Saint Laurent may have been one of the most hated/debated shows of the season, but it was still one of the most viewed and liked on Facebook.

One of the best parts of Style.com's print iteration is the list of the site's most viewed shows with traffic and share stats. The new issue reveals that the top two fall 2013 shows were both the most celebrated (Chanel) and hated/debated (Yves Saint Laurent). Chanel, at nearly 3 million page views, came in at No. 1, while YSL, at 2.3 million, was the second-most viewed show. The top 10 shows by traffic were:

1. Chanel (2,954,287 page views)
2. Saint Laurent (2,277,517 page views)
3. Valentino (2,097,936 page views)
4. Balenciaga (2,008,916 page views)
5. Louis Vuitton (2,005,647 page views)
6. Prada (1,940,157 page views)
7. Givenchy (1,932,456 page views)
8. Dolce & Gabbana (1,869,136 page views)
9. Marc Jacobs (1,604,974 page views)
10. Christian Dior (1,586,969 page views)

Chanel and Saint Laurent's rankings "perfectly encapsulates the two driving factors of what makes a show buzzy," Style.com's deputy editor Matthew Schneier says. One is brand recognition — everyone from L.A to Seoul has heard of Chanel or Dolce & Gabbana, for instance. The other key factor is what's relevant in the moment, like Saint Laurent, which has been under creative director Hedi Slimane's direction for just two seasons now. "It's only with Slimane in the past two seasons that it's made the top 10 list. I think in some ways you have to trace that to Hedi," Schneier adds, conceding, "There are people who love it and people who don't love it." The label put on the second-most viewed show for the previous season as well, again right behind Chanel.

The only label on the list that wasn't on it last season is Givenchy, which lands back in the top 10 after being off for "a season or two," according to Schneier. While Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton were No. 4 and 5, respectively, last season as well as this season, Valentino made a big jump from No. 10 to No. 3, while Marc Jacobs dipped from No. 6 to No. 9. Christian Dior, which also has a relatively new creative director in Raf Simons, also lost ground, falling from No. 3 last season to No. 10 this season.

Placement in the top spot on the Style.com homepage drives extra traffic, of course, but Schneier says editors don't just put what readers want to see in that space. At the same time, what readers do want to click on seems to correlate nicely with what editors decide are the newsiest shows of the day.

Over the years, Style.com has seen more competition with runway slide shows from sites like NYmag.com and NowFashion. Like NowFashion, Style.com has a live component to show coverage, and it compiles slide shows of the top shows as they happen. The explosion of instant show coverage online suggests that fashion is doing just what used to freak out designer Tom Ford so much: going mass. So, is the internet making the notoriously exclusive industry become considerably less insular?

Schneier counters my question with two: "Is fashion going more mass and is mass going more fashion?" Each season, Style.com sees an increase in traffic to runway slide shows from around the globe. "It seems more people are interested in fashion than ever, whether that's a kind of incremental growth from a sort of small office or suddenly the tide of the world is changing and everyone on the subway cares about high fashion, I couldn't say exactly," Schneier continues. "I'll put it this way: Five or so years ago, the top shows at our spot would get a million page views and that wouldn't get you to the top 10 spot on the list."

The order of the top 10 list changes, however, when you look at Facebook "likes" — an increasingly important measure of the success of a piece of online content. This suggests that the most talked-about shows are not necessarily the most viewed. If we rank the top 10 by Facebook "likes," the list looks like this:

1. Valentino 3,229
2. Saint Laurent 2,499
3. Balenciaga 2,107
4. Chanel 1,621
5. Christian Dior 1,562
6. Givenchy 1,416
7. Louis Vuitton 1,110
8. Prada 1,101
9. Dolce & Gabbana 709
10. Marc Jacobs 692

Noticeably absent from the top 10 is Tom Ford, who released images from his women's show immediately after it walked for the first time instead of totally rejecting technology and making everyone wait months and months to see them, like, in print in Vogue (I mean). "I could speculate at my peril about why he might not have made the top 10," Schneier says. "All I can say is better luck next time."

As of publication of this post, Ford's show has 601 Facebook "likes."

The new issue of Style.com/Print is out today.

Her son's animal crackers literally come served on a silver platter, for starters.

