>>  Fashion designers (except maybe Cavalli, Karl, and Donatella) avoid Posh Spice like the plague.  When Tom Ford was still creative director at Gucci, he called up his PR agency after spotting Posh in his designs and demanded to know how she had gotten ahold of them.  When informed that Posh had paid full price, he reportedly screamed, "Well, somebody stop her!"  Needless to say, Posh is associated with negative brand image.
It cracks me up that she just came out with a "style guide" -- or That Extra Half Inch -- I'm sure everyone aspires to have designers hate them as much as they hate Posh.   Bryony Gordon of The Telegraph spent a week living according to Posh's advice (got a fake tan, acrylics done, the works), and came out with a few fantastic conclusions:

I also need heels. Really, really high heels – Victoria likes hers up to five inches high. She recommends tan shoes from Manolo Blahnik, but Manolo Blahnik say that they don't make tan shoes.
Never mind; I can borrow some Christian Louboutin heels instead. Victoria loves Christian Louboutin. But it seems that Christian Louboutin doesn't love Victoria – his staff refuse to loan us any shoes because they don't want the label to be associated with her book.

Seems that style guide authoress or not, Posh's image still hasn't changed with the real deal fashion people.  Maybe she should work on getting down who makes what first.  It might be a start.

>>  It seems that the leggings-mad fashion industry has upped the ante now that your run-of-the-mill black leggings are everywhere to be seen.  Remember those crazy cool but insanely unwearable robo-leggings that Nicolas Ghesquiere showed on the Balenciaga S/S 2007 runway?  The ones that I can't even imagine how the models put on except to be stitched into?  They are being made only at request (surprise), with a price point of... over $100,000.  I guess that's an easy way to keep them exclusive to fashion editorials and museums.

>>  Remember all the technological wizardry that went into Hussein Chalayan's spring 2007 collection?  A very cool concept -- as the director of the engineering firm who handled the morphing clothes describes it:

With the first dress, the girl walked on in a 1906 costume, and it morphed from 1906 to 1916 and then to 1926. So she ended up having a beaded flapper dress of the twenties. The next dress was from 1926, and it evolved from 1936 to 1946, and so on. The final dress was 1986, 1996, and then 2007. So there were five dresses, and each dress [morphed through] three decades.

Three magazines who have already requested samples from the collection for a fashion shoot are getting more than they bargained for:  Chalayan's transforming dresses come with an engineer in tow to operate the complex microchip technology.  I'm curious to see how the magazines will shoot these dresses, which are without doubt cool to watch transform on video, but transformation is much harder to catch on still film...

>>  With their newly revamped web site, it was logical to expect Topshop to finally start shipping to somewhere besides the UK.  No dice.  Never fear, Philip Green was interviewed on BBC Radio yesterday and quoted as saying he expected international transactions to go live in about two weeks.  We just have to hope that he's a man true to his word. 

>>  My little birdie was right after all -- just as Behnaz Sarafpour's collabo with Target gets into full swing, some pictures from next line pop up -- and I am psyched.  I am loving the colors (and cut) of the button-down skirts, and the designers even used their trademark shape (and my personal favorite) -- the bustier.  Cute trapeze coat, too.  That's right -- your next GO International designer is: Proenza Schouler.  Eat your heart out, baby.

pictures via JANE