Rooney Mara's Vogue Cover Leaks

Rooney Mara‘s November cover of American Vogue has hit the Internet. The Dragon Tattoo adaptation star was photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Mara wears a Ralph Lauren dress, the back of which features a dragon embroidered on illusion. Subtle. [Fashin]

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Daniel Desario is the new face of Gucci‘s brand-new collection of made-to-measure men’s suits. (Remember “Gookie! Guckie! Gooo-Chiii!”?) [Telegraph]

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And Thandie Newton is now a face of Louis Vuitton. The combination of her pose, her black minidress with a white Peter Pan collar, and that hat reminds us very much of Noémie Lenoir‘s 2008 Vogue Paris cover. [Bossip, Models.com]

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Marc Quinn‘s 50kg, 18-carat gold statue of Kate Moss in a complicated yoga pose — Dwi Pada Sirsasana, to be precise — sold at auction for £577,250, or $908,245. Moss was the artist’s model for the head, hands, and feet, but a much more experienced yogi with her measurements served as a body double during the casting. [Vogue UK]

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Here’s a photo of Australian model Andrej Pejic outside Buckingham Palace, just before he went inside to meet the Queen. Because some people apparently asked, yes, Pejic wore a skirt, but he still bowed upon meeting Her Majesty. [The Cut]

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André Leon Talley says he “recovers” from fashion week with “long weekends of TCM movies, like Shanghai Express or The Scarlet Empress, both Marlene Dietrich. They don’t make movies like that anymore in Hollywood.” On the left is a photo of Talley assisting Diana Vreeland with a Dietrich costume from Shanghai Express in preparation for a 1974 exhibit. [The Cut]

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A. O. Scott has a wonderful, long appreciation/profile of Patti Smith in the brand-new issue of T which you should totally read. [T]

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• Christian Louboutin says women wear high heels because they’re sexy. Only longer: “Think about Marlene Dietrich crossing her legs — the whole attitude. The language starts with the shoe and radiates over the whole body. A woman can be sexy, charming, witty or shy with her shoes. Shoes for men are about elegance or wealth; they are not playing with the inner character. That’s why women are happy to wear painful shoes. For some a little discomfort is balanced by something else, which has to do with desire.” [Vogue UK]
• And the head of web ops for Target has left the company. Presumably he’s going somewhere he’ll never see another busy zig-zag knit again. [WWD]
• Lady Gaga keeps on getting asked whether she’ll do a fashion line, and keeps on giving responses that are really just polite demurrals (“Part of me thinks it would be such an injustice for someone like me to do it on the side because so many of them dedicate their lives to it. I might do it one day but I would have to take a break from music so I could concentrate on it.”) This means the press continues running headlines like “Lady Gaga Considers Fashion Line!” And because of those headlines, Lady Gaga keeps on getting asked whether she’ll do a fashion line. [Showbiz Spy]
• Chinese tourists spend more per capita in the U.S. than any other nationality. Last year, each Chinese visitor on average pumped $3296 into the New York City economy, out of $6000 they spent in the U.S. as a whole. Brazilians spent $2716 in New York. The French, on the other hand, spent just $2181 apiece. It’s numbers like these that have retailers including Saks Fifth Avenue lobbying Congress to pass a law that would ease the process of getting a visa for Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian tourists. The process can currently take months. “When you go to the London or Paris stores, you see all the Chinese and you just say ‘why?’ Why can’t it be the same here?” says one anonymous “senior level retailer.” [WWD]
• In related news: Bain & Co. predicts that worldwide spending on personal luxury goods this year will reach €191 billion, or $265 billion at current exchange. That’s a jump of 10% over 2010. [WWD]
• Manolo Blahnik: “I’ve never been tempted to do these hideous furniture shoes.” According to the people who write trend pieces, Manolos are back in style. [NYTimes]
• The Isaac Mizrahi label is expanding into handbags, shoes, and jewelry for fall ’12. The new licensing deals were in the works even before Mizrahi sold his company to Xcel Brands. [WWD]
• Vogue Italia has launched a new site called Vogue Encyclo, a kind of Wikipedia-of-the-fashion-industry-with-editors. Franca Sozzani, in essence, wants you to write for her for free: “You can always use [your articles] on a future résumé to become journalists, if that is what you aspire to,” says the editor. [WWD]
• Billionaire L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who has been involved in a long-running legal dispute with her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, has been legally placed under the guardianship of her daughter and grandson by a French court. From 2007-10, Bettencourt and her daughter were embroiled in a dispute over the former’s gift, over many years, of around €1 billion to François-Marie Banier, a handsome, much-younger photographer she considered a friend. Bettencourt Meyers’ lawyers argued that Banier was exploiting the elderly woman; Bettencourt’s lawyers said that Bettencourt Meyers was acting out of concern not for her mother but for the fortune that she regarded as her inheritance. [WWD]
• Pucci opened a sort of museum dedicated to its archives in Italy. [WWD]
• And now, a moment with Elle Fanning, who discusses ways to jazz up a school uniform with Tavi Gevinson:
• I actually got these really cool ’80s khaki pants — I think they’re men’s, so they’re super big, but they look cool when you pull them up really high with a belt. Last year all the girls got in trouble for their short skirts, and it’s sort of happening again, so I’m trying to do the opposite and I’ve decided that the longer plaid skirts look sort of cuter in a weird way. If you wear them a tad longer it makes them look, like, super school-uniform. So I like it.
• [Rookie]