Tyra Banks still makes us a little nuts—if you host a show called America’s Next Top Model, you are possibly not our top source for all things related to the idea that everyone is equally attractive and looks don’t matter!—but we’re glad to see this story (Even if we’d have preferred an alternate universe where Michelle Obama could have had the cover.) We were thinking about a story a friend of ours wrote for the Post, about how fictional black presidents—whether Dennis Haysbert in 24 or Morgan Freeman in like everything he’s ever done—has helped expand, say, the American imagination to encompass this idea. If HB does the same for the first lady, we’re all for it.

This is so OT but we just had one of the most interesting interviews ever, with an Iraqi filmmaker, and we asked him what, in a perfect world, he’d want the Americans to do. And he said to leave within a year. We don’t trust Fox News, we don’t trust CNN, we don’t trust any of this information anymore—but we believed him. We thought maybe that wasn’t what an Iraqi would want—more of the, you broke it, you bought it, perspective. We were wrong. We march on to the polls a bit more confidently than previous.

See a couple more below…

Read rest of story…

We do love the September magazine covers. One of our best friends is a redhead, and we have spent money hours together trying to come to terms with the ginger phenomenon in Britain, which has absolutely no American analogue. Well, "red-headed stepchild," maybe, but at least as far as Lacey tells us, no one beats up the red-headed kids just because they have red hair, or yell things like, "Oi, ginger wanker!" a phrase we’ve actually overhead.

We view this cover as an achievement for redheads across the land but there’s not much on this cover that necessitates our buying the magazine. And what’s up with that "Glorious!" font \ handwriting? Who wrote that? They’re doing better at Starbucks. Meh.

We are cautiously pro the new haircut and VERY VERY ANTI the matching shoes.

We do not want a "Shaggy Aggy," much in the same way we did not want that bizarre Rachel haircut: in this case, because we are not a six-foot-tall British model named Agyness. We found something about the … SWFing of her hair, by, among others, Pixie Geldof:

bizarre. We don’t get style-biting in general, but why would anyone want to walk around with a haircut that is indisputably someone else’s? Why can’t Pixie Geldof go and figure out her own exciting haircut. Entitled ingenues! To the creativity, please! The whole thing makes us grumpy.

We usually hate guest-edited issues—they always seem to be covered in the tearstains of the assistant editors who had to ghostwrite the entire thing—but we loooove the Aggy issue of iD
. Because:

1: She writes a letter requesting an interview with the queen, and it is filled with the sort of sentiment we adore

2: She is 26, which we have decided is a reasonable age for a model, because she is so much more like a person and so much less like a clothes rack. We’re not complaining about 14-year-olds—we’re just saying it gets marginally easier to be yourself in a room full of mean people the older you get (we personally believe) and Aggy, in our opinion, is about nothing so much as being herself.

3: Because the feeling we get from her is not so much that she is beautiful but that she is super-duper alive, and that, we feel, is a quality worth sharing

4: And this photo, which should be taped to the wall of all the non-model, aforementioned 14-year-olds out there. Have we already mentioned our Gossip Girl epiphany from last week? That pretty much everything basically works out? We believe it. Even with braces.

We’re not doing any work today, in honor of our lying liar of a boss who comes to the fucking office with acute, infectious bronchitis and then tells all of us it’s not communicable. Which is. Not. True. So! Here we sit, doing fuck all, but writing this, and staring at the wall, and thinking about whether we will go to the 45-minute or 90-minute yoga class at lunch. And you know: It’s like, he’s not going to get very much productivity out of us today, but we’re not going to get very much productivity out of ourselves the next two weeks, so we’re thinking it’s more than fair. Er, we don’t mean to overreact. but we’re germophobes by nature. It all dates back to our last office job, as a matter of fact, when we were six days from our first marathon, and our boss came to work (where she sat next to us!) totally sick, and we were just like: Could you not threaten our twelve-month training program because you didn’t feel like working from home today? Argh.

So today, instead, we will be thinking of many things, like where we are going to travel to next, and how nice it will be to do laundry, and what we are going to cough into a rag and then send the lying liar next week. And also, the reason for this post, in addition to expressing, on a macro level, how displeased we are with the selfish liar, is figuring out our answer to this question: Can style be acquired?

We were talking this over with Lil Bunny, and we had two distinct viewpoints: hers, that it was innate. Ours, that real styling genius was innate—we’re never going to be a stylist—but that for most people, even most stylish people, it could be acquired, with time and risk-taking. And money. Because the people we know who are stylish—we’re not sure we know the innate kind. But we do know plenty who work and work and work at it. Our position is they try harder, and spend more time on it, and it shows. What do you think?

Life, we have always truly believed, is much too short for discerning one runway model from another, but we love this Daria Werbowy TV ad for H&M. That furry-hooded coat she’s wearing, as she gets out of the cab? We’re so buying that, and stat.

Just a reminder: Kate Moss at Topshop A/W debuts tomorrow. We’re feeling distinctly less excited about this, this time around.

So this is pretty much the most terrifying website we have ever visited: “Run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts who love PVC, plastic and vinyl.” That is probably the most times we have ever seen the word “enthusiasts” in one sentence. This reminds us of the day we were doing Internet searches for bears. Not all bears are the grizzly kind.

Anyway, we were interested in Plastique Unique because they were apparently the source for the Lily Cole editorial in our new British Vogue, and sometimes you really are curious about where you’d be able to find a plastic “all-in-one.” (Which is, it seems, like a bigger, adult version of a onesie. Can we mention here that we once worked with this horrible, horrible woman, who was not a native nor even a competent speaker of English, which was of course totally fine except for the fact that she was ostensibly being paid to write in English? And how she re-edited this story we had already, thoroughly competently, edited, and changed every reference to a “onesie” to a “onesize”? And how we just prayed we would have the chance to piss in her coffee at some point? Er, not to sound completely insane.)

Anyway! Plastique Unique. We can’t put any of the pictures from the site here, because they remind us too, too much of an episode of Taxicab Confessions, but: It is here, if you are in the mood for all sorts of plastic-y weirdness.

Above: Plastic “all-in-one,” about $80

In today’s Reader Mailbag:

Dear Bunnyshop,

I don’t usually care about which model is which, but can you tell me who that Victoria’s Secret girl is, the one who’s all, “No wires, just wings!” I actually don’t really care who she is, but I need to know what her accent is—Estonian? Russian? It’s driving me insane. And I don’t even know if Estonians and Russians speak different languages. Thanks!

We have the answer. Her name is Miranda Kerr … and she’s Australian. And if you’re looking for a bit more of her, here’s a “video diary.” We’re sure it’s really open and revealing. We would like to add that we mean that in the psychological, PR way, rather than the weird clothing-optional way.

And the bra she’s advertising: Infinity Edge wireless bra, $42.50