Source: bravotv.com

The Rachel Zoe Project finally abandoned it's staid format of: Rachel being busy and disagreeing with Rodger while Skyler runs around in some fabulous onesie for the first 40 minutes, with the last 20 minutes being about some super fun photo shoot that Rachel just doesn't have time for. The latest episode was just got a nicely paced show about Rachel's generally fabulous and busy life as a working woman with a son that dresses better than every male ever featured on Your LL Bean Boyfriend and off-the-red carpet Anne Hathaway. Rachel is also feeling strained by her bicoastal lifestyle and the never-ending construction on her New York blow dry. Is she fabulous? Yes. A giant lesson in impracticality? Most definitely. And now, a numbered list of the latest episode's most impractical moments, for your convenience.

Or, if you believe Rodger, she just wants the apartment so that she doesn't have to worry about hotel reservations. (Because those are so time-consuming and stress-inducing, especially when you're on Rachel's insanely tight budget, you know. (???)) Rodger is afraid to even go look for a place because he knows that Rachel is going to want a mansion made of solid white gold and Missoni throw pillows, and he doesn't want to spend the money on it.

I would also like to point out that Rodger vented his feelings about this potential real estate acquisition to one of his hair-geled bros over white wine and blood orange-colored cocktails and what looked like small plates of dainty tapas or antipasti. Is he single handedly keeping the metrosexual movement alive or is he single handedly keeping the metrosexual movement alive?

Source: bravotv.com

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The It Gets Better Project provides support to bullied LGBT youth. Well, fashion never was the most politically correct industry.

And posted this to Instagram:

Online trunk show site Moda Operandi first posted the photos — of a young and modern-day Santo Domingo — in honor of popular Instagram pastime Throwback Thursday. Commenting on the original Moda Operandi 'gram, LSD said, "Fashion Credit: Laura Ashley c. 1989." She also added the photo to her own Instagram feed with the "It Gets Better Campaign" comment. At the time of publication of this post, the internet had yet to seize on the gaffe.

A petition urges the fashion label to drop its suit against Rina Bovrisse. Prada alleges that her complaints about harassment in the Prada Japan office damaged the Prada brand.

Rina Bovrisse.

Soon after starting at Prada Japan in April 2009, Rina Bovrisse says she witnessed Prada Japan CEO David Sesia demoting and transferring 15 female employees whom he called "old, fat, ugly, disgusting, or did not have the Prada look." When Bovrisse spoke out against the attacks, she says faced similar abuse and was asked to resign from the company. She filed a complaint with the courts at the end of 2009. In early 2010, Bovrisse's complaint became a full-fledged lawsuit, garnering headlines around the world. A few months later, Prada filed a $780,000 countersuit against Bovrisse, accusing her of damaging the brand with her very public accusations. A campaign just launched on Change.org urging Prada to drop the lawsuit.

"They're basically saying anything they find that is negative about Prada — people blogging about Prada's bags or anything — I'm making them write," Bovrisse said Friday. "They're going really crazy." As of publication of this post, the Change.org petition only has about 200 of 10,000 desired signatures. Prada declined to comment for this story.

In October of last year — nearly three years after Bovrisse filed her initial complaint — a judge finally delivered a ruling in Japanese court. It held that that although Bovrisse and her colleagues were subjected to harassment and discrimination by Prada Japan, the company's behavior was acceptable and employees of a certain rank should be able to handle it. Bovrisse and her lawyers were perplexed by the ruling, which they believe violates the Japanese constitution.

In court testimony, Prada Japan admitted to requiring Bovrisse and the salespeople she supervised to maintain a certain body shape and hair style. Bovrisse provided BuzzFeed with English translation of portions of the Japanese testimony from a senior HR manager, which reads, "I did receive an order by Sesia CEO, that I told her to 'lose weight.' This is from our perspective to maintain PRADA brand image, we expect the store staff are supervised on the body shape."

Bovrisse says she thinks Prada admitted to the behavior because the company and its legal team didn't understand the full definition of sexual harassment. "They thought sexual harrassment was raping — they didn't know verbal abuse can be considered sexual harassment," she says. "Later it became big news globally, and they realized it was considered sexual harassment."

Bovrisse's fight will continue at the United Nations in Geneva on April 30, when the U.N.'s High Commissioner of Human Rights presents a counter-report on the case's ruling to Japanese Parliament. The report, provided by the Working Women's Network, recommends establishing "explicit provisions for penalties on sexual harassment in the Equal Employment Opportunity Law." It also reads:

This case shows that there are few gender-sensitive-judges who can understand human rights issues including sexual and other harassment cases. The case took 3 years, and the economic and emotional burden on the plaintiff, who was a single mother, was huge. Prada is now suing Ms. Bovrisse for 72 million yen damages for protesting gender discrimination in the company. Prada should withdraw its suit.

