"All three of these magazines are, you know, a few years on either side, 100 years old and we've been through many ups and downs," he said.

Ha, yes. Vanity Fair was founded in 1914 and it's been around ever since! Except for a brief 48-year-long Great Depression-induced hiatus.

VF was the original Men's Vogue!

[NYO; pic via Conde Nast]

"I would like to sincerely apologize for my off-color remarks to the press yesterday from Calgary," Avery said. "I should not have made those comments and I recognize that they were inappropriate.

"It was a bad attempt to build excitement for the game, but I am now acutely aware of how hurtful my actions were. I caused unnecessary embarrassment to my peers as well as people I have been close with in the past.

"I apologize for offending the great fans of the NHL, the commissioner, my teammates, my coaching staff and the Dallas Stars management and ownership. As many of you know, I like to mix it up on and off the ice from time to time, but understand that this time I took it too far."

The NHL could leave him twisting in the wind on indefinite suspension. But odds are he begs forgiveness and, having generated loads of free not-really-harmful publicity for the league and himself, gets it, returning to his $16 million four-year contract and freshly-burnished bad-boy image.

"I'm really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada. I just want to comment on how it's become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds."

Cuthbert (pictured below) is dating Calgary defenseman Dion Phaneuf, while Hunter ended up with Jarrett Stoll of the Los Angeles Kings.

Avery instinctively understands that the NHL, which is trying to attract new viewers, needs to play up conflict and characters within it own ranks if it wants to draw attention. "Tthe NHL does a terrible job of marketing [by not promoting its] villains," he recently told ESPN. "Nobody cares about Jarome Iginla and guys like that, they're just not exciting enough."

Call it the reality television approach to sports — or, less flatteringly, the professional wrestling approach. Either way, alienating the female half of the potential audience with this "sloppy seconds stunt" doesn't seem like the smartest way to extend the strategy. But then ladies man Avery should know that already!

Corporate colleagues also arched their eyebrows when Wintour told a reporter at the National Magazine Awards to "Just go away" after she asked about rumors of the editor-in-chief's impending retirement. The touchy reply added to their suspicion that Wintour, who just this past June celebrated two decades atop Vogue, was worried about being pushed out by Newhouse before she'd lined up a soft landing elsewhere. Her purported $2-million-per-year salary is seen as a hindrance, given the state of the economy, in lining up a follow-on fashion gig of the sort that seems natural, post Vogue: creative director at LVMH, that sort of thing.

Whether the palace intrigue at the world's fashion bible unfolds according to the Waverly buzz or not, it is clear the Vogue masthead is not at equilibrium. Wintour in recent years positioned herself as a sort of mini-mogul over various baby Vogues. But this fall, she's fallen back down to earth. The closure of Men's Vogue was a major personal embarrassment. It followed a possibly fatal blow to the Vogue Living experiment and the cancellation of Fashion Rocks. Worst of all, it came amid slipping numbers at Vogue itself, as competitors leveraged reality television to undermine the title's dominance over the world of fashion.

The poor performance surely undermined Wintour within Condé Nast. But even if the legendary editor-from-hell still had Si Newhouse's full support, there's the issue of personal satisfaction: Wintour could hardly be expected to content herself with a downgrade from "editorial director" of a magazine collection to mere editor-in-chief of a single title, shrinking in ad pages and influence. Even if Wintour does not yet realize that, Newhouse surely does. Thus we see the unwelcome rumors of her retirement in the tabloids. And so it may be that a French revolution comes to Vogue in January 2009. (Photo by Jeremy Kost)

UPDATE: As many of you noted in the comments, the rumored replacement of Wintour by her French rival puts a tragic (for Wintour) twist on a plotline specific to the film adaptation of the novel The Devil Wears Prada. The real-life French Vogue editor has said Wintour is "like a puppet." In a clip from the movie below, Wintour stand-in Miranda Priestly manages to divert her competitor Jacqueline Follet by arranging for her a job once promised to Priestly's lieutenant at Runway (aka Vogue). Her own boss is dissuaded by threats that Priestly's fashion-industry allies will blackball the magazine. That sort of loyalty seems far too posh an extravagance at a time of economic panic and powerful TV shows like Project Runway.

