New words making the rounds at Fashion Week: "glamit" (something that's gorgeous) and "prune" (something hideous). Words that are no longer hot: "cool," according to Project Runway's Tim Gunn, "trendy" (better to say "on trend"), and "fierce." Are you listening, Christian Siriano? [Reuters]

My relationship with Anna is one where we understand each other, says ALT. "We can communicate silently." Also, your generation, with its blogs and no Studio 54, is lame: "Each generation has its moment, and with this generation, I don't know exactly what they do." But we think so highly of you, André! [Mediabistro]

» The scene at Michael Kors was inevitably the central portion of the fashion industry/magazine world/reality TV venn diagram: Nina Garcia, Rachel Zoe with her client Joy Bryant, Heidi Klum, Joanna Coles, and Joe Zee drew the limelight away from Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, Blake Lively, Bette Midler, and Kors' mom Joan. On the runway the (smiling!) models, who were told "you are the most glamorous beach bums in the world," showed off middle-of-the-road, cheerful outfits with polka dots and gingham aplenty. [NYO, NYDN, IHT]

Stacy Bendet is a rising fashion star and the co-founder of the Alice + Olivia label. She's also the wife of Eric Eisner, the son of former Disney chief Michael Eisner. And it seems she's discovered the fountain of youth, too! When she appeared on Vanity Fair's International Best Dressed list in July (top), the very social fashionista was 30. She's since returned to the pages of Graydon Carter's mag—except in the October issue, she's managed to shed a year off her age and is listed as 29 (bottom). Does that mean when she turns 31 next month, she'll be listed as 28 in an upcoming issue of the magazine? Who knows. But considering that once upon a time she was known as Stacey Weiner and then mysteriously morphed into Stacey Bendet (and now Stacey Bendet Eisner), she seems pretty good at creating illusions.

No really, I checked with Jezebel editor Anna Holmes, seriously no one cares this year. I even checked with the anonymous comments left on New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn's blog; this is like the most irrelevant-feeling Fashion Week since the terrorists got involved. Why? Well I thought of five good reasons! This guy (pictured) is your first clue…Marc Jacobs is the only designer anyone cares about and, even though his collection was sort of cool this year, his collection has always been sort of a loss-leader funded by his insane diva behavior and that behavior mostly stopped this year. Last September Marc Jacobs started his 9 p.m. show two and a half hours late and everyone had a hissy fit about it, which in turn caused Marc Jacobs to have a hissy fit over how he was an "artist" and people should not be thinking about quotidian details such as whether their dogs had been fed. Then he dyed his hair blue, went insane and maybe also to rehab. Anyway, that is as good as it gets, in fashion. (That should tell you something.) But he is sane this year. It's all about the clothes, and no one really cares about clothes! Everyone who isn't Russian is poor. Times Thursday Styles regular Stephanie Rosenbloom has a story about the nation's thrift stores. This is hugely significant for two reasons: 1. It is actually a story, and last year around this time Stephanie Rosenbloom was writing about horseback riding in the Hampton's, but it turns out she has been hiding out in the Business section lately, getting down to proverbial business. 2. The story is that the demand for other people's cast-off ill-advised purchases has exceeded the nation's supply of ill-advised purchases. Cindy McCain is the new Victoria Beckham. Example: last week Us Weekly decreed Michelle Obama to have hands-down better style than Cindy McCain. This week the selfsame magazine has a whole feature on Cindy's supposed "makeover" and how pretty she suddenly supposedly looks! And that is not even to mention the matter of Sarah Palin's disappearing-reappearing beehive, and Michelle Obama's Thakoon dress and the cool shirt pictured above, which we found on Philebrity. Political fashion icons are the new celebrity fashion icons, and that is bad for the industry because unlike worthless celebrities who are allowed to change outfits as fast as they can spill tequila and Sparks on the ones they were wearing, politicians, at least when they are not wearing $300,000 dresses, have to pretend they understand the realities of working-class Americans busy raiding thrift stores/insurgent safe houses. The must-have item this year is the jumpsuit. Perhaps you heard about the school in Texas that recently decreed that all kids who chose to violate dress code requirements by rolling up their skirts or whatever would risk being forced to don prison jumpsuits for the remainder of the school day. Now, there is always going to be that one group of totally cool high schoolers who make the prison jumpsuits into some sort of "subversive" fashion statement, but bottom line is that high schoolers would not be incurring dress code violations if they did not want to show off their skinny high schooler legs etc. etc. and those high schoolers grow into the adults who consume fashion. So this gives me pause:

Obsessive brandbuilder Tory Burch reveals what she did on Monday, and of course it sounds impossibly energetic, organized, and glamorous, beginning with a 6am run in Central Park while wearing The Row (the Olsens' label; t-shirts start around $300). She then dons a Carolina Herrera dress and Pierre Hardy pumps, expertly mothers her three boys, lunches at Swifty's, attends fashion shows, and ends the day with a friend's party, to which she wears her own sequined minidress.