Bovrisse is not sure if she'll appeal the ruling since her lawyers told her those legal proceedings could drag out for another decade. But she's going to the U.N. because, "I really wanted to fight for female rights here, especially in the fashion industry," she says. "Prada is not doing the right thing. They're making profits from women, meanwhile all these women working for Prada are suffering."

And the perhaps worrying numbers show he's not slowing down.

This is Justin Bieber's preferred style of pant.

They exhibit two distinct characteristics: one, the crotch droops toward his knees; and two the pants fit like leggings everywhere else. The bagginess yet simultaneous tightness is a distinctly Bieber phenomenon

Not only does Bieber wear the pants on stage, but he also wears curiously droopy crotches to sign autographs, illegally tattoo people, return topless to hotels, stalk Selena Gomez — no matter where he's going or what he's doing, his crotch and pants only seem to exist in a perpetual long-distance relationship.

BuzzFeed's exclusive statistical analysis of Justin Bieber's frequency of harem pants-wearing may shock you.

Image by Matthias Schrader,File / AP

Over the past year, Justin wore harem pants 77% of the time.

For the analysis, BuzzFeed looked at all of Bieber's photographed appearances, including performances and off-stage meandering, as seen on Getty Images. Given that not every paparazzi shot of Justin over the period was included, we might be able to assume that he actually wore harem pants more than 77% of the time over the past year.

Over the past six months, Justin wore harem pants 87.2% of the time.

Suggesting that he's wearing them more and more with age.

Over the past month, he wore harem pants more than ever over the past year.

An astounding 12.5% of the time.

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The proliferation of fashion startups has allowed more women to elbow their way into the tech industry. But will the male investment community “get” them?

BaubleBar's Daniella Yacobovsky and Amy Jain.

Image by Macey Foronda for BuzzFeed

Amy Jain and Daniella Yacobovsky met more than a decade ago when they were working in investment banking together in New York. After four years of the grueling and unfulfilling — if lucrative — work in finance, they both went to Harvard Business School, where they remained close friends. They share the same birthday, which gave them one of many excuses to party together. Their relationship changed significantly the summer between their first and second year at school, when they went shopping for shoes and had a lightbulb moment that would make them business partners.

"We noticed we didn't buy fashion jewelry with the frequency that we wanted to," said Yacobovsky, her bouncy shoulder-length brown hair skimming her shiny statement necklace in her and Jain's glossy Manhattan office. The two women reasoned that if they weren't comfortable spending $100 on a trendy necklace from a department store like Bloomingdale's, other women probably weren't either.

The markup on jewelry you find in stores like Anthropologie comes from its label. It's the same reason Christian Louboutin can charge $800 for his shoes — the brand and those iconic red soles are worth that much to his customers. But, Jain and Yacobovsky wondered, is jewelry the same? With jewelry, "Women are brand agnostic at purchase," said Yacobovsky, noting that jewelry doesn't typically come riddled with logos or other brand iconography.

Realizing they might be onto something, Jain and Yacobovsky started researching. Using their own savings, they threw themselves into the idea of creating an internet-based private-label jewelry business, free from the markups of brand-name jewelry. They met with 550 suppliers and manufacturers over the course of their second year at business school. They signed up for a field study course to pursue the project, allowing them to get academic credit and professor feedback for their work.

Eventually, the project progressed, jewelry was acquired, and Jain's apartment hallway filled with stuff — boxes, baubles, tissue paper, tags. They created a website and launched it in June 2010 under the name 816, in honor of their shared birthday, Aug. 16. Sales and repeat business were so good that Jain and Yacobovsky seriously reconsidered their decision to return to investment banking after school.

One path offered security but no sizzle. "In banking you just keep showing up and they just keep giving you more money. You don't even really have to do anything of value," Jain said.

The other path offered no security but the satisfaction of knowing that they would know how their seemingly great idea turned out — a lot of sizzle if they proved successful: "I don't think either of us went to school expecting to start a business," Jain continued. But, she said, "We felt like we had done so much homework at that point that we would always wonder."

So they quit banking and changed the name of the site from 816 to BaubleBar. In November 2010, they raised $1.1 million in seed funding. In April 2012, they closed on another $4.5 million in venture capital. Their projected revenue for 2012 (BaubleBar declined to disclose earnings) was $11 million. They now have an office of more than 50 employees in Manhattan and are seeing an increase of sales volume by 24% month over month. Jain still seems surprised by their success: "We never envisioned we would get to where we are today this quickly."

