Pippa Middletonmay be coming to fashion week. Do you hear that? The real-life sibling of a person who married a person! Middleton is in New York City to take some meetings related to the October publication of her book about entertaining, and she is expected to attend some fashion shows while she’s here. Let’s hope some designer has the sense of humor to seat her next to fellow random NYFW attendee Zahia Dehar. [NYDN]
Ageless superbeing Iman has launched a lifestyle Web site called Destination Iman. [Official Site]
Anna Dello Russo‘s spoken-word dance-pop masterpiece, “You Need A Fashion Shower,” is getting re-released with a new video in honor of the editor’s upcoming H&M collection. The directors are Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, so the results promise to be fancy. But we’ll take any excuse to republish the original. [WWD]
French photographer Anne Deniau shot Alexander McQueen at work from 1996 to 2010. She has collected some of her images in a new book, Love Looks Not With the Eyes. “After Lee passed away there was this legend about his dark side, that he was a tortured man, that he had some macabre side, and that is absolutely not the man I knew,” she says. “He had dark moments like any creative artist, great highs and downs, but apart from that he spread such light. He was very generous, he was faithful, a lovely person, he was very cheerful. I wanted to do something as close as possible to the man I knew.” [Telegraph]
If you (like us) are a fan of the excellent indie fashion magazine Worn, you should know that the publication just launched an IndieGogo campaign to raise $5,000 to help pay for a planned switch to a better quality, perfect bound format. Tavi Gevinson pops up in the fundraising pitch video. [IndieGogo]
Olivier Theyskens would like you to not read too much into his new haircut. The designer chopped off his long brown hair into a sort of chin-length bob. “There’s no real reason,” he says, “but people always want to think there’s something more to it. I’ve been wanting to cut it for years, but it’s never been the right time — when I left [Nina] Ricci and took a year off, I wanted to cut it, but then people would think, ‘Oh no, did he freak out?!’ [Laughs] And then when I took the job at Theory and moved to New York, people would have associated it with that change. So I just waited.” [Into The Gloss]
Deposed Yves Saint Laurent creative director Stefano Pilati got himself a new job: creative director for Ermenegildo Zegna. [WWD]
Marie Claire editor Joanna Coles will replace Kate White as the editor-in-chief of the Hearst cash-cow Cosmopolitan later this year. White is retiring to spend more time working on her own writing. Under Coles’ watch, Marie Claire offered its readership writing with a bit more intelligence than the standard ladymag fare, with solid articles on interracial dating and Nicolette Mason’s excellent column on plus-size fashion. Coles’ replacement at the magazine has yet to be announced. [NYTimes]
Girl Model, which we reviewed after its SXSW premiere last year, is opening this week at IFC in New York City. It will be in limited release across the U.S. The documentary takes as its subject the trade in young Russian girls who are in demand in foreign modeling markets, particularly Japan. It follows model scout Ashley Arbaugh and 13-year-old Siberian model Nadya Vall as Arbaugh scouts Vall and arranges for her to be sent to Tokyo to work. Arbaugh, says co-director Ashley Sabin, “actually approached us with the idea for a film and that’s how we were made privy to that world. She wanted to be a whistle-blower in the beginning, but as the production progressed, she got deeper in the industry…and really pushed back against the film.” Girl Model is heart-breaking and important. If you have the chance to see it, you should. [WWD]
Aboriginal model Samantha Harris, who is the face of the first-ever Australian Indigenous Fashion Week, says she didn’t have a problem with Rodarte‘s use of prints by an Aboriginal artist in its fall/winter 2012 collection. Rodarte was criticized by some Aboriginal leaders for not giving appropriate credit to Benny Tjangala, the late artist whose works it turned into textile prints. After the criticism, Rodarte clarified that it had licensed the prints, and additional reporting pointed to Tjangala as the original artist. Harris says, “I thought it was a great thing. I felt it gave Aboriginal art a fashion edge and helped raise its profile. I just wish I could have afforded to buy some of the garments.” [Fashionista]
Kate Upton is not in her New York agency’s show package. Was she expected to be? As far as we know Upton has never done shows at New York fashion week before. [FashionCopious]
Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey has applied for and been granted a marriage license. His intended is actor Simon Woods, who responded to a Daily Mail phone inquiry about the nuptials in just about the most polite manner possible: “If you wouldn’t mind terribly, I’d rather not talk about it, but thank you for calling.” [Daily Mail]
Meanwhile, Bailey is also up for a British Fashion Award. The British Fashion Council announced that this year’s nominees for best Designer Brand are Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Mulberry, and Stella McCartney. McCartney is also up for Designer of the Year along with Christopher Kane and Mary Katrantzou. For the non-designer Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator, stylists Edward Enninful and Katie Grand and Central St. Martins professor Louise Wilson are all nominated. J.W. Anderson, Michael van der Ham, and Simone Rocha are nominated in the Emerging Talent Ready-to-Wear category. [WWD]
Moises de la Renta will not get you a ticket to his father Oscar’s fashion week show, so stop asking, okay? The young designer wrote on Facebook, “Haha lol mad peeps asking me top go to #ODLR show this season but where were u when [bleep] was crazy . . . ! Nowhere! So go find ur own invites, fake ass punks . . . PS my name is Moises not Oscar and I’m not in the PR business so see you guys in hell [bleeps]! #lmfao #sweetrevenge.” [P6]
Some bros in San Francisco are acting like they invented shorts. San Francisco bros: we’ve had these in New Zealand and Australia for decades. They are called stubbies. [HuffPo]
Hermès kept any mention of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy and its ongoing hostile takeover efforts out of its (very positive) quarterly results report last week. Now, the other shoe has dropped: Hermès is suing LVMH for insider trading and manipulating stock prices during its stealthy acquisition of some 17.1% of the company. LVMH used cash-settled equity swaps to avoid disclosure laws, a legal loophole that the French government has since closed. LVMH now owns 22.3% of its competitor. [WWD]
American Apparel is making its fashion week debut with a show at Japan Fashion Week, because it thinks that might be kinda cool. [Fashionista]
Carlos Slim sold another 550,000 of his Saks Fifth Avenue shares, leaving him with 23.4 million shares total — or barely more than other leading investor Diego Della Valle’s 22.7 million shares. Slim’s Saks sell-off has now hit 3.2 million shares, dispatched in a series of trades since August 20. [WWD]
Here’s an article about women in East Africa who are employed for fair wages making totes and other bags for brands including Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. [NYTimes]
Today in product placement, Isaac Mizrahi is doing a collection inspired by the Chevrolet Malibu. [VF]
Michael Kors had a great quarter: earnings rose 71% year-on-year, to $414.9 million. [Forbes]
And now, a closer look at social media. From the perspective of the brands who are investing in Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Instagram, Pinterest, and whatever else, is it, you know, worth it? Does it make anyone actually buy stuff?
At this point, observers say, few brands, if any, are seeing significant sales result from their postings on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other sites. Social media hasn’t been about driving transactions; it has been about building brand awareness and a “community” that will be devoted to a brand and, thus, buy it. Social media isn’t about sales today; it’s about driving sales in five, 10 or 15 years as the Internet-mad generation of twentysomethings matures. […]
There’s only one problem: For now, there isn’t a universal metric to measure the ROI.
