New York is stoking a rivalry between Nina Garcia of Project Runway and Marie Claire and Anne Slowey, Garcia's TV stand-in at Elle and star of the forthcoming reality show Stylista. It's hard to imagine either of the two fashion editors terribly minded New York's in-depth article on their differences — which, disclosure here, was written by our own Moe — considering they both have shows to push, Slowey's being brand new and Garcia's in the midst of a controversial jump to Lifetime. But it's hard to imagine Slowey, who desperately needs to put Stylista's embarrassing trailers behind her, is thrilled about the particulars of how she looks.

The Beyonce/ L'Oreal Photoshop scandal, which began earlier this week, has reached critical mass. Lots of people think that L'Oreal digitally lightened a photo (pictured) of Beyonce in an ad in Elle magazine. L'Oreal denies it. The contention that they did lighten the pop diva's skin tone is supported by-in summary-the fact that it looks like they did. Five Beyonce photos from the past are below; compare and contrast:

The Post reveals today that cosmetics giant L'Oréal painted Beyonce a lighter shade of brown for a new Elle magazine ad, "making the world-famous singer virtually unrecognizable." And they made her nose a wee bit bigger, too, no? Of course, this isn't the first time she's been whitewashed.

Anonymous sources can usually put some faith in the journalistic principle, that the anonymity of a source is a sacred thing, to be protected even at the risk of jail. But they should have less faith in a reporter's competence. Last week, a New York Times reporter withheld the name of a critic of the Chinese government but gave him away accidentally by mentioning the restaurant he owned. And there's an equally moronic slip in this week's cover story on plastic surgery in New York magazine.

• Whoops! The "anonymous" magazine editor who was quoted in this week's New York cover story about plastic surgery? Meet Elle's Carol Smith. [Portfolio]

Nina Garcia, the erstwhile Project Runway judge and former Elle fashion director, is truly a force of nature. We told you last week that during her final months at Elle, Garcia was getting paid a hefty fee for making public appearances for Anne Klein. But a source tells us that the Anne Klein endorsement, an angry publisher, and Garcia's own strange sense of ethics helped get her booted from Elle in the first place!

Mariah Carey has gotten us through tough times with her song "We Belong Together." That's why it's so unfortunate to see her unwittingly star in the worst Photoshop job we've seen in a long time. "Her New Body," exclaims the Elle cover line. It certainly is! It's not even hers. Sure, she slimmed down—but not that much, as you'll see from our photo gallery. Also: her head has been re-attached to her body crookedly, making her resemble a Bobblehead. Come on, Elle: it's like you're not even trying. The many Photoshop horrorshows trotted out before the magazine-buying public is astounding for two reasons.

Elle magazine has more internal drama at its website than one fashion website deserves! Elle.com is perhaps Hachette's most visible site, so its success is an important totem for the company to prove it knows how to do digital things right. But after some ballyhooed comings and goings at the site that have been noted here over the past month, media types are wondering whether Hachette is planning a total restart of its online properties. Well, even more new turnover at Elle.com could mean just that!

Fashion magazines have a female target audience. But the look of many fashion magazines is controlled, to a large extent, by gay men. Is that a problem for the magazines? It could be. The interests of the gays and fashion-conscious women overlap, but not perfectly (see the Perez Hilton empire, example A). But is it really possible for a women's fashion magazine to become too gay? A brief perusal of Elle tells us: it just might be!

Surprise, surprise. As we've been predicting for months, the chief exec of Hachette is stepping down. Charming former modelizer Jack Kliger bamboozled the press with talk of a multimedia revolution after taking over the French-owned magazine group in 1999; but the web strategy never moved beyond the stage of rhetoric. After nine years, he leaves behind him a motley group of hobbyist titles and Elle magazine-with neither critical mass in print nor much of a future online.

Two commenters argued today that our coverage of the brewing civil war inside Hachette was way too harsh on digital VP Todd Anderman, who we dubbed a "digital dunce." Anderman, you'll recall, is said to have offended the sensibilities of deputies Joe Berean and Keith Pollock with a mind-numbingly-long series of reorganizations and content aggregation strategies. The case against Anderman as an all-thumbs manager was only cemented by his accidental big-screen projection, at a staff meeting, of some instant-messenger venting of work frustrations to his wife. But our comments say the fault for the disaster at Hachette lies not with Anderman but with fashion primadonnas like Zee and his allies, including former store-salesman Pollock. "Todd's reputation in this business is stellar and for you to put such a nasty hit piece like this is deplorable," one wrote. Well, his reputation isn't universally "stellar," judging from the fallout from Berean and Pollock's resignation, reported in our original post. But every feud has two sides, and far be it from us to ignore either. The pro-Anderman comments are reproduced after the jump.

After the severe bloodletting at Hachette's websites last month, one would expect remaining survivors at Elle.com, ElleGirl.com and Premiere.com might be grateful. Not so. In fact, there's been something of an uprising against digital vice president Todd Anderman (left), a clumsy transplant from Maxim Digital. As Women's Wear Daily is reporting, two of Anderman's top underlings have resigned: fashion director Joe Berean and Keith Pollock, executive editor of Elle.com and ElleGirl.com. Left unsaid? Pollock is the shopboy installed by Elle creative director Joe Zee, with whom he is said to be cozy, so his disgruntled exit from Anderman's employ will not soon be forgotten. Nor will the purported reason, a series of Anderman-instigated messes stretching back to an embarrassing incident involving the VP's laptop and a digital projector.