Jain, Yacobovsky, and their business do not fit the stereotypical image of "tech." BaubleBar's Manhattan headquarters off Madison Square Park is feminine and glossy, the way you might envision the office of a fun fashion company that employs the protagonist of a romantic comedy. Everything is white and cheerful, the walls bear yellow stripes, and everywhere you look glitters with jewelry. When I visited Jain and Yacobovsky in BaubleBar's in-office shop, which customers can visit by appointment and serves as a non-digital way for the company to observe purchasing behavior, the glass cases lining the walls and trays placed on tabletops sparkled with baubles. Though I felt like I was drowning in jewelry, Jain and Yacobovsky kept assuring me the store normally had a lot more stock in it — it just so happened that a lot had gone out to their pop-up shop a dozen blocks away, where more data would be collected on physical purchases that BaubleBar can put toward its forthcoming redesign.

"People say it's so hard to launch a brand online," Jain said. "But you get so much data in real time. If you put something up and your customers don't like it, you know — it just allows you to build so much faster."

These are not women in Mark Zuckerberg's hoodies, wiling away the hours in a dark room with a computer. Nor are they the editors changing four times a day for street-style photographers at fashion week. Rather, they are something in between: They spend half their time working on website optimization and the other half on building a covetable fashion brand. They're not a coding geniuses, but they understand how to use technology to build businesses that solve problems male tech founders haven't — and probably wouldn't have — thought of solving. With their rapid success, women like Jain and Yacobovsky have become a whole new face of tech.

Three companies — Gilt Groupe, Rent the Runway, and Birchbox — helped lay the foundation for this new sort of tech-company founder. All three businesses were founded by women, are run by women, and are aimed at women. And they have been incredibly successful: Gilt Groupe has attained a $1 billion evaluation and plans for an IPO in 2014, Rent the Runway has raised a total of $55.4 million and plans to go public this year, and Birchbox has raised nearly $12 million and begun buying up competitors abroad in its mission to go global.

Those companies in particular have proved incredibly influential in the online fashion space because they expertly and quite lucratively solved key problems millions of women face. Gilt, which hosts flash sales of discounted designer goods, figured out how to use the internet to bring the thrill of sample sales to women outside of New York and L.A., where the vast majority of them are held. Rent the Runway, which rents designer apparel, uses the internet to bring fashionable special-occasion dressing to the masses for a fraction of retail prices. And Birchbox, which sends samples of beauty products to subscribers in the mail each month, figured out a way to let consumers try beauty products before buying them online for the first time.

These companies and the dozens of others we haven't even seen yet stand to make heaps of money with the rapid growth of online purchasing. A recent survey of more than 3,000 women showed that just about as many of them planned to shop on Black Friday as Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year. Last year's Cyber Monday sales reached $1.46 billion, up 17% from the previous year's $1.25 billion. Maureen Lippe, CEO of marketing firm Lippe Taylor, said, "I'd be very concerned if I was a brick-and-mortar store" — because so many websites are offering so much more to shoppers at very competitive prices.

Yet people aspiring to start internet companies that deal with fashion and beauty face the hurdle of explaining to investors how their business model is not only effective but also different from Gilt, Rent the Runway, and Birchbox. One entrepreneur seeking venture capital for a traditional online retail site told me, "The three questions I get asked are, 'Are you a flash sale site?' 'Do you rent?' and, 'Are you sending stuff in a box every month?'" The difficulty many women have pitching their ideas stems from the same challenge Birchbox had to overcome in its early stages — convincing the male-dominated investment community that their female-targeted idea could be huge.

Birchbox founder Katia Beauchamp knows the struggle well. She and her friend Hayley Barna started the company with their own money in 2010, when they were in their second year at Harvard Business School. When they entered HBS's business-plan competition, Beauchamp learned a valuable lesson about the fundraising process. "We quickly realized that one of the most important things is we needed to identify the opportunity in a really simplified way, and in its most basic form," she said. "We were going to be pitching this to [investors] who were not the customers of it, which is hard inherently."

Convincing the HBS business plan contest judges that they had a great idea — giving women a way to try new beauty products without visiting physical stores — was hard: "They definitely didn't get it." But, as anyone who looks forward to their Birchbox package each month knows, they had a great pitch, and Beauchamp sums it up thusly today: "You can research beauty products online and you can replenish beauty products online, but you can't buy beauty products for the first time in the same way." She and Barna had the best pitch of the 85 business plans competing; they won the contest and a cash prize to put toward the company. Yet the problem of explaining their girly idea resurfaced when they started fundraising outside of school. Again, "people really didn't understand," she said.

