Joan Juliet Buck

Those stories and more in our daily news roundup.

• Former Vogue writer Joan Juliet Buck explains the circumstances of her glowing profile on Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad in the magazine's March 2011 issue — which was published in the midst of the Middle East's Arab Spring revolutions — in a new article. "There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children," she writes. [Newsweek]
  

• Stella McCartney wasn't the only British designer who created clothes for the London Olympics. Michael van der Ham designed performance costumes for Friday's opening ceremony. "In total we worked on 300 costumes, divided into about 35 different styles," he said. [Vogue UK]
  

• Self-avowed cat person Jason Wu says whoever wears his upcoming lower-priced line Miss Wu is probably a feline fan, too. "Cats are chic! It’s called a catwalk, not a dog walk," the designer said. [Fashionista]
  

• An analysis of executive compensation in fashion reveals that JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson is among the best paid people in the industry, making over $53 million in 2011. [Racked]
  

• Writer Suzy Gershman, author of the Born to Shop series of travel guides, died last week of cancer. She was 64. [The New York Times]
  

• Writer Michele Gerber Klein is reportedly working on a biography of American couturier Charles James, who's famous for dressing Marlene Dietrich. [Page Six]

Photo: Asma al-Assad photographed by James Nachtwey for the March 2011 issue of Vogue.

>> There have been rumors circulating in the last couple of months that Dasha Zhukova — since resigning from POP last November — was working on a new magazine. Now, she confirms the rumors are true.

Dubbed Garage (the same as her flagship Moscow museum, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture), it's set to launch in September and will be an art magazine with a strong fashion angle. "It's going to be a girls' magazine," Zhukova says. "I have more ideas than I know what to do with. I guess I'm a bit of a fantasist and a daydreamer — all sorts of things come to me during the day."

She's also enlisted former Vogue Paris editor Joan Juliet Buck as a consultant for the magazine, as well as Vanessa Traina. "I'll set projects up and hand them over," Zhukova explains. "I'm a delegator and I find that quite easy. I feel I do it intuitively. But I have to trust that the people I work with are going to make decisions I approve of."

In a selection from the April Vogue cover story, "Earth Mother," now live on Vogue.com, Gisele Bundchen reveals the details of her new beauty line and shares her Bostonian home life with Joan Juliet Buck. The accompanying editorial, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier, follows Gisele to the beaches of Costa Rica where she poses with her six-week-old baby boy, Bejamin Rein.

In the article Gisele is excited to discuss her upcoming beauty product line, called Senjaa, which will launch with three products later this year and has been developed to empower teens. According to Bundchen, "I wanted to teach girls to love themselves and take care of their bodies. What is the first thing you see every morning? Your face! What do you put every day on your face? Cream! I have made the simplest, purest cream—an everyday cream—but it comes with an affirmation." Those affirmations are written on the collection's cardboard packaging with a sliding tab that reveals different motivational phrases.

The natural products will not be sold in a store, rather on a website to build a community, "so I can give my little tips," and will start with three items—a day cream, a night cream, and a mud mask.

Source: Patrick Demarchelier/Vogue

>> There are plenty of model-turned-actresses, but editor-turned-actress is a less populated category. Joan Juliet Buck, Vogue Paris's editor-in-chief from 1994 to 2001 and a current contributing editor at Vogue — she most recently did Christy Turlington's cover story for the August 2009 issue — was a child actress for Disney back in 1961's Greyfriars Bobby: The True Story of a Dog, and made a return to screen over the weekend in Julie & Julia, which features Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Buck's years in Paris paid off — she plays a character with a French accent, who in her words, is "The B*tch: the cold, mean proprietor of the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in 1949, Madame Elizabeth Brassart. I have four scenes. In each scene I abuse Meryl Streep. That was my return to acting."  A slice of her work in the movie — which Elle's Joe Zee thought she "played so well" — can be seen from 2:20 to 2:25 here.

So how did she end up in the movie? »