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Russian Designers Unimpressed By Michelle Obama

2009-07-09T23:09:27Z

Even the Russian fashion industry isn't that wowed by the First Lady. "Her clothes are modest and neutral," was designer Denis Simachev's muted reaction.

Brazilian President Gifts Obama Signed Soccer Jersey

2009-07-09T22:24:03Z

L'AQUILA, Italy — President Barack Obama seemed pleased with the gift he received Thursday from Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but it was bittersweet nonetheless.

Silva gave Obama, a big sports fan, an autographed yellow Brazilian soccer jersey at the start of their morning meeting at the G-8 summit in Italy.

During their banter, which reporters partly heard through a translator, Silva spoke animatedly of the June 28 soccer match between the U.S. and Brazilian national teams in the Confederations Cup series. The game was a crushing loss for the underdog Americans, who led at the midway point, 2-0, only to lose 3-2.

Silva repeatedly said, "Yes we can," which was Obama's campaign catchphrase and apparently what the Brazilian president had in mind while his team trailed. Obama smiled gamely; if he felt Silva was rubbing it in a bit, he didn't let on.

"Hey, look at this," Obama said of the jersey, signed by the Brazilian team's players. "Beautiful. All right, wonderful. I like that."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs later said Obama ended his 30-minute session with Silva by patting the Brazilian's back and vowing, "we will not lose a two-point lead again."

___

Michelle Obama shook her head as she took in the extent of the damage, gazing upon centuries-old churches and other treasures rubbled by an earthquake that claimed more than 300 lives.

Obama and other first spouses on Thursday toured the ghostlike historic center of L'Aquila, the Italian city devastated by the April tremor and hosting world leaders this week for the G-8 summit.

Dressed in a short-sleeved yellow and white cardigan with a matching skirt, the U.S. first lady walked along piles of debris though L'Aquila's main square and in front of a destroyed government palace.

She listened intently to explanations by Italian rescue officials and shook hands with firefighters who work daily to clear the wreckage and reinforce damaged buildings paving the way for reconstruction.

___

A former model-turned-government minister is guiding Mrs. Obama and other G-8 spouses through their Italian sightseeing.

Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna showed the spouses through the dusty L'Aquila streets on Thursday and pointed out historic structures that survived the earthquake. Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, under fire from a sex scandal, asked Carfagna to guide them around the summit. That role typically is assigned the host leader's spouse, but Berlusconi's wife is not attending the summit.

On Wednesday, Carfagna _ wearing a black dress with a plunging neckline and pearls _ escorted the spouses through museums and to the Vatican. Mrs. Obama skipped the Vatican audience with Pope Benedict XVI; she'll join her husband and daughters for a private audience with the pontiff on Friday.

___

First Chavez. Now Gadhafi. Obama has caused another stir with another handshake.

Before the G-8 dinner Thursday night, leaders gathered for what's known in diplo-speak as a "family photo." Several of the leaders mingled and chatted while they took their places, creating occasion for the notable moment of the evening: a handshake between Obama and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.

Once an international pariah, the man former President Reagan once called the "mad dog of the Middle East" has rehabilitated himself in recent years _ shedding a terrorist image for himself and the North African nation he has led for nearly 40 years.

His history reads like a resume of terror and revolutionary causes, including playing host to Abu Nidal after Syria expelled the Palestinian militant leader best known for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Libya also earned a U.S. airstrike in 1986 for the bombing of a disco in Berlin that killed two American servicemen. Two years later, a bomb believed planted by Libyans destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

Gadhafi's decision to hand over the two suspects in the case more than a decade later, pay billions of dollars in compensation and renounce his weapons of mass destruction program paved the way for lifting U.S. sanctions on Libya. Earlier this year, Gadhafi was elected to head the African Union.

In April, Obama shook hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at a Latin America summit, earning criticism from Republicans for being cozy with a leader hostile to the U.S. In that encounter, Obama was all smiles.

This time, at the dinner hosted by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, the president assumed a polite expression, but not exactly a smile. And Gahafi moved on to greet other leaders.

___

Associated Press writer Marta Falconi contributed to this report.

Old Russian Ladies Sing Britney Spears (VIDEO)

2009-07-09T22:01:47Z

In this ad for Lingway, a Russian language learning company, four adorable Russian ladies sing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" with a little help from a mustachioed accordion player. Come on, that's the best sentence ever!