It hardly takes an expert to understand that successful new kinds of shopping models can reap enormous returns and that women are great at coming up with them. But the fundraising environment inherently works against women. A recent Dow Jones study [PDF] showed that just 6.5% of privately held companies that got venture capital funding from 1997 to 2011 had a female CEO. And a recent study out of Stanford showed that venture capitalists were less likely to invest in tech companies started by women with non-technical backgrounds than those started by men with the same qualifications.

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A new film takes an inside look at the playground of the 1%.

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Matthew Miele's film Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's is an inside look at the workings of one of the world's best and fanciest department stores. Loads of famous fashion people make appearances in the movie, including the store's influential personal shopper Betty Halbreich, designers like Diane Von Furstenberg and Karl Lagerfeld, celebrity designers like Nicole Richie, and one of the funniest women ever, Fashion Police host Joan Rivers. In this exclusive clip, Joan talks about why she adores Halbreich: "She's right 90% of the time, and she's smart, and she's funny and she's sharp, and she hates everybody — I love her so much."

“I think I stood out because I'm a real person — I'm educated, I'm smart, I can think fast on my feet. Also, I had a real body, I wasn't perfect-looking, and people can relate to that.”

As a kid I had kind of a bad skin disease and I didn't feel beautiful and fabulous, but fashion was beautiful and fabulous. I remember thinking at 16 — and I write about this in my book a little bit — that it was the life I wanted. I didn't know what jobs were available in fashion, but I knew i wanted to be involved in something beautiful. I was always squirreling away a Vogue, a Glamour, a Mademoiselle. I was definitely a Condé girl from a young age. I remember thinking Claudia Schiffer was the most beautiful person.

When I was at Vassar, where I studied philosophy and literature, I had a very close friend who was French, and her mom got me an internship at Christian Dior in Paris. I was there the first season Gianfranco Ferré did couture. He studied the archives a lot for that collection, and at the time, I remember the press was kind of critical, saying, "This isn't very original." But having been there and being so close to the clothing, I was mesmerized by how unbelievably glamorous every look was. I felt like everything was made of spun gold.

I worked in the press department. We'd prepare the press samples for editors to shoot, and I thought that's what I'd like to do — I'd like to be one of those editors. They weren't nice to me in the office — they were snotty French ladies — but it didn't make me adore them any less. I was so completely shocked by how fabulous they all were, how tall and skinny and gorgeous, and yet they all ate chocolate. It was like watching exotic rare birds flit around the office. And they all had lovers — they didn't have boyfriends, they had lovers. It was just a whole different ball of wax, but it was great — it's what I'd been yearning for. Going to the Dior offices every day was such a gift.

Then I got a job at Vogue. My senior year in college I took on a pretty massive thesis and lost a lot of weight, and that February I went for a test interview at Random House. Random House had been owned by the Newhouses, who own Condé Nast. I went in for an interview where I did that typing test — to see how many words you can type a minute — and I did seven, all of which had mistakes in them, and the guy said, "Why are you here?" And I said, "Well, I'm graduating, and I'm crazy about magazines and Vogue," and for whatever reason, he called his counterpart at Condé Nast and said, "I have a live one for you."

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The king of American fashion turns 50 today. Here's a special card, in honor of his buffness and overall cheeky wonderfulness.

Happy Birthday, you saucy designer, you!

You deserve a full-size cupcake any day of the week, but most especially today.

Love,
Everyone

At this year's festival, why not update your hippie crochet and wedgie-inducing jorts. There is more to festival dressing than suede fringe, I promise.

Source: peggy

This guy may be the embodiment of the worst of Coachella — the unnecessary accessories and the lack of actual clothing are the hallmarks of the annual music festival, where many people don't seem worried in the least about looking like they're on a lot of drugs. Look, this spirit shan't depart Coachella or any other summer music festival any time soon, but there are ways to liven up some of the festival circuit's most tired — and tiring — trends. Here's a handy guide to updating your summer festival wardrobe so that you don't end up as that person who showed up wearing ten dead trends at once. This isn't fashion week, after all!

See-through miniskirts.

Even if yo'ure an exhibitionist you're not going to be happy when you sit on the grass and stand up with grass indentations all over your butt.

Image by Arkasha Stevenson/Los Angeles Times/MCT

She might just be wearing three belts. Who can say!

