• It looks like Vogue is finally taking note of the recession. The July issue features a $40 Gap hat and $50 pair of J. Crew shorts. Ouch. [NYT]
• The Transformers sequel topped the box office once again this week, raking in $42.4 million to edge out Fox's 3D movie Ice Age by a smidge. [THR]
• Some retailers have been covering up the new issue of GQ featuring a semi-nude Sacha Baron Cohen. Not that GQ minds the "controversy." [NYT]
• Casey Kasem counted down the hits for the last time this weekend. [ABC]

You might have thought that Los Angeles is a progressive city, but think again. All it takes is one little wink-wink ass-fucking photo shoot with a movie star and high school students to get parents all upset.

This is what happens when magazines die too fast. Conde Nast folded Men's Vogue last October. But don't worry, Men's Vogue subscribers! We're hooking you up with a subscription to Portfolio. Wait.

Glenn Beck cries all the time because he's incapable of regulating his emotions. Also, it's a good image. Here's some deeply creepy and oddly transfixing behind-the-scenes video of Beck mugging and crying for the camera at his GQ photo shoot.

• More on the winners and losers—both at the dinner and on the red carpet—at last night's CFDA Awards. [NYT, FWD, Cut, TDB, Pipeline]
• Not surprisingly, the powers that be at Calvin Klein aren't the least bit displeased by the new controversy surrounding their not-so-new ad campaign for the company's jeans line. [Cut]
• Say it ain't so: Britain's Mirror reports Agyness Deyn is "quitting modeling and New York and coming home to concentrate on her acting career." [Mirror]
• Because he's willing to do whatever it takes to ensure you see his movie when it comes out, Sacha Baron Cohen appears in the buff on GQ's new cover. [GQ]

GQ assigned photographer Jill Greenberg to shoot Glenn Beck for an interview, in a cheeky homage to Greenberg's notorious series of crying children. Funny! Hey, didn't Beck accuse Greenberg of "terrorizing" children for those photos? Of course he did.

Internet fameball competition was already intense before the recession and subprime celebrity crisis. Now it's gone cutthroat. And Lydia Hearst, never shy about exposing flesh, will not be forgotten so, hey, here are her tits.

A recap of the shows, parties, and gossip you've missed at Fashion Week thus far after the jump.

GQ held its second annual "Best New Menswear Designer in America" competition last night in conjunction witht he CFDA. Finalists like Andre "3000" Benjamin, David Mullen, Alex Carleton, Robert Geller, Sam Shipley, Jeff Halmos, and Yigal Azrouel were joined by guests like Tommy Hilfiger, Fern Mallis (left), Thom Browne, Jim Nelson, Kelly Cutrone, Phillip Lim, Derek Lam, Peter Som, Rory Tahari, Chase Crawford, Steven Kolb, Ally Hilfiger, Fonzworth Bentley, David Chu, Ryan Leslie, David Lauren, Katie Lee Joel, Glenn O'Brien, Steven Alan, Calvin Klein mens creative director Italo Zucchelli, GQ publisher Peter Hunsinger, and last year's winner, Daiki Suzuki. [PMc, NYO, FWD]

• Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helù has pumped $250 million into the beleaguered New York Times Co. [NYT]
• Newsday's editor-in-chief and managing editor have been absent from the office the past few days and it's still unclear what exactly happened. [NYP]
• Matt Cooper has joined Talking Points Memo as editor-at-large. [Politico]
• For the first time, movie ads will appear during this year's Oscars. [AdAge]
• NBC says 90 percent of its Super Bowl ads have been sold. [AP]
• Jennifer Aniston on the cover of Vogue in December and GQ in January provided a nice boost to both titles. [WWD]

• For the first time in 12 years, FedEx is skipping the Super Bowl. [AdWeek]
• Another gloomy sign for NBC as the Super Bowl approaches: The network is allowing an agency to divide up 30-second commercials. [THR]
• GQ's cover featuring a half-nude Jennifer Aniston seems to be too risqué for the Hudson News outlet in Grand Central Terminal. [Folio]
• SAG has delayed voting on a potential strike until at least January 14. [EW]
• Ticket sales have tumbled since Jeremy Piven ditched Speed-the-Plow. [AP]

• Jennifer Aniston posed naked on the cover of GQ and inside said boyfriend John Mayer is "extraordinary" with his instrument, but couldn't name his big hit song: "Did not know much about him before I met him. I'd heard ... you know, uh 'Your Body' – that song."

♦ Barack Obama's first post-election interview with 60 Minutes (an excerpt is on your left) earned the show its biggest audience in nine years. [THR]
♦ Dan Rather has spent $2 million battling CBS thus far, but it looks like his time and money may finally be paying off. [NYT]
♦ MTV's TRL came to an end yesterday, in case you haven't heard the terribly tragic news. [NYT]
♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post appears to have warmed to Barack Obama. "So has Mr. Murdoch gone soft on liberals—or perhaps just reacted pragmatically to Mr. Obama's sizable victory?" [NYT]
♦ The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The flick generated $70.4 in its first three days. [Reuters]

Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!