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Sarkozy Names Plane 'Carla One' After Wife: Report

2009-07-09T21:53:31Z

The first, a hugely luxurious Dassault Falcon 7X with a range of 6000 nautical miles, has now been delivered complete with the hand-painted legend 'Carla One' glistening on its side, in honour of First Lady Carla Bruni.

Paulina Porizkova: Fired at 44

2009-07-09T17:40:19Z

I never actually heard the words made famous by a certain man on a certain TV show. Instead I got a lot of harrumphing and vague "I-got-some-bad-news" mumbling. Over the phone. The night before my 44th birthday.

When I was fired from "America's Next Top Model" this past spring, two things hit me simultaneously: the heavy thud of realization that I am not wanted, not liked, not worth my salt, not loved--yes, I know this sounds a little over-the-top, but I have the tendency to run with the negatives--and the lightening of a burden lifted; I would no longer have to worry about missing my children's recitals, date nights with my husband, and all that family life has to offer. It was a curious mixture, one I imagine akin to standing in a falling elevator, but knowing you can jump up at the last moment to prevent gravity from crushing you. And you can walk off. Not unscathed maybe, with a permanent distrust of elevators perhaps, but alive.

My announcement about getting fired was a decision I made when I, a day after a rather depressing birthday, realized that all the famous people I've ever read about have rarely, if ever, "gotten fired." It's not that it hasn't happened. In our biz, the showbiz, you get hired and fired at the speed of sound. But it seems only comedians have the guts to admit it.

Performers are, by nature, self-employed. Sort of. We are used to being out of work; we are used to the thought that this job may be our last. The threat of unemployment doesn't so much hang over your head as it surrounds you like water in a pool. But being fired is different. It's not only that you now have no foreseeable income, but--for a celebrity--you have also been publicly punched in the face. It is the one last kindness that is performed by whomever is actually firing you, usually the producer, to do a lot of harrumphing and vague mumbling about bad news, and allow you to put it out to the public in a way that won't forever mark you as failed.

Generally, admitting to a weakness in a cutthroat setting is far braver than keeping a stiff upper lip, but unless you are Jimmy Stewart in a Hollywood movie, the consequences are the same as announcing you've twisted your ankle to a bunch of muggers.

Hence, all the celebrities that "quit" because they were exhausted, had personal conflicts, and the ol' scheduling problems.

So why did I do it? I'd like to imagine it was in part because I'm always so appreciative of when someone tells the truth--clean water escaping muck, and all that sort of imagery I like to amuse myself with--and in part because I have come to the conclusion that saving face takes more effort than it's worth. For me, anyway. (It is also more than possible that I thought it would get me sympathetic attention and another job.) In any case, a day after I outed myself as a fired (failed) celebrity on Craig Ferguson, my phone rang off the hook. I'm still not sure whether it was because people were appreciative of the truth, or merely looking for me to dish further dirt, but the beauty of being 44 is that one spends a lot less time bullshitting oneself. And none of those calls were to offer me another job.

One of the people I spoke to was a lovely female journalist who, after a few minutes, confided she had also just gotten fired and that I was her last interview. How is that for irony? She had worked for the paper for fifteen years and got a fairly unceremonious boot. She had a little money saved up. She had some plans to make the best of it. She wasn't 20 either.

When you get fired at 20, it may be a kick in the butt, but one that propels you forward to the next adventure. When you get fired at 44, it's a slap in the face that takes you backward to sink into your well-worn couch and to reexamine your life, to re-evaluate your place in the world.

In all honesty, getting fired from "Top Model" was nowhere near as tragic as I'd like to make out. It's mostly a slight public humiliation, and one that I decided to perpetuate myself. It in no way compares to the thousands of people who have been laid off and are struggling to survive.

Still, I wouldn't have minded to walk away with an extended middle finger and a victorious "I quit!"

Oh, and by the way, I'm available for hire.

