Chanel has finally presented her "official" new in-house model, Anna Mouglalis (the "s" is silent). The press release about her contract was sent in May, so it took them 6 months do decide what to do with her. Judging by the results, they should have taken six months more.

Mouglalis was a typical MAW (Model, Actress, Whatever) before she met Karl Lagerfeld. He was moonlighting -- Lagerfeld loves money -- as a film costumes designer in an historical movie she appeared in. According to the official storyboard from Chanel PR, he decided "on the spot" (yeah, sure) that this girl should be the next Chanel girl. It's really difficult to understand why.

She looks a bit like Ines de la Fressange (Ines was, and still is, much prettier), the best Chanel girl ever. After Lagerfeld fired Ines over a stupid argument, he never found a model like her again. They were either invisible (even I can't remember the names), or great supermodels who didn't agree to sign the exclusive clause in the standard Chanel contract, so were not recognised as Chanel girls anyway: Claudia Schiffer, Christy and Linda, Angela Lindvall and the such.

Now, this girl ain't Angela, that's for sure. In her first portfolio for Chanel (pic above, bigger frame and scan here), published this week in ELLE France, she is presented by Lagerfeld as a caricature of a Parisian lady. She looks like the French mistress in American movies: a table in La Closerie des Lilas, a paris-beurre sandwich, an empty glass of wine, and a slightly messed-up shirt, like she's just back from a romantic interlude. Only the beret is missing.

Mouglalis gets also the cover, with a prominent mention of Chanel (I've put the scan here). it's a kind of "shocking" fashion cover, because she wears denim with Chanel. Only it's been 14 years since Anne Wintour's most famous cover, Michaela Bercu in Place de la Concorde wearing denim and Christian Lacroix, so if anything, the same styling today looks conservative and reactionnary, not shocking at all.

You'll all probably prefer Mouglalis in this old Numero photo.

Irrational Exuberance
By STEPHEN TODD NY TIMES

When readers opened the June 2002 issue of Wallpaper magazine, they found a baffling surprise. It wasn't the discussions of $500 dominos, personal submarines or ''two-roomed goldfish bowls.'' It was the editor's letter. Written, as always, by Tyler Brûlé, it ended on an uncharacteristically melancholy note: ''As for me, gentle readers, little more to say than thank you and adieu.'' The man who had run the magazine since it was founded six years before, who had used it to define and propagate a new aesthetic so thoroughly branded that it was known only by the magazine's name, was stepping down. It was the end of an era.

Or to put it more precisely, it was the end of a vanishingly brief moment in consumer history. But through the combination of the style world's insular obsession with trends and the magazine's own self-mythologization, that brief moment had come to seem, to Wallpaper's devoted readers, like the dawning of a new age in design. The look of the magazine, the tone of its articles, the subjects of its fascination and the precision of its demographic target had all been perfectly in tune with the cultural mood of the times. Without Brûlé, supporters and detractors alike wondered, could the magazine survive? More important, could those times?

Brule, now 34, got his start in television, working first for the BBC, then eventually as a London bureau chief for Fox television. Quick-witted, charismatic and attractive, he was swiftly picked up by the fashion pack and was soon writing style features for The Sunday Times, The Observer and Vanity Fair. But he was easily bored and began accepting reporting assignments in the Middle East and other trouble zones. In Afghanistan, Brûlé was injured by sniper fire and subsequently repatriated to England, where he was hospitalized for a month. As the urban(e) myth has it, while reading magazines and reflecting on the meaning of life, the universe and Verner Panton plastic chairs, Brûlé had something of an epiphany. ''I realized you got one shot at life,'' he said, ''and there was no magazine out there that was telling me about things that were suddenly very important in life -- home, food, drink and seeing the world.''

When he recovered, he gathered a small team of creative acolytes and put together a photocopied mock-up to show to advertisers and publishers. ''At that time, I thought of Tyler as my cute, clever, funny friend,'' remembers Alice Rawsthorn, director of London's Design Museum. ''But I was blown away when he showed me the dummy of the magazine. It was astoundingly concise and clear.'' Read on (free regis. needed)