industry scouts; her melancholy poems; how she'd been watching "Ghost" the night before. It was mostly bullshit. But there is something about great beauty that inoculates us to the more mundane realities of life, which was that Ruslana Korshunova was an immigrant from a desperately poor country who came to New York at a scarily young age to make money to send back to her parents. In that way she was no different from the tens of thousands of kids from former socialist states whose parents send them thousands of miles to work in restaurants and gas stations. It's generally more legal, and the living conditions a little nicer, but as our anonymous model columnist Tatiana has discussed before in this space, the people governing a model's fate are no less predatory and self-interested, and the experience is only slightly less anonymous. Herewith, Tatiana's initial thoughts on the suicide of a pretty girl from Almaty:

At around 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, a 20-year-old model named Ruslana Korshunova jumped from the balcony of her ninth floor apartment in New York's financial district. A Kazakhstani of Russian heritage, she had modeled since the age of 15; top London agency Models 1's Debbie Jones tells a great story about her discovery and tracking-down of Korshunova after seeing her pictured at German club in an in-flight magazine. (I suspect Jones is spinning a typical fashion creation myth: Korshunova told UK Elle magazine that when she was 15, she submitted her own photos to the Moscow agency iCasting, a version somewhat shorter on romance and international intrigue but vastly more believable.)

Korshunova followed the usual career path of an Eastern European model — working abroad from a young age to send money back to her parents, who remained in Kazakhstan — albeit with considerably more success than is common. A slight 5'7.5" with braces and Rapunzel-esque hip-length hair, Korshunova nonetheless shot out of the normal model demi-monde of sometimes sweet, sometimes snide, always obsessive commentary on TheFashionSpot.com. She wowed casting agents and booked a slew of clients during her five years in the business. Korshunova worked for Marc Jacobs, Blumarine, Vera Wang,
Paul Smith, DKNY and Moschino; she booked a cosmetics campaign for Clarins and starred in a Nina Ricci perfume ad. She shot with Mario Sorrenti, Patrick Demarchelier, and Paolo Roversi. She had covers for European editions of Vogue and Elle, she had pictures inside American, Japanese, and Italian Vogue. Korshunova, it appeared, had grabbed fashion's brass ring.

She had achieved the kind of career that must have been reasonably consistent, and decently-paid, though of course pursued in total anonymity — even her doorman told the New York Daily News he didn't know the girl he saw return home at 5 a.m. on Saturday was a successful international model.

No doubt this is a story made more interesting in the eyes of some by the allure of Korshunova's profession. Journalists have already taken to calling Korshunova "the beauty," "the lithe looker," "the 5'8" head-turner," "the green-eyed blonde beauty," playing the fashion industry's own exoticizing, objectifying game. On Fox news - where else? — Geraldo Rivera showed "the last images" Korshunova. The camera lingered over her dead body — pale, bloodied, and partly covered by a sheet — while Rivera in a voice-over called Korshunova's ex-boyfriend's description of the model as "a good person" a "kind of a lame quote." I am not linking here on purpose.

It is as a woman, not a mannequin, that I'm sure Korshunova's loved ones will remember her. And irrespective of her field, one has to wonder at the process by which a girl decides to kill herself four days before her 21st birthday.

I did not know Ruslana Korshunova, but I do know something of depersonalization and loneliness of this profession, and its occasional outright miseries (Korshunova also told UK Elle, of her worst professional experience, "We were in the Alps shooting, high
up in the snow, and I was wearing a tiny dress. We were so very cold and it was snowing so hard — we couldn't see a thing. I thought I would not live to see another day.") The Daily News reports that Korshunova wrote long messages in English and Russian on a social networking site; the messages make frequent mention of things like love, desire, dreams, and rainbows; they
read as the missives of a very young girl who has discovered that romance often fails to live up to its promise. Korshunova quoted inspirational Internet poetry about the importance of forgiving quickly, kissing slowly, loving truly, and laughing uncontrollably, which the Daily News apparently mistook for her original work. In March, she wrote, "I'm so lost. Will I ever find myself?" In her most recent post, on May 30, she mused angrily that "Love does not take away from one in order to give to another."

Korshunova spent her last night watching Ghost with her ex-boyfriend, 24-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Artem Perchenok.

Many models would have envied Korshunova's career; many women would have envied her beauty. But clearly, leaving home at 15 to travel the world under the often-lax in loco parentis care of a series of agencies, even when it culminates in a nice Craig McDean editorial and a Dior Beauté campaign or three, can take a devastating toll.

• Kazakh model Ruslana Korshunova jumped to her death from her Manhattan apartment in an apparent suicide Saturday. The 20-year-old had been featured on the cover of Vogue and walked for Marc Jacobs, Nina Ricci and DKNY. [CNN]
• Friends say Korshunova had been suffering from health problems and personal stress. [New York Post]
• And in a shocking show of ghoulishness ('poor taste' doesn't begin to approach this one), Fox News has aired footage of her body. [Huffington Post]
• Oy vey.Real World producers sign on for Project Runway. Bring on the hot tub. [Variety]

• First seeing-eye cats guiding dogs, now designers collaborating! What's next, peace in the Middle East? [The Independent]
• Tom Ford seeks to do the impossible: "“For this project, I wanted to reinvent patchouli . . . I loved the idea of mixing patchouli with white florals. We used patchouli orpur, which takes out some of the darker, smoky notes of patchouli. We mixed that with peony, bergamot, and jasmine,” says he of his new, Erykah-Badu-faced "White Patchouli." [Oh No They Didn't]
• Family to take Clarins private. [WWD]
• In a post-Sharon-Stone world: the future of Dior. [Financial Times]
• Bella Freud: "I wish people would take more notice of what's going on in Palestine because if they knew the level of suffering of the Palestinian people, they would be outraged and appalled. People would demand that something should be done." [The Independent]
• Gellin' like Magellan' is apparently complete nonsense. [Los Angeles Times]
• Twiggy's daughter is staying off the runway. [Mail on Sunday]
• Kaiser Karl: the ultimate arbiter. [Guardian]
• A day after her sentencing, Naomi Campbell —surprise! — hits the catwalk. Um, in a men's show. [Los Angeles Times]
• Liberty of London opens first boutique. [WWD]
• Recessionistas take note: virtual H&M opens in new, depressing Sims world. [Los Angeles Times]
• So, that hair extension Kate Moss lost? You can buy it on eBay. [Sassybella]
• In a match made in...an insane asylum, Master P relaunches his line exclusively for Wal-Mart. [Reuters]
• Green cosmetics take it to the fields. [New York Times]
• Sit tight for today's Ebay knockoff ruling! [Breitbart]
• Old-school Converse goes high-tech with new interactive marketing. [Adweek]
• Oh, that should make the Queen happy. Kate Middleton, aka "Prince Williams maybe-fiancee" is a maybe-model. [Daily Express]
• Molly Ringwalg gets the fashion-icon props she deserves! [Los Angeles Times]
• Oh, and I guess Helene Rochas qualifies too. [W]
• Recession? What recession? Fabulously wealthy keeps the good times rolling for Paris couture. [WWD]