Despite Isaac Mizrahi's noncompete with Target a few of his sketches for Liz Claiborne have made their way into the open. The consensus from WWD is that they are fresh and very much in the spirit of Isaac.

Lynn Yaeger prepares for Fashion Week at Zara in order to avoid the fuel versus food dilemma.

Which might be fine since apparently it's all just a case of history repeating with this season's trends.

If we are all just lemmings then its no surprise
Japan Fashion Week is being called quirky and derivative.

Or Japan's independent shows are getting lambasted because its just too expensive for many designers to show in the traditional style, taking away valuable resources for real creativity to spark. Even a bare bones show costs $100,000. To which we say just host a nice intimate presentation guys, your editor REALLY prefer the low key stuff. Though we still prefer at least a market appointment not just an video.

In retail news, Chanel is getting more space at Saks and Bergdorfs, ostensibly because they need sage superstar brands in this downturn.

Moschino has opened a new Meatpacking District Flagship. It will carry the full collection as well as diffussion lines like the inappropriately named Chic and Cheap which is only one of those things.

Even though it feels like women's collections are frequently being slated as menswear inspired, sometimes it's the other way around. This men's collections for Spring 09, so far, have shown quite a lot of pink. From Calvin Klein to Louis Vuitton to Moschino, it seems the boys just aren't afraid of the color most commonly associated with, well, princesses.

In the Moschino show, the models were proper gentlemen in red checked suiting sometimes accented with a pink prints or blocks of color. As for Calvin Klein, the statement was more sharp, when pink came down the runway in neon suiting. Among a signature black and white palate, one pink suit (there were other neons as well) made a statement about the possibility that a slick, serious Klein customer doesn't worry too much about the gender of color. Louis Vuitton effortlessly included pink as well, in the show it was used confidently from head to toe on more than just one look. So it seems a strong trend for menswear in Spring 09 and one that just maybe isn't that big of a deal. Typically, when we talk about androgyny, we're talking about women dressing like men, and in this case, it's just the other way around. No big thing.