Cityfile compiled a booklet of Faces at Fashion Week and posted it online so people like you could have your own glamorous little liquid crystal menagerie to admire right at your very own venue of indentured servitude. Look, Carine Roitfeld! The Ronsons! Andre Leon Talley and Kelly Cutrone and two separate Hearsts! And the most startling realization upon clicking and resetting text size enough to read the goddamn thing…

♦ At Betsey Johnson, the front row—Kelly Osbourne, Perry Farrell, Miss J Alexander, Bow Wow, Ugly Betty's Mark Indelicato, Jason Lewis, Mickey Boardman, Lynn Yaeger, and Patrick McMullan—sat at little tables festooned with frosted cupcakes and lollipops for a Peter Pan-themed show in which Liam McMullan played a pirate "throwing gold coins at the audience and pinching the models' exposed bottoms as they walked by." Betsey did her customary finale cartwheel, showed off her granddaughter (left), and went off on vacation with her boyfriend (an Italian decades her junior, of course). [NYO, The Cut, Fashion Wire Daily]

Worst outfit spotted in the tents during Fashion Week? [TONY]

Fashion tragedy! Halston, the glamorous 70s brand that mogul Harvey Weinstein was planning to revive with relentless sexiness, is not lighting the world on fire just yet. Harvey paid $25 million for Halston last year, but its latest collection got "largely unenthusiastic reviews"—a problem the company decided to solve by reining in its creative director and moving towards design-by-committee. Which always works well in creative endeavors, yes! For Weinstein, Halston so far is just another disappointing investment, along with his "Myspace for Millionaires" and his DVD business. Free solution, Harvey: get them to wear Halston on Project Runway. You can send a check to our office. [WSJ]

The Fashion Week crowd will take a break from discussing hemlines and turn its attention this evening to the other big (and possibly more important?) story dominating the media: the upcoming presidential election. A fundraiser for Barack Obama will take place tonight at Charles Nolan's Chelsea studio. Expected to attend: Anna Wintour (who sat alongside a dour Natalie Portman at Derek Lam's show earlier today, left), Sarah Jessica Parker, and André Leon Talley, among others. The Obamas won't be there, but they'll gladly scoop up the $5,000 checks that buy admission to the VIP party beginning at 6:30pm.

Well if it isn't a blessing from the Gawker Media Gods who brought us that pretty fundamentalist rape victim hating Alaska Governess! The Style Network plans to double your viewing rations of Project Runway judge Nina Garcia! This was known already, actually, but now there are details: the show is called Running in Heels and revolves around the staff of Marie Claire magazine, Elle having fired Garcia after deciding to make a reality show featuring Garcia rival Anne Slowey. Nina vs. Anne! Elle vs. Marie Claire! It is like Road Rules vs. The Real World, only…something we'll actually set our DVRs for! But can the show be anywhere near as awesome as the reality-TV-esque circumstances that enabled it to be?Nina told me1 last month she'd had plenty of offers to do other shows before, but didn't want to do a makeover show. She hasn't: According to Marie Claire, Running In Heels intends to "offer unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Marie Claire and the stylish, smart women who put the magazine together each month," including "private video confessionals," in which "viewers will learn how the interns cope with their jobs, their superiors and each other." That sounds so good!!! Except, of course, for two things: 1. Seriously, it's Marie Claire.2 How bad could the bullshit be at Marie Claire? The show runs the risk of being as boring as Vogue's stupid three million dollar "documentary" web show no one except Tatiana watches. At least Elle's Stylista has the virtue of being watchable, at minimum, as a trainwreck. 2. It's going to be on the Style Network. Which is owned by Comcast, unlike new Project Runway host Lifetime, which is half-owned by Marie Claire publisher Hearst. What kind of entertainment conglomerate snatches up Nina Garcia only to not air her new foray into "docu"-reality TV? Something is off there. My guess is that Nina, who is pretty controlling of her image, did not want to make a campy gossipy addictive voyeuristic Devil Wears Prada-type reality show when she is already, you know, famous.