Source: imgur.com

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This time, by British Vogue .

Source: @AShulman2

Frankly the girls didn't look any more skeletal than most runway models in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Some might argue they don't look much different than the models in fashion magazines either. So it might make sense that British Vogue just signed an agreement with British labor union Equity, agreeing to enforce ten specific guidelines when working with models. They include (and I paraphrase):

1. A work day of no longer than ten hours should include regular rest breaks.

2. Proper refreshments and meals should be provided on set.

3. Travel arrangements should be provided to within ten miles of the shoot location. Models kept working longer than 10 p.m. should get a cab back to wherever they're staying.

4. Models will be treated professionally and respectfully. The contract states explicitly: "No one will ask or impose upon the Model any action or activity which is dangerous, degrading, unprofessional or demeaning to the Model."

5. Models can't be forced into doing things that permanently alter their appearance. Like dying their hair/eyebrows.

6. Nudity or semi-nudity must be agreed to by the model before arriving on set.

7. Models will be provided with proper bathrooms and changing facilities.

8. The temperature of the studio hosting the shoot will be comfortable. Which means "reasonably warm in winter" and "reasonably cool in summer." In adjusting the temperature, what the model is wearing for the shoot should be taken into account.

9. Models must be provided with proper insurance coverage and paid promptly after the shoot.

10. Models under the age of 16 won't model adult clothes or be asked to do any nude or semi-nude posing.

British Vogue is a highly respectable magazine that probably already ensures excellent working conditions for the models it hires. Magazines like that shoulder the responsibility of setting an example for the industry, which is probably part of the reason they signed the agreement with Equity (which is not to say they don't actually care — not everyone in fashion is as heartless and soulless as stereotypes suggest).

What would be even more newsworthy is to see a much edgier magazine like Purple — or perhaps better yet, a raunchy photographer like Terry Richardson — sign this contract. But beyond the initial ooh-ing and ahh-ing over a move like that, one has to wonder what the use of these agreements and initiatives is anyway? Plenty of people have tried to set examples — but setting an example doesn't always lead to lasting impact as we've seen previously with this issue.

With the support of British Vogue, American Vogue spearheaded the launch of a "model health initiative" last year to publicly pledge Vogues around the world would not hire any models who were under the age of 16 or who appeared to have eating disorders. The initiative has obvious flaws like: what if a model has a fake ID? And what does it even mean to "appear" to have an eating disorder? (By contrast, British Vogue's contract says nothing about eating disorders and does not ban models under the age of 16.) Do Vogue models look any healthier or different at all since the initiative? Not noticeably.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America also has a "health initiative." Each fashion week, CFDA president Diane Von Furstenberg reminds designers to ensure their models are healthy, well-nourished at shows, and age 16 or older. Do the models look any different season to season? Not really. Do 15-year-olds end up in shows anyway? Yes. And besides, the New York shows comprise just one-fourth of fashion month. Over in London, the editor of British Vogue is publicly tweeting about how the models look "skeletal."

So if the industry and the world wants models to be treated better and fed more by the people hiring them, enforcing some actual laws would probably help. Because thus far, the industry has been incapable of regulating itself. And laws on the books in New York about working conditions for child models regularly go ignored (you can read more about these at the website of the Model Alliance, a group that fights for the enforcement of said laws). So magazines can go on signing pledges and publicizing "initiatives" about model working conditions but until someone makes the industry abide by actual laws, nothing is going to change.

If she and Rodger get an apartment in New York, how will they know where all their favorite clothes are at any given moment?

Source: bravotv.com

The Rachel Zoe Project's ratings are down a lot in this fifth season of the Bravo show. Radar Online reports that in the 18 to 49 demographic, the audience has shrunk by 40%. Does that mean that this show is just, like, so last season? Or could the numbers indicate that the program has peaked and is now on a steady downhill journey that suggests the show has become just too much of a sham for viewers to keep up with? Really, everything in The Project serves as a promotional vehicle for what Zoe is working on. We're treated to some adorable shots of fancy baby Skyler and some sort of funny spats between her and Rodger, but mostly it's a big commercial for things that will make the Zoe clan's life that much more fabulous (her Jockey deal, her clothing line, etc.), which can contribute a disingenuousness to the show. Include an episode like last night's about how uncomfortable she is being famous and the whole enterprise only becomes that much more disingenuous. Audiences are savvy enough to know that reality shows are not exactly vehicles of candor or modesty, but they aren't flat-out stupid, and the least they can ask of their most beloved reality stars is that they just pretend they're modest, genuine people despite their mega fame. You don't see Kim Kardashian going around acting like she doesn't like being the center of attention.

