• Wacky old Giorgio Armani is going back on his promise to PETA not to use fur in his designs. [P6]
• Meanwhile, Jennifer Aniston was seen coming out of a fur shop. [Faded Youth]
• Oil heir Brandon Davis hasn't actually inherited anything yet, so he's scamming all the other heirs and rich people for money, and that's apparently not cool. One of them is going to call the American Express fraud department if complaining to Page Six doesn't produce immediate results. Smart plan. [P6]
• Heather Mills is actually suing someone who called her a "witch" on the grounds that she's not actually a witch. Apparently in England witch accusations are still taken very seriously. [P6]
• Perez Hilton will be photographed with his hair on fire surrounded by naked people. [P6]
• Supposedly, Crispin Glover disowned a friend for sleeping with Gene Simmons in that sex tape. [Showbiz Spy]

From Horyn's January Paris dispatch, which set off the whole fight:

Mr. Armani’s niece, Roberta, sat next to Hilary Swank, who had on a black beaded cocktail dress. Ms. Armani never seemed to stop smiling. [Apparently Armani was offended at this characterization of his niece. —ed.]

...There was nothing lurid or in bad taste about Mr. Armani’s clothes, but neither was there anything subtle or particularly surprising about them...

Despite his incredible design range over the years, irony and self-reference are not within [Armani's] imagination, so there will never be a jewel of a dress coming out from a huge beige hub of an Armani jacket. The great thing about watching a Lagerfeld couture show, and to an extent a Galliano, is that each dress and jacket is not only unique but also conveys with wit the history of the house. You get that much less with Mr. Armani.

The response from Armani, in one or more letters he wrote to Horyn's editors and possibly to Horyn herself, as described by Horyn:

He thought I was “belittling” of his family and friends...

In a letter to my editor earlier this month, [Armani] cites my “unnecessarily sarcastic comments” about his friends and family in a review of his last couture show and notes that I have “rarely found positive remarks” to make about his ready-to-wear collections, and then surmises that I have “an embedded preconception.” He concludes: “Going forward therefore, I see no real merit in inviting Cathy Horyn to my women’s shows.”

Horyn replies:

Practiced mainly by older designers, whose careers took flight in the 1980s, banning seems a reflexive action against a perceived threat to their power...

The ’80s was a creative period in fashion, the decade of nouveau-riche dressing and the invasion of the Japanese designers in Paris, but it was also an uncritical one...

it is clear to her that some designers don’t fully understand the different roles of the media — the magazine editors looking for beautiful clothes to photograph (and, with luck, an advertiser to satisfy in the process), the newspaper critic examining a creative change, and increasingly the amateur blogger...

Many consumers find Mr. Armani’s clothes very appealing, and certainly no one would bother denying that he had a huge impact on the way men and women looked in the ’80s and early ’90s. I loved attending his shows then...

I can’t say yet whether I will write about Mr. Armani’s clothes by viewing them online. Frankly, I would be much more excited if he unburdened himself of the whole system, closed down the shows, stopped with the backstage stroking sessions, and went directly over the Internet to the public.

Times: My Invitation Isn’t in the Mail

The Third Leader: Not too thin...
Giorgio Armani
Published: 21 September 2006

Ever since I started out as a fashion designer, I chose to use models who were on the slender side. This was because the clothes I design and the sort of fabrics I use need to hang correctly on the body. I want the dresses to seem to float and flow with the body.

Gianni Versace was a very different kind of designer. He used jerseys and chiffons, which needed a body of a certain shape to hold the fabric. He used more voluptuous models. The particular styles I designed were quite different, and this is why, maybe, I was regarded as being among those designers who used slim women as models.

But I do not feel responsible for setting a trend towards models who look anorexic. As so often in the fashion world, things have been taken to extremes. And unfortunately there are a lot of young women who never accept that they are thin enough - and this is an illness.

In my view, all women want to look much slimmer than they are, and this encourages them to be very careful about what they eat. But there is a similar issue at the other end of the scale: there are very few women who have just the right degree of voluptuousness to be pin-ups.

Most of the comment on this issue of anorexic models - like comment on anything - tends to exaggerate the problem. But the fact that we are dealing with the world of fashion, where so much is exaggerated anyway, means there has been a particular lack of balance in this discussion.

The Third Leader: Not too thin... [Independent]

The Independent