The Cut: There have been some rumors, and we were wondering if you had plans for retirement.
Anna Wintour: I'm so sorry, I think that's an extremely rude question. Leave me alone.
The Cut: May we ask what you would do if you did retire?
Anna Wintour: No. Just go away.
The Cut: Okay, thank you, enjoy your dinner.

Hee!

[The Cut]

• Wintour famously passed on the chance to cooperate with the launch of Project Runway four years ago; by September Runway partner Elle was well on its way to passing Vogue in total ad pages, growing while Wintour's magazine was shrinking.
• Vogue's belated (but semi-successful!) reality show response, Model.Live, was masterminded by worried Vogue publisher Tom Florio, not Wintour.
• Those hussies at Elle launched their own cable show imitating an imitation of an imitation of Wintour. And she's not even getting royalties and whatnot!
• Vogue this year was beset by a series of ill-advised covers.
• Wintour was publicly snubbed in Europe for being an arrogant cultural imperialist.
• Men's Vogue fell in the Great Magazine Die-Off and, according to Page Six, Wintour didn't even have the energy to mount a vicious internal turf war. Sad!

Worst of all, the Times not two months ago profiled one of the bevy of smart young Euroskanks angling to push Wintour out the door (an elegant Russian with a Ph.D.), so when Wintour goes to recommend a replacement to Conde Nast boss Si Newhouse, as Page Six said she plans to do, he might just ignore her and go off in his own direction. (Maybe the editor of sexy Vogue India?)

Vogue's people deny everything, but leaving the magazine makes so much sense for Wintour: She gets to exit while the magazine is still on top; she doesn't have to learn how to effectively publish on this cesspool they call the internet; and Wintour will finally have time to close the deal on one of her many crushes. If the editor hasn't considered these positive aspects of retirement, she ought to, because someone at Conde Nast thinks she should!

Calls to stores over the last week to do just that revealed a more-surprising truth: most of the unpriced items were never available for purchase...


Out of 30 items for which prices were requested, 21 were not available at the stores at which they were listed.


Two editors at different fashion publications, who would not speak publicly because they did not want to embarrass their employers, said “price upon request” was usually a misnomer. It has become a euphemism used to credit designs that were never produced for sale...

At one point writer Eric Wilson almost (cue dramatic music!) had his cover blown: "To get the price of the Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, a caller had to give his full name and identify himself as either a news media member or a potential client before the details were revealed."

This sad practice is getting more and more common as people stop buying high-end fashion, due to the depression making them broke. So don't get your hopes up for those metal suspenders in Elle, or the Versace shoes in Harper's Bazaar, because you can't buy them.

Or maybe do get your hopes up, because if you still afford these sorts of products there are a great many poors who will enjoy seeing you cry, or even just get a little flustered.

(Picture: Harper's Bazaar via Times.)

Yesterday, Men's Vogue folded. That was a major embarrassment for Anna Wintour. She was a force in the women's fashion world, but she thought she was destined to build her own fashion magazine empire in her own little corner of Conde Nast. MV was supposed to be a big part of that. Now it's dead, along with Fashion Rocks, the huge advertorial project that Conde Nast put on each fall. Teen Vogue is rumored to be shaky as well! That means fashion advertising is weak overall, and Anna's dream is deferred. If not dead.

You know who this should be of concern to? Dave "Abs" Zinczenko! And every other aspiring magabrand mogul. Dave Z made his name editing Men's Health, but now he oversees a bunch of "Health" titles, writes ridiculous "Health" books, and goes on the Today show as an expert all the time. He's not an editor, he's a brand name.

Until the advertising collapses! Then he's back to being just another dude checking copy and approving pages and hopefully getting out of the office in time to go to the gym, not so he can look good on TV, but just so he can feel good for himself.

