Remnants

• Is The September Issue Anna Wintour’s swan song? (Fox News)
• Fashion meets finance, wackiness ensues (New York Times)
• Jessie from NYC Prep talks Fashion Week, Carmen Marc Volvo (Wall Street Journal)
• Harvard finally caught on to the whole Gossip Girl thing, launches clothing line (The Frisky)
• Marrying fashion and technology (Reuters)
• Vivienne Tam to try hand at furniture (Furniture Today)
• Hold on to your teens: the Twilight Barbie dolls are here (People)
• Flip-flops apparently a potential hotbed for disease (NY Daily News)

Remnants

• Is Vogue still fearless? (The New York Times)
• Scientology’s new uniforms (Gawker)
• 30 is the new 80 (Jezebel)
• The latest twist in the Emma Watson as fashion designer rumor mill: is she launching an eco-friendly line? (Treehugger)
• Designer Alannah Hill receives death threats for using fur (Herald Sun)
• Cynthia Rowley partners with Babies “R” Us (PR Newswire)
• Rachel Zoe launches The Zoe Report (BravoFan)
• Private equity house pulls out of Cavalli deal (Wall Street Journal)

Remnants

• Amazon buys Zappos, gives press the boot (Gawker)
• The chambermaid wears Prada (Financial Times)
• Esteban Cortazar leaves Ungaro (BlackBook)
• Launch My Line features familiar faces (Los Angeles Times)
• The newest celebrity fashion statement: bald is beautiful (All The Rage)
• Lily Allen launches jewelry line (People)
• The Obama Effect: Chicago turns “Milan of the Midwest” (AP)
• Conde Nast assistants pitted against one another (Gawker)

Remnants

• New York no longer considered fashion capital of the world (Huffington Post)
• How Stella McCartney bagged Bambi (Los Angeles Times)
• “Tatiana the Anonymous Model” unmasked (Jezebel)
• NY Fashion Week to have more shows (New York Magazine)
• Ad sales for fashion magazines unfashionably slim (Forbes)
• Olsen twins inducted into CFDA (ET Online)
• Susan Boyle to get glammed up for Harper’s Bazaar (The Press Association)
• Unexpected jump in Hermes sales helps luxury rivals (Forbes)

Vogue Goes Recessionista?

From The New York Times:

When a magazine features items like a $40 Gap hat, a $50 pair of J. Crew shorts and a $48 Tommy Hilfiger scarf, one might assume that the magazine is Cosmopolitan or Lucky, proudly midrange publications. But in fact, the magazine is the high-fashion bible Vogue, which has gone budget-conscious in its July issue, promising a “Steal of the Month,” and a section with all items under $500.

“Sally Singer, fashion news and features director for the magazine, said that Vogue had included lower-priced items for some time. “We’ve always shown a wide range of price points and lower-priced items,” she said. “As long as Anna Wintour’s been at Vogue, from her first issue, she had jeans on her cover with a Christian Lacroix top. She’s always had a high-low sensibility.”

But take away the Christian Lacroix, and what do you — or anybody — really have? “It was a very deliberate decision,” Ms. Singer said about the cheaper items. “In the past year, I feel a greater need to signpost certain elements we’ve had in the magazine. Maybe we need to make sure the reader can find them more easily.”

Part of the shift was because of the economy, Ms. Singer said, and part of it was that popular designers like Phillip Lim and Alexander Wang were selling clothes at reasonable prices. Chain stores, as well, have stocked increasingly sophisticated designs, she said.

Despite the proliferation of Gap and Nine West items in its pages, Ms. Singer said she was not worried that Vogue would be confused with its price-conscious sisters. “We tend to, when we pull something in to photograph it, have an exclusive,” she said, meaning designers would not let another magazine feature the item until after Vogue’s issue hits the stands.

I’m an Anna Wintour fan, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever really considered her someone with a “high/low sensibility”. Vogue has always been somewhat about the unattainable, but the article does bring up an interesting point: there are more and more fashion forward items being produced at a lower price point as well as more higher end designers producing affordable lines (although whether or not the construction is high quality is another matter altogether). It is conceivable that Vogue is finding more lower end items worth featuring instead of simply reacting to the undeniable economic situation.

André Leon Talley Declares Death to High Heels

From New York Magazine:

After spring 2009, it seemed heels couldn’t get any taller. But then came the fall 2009 shows and with them, heels of twelve inches or higher. Well, André Leon Talley has had enough. He’s tired of watching his Vogue colleagues suffer for fashion in the torture chambers designers call shoes. He says only one Vogue staffer wears flats regularly: style director Alexandra Kotur, who, incidentally, wears the same thing to work every day. Writes Talley:

Designers with an obsession for towering torture chambers, often poorly designed for the well-being of the foot, must get a reality check. I, for one, am over the mania for the high, high heel. Too many career women look like a herd of fashion beasts, aping one another in impractical shoes.

Yet Talley has noticed perhaps a shift toward more comfortable footwear. Vogue’s Lauren Santo Domingo still wears high heels, but wore a pair recently with “sensible rounded-toe fronts.” The world’s most famous fashion icon at the moment, Michelle Obama, wears flats or kitten heels. Also, Calvin Klein showed flat shoes in the 2010 resort show (as did Ports 1961, Marc by Marc Jacobs, and Vena Cava, among others). Talley forced Kotur to try out the Calvin booties. At first she didn’t like them because she felt they didn’t have enough support, bless her practical heart, but then she “grew into” them. Talley also notes that in a new book with a forward written by Diane Von Furstenberg the designer writes, “I never go out in something that I am uncomfortable in, well, except shoes, and they’re torture. And that’s just something I deal with.”

Interesting that Talley would take up this cause, given that Anna Wintour allegedly made high heels part of the Vogue staffer uniform. Talley isn’t being entirely humanitarian, however; in his Style.com editorial he refers to sky-high heels as defying “not only gravity but elegance.”

There is no doubt that high heels don’t exactly do a body good, but many women take a particular pride in footwear martyrdom. In my advanced age I find myself eschewing the utterly painful options for more foot-friendly choices like Chie Mihara and Te Casan. While I’m not ready to give up the heels altogether, hobbling around on damaged feet 20 years down the line is certainly not an attractive option, either.