• Alexa Chung has been named British Vogue's best-dressed for her "quirky sense of style." Also: Audrey Tautou, Freida Pinto, and Emma Watson. [ThisIsLondon]
• She's "deposed" Kate Moss, now "relegated to 10th place, only one spot ahead of Lady Gaga." [Telegraph]

• The magazine says the list was given "in no particular order," but whatevs, they totally put Alexa first on purpose. [Vogue UK]
• Speaking of Lady Gaga, she is making a guest appearance on Bravo's new replacement for Project Runway, Launch My Line. After dropping in on the aspiring designers — and scaring the pants off them, we don't doubt, see what we did there? — they learn that their weekly challenge will be to create outfits inspired by the Lady and "make sure they are pushing the boundaries of fashion without crossing the line of good taste." Since when has Lady G cared about good taste? We thought her thing was more to épater les bourgeois. [The Cut]
• Actresses and actors attending the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Awards, consider yourselves on notice: Joan Rivers is doing Fashion Police segments this year. Yay! [Stylelist]
• Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady have decided to name their two-week-old son Benjamin. [Vogue UK]
• Says Copyranter of the disturbing new Lanvin ad featuring photographer Inez can Lamsweerde in bloody red body paint, "this could be the start of a new zombie trend for 2010." Well, that or "first-year med school." [Copyranter]
• Oh, Daily Mail: "Shamed supermodel Sophie Anderton was held overnight after making a drunken scene at a London railway station." After attempting to board the Eurostar from the wrong station, Anderton, who has been described as "embattled" more than once, apparently made a scene, actually uttered the words "don't you know who I am?" and was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. [DailyMail]
• Abbey Lee Kershaw says that she, Natasha Poly, and Sasha Pivovarova took one look at Alexander McQueen's 12"-tall alien shoes and politely declined to walk in his show. Kershaw has had several runway mishaps in her short international career: platforms caused her to fall at Rodarte in September of 2008, a stumble at the same show six months later injured her knee and left her unable to walk for the rest of the season, and she fainted on McQueen's runway due to a tightly laced corset. Good to know she has her health in mind after those close calls. [Fashionologie]
• Speaking of the health vs. vanity paradigm, a woman in England had an allergic reaction to an eyelash tinting procedure — one she apparently had undergone regularly — that left her eyes swollen shut. She feared she would lose her sight and was rushed to the hospital. After 14 days of treatment with antihistamines and antibiotics, her face and eyes are still swollen, and she has had to take time off work. The salon gave her a refund but accepts no responsibility for her injuries. [Daily Mail]
• High-end retailers claim they are trying something really novel this holiday season: being nice to shoppers. Complimentary champagne, sending thank-you notes to customers, and even designer Dennis Basso himself playing shopboy: these are all strategies that department stores and boutiques are trying after a consultant performed a year-long study that determined service at pricey stores was no better than that at Ace Hardware or Lowe's. At Bergdorf Goodman, the doormen are nicer than ever — because the old ones were fired "when we found the ones we were using weren't as friendly as we wanted them to be." Happy holidays! [NYTimes]
• For its part, Macy's is keeping 12 New York-area stores open 24 hours until 6 p.m. tomorrow. Nothing says "I love you, Uncle Gary," like a box of seasonal socks you pluck from the display at 4:30 a.m. [WWD]
• Lacoste would like you to know that it is going to spend $500,000 over the next three years to try and save an endangered crocodile. Perhaps news of this relatively modest charitable investment will spur you to think fondly of its crocodile logo, and buy an item of clothing with it on it this holiday season? [WWD]
• "Project White T-Shirt" is, yes, another ts-for-charity project, but in this case the results may be purchased for reason other than philanthropy: the 31 contributors, including "Andrea Crews, Bruno Pieters, Pelican Avenue, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Daniel Palillo and other contemporary avant-gardists" were chosen for their creativity, and the results will be exhibited around the world before being auctioned for Designers Against Aids. [DazedDigital]
• Topshop's London Fashion Week designer collaboration project is brilliant: once again, the high-street innovator will present budget capsule collections with fashion week designers like Jonathan Saunders and Ann-Sofie Back. The way of the future? [Telegraph]
• The first preview for Beyoncé's fragrance, Heat! It shows her in what looks like a Russian bath-house, singing Peggy Lee. [JustJared]
• And speaking of celebrity scents: Danica Patrick has one. It's called Danica. Insert diesel fuel joke. [WWD]
• And speaking of previews: In case you didn't get the memo, Project Runway is back in New York. Like, really, aggressively, back in New York. [BloggingProjectRunway]
• On Sunday, various royals and fashion royals came out to watch the premiere of Karl Lagerfeld's film Sergei, Misia, Coco et Les Autres…100 Ans de Ballets Russes, Chanel et ‘Le Train Bleu. "Guests were given two dance-inspired Lagerfeld picture books, entitled "Sergei, Misia, Coco et Les Autres" and "Les Nijinsky." [WWD]
• Lifetsyle brand Le Tigre put up this charmer of a billboard on Manhattan's West Side Highway yesterday: "Golf Needs a Tiger: Let's Get Back on Course." In case you're wondering, yes, Le Tigre is owned by punmeister Kenneth Cole. [WWD]
• "When I was asked as a child what I wanted to be, I'd say, 'I want to be rich, I want to be famous, I want to live in the big city, I want to have a fabulous life'," says Tom Ford. "All I've done my entire life is fulfil my destiny." Thoughts? [Independent]

