Marc Jacobs Can't Say No To Anna Wintour

Anna Wintour, shot by Vogue favorite Mario Testino, appears on the cover of the new issue of WSJ. Editor Deborah Needleman reminds us of the longtime Vogue editor-in-chief’s importance: “She’s a really powerful figure in America … someone whose power extends beyond what she does.” See, she’s powerful because she has power! Marc Jacobs — whose career has been greatly aided at various turns by Wintour‘s patronage — explains that he cannot tell her no. “If I get a request for something, there aren’t two possible answers. First I get an email, then a phone call from someone at Vogue, and now I don’t even bother to say no — I know the next call is from her.” [AP]

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Retouchers in Dubai gave Gisele Bündchen a Photoshop tank top for her H&M ads. [Fashionista]

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Tom Ford — the last person on earth who needs a loudspeaker, pretty much — was given one for this cover of Another Man. [DS]

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Julia Restoin-Roitfeld AND HER NIPPLES star on the cover of Russian Tatler. [Fashionista]

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• Michelle Obama wore Tracy Reese, Rachel Roy and Naeem Khan on her trip to Brazil. [NYDN]
• Hedi Slimane on the intersection of fashion and mass culture: “The unfortunate outcome might be the obsession and collusion between the celebrity culture and high fashion. It is just a big global mess of random endorsement. Nothing looks worse than a dress or a suit on a red carpet. It is an ongoing tragedy of cheap fashion on cheap celebrities, followed by ubercheap comments. I only like designers’ clothes on models. Good models have an inner understanding of the clothes and design.” [Style.com]
• Oh, but Lily Cole, model-slash-art-history-student-slash-sustainability-campaigner, isn’t “sustainable fashion” a contradiction in terms? “It is! It is oxymoronic, just in terms of the name ‘fashion’ meaning trends. And so it’s risky, biting the hand that feeds me, obviously. But I don’t think it’s particular to the clothing industry. It’s a problem with the manufacture of everything. I mean, the fact that there’s already a second iPad out now is ‘fashion’, in a similar way. I don’t think this is fashion’s fault. It’s a broader issue to do with the capitalism, and an economy which needs us to keep buying, and creating this superfluous kind of waste. It’s not that I don’t believe in creativity and innovation and new ideas, and the creativity that comes with fashion, which I really respect. But one of my biggest concerns is just how cheap we expect everything to be.” Lily Cole‘s extremely eco-friendly low-impact sustainable green fashion line, the North Circular, sells such items as a hand-knitted hat made of wool from “rescue sheep” that costs £65, or around $104. (Guess that’s the capitalism for you.) “I’m not against people buying clothes; I think clothes are wonderful, and I’m very materialistic myself — but there’s a way of finding a compromise. I just think we can buy less and pay more, to make sure people aren’t being exploited.” [Guardian]
• Now John Frieda would like us all to believe that Katie Holmes colors her hair at home. [WWD]
• Solange Knowles, on being asked to “design” a namesake clothing line: “I was absolutely that person who frowned upon random artists and models and musicians for crossing over into that design process and I always said, I feel like there are so many talented people who’ve studied this and know the skill of the craft of designing because it is an art, that I would be reluctant to call myself a designer.” Can you tell there’s a huge BUT coming? Here it is! “A line that I really respect and was already a fan of reached out and had a great idea of us collaborating on maybe a particular collection and me just sharing ideas and prints and being involved in that way I would absolutely love. It’s still in the early stages so I can’t really reveal [much] but hopefully something will develop.” [ContactMusic]
• Dolce & Gabbana says it has turned down offers to collaborate on a co-branded line with the likes of H&M — three times. Domenico Dolce also said that in order to succeed in the industry, “Fashion has to be your love. Look at me, I am a fashion priest — no boyfriend, no husband, no family, only fashion.” [WSJ]
• Alexander Wang: “I’ve always had a very supportive family. There are all these sorts of stereotypes that certain backgrounds — Asian families — want to direct you into certain [careers] but my family has always been, ‘This is where your talent is, let’s go for it.’ And with that I’ve been very lucky.” [Telegraph]
• Snoop Dogg is selling a t-shirt for Japan. [ContactMusic]
• Speaking of which, luxury stocks rallied in yesterday’s trading because analysts now believe that the earthquake’s impact on high-end retail will be less severe than previously anticipated. [Globe & Mail]
• H&M, which had temporarily relocated its Japan headquarters from Tokyo to Osaka because of the disaster and the risk of nuclear fallout, has returned to Tokyo. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, in New York, hipster boutique Opening Ceremony held a Japan fundraiser at the Standard hotel. [WWD]
• Riccardo Tisci says he was going to turn down the creative directorship of Givenchy, “But the week before, my mother called me and said to me, ‘I am going to sell our house, because your sisters are struggling, they’re having children, they need the money, I will go to a retirement home.’ I heard that, and it was like a knife in my heart. I felt such a failure, that my mother had to sell the house of my father whom I don’t remember. And then I went to Paris, and they showed me a contract with all these zeros on it, and it was like help from God. I thought, ‘If I sign this, my mother will never have to worry again.’ So I signed it.” Catholic Italian mama guilt trips for the fashion win. [The Cut]
• Lovable leather-daddy starchitect Peter Marino certainly speaks highly of his fashion clients: “They are in the realm of artists. A lot of people call it craft. But there’s a huge amount of artistic talent. The Metropolitan [Museum of Art] has given fashion its quasi-mark of approval with the Costume Institute in the basement of the museum. Dude, get over it. Not only painting is art.” [WWD]
• Nicola Formichetti paid “Like ten or twenty” thousand dollars’ worth of Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest’s fines so that he could obtain a passport in time to model in the Mugler show in Paris. Genest, who had been homeless, “had a lot of fines or something because he was always sleeping on the street,” explained Formichetti. Genest has tattoos that cover virtually all of his body — except for his genitals, says Formichetti. [Hintmag]
• J. Crew has made what is likely to be its last public regulatory filing for the foreseeable future — the company recently went back to being privately held via a controversial leveraged buy-out. And just in time, too: Wall Street doesn’t take kindly to 90% year-on-year declines in quarterly profits. For all of 2010, J. Crew’s same-store sales nonetheless grew a healthy 4%. [WWD]
• American Apparel is still such a financial mess that it cannot file its 2010 annual report. But the company has warned the Securities and Exchange Commission that it expects that it lost money. This is only the latest in a long series of overdue filings for the troubled t-shirt maker; it has even received de-listing warnings from the New York Stock Exchange because of its persistent inability to meet the deadlines that every other publicly held company must meet. American Apparel has still not filed certified results for 2009, because American Apparel’s public accounting firm said it no longer had any confidence in previously reported ’09 results when it hastily quit last summer. Maybe we’ll find out how much money American Apparel lost in 2009 by Christmas? [CSA]
• As the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire approaches, Obit mag encourages us to remember this watershed event in U.S. labor history: “Yes, they were union, at a time when union members literally put body and soul on the line. And why? Not just for an eight-hour day and a job that wouldn’t kill them, but also for the sense of self, the decency, that comes from knowing you have a say in what you do. For all those ‘benefits’ we take for granted, unions and unions alone are responsible.” Garment workers, especially those in the Third World, are still some of the world’s most vulnerable to exploitation. Last March in Bangladesh, for example, a fire at a factory that produces knitwear for H&M killed 21 workers. [Obit]