Related links on Modelinia.com:

*Slideshow: Paulina Porizkova's Covers
*Watch: Paulina Porizkova Wishes You A Happy 4th of July
*Watch: History of Models V: Beauty Incorporated

Josa Young: Women Like Reading About Sex

2009-07-09T16:43:30Z

Reading about sex is all the rage for women over 45, according to Astral -- a pleasant skincare range that you buy in your local chemist (which tells you what kind of client base it has). Which is just as well, because I finally was able to write about fully rounded relationships after my mother died in the mid-1990s and the resulting novel, One Apple Tasted, is launching in August 2009. And it's about a lot more than sex, it is about people and their relationships, and that is what I found it difficult to be frank about when I still had parents.

Astral surveyed 2000 women aged between 45 and 60 this week about their reading habits. The results were revealing. What hit the UK press with a bang is that, far from shrinking from the gaping bedroom door, they revel in passionate love scenes with plenty of detail.

Naturally, I was still worried about the reception it would get, but delighted when acclaimed author Julie Myerson emailed me while she was reading a preview copy, to say: 'Hey, I've been reading your book for the last hour and i have to say one quick thing: you write sex brilliantly! (hardly anyone does)'.

My mother in law, a more outwardly liberated woman than my mother and now 85, also commended my ability to write well and realistically about sex.

Thrilling stuff for a newbie writer, because it's a big risk writing about sex at all. What if you don't get it right. What if you win the hilarious UK Bad Sex Award for Fiction because what you write is lurid, unconvincing, unmoving, embarrassing. I did put a preview passage up on the novel's website and a friend read it and told me to take it down as being too raunchy. I thought it was rather mild, a description of two people completely failing to get there at all, and having a massive misunderstanding in the process. Anyway, she changed her tune when she saw the survey, and I wrote up my whole experience in the UK Daily Telegraph this week.

But the kind of sex I write about is not the parachuted-in, semi-pornographic stuff that writers pop in to keep their readers awake -- it is meant to express the characters in a fully rounded way. And I have to confess, the characters certainly were enthusiastic -- surprisingly so, I felt, as my fingers rushed over the keyboard, that they were getting away from me and up to all kinds of stuff that I hadn't really anticipated.

Anyway, sex is part of life, and I am more interested in what sexuality says about people and their behaviour and motivation, than keeping my readers awake. It drives the plot forward too. So, there you are, I won't take their clothes off (or even leave them on but disarrange them) unless the role really demands it.

The daft thing is, I found letters and photographs after both my parents died that showed how passionate their relationship had been. Of course they would not have been shocked. They might even have been proud. I miss them anyway, but particularly now when my dream of being a novelist looks like coming true.

Jo Bryant: What Is Modern Wedding Etiquette?

2009-07-09T16:14:21Z

The wedding season is upon us and here at Debrett's we are frequently asked: what is modern wedding etiquette? Etiquette is constantly evolving and many traditions and conventions don't fit comfortably into the wedding day. Many brides and grooms are throwing the rulebook out of the window in the desire to have the wedding day that they want, rather than one that convention created.

Does this mean that wedding etiquette no longer matters? Not at all. In its purest form, etiquette is about how we communicate and interact with each other. It is how we make those around us feel -- good etiquette lies in consideration for others. So, in the case of a wedding, the care of the guests and the roles of the wedding party -- the best man, ushers (groomsmen) and bridesmaids -- are crucial.

Planning a wedding is, for the most part, the same as organizing a party. Care and attention are required for those who are attending -- they have, after all, often traveled from far afield, bought an expensive gift and forked out for a night's accommodation. Some couples, however, think that merely issuing an invitation and allocating a suitable spot on the seating plan is more than enough provision for the guests.

Good organization and clear communication makes for happy guests and, in turn, happy guests create a better celebratory atmosphere. The couple should think about weddings that they have attended and use their experiences to their advantage. Did they have to wait for endless photographs to be taken of the happy couple and their extended family? Did they know where to park, and were there plenty of ushers on hand to point them in the right direction? Were they well fed and watered? No matter how happy the guests are for the newly weds, all too often they remember a wedding for all the wrong reasons -- delays, bad timing, disorganization, low supplies of drink...

Good advance planning creates the structure of the day, but too many weddings fall down when nobody, apart from the bride and groom, is familiar with the order of events. The key players -- the best man, ushers (groomsmen) and bridesmaids -- must be properly briefed. The bride and groom should be able to relax, safe in the knowledge that everything they've planned is in hand. It is, therefore, good etiquette for the wedding party to understand what's being asked of them, enabling them to fulfill their duties.