Don't worry. Pretty soon you'll be thankful just to have those editing jobs. [Pic via Reuters]

So yes this is Archie Bronson, the celebrity professor, writer (been on Charlie Rose), and public speaker. A visiting fellow at Columbia, Archie spends most of his time hitting the celebrity circuit, regaling the glitterati with his infamous bon mots and ribald stories. His area of expertise is "the linguistics of economic popular culture," which means he likes to talk about money and famous people and the media and the Hamptons. But, you know, intellectually. Lookswise he's a combination of all (or at least many) of the fellows she's loved. Mr. Dressler breaks it down:

Head/hairline: Eric Idle
Glasses: Shelby Bryan
Eyes: Roger Federer
Nose: Lebron James
Lips/Jaw: Si Newhouse
Beard: Gerard Butler

Anna are you reading? This is him, right?

Jesus Christ Belles on Wheels. Is this fashion spread as stupid as Keira Knightley in Africa with the Louis Vuitton blanket draped over the baby elephant, you ask?* No, but the thing is they have totally run a fashion spread featuring Agyness Deyn's stupid bicycle before. This is not even a new stupid idea! Even Vogue publisher Tom Florio thinks the magazine has gotten stale. And publishers of cash rich magazines are usually too busy counting money and launching international editions in developing countries with emerging plutocracies to care!

Though Florio says Vogue is set to have its second-best year of ad sales ever, he's worried about keeping the brand relevant for the next generation of readers. So he—not Wintour—is creating Web shows like Model.Live with his 16-year-old daughter in mind.

"I'm comfortable with it, because I feel that the principals of what we're doing are based on the same principals as the brand," he says. If Wintour objected to the content, he says he would kill it. A Conde Nast spokesperson said that Wintour understands Vogue.TV is run by the business department and stays informed about its programs. Wintour is attending Fashion Weeks in Paris and Milan and was unavailable for comment.

Model.Live, if you were unaware, is Vogue's big-budget online reality show about the modeling industry, and apparently, at one million viewers so far compared to basically half that in terms of unique users on all Style.com in August, it is basically the most successful thing Vogue has ever done on the internet. (I rely on Tatiana to watch it for me — my god that girl can write the shit out of a reality TV recap! — but from what I can tell it's interesting, nuanced, occasionally dull and not infrequently poignant. Guess which one of those adjectives is the only one I'd generally apply to the content of Vogue?)

Wintour famously turned down the chance to sponsor Project Runway back in the day, and one of its founding producers told me Tom Florio tried desperately to change that after the first season. So it's understandable how he managed to pry this critical component of the future of Vogue's business model away from her, but the interesting thing to anyone who ever worked at magazines is this: at what other publication is the most interesting content being produced by the business side?

*In this and many other cases, "you" = "me."

Elle still trailed Vogue by more than 350 ad pages in the first half of 2008 but seems to be evening the playing field online, not to mention in pop culture. Forbes' recently compiled list of the top 10 most-powerful editors in fashion had Elle's Robbie Myers and Vogue's Anna Wintour tied at No. 2, citing Elle's "Runway" exposure and significant web traffic.

Even Wintour's former intern Sean Avery is wowed by television. Supposedly he's already filmed a scene for Marie Claire's forthcoming reality show Running In Heels.

The editor's only consolation is that her rivals are divided. Internal bickering has Runway switching from Elle to Claire. And it's not at all clear that Elle can hold on to its number-two spot with its new show Stylista, which competes with both Runway and Heels and thus far appears to be premised on clumsily imitating Wintour. She should hope the show doesn't gain traction — THAT would burn.

[Ad Age]

Yes jerking off! We can just picture a moment when the actor playing Avery, probably someone like Josh Lucas, or maybe someone a little less intense like Jesse Bradford, meets cute with the female lead, maybe a playful rival fashionista played by some frustrating television actress, and he says coyly yet masculinely "I'm going home to jerk off to you now. And that's a big compliment." That little zippy "Suddenly I See" song will swell and they'll both bop back to their ridiculous lower Manhattan apartments and then it will devolve into solo porn with sugary voiceover full of hackneyed hockey metaphors and Anna Wintour, sitting alone in a dark screening room, will adjust her wig and issue a guttural, disgusted-yet-oddly-pleased groan.