Or maybe part of the problem is that the way Rachel and Mandana say "ehrmahgah" instead of "oh my god" makes them sound like Snooki grunting and that's just too annoying? It's anyone's guess, maybe.

Anyway, last night's episode perhaps offered a window into why ratings are down. Because it was nothing more than a neatly edited summation of some of Team Zoe's first-world crises. A list of them here:

Rodger explains, logically, that such purchases are silly because the baby will just grow out of them in, like, two hours. Rachel gets defensive and says she could stop buying Rodger clothes because he keeps getting fatter. To which Rodger replies, fine, don't buy me clothes. As if it matters if Rachel shops for him — a man who makes a special trip to the luxury candle and incense boutique surely has no problem popping into John Varvatos to pick up some pinkie rings and leather jackets all on his own.

2. Rachel has to view her Jockey billboard even though she doesn't want to.

Source: bravotv.com

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Miranda Kerr is 30 so do the math in “Angel” years.

This week news broke that Victoria's Secret "Angel" Miranda Kerr would no longer be an "Angel." Rumor had it that the brand divested the model of her wings because she's difficult, expensive, and doesn't sell enough underwear to be worth it. After Us Weekly broke the news, her public relations team went into damage control mode, claiming that the real reason she wouldn't be an "Angel" anymore is because she has so much other stuff going on and just can't possibly fit it into her schedule, but will be in this year's fashion show anyway.

This morning, Good Morning America rehashed the speculation about what's really going on with this incredibly important news item, noting that Kerr will turn 30 later this month. Now, if you look back at some of the brand's famous "Angels" you'll see that they have a point: the average age of retirement from commercial mall brand lingerie "Angel"-dom is 28.375, based on the eight ladies pictured here. So seems like Kerr may as well push a walker down that runway, far as the world of VS modeling is concerned.

Art by John Gara.

The brand said he hadn't shown “appropriate remorse” for alluding to rape in one of his songs. The offending lyrics: “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it.”

LINK: Reebok Drops Rick Ross

The brand said he hadn't shown "appropriate remorse" for alluding to rape in one of his songs. The offending lyrics: "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it."

Tajik citizens are outraged but not surprised.

Female students at the Tajik State Pedagogical University in Dushanbe are reportedly required to wear heels to school as part of their uniform.

Source: images.newscred.com

The shoes are to be no more than 10 cm (or about 4 inches), Emma Sabzalieva writes on her blog, which focuses on higher education in Central Asia, a subject she researches. Sabzalieva, who picked up the story from Tajikistan newspaper Asia-Plus, writes:

I read through Asia-Plus' latest reportage on the situation with complete bewilderment. Could it really be that the Rector believes that ordering such a dress code (which is much more explicit than the national dress code for university students) – and having security guards at the entrance of the university checking this in what in Russian is called face control – will enhance female students' learning experience? Will it make them smarter or better equipped to learn?

Of course, the answer is no.

This is not the first time Abdujabbor Rahmonov has interfered in such affairs. As Minister of Education, he introduced a dress code into schools which included such rules as banning male teachers from having beards.

She also translates this reaction posted to the Asia-Plus Facebook page, where people expressed outrage but not surprise: "Where is Tajikistan and its government heading? Rather than starting with high heels… it would be better to strengthen teaching, stop bribe-taking and simply give students the chance to study…"

Some fashion people treat their work as though they're dealing with nuclear secrets. And well, that's just wrong.

The business is full of eccentric characters who don't seem to have any sense of what they themselves are actually like.

Source: alexrees

Everyone who sits on the front row looks like they're in a fight/miserable.

Yes, everyone complains about fashion week but! Do you know how many people would LOVE for this to be their job? This ugh I have this incredibly fun job, I'm going to act so annoyed by it attitude gets really old sometimes.

Via: Cindy Ord / Getty Images

Every honest critique of some clothes might result in a ban threat.

Like this famous rant that Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane posted to his Twitter feed since he didn't like New York Times critic Cathy Horyn reviewing his collections.

Source: celebritystreetstyle.com

Because baked goods really deserve to be served in full-size.

Jay Manuel can hardly contain his shock at discovering these legit cakes instead of Hershey's kiss-sized cupcakes served at most fashion parties in the interest of saving people the embarrassment of publicly consuming substantial food.