The best man has the most important role. He must be a good communicator, a diplomat and work with everyone, from the mother of the bride and the bridesmaids to the caterer and the wedding band. He is also the groom's personal assistant, ensuring that everything runs to plan and that the groom can focus on the important stuff -- such as enjoying the day, rather than worrying that the carefully-chosen canapes aren't circulating.

The ushers (groomsmen) should also work closely with the best man. They are there to help the guests and, in a sense, act as the floor managers of the wedding day. They must make sure that the guests know where to go and that people are in the right place at the right time.

At Debrett's, we recommend that there is one usher for every 50 guests, but most grooms choose more. What many couples also forget is that the ushers set the tone for the entire day as they are the first faces that the wedding guests see when they arrive. They must employ good manners right from the start when they seat the guests and await the arrival of the bride.

The bridesmaids, meanwhile, get off quite lightly. After last minute bridezilla panics, the maid of honor and other bridesmaids should ensure that the bride has her dream wedding. There may be flower girls to keep an eye on, or the odd task here and there, but often the bridesmaids come into their own in the run up to the wedding rather than on the actual day.

So modern wedding etiquette is not about old-fashioned formalities or getting it right (or wrong). Many conventions expected at weddings of yesteryear now seem contrived and awkward. A successful wedding is one where everyone -- not just the bride and groom -- has a special time. So, don't be scared to ignore the rule book as good wedding etiquette lies in successful organization and planning. Just make sure you look after those guests...

Christian Lacroix: "This Is My Annus Horribilis!"

2009-07-09T15:20:14Z

He is confident in his design vision for the future, one that includes "high-quality ready-to-wear because this period is so difficult and tough. We will forever need refined and beautiful things" and a "couture light" that focuses on the daywear American clients demand; special evening gowns and wedding dresses are generally designed in collaboration with clients. Lacroix envisions a move to a different house in a different location and a customer approach that mirrors that established by Azzedine Alaïa in his own studio-emporium-salon in a converted factory space in the Marais.

Michael Henry Adams: 'No Homo': More Queers in the Mirror

2009-07-09T15:13:51Z

For generations in America, to say that someone was gay, was deemed comparable to identifying them as a bigamist or in some way criminal. And even today, young people admiring one's sweater, lest any unintended inappropriate hook-up be inferred, end their compliment with the disclaimer, "no homo." In the recent past, the 'bad old days' before gay liberation's Stonewall rebellion in 1969, many well-off gays and lesbians were as much on the DL as young closeted queers in the hood are today.

"We liked it that way. Our lives, like everyone else's, were much more dignified then: appreciating one's own sex was like belonging to an exclusive and select private club. It was far more exciting..."

The speaker was my friend, Alexander C. Robinson, III. The late dean of Cleveland's architectural community, Alex was well past 80 and I was 20 when we first met in 1976. Newly a widower, the father of three daughters, with nearly a dozen grandchildren, he was 'privately' gay just the same, persistently offering attentions as unwelcomed as they were astonishing, coming as they had, from a great-grandfather!

Fabulously rich Leonard Hanna, photographer Jerome Zerbe, Cleveland Art Museum Director William Milliken and several other socially prominent residents of the Western Reserve were also 'gay blades'. But if they were reasonably discrete, unlike Winsor French, Kenyon Bolton or Alec Robinson, they hadn't resorted to the expedient of marrying or having childern. Instead they either moved to, or lived a part of each year in, Europe and New York, meeting and befriending in the process other young pilgrims escaping the intolerant provinces.

The lure of the relatively greater freedom offered here continues. Relocating to Manhattan in 1985, three years after I'd come out, to myself, I immediately met a succession of celebrated men whom I'd read about in books and magazines.
It began with the still raffish Mr. Zerbe, who regaled me with gay tales of glamorous old New York. Like perfect pearls strung on a grand necklace, one marvel leading to the next, Jerry's friendship led to my meeting Luther Greene, which coincided with my calling and introducing myself, as a fan, to Mario Buatta. It's thanks to both Mario and Luther that I went to work as a cook for incomparable interior designer Tom Britt. Oh, how I wish I'd taken better notes when I was young.