Seriously, though, it is kind of an interesting story, and a male-perspective movie about the women's fashion industry has the potential to be a pleasant fish-out-of-water diversion. Or, you know, it could be cloying and awful and full of "haha, I'm not gay!!" panic jokes. Either way, we're surprised it's been so hastily picked up. And without even a chick lit book preceding it!

To many industry watchers, US Weekly remains an intriguing prospect for a sale. Mr. Wenner is perceived to be less emotionally attached to it than to Rolling Stone, which he founded 41 years ago as an outlet for his interest in music, and with which he is as personally and professionally involved as ever.

...And while he periodically floats the idea of selling his magazines, friends and former colleagues say, Mr. Wenner himself says he would like to hand over the business to his sons.

Still, he won't exclude the possibility of a sale. "You always think about it," he said.

And you always think about in such visible places!

[WSJ]

Oh why hello there lumpen. I'll bet some of the woefully untrained eyes staring catatonically at these particular specimens of my ubiquitous, iconic silhouette merely see a woman wearing a dress, the same dress, a blue dress to be more specifically unspecific, on three separate occasions. But who else wore a blue dress? Ha ha, that's right, the Devil; brilliant work, not really. Now if your "blog"-enfeebled minds weren't so blithely incapable of retaining even the most basic business memes, you might recall that it is not blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean, and also that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, which became not only the basis for a massive trickle-down ceruleanstravaganza, but by extension the most memorable line of a blockbuster movie I which I might have chosen this moment to wryly and with my eminent good humor, reference.

But why? Was it my little joke with Oscar, not coincidentally the designer of this season's dress commemorating the sixth anniversary of the original collection referenced in that little film? Or perhaps was it further meant to conjure images of that other, slightly more plebeian "devil in a blue dress" of recent history and thus comment wryly on the presidential politics and my esteemed publication, which Hillary Clinton this year deemed too "frivolous" to be influential? (Poor dear, her decision to deem herself too "serious" for fashion didn't do a whole lot better for her campaign than her husband's decision to blithely usher in the exodus of those one million "downstream" textile and apparel industry jobs, did it now?) Or to that end, perhaps I'm merely acknowledging the state of the economy, which as we are all well-aware would be right now deep in the throes of recession were it not for the stimulating properties of Ben Bernanke and the chieftains of "aspirational" consumption such as, that's right, me. Horrors, and what do you think will happen to this economy now that my employer is restricting our hordes of expense form-forgers to a a Gulag-esque five lunches a month? Well let's be honest, dears: nothing my colleagues over in the Vogue Subcontinent would bat a Lancomed eyelash about. Which is to say: why are you still reading this? Wherefore the unceasing constant Wintourology on all your silly little gossip sites? Did Tucker Max sexually humiliate no one over the long weekend? Isn't the cocaine better at Elle?

Look, here it is, "real talk" as the kids say: I just think it's a pretty dress. And Roger said it brought out the green in my eyes.

"Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.

“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.

Never mind the bleeding hearts: Tanna risks having her eyes clawed out by Anna Wintour herself with all this business about not taking fashion seriously.

[Times]

(Vogue India scan via Times)

While Garcia comes across as a natural fashionista descended from South American aristocracy, Slowey seems like an East Village hippie with no claim on the Miranda Priestly airs she apparently will put on in Stylista. She's described in "Birkenstocks and vintage frocks" and consulting "healers [and] alternative-medicine practitioners." She even hires an "energy cleaner" to get rid of negative energy after Garcia leaves.

Perhaps the clearest contrast between the two, the article notes, is revealed in comparing Elle.com videos touring each woman's closet. As you can see in excerpts from both videos above, that's true: Note the size and organization of Garcia's closet (presented first), in an apartment overlooking Central Park, to that of Slowey's in the East Village.