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BRB buying all of these right now.

Source: pinterest.com

Source: wanelo.com

Source: wanelo.com

Source: wanelo.com

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There is only one appropriate reaction: !!!!!!!!

Source: fashin.livejournal.com

Source: fashin.livejournal.com

Source: fashin.livejournal.com

Source: fashin.livejournal.com

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Coachella: where men wear capes instead of shirts, fringe wears fringe, and shoes are terrifyingly forgotten.

Showing up in a full, totally random costume.

You have Santa.

Source: web.stagram.com

And a unicorn.

Source: web.stagram.com

Carrying blow-up sea creatures as accessories.

Source: web.stagram.com

You can imagine all the hilarious "finding Nemo" jokes this must've led to.

Via: Jason Kempin / Getty Images

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” Dazed & Confused is the largest independent, and it still does what it did all that time ago. And it hasn't become a pastiche of itself, and it hasn't become a sellout.”

The September 1998 cover.

BuzzFeed Fashion takes a look at how the iconic image makers of our time made it in fashion in this weekly feature. Today, Dazed & Confused founder Jefferson Hack tells us how he went from editing a student publication with Rankin to growing Dazed into a network of print magazines that thrives even in the internet age.

Can I be emerging? It makes me sound younger and more relevant: emerging, precocious young talent Jefferson Hack? (Ed note: Yes, OK.)

I think the British have always been amazingly creative because we've always had to use our imaginations to make a lot out of nothing because there's never been a big fashion industry in the U.K. the way there has been in other countries.

I met Rankin in college when I was a student at the London College of Printing. He was just going around the London College of the Arts, which is the combined school with St. Martins — they had a magazine they wanted to launch, and he was recruiting. He came to my class and gave a speech and asked if any journalism students would want to contribute to the student publication. I signed up at the appointed time in the school canteen and looked around expecting there to be, like, a bugging scene of young students wanting to get together to make a magazine, and I couldn't see anyone — and he popped up and then I got the job. It was really inventively titled Untitled. And we started making this magazine Untitled together and I did all the words, he did the pictures.

Inside the "Fashion-able?" issue.

The first time I met Rankin, he said, "OK, tomorrow we're doing the first interview for the inaugural issue of the student publication." He said, "Do you know who Gilbert and George are?" And I said, "No, I have no idea who they are. And he said, "Great, well, you're interviewing them, and I'll take the pictures." I was a young innocent, and Gilbert and George treated me very gently, so that was a great start. And Rankin did some brilliant portraits, and the magazine went on to win a bunch of awards. We had these annual student magazine awards — we won Best Magazine of the Year, Best Graphic Design; all of the awards we could win, we won.

We were always kind of outsiders as a kind of independent fanzine that Dazed and Confused was. When Rankin and I started publishing Dazed — after a few issues of Untitled — I was 19. I think that really my understanding of fashion came about through working closely with Katie Grand and then Katie England, who were my first fashion editors at the magazine, and the designers that they would be bringing into that environment. I mean, it was pretty shambolic and organic in the sense that it was a tiny office, and a lot of what we did was sort of social in terms of how we connected. So I would meet with Alexander McQueen or Hussein Chalayan or with different kinds of graduates all at the same level, all straight out of college. So that was really my first contact with the fashion world, really through young creatives and being a young creative myself, and learning through their eyes and their talent, and understanding what they did and how they did it — the challenges that they had to get recognized and find their own style, find their own point of view in an environment where there was very little support financially.

Alexander McQueen is very special to the magazine because he contributed regularly to a number of special projects over the years. He held a master position as a fashion editor — I can't remember what the right title is, but he had a masthead title and he contributed these incredible products where he would do something that was editorial and free and experimental. He would speak to us and he would work very closely with Katie, who was fashion director at the magazine and was sort of his creative right hand, so there would be this dialogue between him and the magazine through her, and we would get together and develop what those ideas were.

One of the ideas that got a lot of media attention was when we did a series with Nick Knight with people with different disabilities. So the cover was this amazing image of Aimee Mullins, this girl who was a paralympic athlete with mechanical sprinters' legs, and a whole series inside including an image where Philip Treacy made a headpiece for a blind girl. This story kind of was the moment when Dazed went from being a niche mag in the U.K. to being much bigger. We tripled our circulation overnight because we had everyone talking about this amazingly creative way of bringing fashion and disability together. So those kinds of things would become a national debate afterward because newspapers would write about it and it would be on TV and it would be an issue of debate about identity and beauty.

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