Megan Fox's bracing candor in the new issue of GQ continued to captivate readers today, with her stripper-wooing antics and confession that "Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a mountain ox with my bare hands" stirring both deep resentments and arousal among animal-loving lesbian fetishists around the world. The sexless Defamer investigative crew, meanwhile, had more specific interests in mind: Olivia Wilde is lovely enough, but who exactly is "Nikita," the Body Shop stripper Fox claimed to have had a brief, intense fling after relocating to LA a few years ago at age 18? It's funny — when we called The Body Shop this afternoon, a veteran employee there wondered the same thing!Told about the Fox story and asked if he knew a Nikita, the man who answered the phone replied in brusque, Slavic-accented tones. "No," he said."No Nikita." This would have been back around 2004, maybe 2005. We know it was a long time ago, but — "No, we haven't had Nikita. But lots of girls come and go." He said he'd been there 13 years, but responded with silence when asked his name and position. "Everybody's coming and going. They work one day, two days, one week. It's like this." But no Nikita? "No." Click. We were worried about this, particularly after Fox doth protested too much to her interviewer about her high-octane acknowledgment projecting "a Lindsay Lohan vibe" and asking, "Are you going to push an ‘Is she a lesbian' angle?" Well, kind of, though we'd technically need another girl before buying into all the Aerosmith ballad-dancing and Fox's lovelorn urgings to Nikita to leave the lifestyle. Still — we want to believe! If "yes Nikita," there surely must be some Body Shop regular or former patron who can put a name to the date or — better yet — a face to the name. Operators are standing by! [Photo Credit: GQ]

Though the upcoming Diablo Cody thriller Jennifer's Body may cover up more of actress Megan Fox than people were expecting, at least Fox makes up for it by exposing herself in the latest edition of GQ. Few subjects are left untouched in the wide-ranging interview, whether it's her boyfriend's penis ("Who’s given a hand job since seventh grade? Not me"), Disney ("Fuck Disney"), or her Transformers director (when asked if the Transformers sequel will give the actress more to do, Fox flatly responds, "Transformers 2 is directed by Michael Bay"). Still, most tongues will wag when Fox recalls the female stripper she fell in love with at LA's full-frontal emporium The Body Shop when she was just 18:

At what point does empathy for elfin British pop singer Lily Allen begin to dry up? So far this year she's had a miscarriage, broke up with her lover and lost a contract to Agent Provocateur. Last night she got drunk at the GQ Men Of The Year awards, drunkenly told off her co-host Elton John, got in a big fight with her future sister in law and infuriated police by revealing details of a secret kidnapping. Fun to watch (click the video icon to do so), but telling Elton John "fuck off... I'm 40 years younger than you and have my whole life ahead of me: probably does not enhance Allen's chances of retaining her BBC Three show, which she still has not yet lost. Unfortunately, if Allen is on the typical cycle of starlet drunkenness, she has further to fall before the rehab and bounceback. [Daily Mail, Dan News]

Rear end greasee Gisele Bundchen reveals what her astonishingly edible behind looks like without the assistance of Shiny Butt Masters in the new issue of GQ, but after spending the required hour drooling over the photos (many more, don’t you worry, after the jump), also overshares on her clear indifference towards boyfriend/baby mama abandoner Tom Brady. Despite confessing that former paramour and constant Lakers (tear) game make-out partner Leonardo DiCaprio “broke [her] heart,” it seems the tall, dark and handsome quarterback barely even caught Bundchen’s eye after repeated introductions. And when pressed for more details on why exactly she’s with the cheating jock, her reasoning sounds eerily similar to the way we’d describe our feelings towards a brother, ex-stalker, or (gulp) our dear ol’ dad. The skin-baring photos, and evidence Gisele is just playing the friendship game with Brady, after the jump.

The outline on the model at left is not a bathing suit; that would be a tan line. The woman is completely naked. The ad for Cabana Cachaça was accepted not only at Playboy but also at Details, Men's Vogue, Esquire and GQ. Yes, this says something about eroding publication standards and the financial desperation of magazines amid the current advertising downturn. But more critically, it says that Cabana Cachaça is probably some really, really crappy liquor. Larger shot of the ad, marginally NSFW, after the jump.

As we've been noting throughout Gwyneth Paltrow's incredibly successful campaign to rack up attention during her Iron Man press tour, her wardrobe has been just this side of trampy. In the last few weeks, transparent dresses (but they're designer!), S&M shoes (eccentric!), and clavicle accented jumpsuits have all been pulled out of the twice-retired actress' bag of tricks. But now that we've seen just what lies inside the June issue of British GQ, we think this sexy train has reached its final destination. Yes, Gwyneth has dropped trou, but listening to her tell it, it's just not that big of a deal, okay?