Garcia may now be known as "the evil one" or "the monster" around Elle, as Moe writes. But at least her show brings some redeeming value to the world of fashion, rather than indulging a contrived (for Elle and for Slowey, at least) and masochistic view of magazine employment.

[NY Mag]

One of my old [Conde Nast publication redacted] interns had a nightmare herself - she moved up to Vogue and was passing Anna in the hall on her first day. Knew she wasn't supposed to look at her. As they passed, Anna tripped and fell, just bit it. Intern freaked out. she didn't know what to do. So she ran.

Oh, no! How like a poor young thing unschooled in social interactions not involving the "BRB" option! However.

Didn't help AW. got back to her desk, told her new boss what had happened, and the boss told her she did the right thing and that if she'd actually attempted to help AW, her first day would def have been her last.

Of course, there are two castes of interns at Vogue: worthless debutante billionairespawn, and meticulous and diligent pretty untouchables. Now let's contrast that with this dispatch from the Embassy of a major European country:

I've got a story of an intern here whose dad is some bigwig in the biggest [European country] union, and who has erased his title of "intern" from his sig., and instead calls himself the "acting social economic attache" or some bullshit like that just because he's commandeered in the office of the REAL social economic attache, who is on vacation. Because of this elevated, clearly non-intern status, he refuses to engage in the less-glamorous work all the other interns are required to do, namely act as hosts and hostesses at events and basically be bitches.

But! What works in Old Europe won't fly in, say, Boston.

We had 2 interns last semester who showed up at an Ashlee Simpson appearance at saint, or some other club here, and tried to bully their way in by telling the GM they worked for Boston Magazine and if he didn't let them in they'd blog mean shit about him and his club. Then they gave him the names of various Boston Magazine editors. While they were arguing they spotted one of our art department assistants, who was on a freelance photo job, and tried to pretend they were with her.

Such an uncharacteristic show of resourcefulness, right?

So the art assistant almost lost that freelance account because the GM was so pissed, and an editor here had to make some big show of apology to the GM or else it would probably end up in the Track. And then the interns first denied the whole thing. Then each blamed it on the other one.

God, are they too preoccupied with aspirational reality TV to have absorbed the single most obvious lesson of all crime television?

Then we made them write notes of apology to the club and they were filled with misspellings.

Yes.

Anyway, our last story, from a publication in Philadelphia, is a long, cautionary tale about Why You Cannot Trust Ivy Leaguers Even If They Appear To Be Hardworking And Eager To Please (And Also Attend Lesser Ivies)