Sequestered in a subterranean railroad flat on the eastern end of 58th Street near Sutton Place, Luther Greene's home might have gone totally unnoticed by passersby. To prevent the tragedy of anonymity though, this Virginia-born-and-reared mid-western transplant, who was first a brilliantly innovative theatrical producer-director, and then a creative landscape architect and florist, took decisive action.

Beyond the the entrance and the living room all decked out with Delftware,

behind his vermilion-walled bedroom, at the very back of the apartment, he spent ten years creating a sea shell-encrusted grotto with a pool and waterfall, where he liked to serve meals to awe-struck guests.

Patently illegal, the greenhouse addition that Greene erected on the façade of the one-time tenement where he lived, encroached well into the public right-of-way. It's been removed since his death in 1987. But how ingeniously it helped to illuminate otherwise gloomy digs. It also dramatized one's descent into the special, eclectically decorated realm of a gifted artist: across a stream, past a waterfall, amidst a jasmine-scented semi-tropical garden.

The first Mrs. Luther Greene was painted by Salvador Dali, the director-producer's good friend. Greene's lesbian second wife,
Judith Anderson, is best remembered for a series of first-rate performances in movies that have become gay-cult-classics. "Big Mama",

in Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and "Ann Treadwell", in Otto Preminger's Laura, each stands out, but it was as "Mrs. Danvers", one of the screen's most memorable and sexually ambiguous female villains, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, that the Australian stage actress achieved true Hollywood stardom.

Appreciating what extreme snobs some gays can be, it hardly comes as a shock that among his well-turned-out wives, and a host of furtive short-term companions, of the type sometimes referred to derisively, as 'twinks', the great love of Luther Greene's life was a genuine royal prince, a son of exiled King Amanullah of Afghanistan. Prince Hussein, a younger son, born of a second wife, grew up in London where he was known teasingly as, "Princess Anne." Married as a youth, he had a large family.

When I knew Hussein, he lived on Fordham Road in the Bronx and worked giving test drives to VIP-customers of Budget-Rent-a-Car. In a solitary room adorned with framed invitations to the coronations of every British monarch from Victoria to Elizabeth, he lived with six rescued formerly stray cats. A one-time boy friend, too fat and too old at thirty, lived next door with his young wife and kids. But none of this, and nothing else from an eventful life grown quite ordinary, was ever permitted to interfere with either Hussein's steady pursuit of muscular young men or his unfailing commitment to the steadfast Luther.

It was because I wanted to write that Mario Buatta persuaded me
to go to work for Thomas Britt. Mario had met the artsy, brazen and antic native of Kansas City while both were students of indomitable aesthete, connoisseur, and decorative arts scholar Stanly Barrows.
When their class at Parsons went abroad to study in Paris in 1956, Tom Britt met Julie Schenck. They were later to marry at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Slender, blond, demure but elegant, Julie Britt was descended from early Dutch settlers who had immigrated to New Jersey in the 17th century. Creatures of their time, the ultra-smart Britts became darlings at Studio 54 and at the private club at the Hotel Sherry-Netherland, called Doubles.

Tom Britt's East 63rd Street apartment in a century-old town house is as grand as his country house at Watermill, Long Island is serenely simple

Despite ups and downs, including alcoholism and drug addiction, they are still very close. "Our friendship is hard to describe," said the editor, who worked for Glamour (where she put an unknown teenager named Cheryl Tiegs on the cover) and Harper's Bazaar. She was also a stylist for Richard Avedon. A couple of years ago Julie explained her unexpected life in New York to Mitchell Owens in a Time's profile. Recalling the intensity of their courtship, she reflected how, like a latter-day Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, they too, had cavorted in a fountain and danced as Karl Beiter's personification of abundance drenched them in an allegorical shower of 'gold'. Smiling, with what? Yes, incredulity, Ms. Britt said of her
former husband to Owens,

"He changed my whole life."

Scion of one of America's first families James Biddle, who insisted on always being addressed as Jimmy, seems a typical candidate for an old-fashioned 'lavender marriage'. This seems even more to be the case, as his wife, the mother of his heirs, Louisa Copeland Biddle was the daughter of DuPont president Lammont du Pont Copeland. "Alas," confides an old friend, one might wish that it was so straightforward. But nothing, ever, was exactly straightforward, not where Jimmy was concerned".

