>> Soon after Maybelline announced it would be be taking over from five-year Bryant Park cosmetics sponsor MAC, MAC — presumedly, as New York Times' Eric Wilson put it, tired of having to share "a rather circuslike stage with other sponsors who were competing for attention, sometimes including makers of doughnuts, cameras, toilets and Big Macs" — announced that it would be producing the tentatively-titled MAC and Milk Fashion Week with Milk Studios at the same time as the traditional New York Fashion Week.

The event can be seen as either a complement or a competitor to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, but on the record, anyway, there seem to be no hard feelings.  Milk Studios founder Mazdack Rassi says of the initiative: "This week is not an alternative show space, it's a way of cultivating designers and helping them come up with new ways of selling their clothes."  And Zach Eichman, a VP of IMG Fashion, which produces the shows at Bryant Park, told the New York Times last week the company welcomed the MAC and Milk event and that bus service between shows would be available when possible. “We can’t do every show in the tents. We hope they will be successful.”

Alexander Wang will be there, so will Preen »

>> In the March 2008 issue of Vogue, premier retoucher of fashion photographs, Pascal Dangin, tweaked a total of 144 images, from ads to editorial spreads, and in The September Issue, which focuses on the making of Vogue's September 2007 issue, Anna Wintour definitely displays a reliance on retouching, asking Mario Testino to superimpose cover girl Sienna Miller's head from one shot onto her body in another shot, and requesting that a cameraman's gut from an editorial shot be diminished, to Grace Coddington's dismay: "Everybody isn't perfect in this world.  It's enough that the models are perfect."

When digital manipulation programs first came into use in the early '90s, reports Eric Wilson for The New York Times, art directors originally used them to create a heightened sense of reality like images achieved through movie special effects — "hyper real" style, as former The Face art director and current Love creative director Lee Swillingham coined it — as a reaction against the images of supermodels that looked too perfect. Editors weren't suggesting the resulting look be attainable, Swillingham explains: “We were trying to create a future fashion. You could do something that looked gritty and real or something that looked like plastic.”

Now, some major photographers are pushing for less plastic, more real »

>> Fall 2009 is "the make or break season" for small designers, according to Eric Wilson of The New York Times.  Stores are reducing their orders by 20 percent or more for Fall, and some are already trying to cancel their Spring orders, which puts small businesses, especially those without independent financial backing, in a tenuous position.  Basically, Wilson points out, "The more stores that close, the more designers will follow."  And in show season, the cost of samples and putting on a show doesn't help with the strain.

"We're just trying to survive." »

>> THE ZIETGEIST —Everyone's hoping to stay in the black these days, the fashion flock included.  At the Calvin Klein Pre-Fall presentation Tuesday, 28 out of 31 front row guests wore black; Eric Wilson likens it to "fashion's version of comfort food" — "the fashion crowd hasn’t looked this dark since the early 1990s." [NYT]

*image: source