Once upon a time, [website] had an intern. Let's call her Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston came into our lives around three winters ago. Our website explicity states that we do NOT consider Penn students for internships, for reasons that would be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in any kind of proximity to Penn, and Philadelphia's radical allergy to the kind of senses of entitlement for which Penn students are widely known. But when we met Jennifer Aniston, she made a good point: She had graduated from Penn, and was thus, no longer a Penn student. And she seemed nice enough, and we really needed the help, so we let her by on the technicality.
And here it must be said that Jennifer Aniston was actually a really, really great intern. She loved the [publication], did tons of grunt work with gusto, and was really just super diligent about any task with which she was charged. She ruled. But the more time we spent with her, the more we realized that Jennifer Aniston basically had no sense of self. For example, she constantly talked using "we" when discussing anything about her personal life, referencing things not simply she, but she and her boyfriend of a few months, did or enjoyed.
Q: Hey, Jennifer, what are you listening to these days?
A: Gosh, well, we really love Peter Bjorn and John and Italo disco!
It also became apparent that JA was just a really, really sheltered young adult — that she was one of these people who moved to a big city to go to school, and then proceeded to basically never leave the campus, thereby terminating more than half the value of her education.
In addition, we soon learned that she was attending this strange emo born-again Christian church that seems to prey on hipster transplants here in Philly.
We felt bad for her. And we also felt like we wouldn't be doing our duty as intern masters/psuedo mentors if we didn't expose her to the world as we knew it. So we took her on a trip that we needed to make for work. A long, long road trip.
On the trip and long conversations that ensued as we drove halfway across the country, we learned a lot of wacky stuff: That Jennifer Aniston didn't seem to know a lot about sex for a young woman approaching her mid-20s. That her boyfriend seemed to hold an almost cult-leader-like control over her. That she would pout at the slightest inconvenience. She was utterly horrified when we started listening to Howard Stern to break up the car rides.
Well, the trip was what it was. But when we got back, through the strange social mesh of Philadelphia, we found out (inadvertently) that a friend of a friend of ours had met up with Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend roughly 30 minutes after we picked her up for the trip. This friend of a friend was then reported to have holed up and fucked Jennifer Aniston's boyfriend for a week solid.
We didn't know what to do with this information.
So we just held onto it for a while. But then, things got weirder
It turned out that we started working another young woman who turned out to be Jennifer Aniston's Boyfriend's last girlfriend. We'd known this woman for a while, respected her a lot, and eventually, one day while chatting we realized that she and Jennifer Aniston shared something in common ( Jennifer Aniston's Boyfriend), and unbeknownst to Jennifer Aniston, that at least in the beginning, they were sharing this young squire concurrently.
But Jennifer did know that our new co-worker did see her boyfriend in the past. When she found out that she was on the team, Jennifer quit her internship. Immediately. Despite the fact that she'd basically never have to see her.
Meanwhile, Jennifer had been posting on her blog and talking nearly constantly about when she and her BF were going to get married, and how much in love they were, etc.
We were worried. It made us sick to think that here she was, proclaiming eternal love, when in reality her BF was basically the town pump and here she was, unwittingly making a fool of herself.
This all came to head at another employee's birthday dinner, where, unlikely as it seemed, all concerned (except the chick that Jennifer's BF screwed for a week while we were away) were present.
When Jennifer's BF showed up, our new employee asked if they could talk outside for a moment.
While we were not there, we assume and were told later that Jennifer's BF was given the dressing-down of his life.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Aniston slowly sat at the table and slowly lost her mind. When everyone returned to the table, Aniston bragged to our new employee, as if she had been hypnotized, about how she and the BF were so in love and were going to get married and make many many Aniston babies.
Everyone at the table stared in disbelief. Silence.
When the dinner ended, we decided that this could not go on. While it was not really our place to tell Jennifer Aniston what we know, we could, we realized, pass it along to a mutual good friend and co-worker whom we did know, and at the time, was very close to her.
In short order, Jennifer Aniston reacted in the following ways:
- She pulled down her Myspace and her blog.
- Her Flickr stream as well.
- And never spoke to us again.
In the time since, it's become clear that she shot every messenger she could, and stayed with the BF. She still alludes to us on her blog from time to time as these evil, awful people from her past. It's made us sad, but it's also shown us one thing that we kind of knew already, but needed to be reminded about:
No Penn students, ever.

Surely sweet young Bee did not intend to mock J. Lo. She would be unconcerned that the Lopez dress picture was taken during a photoshoot for Elle, Hachette's nominal Vogue competitor. But who would put such machinations past her mom, the likely source of the garment?

The Shaffer dress photo has been yanked from Facebook, but perhaps it was meant to be found and leaked! THINK ABOUT IT.

(Photo by WENN)

And with her senior year about to begin, an internship of some sort seems highly likely in the near future. Perhaps she could help her mom make better choices about covers.

(Photos via Josie Duffy)

The willingness of men to expand the amount of skin they are inclined to display can be gauged by the short-sleeved shirts Senator Barack Obama has lately favored; the muscle T-shirts Anderson Cooper wears on CNN assignment; and the Armani billboard in which David Beckham, the soccer star, appears nearly nude.

...When the hockey star Sean Avery took an internship at Vogue earlier this summer, the work uniform that the fashion-besotted left wing chose included a shorts suit that showcased his athletic calves.

