>> The company that owns Betsey Johnson's boutiques is bankrupt, and as a result most of the designer's freestanding stores will close between May and July.

In a statement, the company said that it's spent months "rigorously pursuing alternative restructuring arrangements to address Betsey Johnson LLC's cash flow problems," to no avail. "After exhausting our resources and possibilities, it became apparent that neither a restructuring arrangement with a new equity investor nor a sale of the business enterprise as a going concern outside of bankruptcy was to be forthcoming."

Betsey Johnson LLC operates 63 of the designer's eponymous boutiques in the United States, Canada, and England. An executive at the company told WWD that some 350 people will be out of work when the stores close, but executives at Steve Madden — which saved Betsey Johnson from collapse in 2010 when it bought Johnson's $48.8 million debt — wouldn't confirm how many people would be affected.

Johnson herself won't lose her job. She's staying with the company as creative director and will focus on the lower-priced Betsey Johnson label sold in Macy's and other department stores. "I love the moderate price range," Johnson said. "It is in sync with all the girls who are buying my clothes." Mr. Madden said that the closure wouldn't interrupt wholesale deliveries to stores that sell Betsey Johnson and that there would be no impact on ecommerce availability.

Johnson executives are arranging an auction to determine which company will handle Betsey Johnson LLC's liquidation on May 8.

Photo: Betsey Johnson walks the runway with her daughter Lulu Johnson and granddaughter Layla Johnson at her Fall 2012 runway show.

>> Those stories and more in our daily news roundup.

• Turns out that much-rumored collaboration between Manolo Blahnik and J.Crew isn't going to happen — or at least not this Fall. "Although we were looking forward to the potential collaboration between our two brands, we both came to the conclusion that fall wasn't the right time," a rep for Manolo Blahnik said in an email. "We hope to do something together in the future." [Elle]
  

• Nowness, the online fashion and culture showcase owned by LVMH, debuted a Chinese version yesterday. In a statement, the site's editors said they made the move to capitalize "on China's significant position as a growing luxury market and the importance of digital and social media in the region." [The Wall Street Journal]
  

• Heidi Klum partnered with Babies "R" Us on a line of baby products called Truly Scrumptious. The line includes infant-sized clothing and accessories, but it also extends to furniture, home decor, and bedding for the under-5 set. [LilSugar]
  

• Christian Louboutin will collaborate with Disney when he creates a real-life version of Cinderella's famous glass slippers this Summer, commemorating the release of Cinderella on DVD this Fall. "I have been so lucky to have crossed paths with Cinderella, an icon who is so emblematic to the shoe world as well as the dream world," Louboutin said. [The Huffington Post]
  

• Calvin Klein's on-and-off boyfriend Nick Gruber reportedly left his New York penthouse for a stint at an undisclosed rehabilitation clinic on Wednesday. Sources saw Gruber, who was arrested for cocaine possession earlier this week, leaving his apartment with a wheelie suitcase and overheard him talking about the trip. [The Cut]

  Photo: Models wearing Manolo Blahnik shoes during J.Crew's Fall 2012 presentation.

>> Pringle of Scotland announced today that Alistair Carr, its design director of just over a year, will leave the company this Summer.

Pringle CEO Jean Fang told WWD that Carr's departure was a "mutual decision." After he leaves, Pringle's in-house design team will be responsible for designing the line. Carr will stay on for the next few months — he will present Pringle's Resort collection in New York on June 11 and then head to London for his Spring 2013 menswear show. Fang said Carr will also art direct the Fall 2012 ad campaign and that he's still working on the Pringle-sponsored Princess Grace: More Than an Image exhibit at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

"I want to thank Alistair for all his great efforts and contributions at Pringle," Fang said. "We will miss him, and we wish him all the best in his future endeavors."

While Carr's future endeavors are unknown, Pringle is definitely planning on scaling back. Fang said that future shows will follow a presentation format, rather than a full-fledged runway show. She also said that the next few stores the brand opens will be smaller on average than its current ones.

Carr joined Pringle last March when its former design director Claire Wright Keller left to be creative director of Chloe. Before starting at Pringle, Carr had been styling Nicolas Ghesquiere's shows at Balenciaga.