If you were hanging around the tents yesterday, you might have seen people clutching a little black booklet, an illustrated guide to some of the familiar (and not-so-familiar) faces attending the shows during Fashion Week. In honor of the events in Bryant Park, we put a handy facebook together, just so no one would—God forbid!—get their magazine editors or socialites mixed up. If you weren't one of the lucky ones to get a hard copy, have no fear. We've posted it online. For a lower-resolution version, click here. For a copy in PDF format, click here.

♦ At Marc Jacobs, there were lots of celebs like Helena Christensen, Elijah Wood, Nicole Richie, Stephanie Seymour, Kelly Osbourne, Sofia Coppola, Winona Ryder, and Jennifer Lopez, and the elaborate, adventurous, world travel-inspired clothes got high marks—but all of the above was entirely eclipsed by the presence of Posh Spice's new gamine haircut. [WWD, Telegraph, Hello]

If you're still wondering how it is that people take Sarah Palin seriously, consider this: Her eyeglasses have caused a run on Kazuo Kawasaki frames, idiot reporters at ABC are calling her glasses the "bipartisan must-have fashion accessory" of the season, and even her hairdo, which the LA Times described as "a study in contrasts, carefree and 'done' at the same time" and noted was longer than "any other major female U.S. political figure's," is becoming all the rage. No word on American parents are now naming their little babies "Trig" in record numbers. [ABC, LAT]

It was a little over three years ago that the Onion lampooned the idea of a highbrow quarterly spinoff of Us Weekly. Now, thanks to the American cult of celebrity, this "joke" has finally come true! The celebrity gossip rag is expanding, via an unnamed new publication, into the slightly more highbrow topic of celebrity fashion, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Us owner Jann Wenner is chasing the success of People's StyleWatch, which now publishes 10 times per year and circulates more widely than Vogue. Given the "fashion" choices of many celebrities, that's insane. It's also a singular accomplishment: Time Inc.'s In Style and American Media's Star both launched failed fashion spinoffs. Maybe Wenner thinks he can do better. Or maybe he's just trying to jack up the price he'll fetch when the magazine overlord finally sells off (as long rumored) the Us portion of his empire. Notes the Journal:

Getting your photo snapped by New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham as you click around Manhattan is every girl's secret dream. But Fashion Week is full of heartbreak—there will always be more richer, thinner, and better-connected than you. Cunningham, who captures seen-about-town street style, is apparently no exception: a student from the Fashion Instutite of Technology says he summarily dismissed her with a "slight wave of his hand" when she spotted her idol in the FIT lobby earlier today:

It may well be within the realm of human achievement to make an ad for Hair Club For Men that does not cause an involuntary shudder of revulsion. But this is not that ad. This is an ad where a bald man goes to Hair Club to grow a curly mullet, and is then fawned over by his own comely "stepdaughter." "Is that your stepdad...oh my gosh, he's not too bad looking!" Christ, why, why? All the disturbing subtext you can fit in one minute:

Eva Longoria (left) leaving the tents with Robert Verdi ... Simon Doonan showing off his moves in Bryant Park ... Mickey Boardman and Veronica Webb smiling backstage at the Catherine Malandrino show ... Blake Lively looking pretty for the photogs at the Miss Sixty show ... Lindsay Lohan posing with Fern Mallis ... Bijou Phillips smoking with a friend in Bryant Park ... Renee Zellweger posing for photos with Carolina Herrera ... Rachel Hunter relaxing with friends at an after-party at Socialista ... Mary-Kate Olsen walking with her handlers in the rain through Midtown ... model May Andersen wearing a short black dress at the William Rast after-party ... and Mariah Carey going to dinner at Nobu with husband Nick Cannon after performing at the Fashion Rocks event.

• Drama abounded at DKNY's show yesterday: PETA protestors burst onto the runway, shouting and brandishing placards—to the apparent amusement of André Leon Talley—while Petra Nemcova's new bangs rendered her unrecognizable and therefore unmolested by the media. Meanwhile the rather random celebrity trio of Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and Nicole Richie were regaled with "combinations of electric blue and black, neon pink and yellow anorak dresses, parachute pants and color-blocked knits" and a finale led by Donna Karan's five-year-old granddaughter Stefania. [The Cut, Fashionologie, NYDN, Telegraph]