For some reason, Caroline Trentini has practically never within living memory been permitted to keep both feet on the ground in an American Vogue editorial. Anna Wintour’s favorite springy Brazilian, seemingly without regard for osteoarthritis or patellar tendonitis, casts herself nobly aloft in every season, in every setting, and in every conceivable kind of pump, flat, sandal, mule, platform, and T-strap. Sometimes in the past she's had partners in airborne crime like Elise Crombez (whatever happened to her? Did she age out of the industry at a ripe old 26?) but most often it's Carol, alone, doing what apparently comes naturally. In case you've forgotten her crucial gravity-defying role in Vogues past, they even run a June 2008 photo of her midflight in crampons and 24k gold fur on a Patagonian glacier on page 544:



So. Surprise! There's a jumping editorial in this issue. But! This time, instead of heading into mid air to sell sheath dresses to office workers (in some makebelieve world where office workers can afford Lanvin), Caroline jumps for a reason. Kind of. It took a while (in fact it took so long I'm half sure the jumping overlapped with a ready made narrative completely by accident) but Vogue finally found a story where Caroline leaping in frocks makes sense — because she's posing with the three kids who'll take turns playing Billy Elliot when it opens on Broadway October 1. Dancers! Dancers jump!


And the results are beautiful.
Seriously, the editorial is kind of breathtaking.




And then the magazine goes and ruins all the uncharacteristic pro-Vogue mojo it dredged up with that heavenly dozen pages by painting the distinctively freckled and pale Trentini the color of burnt Cheetos and giving her a vicious bikini wax so she can wear a swimsuit that makes my vulva scream and reach for the smelling salts. Oh well! The aesthetic contact high was nice while it lasted.


September Vogue to me signifies a worrisome rubicon in the gerrymandering of the definition of "model" to include any two-bit celebrity with a film or an album or a divorce to promote. (I have nothing against actors and I think Keira Knightley is a fine practitioner of her particular craft. But I don't try to do her job and I ask the same courtesy in return.) Ordinarily the actress — supposedly a ringer to drum up readership, although that paradigm appears increasingly flawed — gets the cover because she is profiled inside; the "fashion spread" accompanying the inevitable puff piece is just a bit of lifestyle-y, cult-of-celebrity-reflecting extra bang for your buck. But in this issue, there is no profile. Keira Knightley has 18 pages of this magazine to herself to illustrate a paragraph about Berlin and "the current generation of intriguing, intelligent provocateurs working there." Keira Knightley isn't an actress posing for showy portraits to illustrate, however obliquely, her own press: She's treated here like any old pretty face attached to a random (no, really random: Knightley admits she had never even been to Berlin until the shoot) concept — and a wardrobe of this season's clothes. She is, in these pages, presented more as model than actress.
So it is my judgment of her as a model and nothing less when I say she looks, on almost every page, perfectly awful. She doesn't know what to do with her hands. She doesn't know what to do with her face. She doesn't know what to do with her mouth, so in picture after picture, she lets it fall limply open. She doesn't know whether to mug for the camera or grasp for some idea of high-fashion gravitas; she sort of does both and she sort of does neither and it all comes off badly more often than not. In this jailhouse dress photo she's actually grimacing.


As one commentator noted, a propensity for holding your lips pursed and half-open makes it look like you're always blowing on an invisible bowl of soup.


Keira Knightley has more of a neck in that sketch likeness she's holding up than she does in most of this edit. One of the reasons why non-models just aren't as good at showing fashion to its best effect as models are is because they don't have the practiced photographic subject's knack for guessing how the human body will read in two dimensions from a given angle — so here I am worrying why this beautiful woman doesn't appear to have a neck, instead of thinking about either of those potentially interesting dresses.


This is her best shot and it's pretty fantastic. But is it worth the 17 other hammy, overacted, more or less off-looking lavishly produced editorial pictures full of light and color and signifying nothing? I say no.


Because, seriously, what kind of a culture are we living in that when Anna Wintour tells an Academy Award-nominated actress to tie a trash bag on her head because some art world folks are dossing in Berlin (apparently for such deep and meaningful reasons as the fact that in New York you can't smoke anywhere anymore), the Academy Award-nominated actress automatically does it? I tell you who ties trash bags on their heads because Ms. Wintour says so: Models. And we submit to the vagaries of fashion editor whims good naturedly, because it's an honest living and better than many, and because we certainly aren't inclined or empowered to question a shoot's direction like, say, a respected actress would (or should) be. And we do it because we don't have the comforts that being Hollywood's second-highest paid actress confers. Keira Knightley, you may be beautiful, but more importantly, you have at least some measure of talent; you ought to be sharing that with the world. Don't just model, because done barely adequately it's bullshit, trust me.


Now. Back to sublime: It's Sasha time.


Sasha Pivovarova is a goddess. The lithe Russian elf (who, as a part-time artist, would've been a much better fit for that Berlin story than Knightley) is nevertheless the perfect foil for McQueen's clothes, which can skate close to excessively baroque territory. She wears these dainty little embellished slippers in every shot and it makes for a really nice change from the ubiquitous 4 lb heavy, 7" tall editorial platforms.


I don't dig the waxed-candyfloss hair and I know it must have been painful to achieve. But, I think, thoroughly worth it.


For future reference, Anna Wintour: This is your cover shot.