>> The Metropolitan Museum will broadcast the red-carpet arrivals for its Costume Institute Gala for the first time ever this year, and viewers can choose among three websites to watch it on.

Vogue.com, MetMuseum.org, and Amazon.com — which is sponsoring this year's exhibit, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations — will all live stream the celebrities and designers walking into the museum from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on May 7. Fashion journalist and longtime Vogue contributor William Norwich and model Elettra Wiedemann will man the red carpet, interviewing notable attendees like Anna Wintour, Miuccia Prada, and Carey Mulligan.

Viewers can submit questions for Norwich and Wiedemann to ask celebrities on Twitter with the hashtag #metquestions. The live stream will also include pretaped segments about the Costume Institute's history and this year's exhibit.

While the live streams won't differ across the three sites, the Met's website will feature additional content and information about the exhibit, including interviews with its curators Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda. Vogue's site, meanwhile, will focus on giving readers an inside look at the gala and a video of this year's unknown musical guest.

See last year's standout red carpet looks.

Photo: Renée Zellweger arrives at the 2011 Costume Institute Gala.

>> Those stories and more in our daily news roundup.

• Calvin Klein designer Francisco Costa landed his first modeling assignment with the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Costa will star in a campaign advertising the organization's new "São Paolo for the Cure!" t-shirts, set to debut tomorrow in his native Brazil. He's joined in the campaign by fellow Brazilians Luciana Casta and Raquel Zimmermann. [Daily Front Row]
  

• Natalia Vodianova took flak for saying "It's better to be skinny than to be fat" at this past weekend's Vogue festival, and today she responded to the criticism on her Facebook page, explaining that her original comment was designed to make people laugh. "If I was giving a speech I would have chosen my words more carefully of course," she wrote. [The Cut]
  

• Opening Ceremony will open its first London store — a pop-up shop — to celebrate the start of the 2012 Olympic games this July. When the games are over, the store will move to a permanent spot on King Street in the Covent Garden neighborhood. "Bringing Opening Ceremony to Covent Garden is an important next step in the growth of our company," said founders Humberto Leon and Carol Lim. [Catwalk Queen]
  

• The Food and Drug Administration will start monitoring what goes into beauty products sold in the United States by creating a mandatory ingredient registry next year. Current law allows beauty companies to report their ingredients voluntarily, and there are only 10 ingredients that are banned from domestic products. In the European Union, tighter beauty industry regulations have banned some 1,200 ingredients. [Refinery29]
  

• Richemont, owner of luxury jewelers and watchmakers like Cartier and IWC, won a momentous infringement case against a company that registered the trademark for Vacheron Constantin — Richemont's oldest watch brand — in Russia and sold clothes under that label. The outcome of the case means that a well-known trademark in one country can't be taken and reregistered in another country, because it can confuse consumers and harm the original trademark holder's reputation. "This is a landmark case with worldwide implications," said Richemont chief counsel Frederick Mostert. [Material World]

  Photo: Natalia Vodianova walks during Stella McCartney's Fall 2012 show.

>> Uniqlo appears to be working on a plan to add shopping functionality to its US website, but the company says that nothing about the site is set in stone.

According to documents acquired by Advertising Age, Uniqlo has asked an array of digital agencies to come up with a plan to build an ecommerce site for the US market. The request for proposal asks that the site go live by October and that it "provide a universal foundation for future expansion in other global markets," like China and Europe. Currently, Uniqlo operates online shops in Japan, the United Kingdom, and a handful of other countries.

Uniqlo also wants to add mobile commerce and a shoppable tablet app. The documents say that Uniqlo wants to grow its business in the United States to $10 billion by the year 2020, with 20 percent of that money coming from digital sales.

But for all the specificity in its request for proposal, the company is still tight-lipped about its plans to launch a site.

"We continue to explore the possibility of launching e-commerce," said Mary Lawton, Uniqlo's head of public relations, in a statement. "However, at this time, we are a long way away from confirming when specifically this will happen in the U.S. As we have said in the past, when we launch e-commerce in the U.S. we want to be sure it will benefit our customers, and currently we do not have a plan that meets that expectation."

Uniqlo's rival H&M has said it will launch a US ecommerce site in late 2012. Zara, meanwhile, launched an online store here last September.

Photo: A look from Uniqlo's Spring 2012 line.