• "I've thought about clothing and jewelry lines," says Usher. "But fragrance stays on when everything else comes off." [People]
• Bottom of the barrel? For $8, American Apparel will sell you a bag of fabric scraps. [BF]

• Elle Creative Director Joe Zee dined with R.J. Cutler, the director of The September Issue. Which obviously means that he's going to spend two more years making a movie about Elle now! [FWD]
• Says lost soul Ashley Olsen, in fashion, "everyone is just really looking out for themselves. I don't know if I'll be designing this collection forever. A couple of years from now, I'm sure I'll want to do something else, and I'm not going to shy away from that. What if I just want to be an artist, or if I want to go back to acting? Which is not in the cards, but what if I wanted to do that?" [Daily Express]
• An Hermès representative says the rumors that creative director Jean Paul Gaultier is going to leave the company are false. Gaultier has been in his position for six years, and Hermès has experienced continued strong sales from its luxury categories since the start of the recession. [FashionMag]
• Christian Blanckaert, Hermès' director of international affairs, is leaving the company in early September. Blanckaert will become the non-executive chairman of the French children's clothing line Petit Bateau, and is expected to pursue a more international strategy for the brand. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, some anonymous sources in the finance industry are saying that Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy may spin off DKNY, the Donna Karan diffusion label it has owned since 2001. Or that it may sell Moët Hennessy itself, where revenues fell 17% in the first half of 2009. The reason the luxury conglomerate supposedly wants to free up some cash? To make a bid for Hermès, which is trading well below its usual share price. [Fashionista]
  
• Conservative party supporter Anya Hindmarch: "I started my business when I was 18, and I realized the difference it made having Thatcher in power. It was the start of privatization-there was a feeling of ‘Get out there, get going, be an entrepreneur.' I've seen what politics can do to make a difference. It really inspires me and that's why I've been passionate about it." [VF]
• Lara Stone is set to curate the choices available at Not Just A Label's online shop, a home for avant-garde and emerging designers. Lara's choices go on sale on September 2. [UK Elle]
• Uniqlo has a licensing deal with Disney that'll allow it to roll out Disney-themed apparel starting next month. Which should mean the mouse products will hit stores around the same time as Jil Sander's long-awaited first collection for the retailer. [WWD]
• Jean-Charles de Castelbajac is launching a diffusion line called JC/DC. The line will be presented in London and again in Paris at the upcoming shows, and the company wants real-life hepcats to model its wares — anyone who wants to apply for a spot in the runway lineup can do so via the websites of Dazed & Confused or Jalouse magazine, respectively. [WWD]
• Someone named Bronson van Wyck is obsessed with "The Penguin Sparkling Water Maker from Williams-Sonoma. The penguin makes the water fizzy. You can adjust from superfizzy like Perrier to moderate like S. Pellegrino to milder like Hendon." Socials! They're not like us at all. [WWD]
• Vogue Brasil mis-spelled photographer Guy Bourdin's name as "Guy Bourdain" in huge font on its cover. [MadeinBrazil]
• Rosemary Port, the writer behind the infamous "Skanks In NYC" hate-blog against model Liskula Cohen, says that she will continue her $15 million lawsuit against Google for disclosing her e-mail address and IP to Cohen. Even though Google only disclosed those details after losing its long legal battle and being ordered to so by a Manhattan supreme court judge! Port feels her right to privacy has been violated, and alleges of Cohen, "By going to the press, she defamed herself." Her lawyer had this to say: "I'm ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. Our Founding Fathers wrote 'The Federalist Papers' under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn't that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?" Which, if you think about it, is an airtight argument. Doesn't anyone else remember reading that long footnote in the Federalist Papers where James Madison goes on and on about how Brutus is, like, such a ho? And then of course next month Robert Yates was all like, Nuh uh, you're a big fat skank, Publius, and everyone knows it! Whatever, Rosemary Port. Defamation isn't traditionally considered protected speech. [NYDN]
• Louis Vuitton has won a $400,000 judgment against Bonini Handbags for trademark infringement. [WWD]
• Derek Blasberg watched The Rachel Zoe Project in Los Angeles, with Rachel Zoe. "Watching the actual show and having an alternate show happening in front of me was surreal. And kind of confusing. There was Brad on TV wearing a Missoni sequined shift dress impersonating his boss, and then there, in the flesh, was Brad trying on a Louis Vuitton tennis skirt and booties impersonating his boss. Taylor was on TV moaning, and there she was in person moaning." [StyleFile]
• Casual Male, a U.S. maker of men's plus-size clothing, has seen its quarterly profits increase by 92.1% on last year, even as sales fell 13.4%. [WWD]

As mentioned previously, these unkind words were launched at model Liskula Cohen by class-act blog Skanks In NYC. The 36-year-old model, who has appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines, is suing Google, which hosts the blog, for defamation, in an attempt to force the blogger out of anonymity. In the lawsuit, Cohen states that the blog's slings and arrows paint her as a "promiscuous woman who is filthy, disgusting, foul and a whore," a rep that's not done much for her "desirability for endorsing products." While the uncharitable could perhaps suggest that this desirability was already somewhat in question — and, further, that said anonymous asshole is considerably more fixated on the model's activities than is the public; and, further still, that this is in fact the first we have really heard of her and this kind of publicity isn't really serving to distract from a site we'd otherwise be unfamiliar with — the real question, which Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory poses is, does she have a case?

Not exactly. As a lawyer tells her, for the case to hold water, the model would have to prove that Skank's assertions were not just their opinion, but rather, deliberately misleading: "a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to a person's reputation." In other words, well-nigh impossible to do. (Although it does seem like she could probably prove pretty conclusively that she's not the #1 skank in New York — surely there's gotta be some viable competition, both amongst celebrities and professional prostitutes, no?)

Of course, however much flack she'll take for the law-suit, her thin skin, the fact that she had an unpleasant bottle contretemps with a bouncer last year, and the possible publicity ploy — in short, however misguided it may be - we get why someone would want to do it: on a basic level, it seems wrong that a stranger (or, even worse, not) should be able to write vile things anonymously. Sticks and stones nothing, reading that has to be a punch to the gut for anyone not trained from childhood to weather gratuitous insults. And the internet is, as pundits are fond of saying, still the "wild west," legally speaking. There's certainly scope for precedent-setting and why not in this case, frivolous though it may seem? It would be nice if there was some resolution to this case beyond "Skanks in NYC" getting more hits, Cohen humiliating herself, and the rest of us just feeling really, really sad. Because we imagine the wild west being slightly more exciting than that - or at least involving more frontier justice.

Model Sues Over "Skank" Comment [Salon]

Earlier:Rag Trade: Model Sues Google After Random Blogger Calls Her "Old Hag"