From Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas:

I was taken to a room I had read about often. It is officially Miuccia Prada’s office, and it is as stark and contrived as her designs: poured concrete, a slew of orange and yellow molded plastic Eames chairs; and, sticking up in the center of the floor, a metal tube slide – by artist Carsten Höller – that runs three floors down to the parking lot and is titled The Slide No. 5. Prada has whizzed down it when asked to by reporters.

If the name Carsten Höller seems familiar, it’s probably because you saw photos of the crazy amazing slides he installed at London’s Tate Modern in 2006. Note to self: if you ever become a Lex Luthor-type, make sure to commission your own Höller office slide.

Cintra Wilson has a fun piece on Salon right now about her first time covering New York Fashion Week (which I think she is actually at on behalf of the NYT as their Critical Shopper):

So I ventured backstage to ask irrelevant questions of the designers and ogle the gorgeous little girls with their hair in curlers: 8-foot-tall high school girls with the bones of model airplanes and the faces of 8-year-old children. Their thighs are the same width as their ankles; their arms no bigger around than a silver dollar. A model named Carly, age 15, quickly became my favorite—an entirely sweet, corn-fed child. She is becoming famous on the runway for jutting out her tiny hips, leaning her shoulder blades to curve at a 30-degree angle over her 6-inch heels, stupefying her already bewildered expression into “someone slipped a Darvon in my Mountain Dew” and stomping down the catwalk looking like a zombie Slovakian sex slave.

Pretty sure the model she refers to is Karlie Kloss, whose signature walk Amy Odell of New York Magazine describes as featuring “a kind of stoned death stare; she moves in slow motion, swaying her head from side to side in such a way that if laser beams were to suddenly shoot out of her eyes—and we suspect they might any minute now—she would obliterate everyone in the first two rows.” Apparently Tyra Banks does not approve of her walk, which you know, makes me kind of really love it without even having seen it.

Victorya Hong finally got Auf’d on last night’s Project Runway, and so after YiMay and I got over being upset that the lone Asian on the show was now gone—about five seconds—we decided it was time to adopt Christian Siriano as one of us.

He thinks Asians are fierce, and we think he’s pretty fierce, so hey, welcome to the fold, Christian, you Honorary Fierce Asian you!

Okay, so Heath Ledger died today, in an apartment owned by Mary-Kate Olsen, that’s conveniently located a block away from both the Gawker offices and Nick Denton’s loft. The cops are saying it looks like a suicide, sure, but let’s pretend we live in the world of Ugly Betty for a minute and consider alternate theories:
Maybe Denton offed Ledger to give his flagging flagship property a boost? Or even better, maybe Scientologists killed him and are framing Denton for it, an elaborate revenge for Gawker publicizing that bizarre Tom Cruise video?
Really, almost any stupid idea one can come up with is preferable to thinking a smart, successful, handsome young guy with practically all the world at his feet just killed himself, and that he chose to leave his daughter, who’s so young herself that she’ll probably grow up not being able to remember him. Drugs are retarded and accidental overdoses suck, but man, that kind of suicide is for assholes.

I wasn’t affected by Dreamhost’s massive money fuckup today because I’m fairly paranoid as a result of watching The X-Files as a teenager and never trust companies to auto-bill correctly, so hey, thanks Chris Carter!
Anyway, the mystery that’s currently got me going is how a company that’s gotten as big as Dreamhost has over the past couple of years still let the guy who runs the Groo the Wanderer mailing list anywhere near the billing. Has no one else there ever read the damn book? Clearly this disaster was an inevitability.