The Olsen Twins have been attached at the bony hip since first entering our living rooms as the painful-to-watch double duo of Michelle Tanner on Full House, during which they spent most of their first six years staring blandly into the camera and earning thigh-slapper after thigh-slapper off the laugh track. And right up until now, days before turning 19, both Mary Kate and Ashley have remained one seemingly inseparable force, designing their Row line together, co-operating Dualstar and even cohabitating in their New York party palace. But as the July issue of Elle reveals, all is not well in billionaire twinland. Mary Kate, either high on the scent of Christian Louboutin leather or suffering a brain fart after all the recent trapeze classes in China she blabs on and on about taking on a whim, spills a bit too much when it comes to the twins’ recent ...”differences.”

By the end of last week things looked pretty dark in the world of Project Runway. Even setting aside the show's imminent move to Lifetime, the lawsuit between producer Weinstein Co. and former host network Bravo and the defection of Runway's executive producers, there were also alarming reports about Marie Claire maybe partnering with the show and judge Nina Garcia leaving Elle and possibly Runway itself. None of that has yet come to pass, and Women's Wear Daily informs everyone today that it's because Garcia is still negotiating with both Elle and Runway and because neither Elle nor sad Marie Claire have even started negotiations with Runway yet. WWD also reminds everyone that as bad as Elle is, at least the magazine is growing its circulation, while Marie Claire's circ dropped nearly 60,000 copies to 341,000 last year, so maybe the magazine is being used as a pawn by both Elle (in negotiations with Weinstein Co.) and Garcia (in negotiations with Elle). When you throw in the possibility of Bravo developing its own Runway imitation, there are some real opportunities here for groundbreaking research by ambitious game theorists. [WWD]

One expense line at Hachette that's been spared the French-owned magazine group's increasingly desperate cost-cutting: the travel and boyfriend-employing expenditure of Elle creative director Joe Zee. Embittered peons: gossip away.

When Jack Kliger took over Elle and Hachette's other US titles in 1999, he established himself as one of the magazine industry's few multimedia visionaries. The former Conde Nast publisher pushed Hachette's content onto EchoStar's interactive TV platform; Hachette's Car and Driver teamed up with the USA Network to produce a reality show spin-off of Cannonball Run, the cross-country car-race movie. And, when Hachette closed Elle Girl and Premiere magazines but kept their websites going, Kliger the charmer spun the cost-cutting exercise as an embrace of online media. So how's that going? Try utter disaster. We've been getting reports all day that the group has laid off almost its entire online staff. And here's one good reason: even Hachette's most successful online properties have the reach of a mid-sized blog, according to previously undisclosed web stats. (Oh, yes, and Hachette's Elle is about to lose its cherished role on Project Runway, the fashion-industry reality show.) If the future of magazines is some multimedia magic, as Kliger has been saying for a decade, Hachette has not much of a future; nor the Hachette boss himself.

• Word is that 15 people have been laid off from Elle.com and other websites at French-owned magazine group, Hachette. We're working on a longer story about the travails of Elle and the other Hachette titles. Backstory to nick@gawker.com.

Fashionista spotted the recently ousted Elle editor (and Project Runway judge) "leaving the Hearst building, sprinting across the street before hailing a cab and trying to avoid eye contact with anyone as she left." Maybe she had a job interview! (Hearst publishes lots of ladymags, but not Elle.) [Fashionista]

For reasons utterly unknown to your non-fashion mag-reading day editor, Elle has a lengthy feature this month about "Anna," the FBI agent provocateur (in the COINTELPRO sense, not the lingerie sense) who brow-beat some lazy, unemployed pot-smoking self-proclaimed "anarchists" into planning a mild act of terrorism they didn't actually have the resources or intelligence to pull off. The story is a largely sympathetic interview with "Anna" ("The car stank of body odor and sweat, thanks to the extremists rejection of regular bathing and hygeine products.... Vicks VapoRub, which Anna routinely dabbed inside her nose, made it barely tolerable."), who rented the would-be bombers a cabin and bought them bomb-making supplies and provided them with bomb-making plans and demanded they stick to the fucking plan the night they all decided they'd rather smoke pot and make pasta. If it sounds like we're condoning either terrorism or lack of personal hygiene, well, entrapment makes us queasier than hippie stink. Now the ringleader of the The Collective That Couldn't Shoot Straight faces 20 years in prison. So let's all make like anarchists and insert these little culture-jammy 'retractions' into copies of Elle! That'll help, right? Sigh.

Elle update! So, in re. today's story on the magazine and all the reality show fighting and Joe Zee and Nina Garcia—well, Ben Widdicombe's item on the upcoming Tyra-produced show about the mag mightn't have been totally accurate. The contestants cannot literally be in the way of any Elle staffers, because the show is being filmed in a recently constructed pretend office for the magazine, which has a notoriously shitty real one. All the other stuff we're still no clearer on.