“Why go to work and be hot?” he asked last week... “Why are women allowed to do it and not men?”

The slideshow, by the way, is called "who wears short shorts?"

It's only getting hotter, so get used to it, I guess. And maybe open a waxing salon, those should take off!

[Times]

Right now, Wintour's Vouge has an overpaid hockey player as an intern, which was probably meant to be a publicity stunt, but mostly confused people. The cover girls are consistently bland, overexposed actresses (who have often graced the cover several times before) instead of fashion models. Plus, the aggressive airbrushing is almost an insult to readers' intelligence.

American Vogue's last bid for attention was its somewhat infamous Lebron James cover from April, in which the basketball player grabbed model Gisele in a King Kong moment. (Annie Liebowitz shot it.) People found this more offensive that not, however, so that sort of backfired. (The cover wasn't that interesting to begin with, and it was the worst-selling April issue since 2001. April is the month of their annual "Shape" issue, in which they pay lip service to different body types and usually get a sales boost in return.) The following cover, an over-airbrushed Gweneth Paltrow, didn't do much better.

Meanwhile, the French edition of Vogue (edited by Carine Roitfeld) is still kicking ass creatively! (Of course, it's a much smaller operation.) You remember the November 2007 issue, which featured model Carolyn Murphy with New York eccentric Andre J, bearded and in a dress. The brand-new August issue features a fashion spread of an anti-fur protest, with a fur-clad attitudinal model flipping protesters the middle finger. That's the kind of spunk we like to see!

Jeff Bercovici points out that the April cover of Vogue with Lebron James (a black man) was the magazine's worst-selling April cover since 2001. They tried! Scrap the experiment! The world isn't ready for black people in fashion!

Of course, the best solution to all of this would be to let black people be models in high fashion magazines as a matter of course, just like everybody else. No need for a special occasion to run topless Naomi Campbell photos. And as pointing-out machine Bercovici also points out, Vogue's worst-selling issue of the year so far had Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover. Failure brings us all together!

[Faded Youth, Mixed Media]

The trouble started, we hear, when Wintour found out that star fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier had some work in the latest issue of Interview. Demarchelier is closely associated with Vogue, and has shot numerous covers for domestic and international issues of the magazine.

Further, we hear that Demarchelier may be on an extremely lucrative exclusive contract with Vogue. So Wintour "flipped her shit" at the thought of him working for a semi-competitor. She got so upset that eventually she had to go and have a mob-like "Sit down" meeting with Glenn O'Brien, who oversees Interview for Brant Publications and is not a fan of celebrities.

The outcome of that meeting is unclear. But everyone involved better hope that Wintour cools off. Her reaction to Demarchelier's perceived betrayal was to call around to Vogue's top photographers—including Brad Pitt chronicler Steven Klein—and urge (order?) them not to shoot any photos for Interview. We hear that this isn't the first time she's gotten angry like this; she tried to tell photographers not to work for Tina Brown's ill-fated Talk magazine when it launched, too.

The upshot of her earlier attempt to keep all the good photographers for herself? They all got to jack up their own prices, which may have played a role in Demarchelier getting such a lucrative contract from Vogue in the first place.

Such a cut-throat fashion photography world. Or so we hear! If you have anything to add, email us.

"I'm going home to jerk off to you now." Aww/eww. A tipster tells us that Avery added "And that's a big compliment," and later text messaged Kirschbaum saying that "the session is going well." So yes! A little creepy, but at least he's not been completely be-sassed by the sleek and bitchy fashion industry. Though it could all be an elaborate ruse and he really went back to his hotel to drink Moët and do blow all night with Tom Ford while Anna Wintour did slow 70's disco claps in the background, Carly Simon playing softly. If that's the case then boo, but if he really was practicing his stick-handling skills then good on him. I hope he had a steak afterwards.

The rumor is floated by Post gossip Liz Smith:

Anna's speech to her staff receives a mixed reaction:

Wintour takes her complaints public:

[Front Row]