- Sienna Miller is going to be the face of a new Hugo Boss fragrance. When was the last time you remember Sienna Miller actually acting? [WWD]
- In further crossover tales, newly minted TV host Coco Rocha, who’s jumping between walking in shows and filming them for an E! Canada documentary this week, says she’s glad she doesn’t have to talk to celebrities because, unlike industry people, they don’t know who she is. Also, she thinks her red hair makes people treat her differently. “I think people are more scared of me. They think I’m evil.” [The Cut]
- The Costume Institute’s spring exhibit will be all about the model as a fashion muse and the evolution of beauty standards for women. [Guardian]
- Event co-host Kate Moss‘s muse status has already translated to the art world: a set of Banksy portraits of the model, done in the style of Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, are going to be auctioned in London. [Telegraph]
- Speaking of model muses, Japanese model Tao Okamoto‘s haircut inspired Philip Lim’s runway hairstyle. She shot his look book and he was taken with her. [Elle]
- Meanwhile, Michelle Obama inspired the hair and makeup look at Baby Phat. [WWD]
- If you’re taking any New York taxis this week, the video screen of asinine weather and real estate information (“Buy A West Village Condo For Eleventy Million Dollars! Someone From Corcoran Explains Why!”) you immediately poke at furiously to turn off may contain images of Cynthia Rowley‘s fall collection. [WWD]
- Male model Cole Mohr shot a fashion week video for New York. He goes backstage and tells fellow model Tyler Riggs, “Say something meaningful! We’re on film!” Riggs pulls a face and replies, “It’s better to destroy than create what is meaningless.” Then he thinks a second, lights a match, and says, “I am why the ozone layer is fucked up.” And this is why I cannot hang out with male models. [The Cut]
- The New York Times has been to the tents and sees only Doom and Gloom (with sides of Sturm and Drang). Representative line about a drag queen: “Having spent two decades capitalizing on the froth thrown off by both boom and bust economies, he was also well acquainted with the uses of sobriety.” And Twitters about Marc Jacobs’ hair get at something existential. [NY Times]
- PPR, the megaconglomerate whose luxury holdings include Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Bottega Veneta, saw flat revenue in the fourth quarter of 2008. But luxury sales for this year have grown by 8.1% on last January. Emerging markets like China saw Gucci sales increase 42% in 2008. [Financial Times]
- Also weathering the downturn passably is Uniqlo chairman and CEO Tadashi Yanai, whom Forbes just named Japan’s richest man. $6.1 billion is a lot of $30 cashmere sweaters. [WWD]
- The Italian apparel sector has formally requested aid from the government. Auto makers and homewares manufacturers were included in a stimulus package approved last month, but not fashion or textile companies. One large company, IT Holdings SpA, has already seen its luxury division (owner of the brands Gianfranco Ferre and Malo, as well as licenses for Cavalli Sport) teeter into bankruptcy. [Reuters]
- Dress Barn projects a second quarter loss. [WWD]
- PETA supporter Tim Gunn says designers “Hhve a responsibility to know about [ethical issues surrounding fur]. If you’re going to use fur, you at least need to know which sources are less abusive than others…I would never use anything from China. What people don’t tell you is that it’s most likely dog. And they call it something else and they make it look like something else.” Fur cannot be used in the Project Runway final collections, interestingly. [Reuters]
- Even Anne Slowey‘s dog is fasting this fashion week. [Elle]
- However, this story about how Slowey missed the first few days of shows because her 85-year-old mother in Indiana needed help converting her analog TV for digital signal is very sweet. [Observer]
- UK Vogue features editor Harriet Quick says Posh’s new dress collection is good. (It’s hard to imagine how a set of Roland Mouret rip-offs could be bad, exactly…) As if to highlight her unoriginality, the story is illustrated with pictures of Posh’s dress presentation side-by-side with pictures of Posh wearing similar outfits in years past. [Daily Mail]
- Luckily, she wasn’t taking inspiration from Cartier: the French jeweler is suing QVC over the similarity of several watch designs in their Joan Rivers collection. [WWD]
- American Vogue‘s fashion news and features editor, Sally Singer, is a Berkeley- and Yale-educated former book editor who certainly reads more contemporary fiction than you do. She also skipped several grades, wrote a letter to Andy Warhol when she was 12 asking for a job at Interview, and has sewn her own clothes since she was in middle school, because her family’s budget didn’t stretch to the kinds of garments she saw in the fashion magazines she scoured growing up. She seems friendly, well-adjusted, and entirely non-sociopathic. It is a heartbreaking paradox of this industry that some of the smartest, funniest, and most culturally engaged women you could ever meet, somehow, once they get together, are responsible for creating the lobotomized morass that is the women’s media. [Mediabistro]
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