His wife, as well as many of their friends, several different sources stress, was well aware that he was 'different'. "Only his family, particularly his parents, retained complete and deliberate ignorance. That was how he inherited Andalusia, his family's remarkable estate that was built from 1794 to 1836," insists his friend, "It's a superb house, like a Greek temple above the Delaware River in Bucks County.

When one is gay, as we are, one so strives to please and inspire admiration. It's a feminine trait we aren't afraid to show. In our case it included making an advantageous match, producing descendants and saving the ancestral family homestead, should one be fortunate enough to possess one that's still worth saving. On the other hand, one often acts out somehow, just because one can sometimes, it shows one is a man to be defiant. I suppose that was what Jimmy's black 'friend' must have been all about?

The 'friend' in question, just a 'boy' when he came to Andalusia long ago to clean the pool, and met Jimmy, is now a popular dinner guest, attentive host and retired dentist. "He simply knocked me out, I could hardly help myself" Jimmy said as I listened in disbelief. I was seated beside the immense Gothic revival mahogany four-poster bed where he reposed in his high ceilinged-room in Andalusia's dower house, the imposingly large Gothic Cottage. The only black guest at a house party, I was stunned by this revelation, but not a bit surprised that neither Jimmy's marriage nor his then-controversial black lover had worked out.

Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing, Jimmy went on to lead the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

"Exquisitely garbed, always in gowns, jewels and furs carefully selected by her husband, Louisa Biddle, ever gracious and smiling, played the part of a curator and philanthropy director's wife, one on the lookout for needed funds, to absolute perfection,"

Remembers their friend.

"Toward the end, relinquishing those beautifully tailored Saville Row suits he'd sported as dutifully as any prisoner wears his uniform, Jimmy ultimately graduated to custom-made attire that resembled a cross between a caftan from the Levant, and a shift from Lilly Pulitzer in Palm Beach. In the end, no longer sublimating his flair for fashion by dressing Louisa, he was finally, mostly, done with pretending, I think.

How much was the marriage of Calvin and Kelly Klein a game of let's-pretend? Quite apart from the 'style magnate's' gift to his wife of superb pearls that had previously belonged to the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary,

did Klein regard Kelly much as some adoptive gay parents treat their children , like a doll or a must-have new accessory? Will we ever really know for sure? As with many lavender unions, now the principals have 'called it a day.' Acquired for nearly $800,000, the duchess' pearls were sold by Ms. Klein for more than five times as much.

In a press release prior to the sale, Kelly Klein is quoted as saying that she hoped the pearls might be "given again, as they have been in the past, as a gesture of love and worn often and proudly." It's a nice sentiment, isn't it? Yet I, for one, hope that the next owner will not be a mere trophy, indicative of how enough money can buy all things, including a beautiful wife or a handsome husband, whose very presence shouts loudly and clear, 'Hell, no, I'm not gay, only, my, you do have a great ass---no homo!

Mr.and Mrs. Michael Jackson

Michelle Obama In Italy On Thursday (PHOTOS)

2009-07-09T13:40:59Z

On Thursday, the first ladies of the G8 were given a tour of earthquake damage in L'Aquila by Italian Equal Opportunities Minister (and total hottie) Mara Carfagna.

Michelle Obama wore yellow for the second day in a row, layering a floral print cardigan by Liz Claiborne (last seen May 23rd en route to Camp David) over a daffodil-colored tank and skirt by J. Crew. Later that day,the first lady changed into all-black for a visit to the Pantheon with daughters Sasha and Malia.

(PHOTOS by AP and Getty)

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Model Coco Rocha Lip Syncs And Dances With Her Dad (VIDEO)

2009-07-09T13:32:37Z

Model Coco Rocha is used to making serious faces on the runway and holding intense poses in ad campaigns, but she lets it all go in this video posted on her blog, Oh So Coco. Watch as she lip syncs to "I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book with her father Trevor Haines. We wanna be like you, Coco...or at least, we're taking notes on your dance moves.

WATCH:

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Michael Likosky: Bailing Out Luxury

2009-07-09T09:39:30Z

With the start of Haute Couture Week in Paris, luxury is already on the ropes. Christian Lacroix is going under. Meanwhile, Prada and Armani are offering their brands to cell phone makers, televisions and cars.

Still, at the recent Financial Times Luxury Summit in Monaco, Bernard Arnault, chairman of the Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton group, explained how the glut of luxury goods on the market was driving down costs and thus stimulating demand. And, as Marc Jacobs shoes sell for the same price as Loomstate at Target, more folks will choose champagne and caviar dreams. Or, as Arnault put it: "We don't buy our dreams at the supermarket."

However, this oversupply of luxury goods is not just the result of fewer spenders on Madison Avenue and Rodeo Drive. We, and our allies, are bailing out luxury.

We are offering government loans, grants and insurance to keep factories around the world over-producing luxury goods. Along with our allies, we are paying power bills, giving money to buyers to purchase these goods and bring them to market, and even building new factory towns from scratch to increase capacity.

This luxury bailout is making sure that artisan sewing jobs, supposedly essential to luxury manufacturing, do not return to Italy or Manhattan. In other words, we are keeping labor costs down overseas, making our own labor markets less competitive. We are also relaxing our legal rules, so that a purse made in China can wear a Made in Italy label by sewing on a strap in Europe.

Our fashion foreign policy is not just about what we wear abroad.

It is also about how we inject large amounts of money into fashion houses. As Louis Vuitton joins Citi, Chrysler and AIG, we should ask what public purpose is being served.

Wedding Proposals Gone Wrong (VIDEO)

2009-07-09T02:25:43Z

It's summer, the time for weddings! A few of my friends are getting married this summer and fall, so lately I've been thinking about this time-honored tradition. However, it wasn't until I ran across this compilation on Buzzfeed that I realized the plan does not always go perfectly, the ending is not always happy. So, for those of you thinking about popping the big question, I urge you to check out the videos below, which chronicle the terrible moments when that huge decision you've made turns out to be poorly planned or the wrong decision entirely. Make sure you don't up like these poor souls.

WATCH: (more videos here.)

Man proposes on live TV and does not receive the response he's looking for.

This is not the player's fault; this reporter is just an idiot.

This one had such potential! Alas.

The silence at the end of this is almost too painful.

I don't want to totally bring you down, so let's end on one that's just a huge success.

Nicole Williams: 5 Things You Should Never Wear to Work

2009-07-08T22:53:24Z

They say that clothes make the man, and that's often true of women, too. Your choice of clothing speaks volumes about your personality and your level of professionalism. A black figure-flattering suit with a punch of color says "I am savvy and stylish." A miniskirt and stilettos says "I'm the office slut." Here are a few more items that may send the wrong message.

1. Anything resembling lingerie. We know you're too savvy to have a lace thong peaking out of that pin-striped suit. (Right?) But even clothing that looks like underwear can be distracting, like that white lacy cami or that bustier-style shirt. If you don't want give anyone the wrong idea, then cover up with a cardigan or a fitted jacket until after work.

2. Excessive perfume. You may love Jessica Simpson's new fragrance, but your co-workers might be sensitive to strong smells. One or two spritzes should be more than enough to get you through the day. If not, you can always touch up in the ladies' room after work, but there's no need to assault your cubicle mates with perfume. Scented lotions offer an even subtler smell in moderation.

3. Workout wear. This should go without saying, but if your office is ubercasual you might need a reminder. Sweatshirts, Pilates pants, track jackets, and especially spandex shorts should never see the inside of your office. We're willing to compromise on running shoes, especially if you walk to work, but other items should be safely stowed in your gym locker or yoga bag.

4. Sequins. Unless you are Cher and you're working on your Vegas club act, sequins are a definite don't for work. A patent-leather belt or bag offers a bit of shimmer with a more modern, work-friendly vibe. Or use earrings to add bit of bling for happy hour. But a sequined shirt or jacket is a little too loud for daytime wear.

5. That "Barack My World" T-shirt. Or any clothing with a message on it. Though you might enjoy shirts that make a statement (literally), others could take offense at political or religious messages. Best to play it safe and save that outfit for the weekends. Instead, stand out with a beaded necklace or a colorful scarf.

Daphne Guinness Calls Herself "A Work In Progress" (VIDEO)

2009-07-08T22:07:17Z

Artist Daphne Guinness has eclectic and ever-evolving style that she refers to as "a work in progress." But when New York Magazine caught her on the street, Guinness looked completely pulled-together in a black dress, seven-inch red heels and irregularly-shaped sunglasses. Watch her talk about what she's wearing and how she thinks she looks "so normal."

WATCH:

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