Chic Happens is updated, and although all of their news items were previously posted on this humble weblog, I truly can't beat the writing, nor the small bits (I especially liked the item on Peta and Yasir Arafat). This is their two cents on the HB carnaval:

Here's a Fashion Week puzzle to sink your Mombasa handles into: Bonnie Fuller's contract at Us! Weekly is up for renegotiation just as Glenda Bailey is teetering on her stilettos at Harper's Bazaar. Conventional wisdom has Bonnie buzzing and Glenda gurgling. Remember last year's HB re-launch issue, with Gisele's back on the back cover, and the deathless cover-line, "Fashion's Back!" Unfortunately, "fashion's back" is just what the industry showed the mag, with a 12.5 percent drop in advertising. Glenda's decision to revive the occasionally baroque HB cover style did kick newsstand sales up 13 percent in the last half of 2002, which is not hard to believe when you compare them with Vogue's recent outings (Debra Messing on a swing? And they say British Vogue looks like a TV guide.) Bonnie's stellar result at Us! means she has momentum. But she's fighting a two-front war. She can't be trying to make up with Vogue over that unfortunate Zeta-Jones cover incident (see "It's All About Anna!" in last Fashion Week's Us! special) at the same time as angling to be her chief rival. Yet she and Glenda still have that whole "any Marie Claire you can do, I can do better" thing between them.

BRYANT PARKS FAUX FATTIES ON RUNWAY
By JARED PAUL STERN, NY POST

Tuesday night, Lane Bryant presented its super-size lingerie line with a show at the Manhattan Center. The audience, culled from a list of fashionistas and press, was hardly the sort to need extra-wide undergarments.

The camp value was high; the message, if any, all but lost.

Most of the men watching were not slobbering over the corpulent cuties. They looked like they'd rather be wearing the lingerie themselves.

The evening's emcee, Roseanne, quickly caught the vibe. "Are there any gay people here?" she asked, drawing a big laugh.

The girls weren't exactly massive; you wouldn't want some of 'em sitting on your lap, necessarily, but they were hardly behemoths.

In point of fact, Roseanne was the biggest of the lot.

"I thought I'd be the only fat person here," she joked. Hardly. Not everyone can look like Gisele in Victoria's Secret, it's true. There can be no arguing that our society is obsessed with physical perfection to the point of insanity.

But faux fatties in frilly panties don't add much to the equation.

Luckily, Tuesday evening's theme was "The Grand Cabaret," which meant drinks were served - a good thing, since some of the glistening protuberances necessitated large gulps of same.

One thing that rubbed Roseanne the wrong way, and definitely did seem incongruous, was the troupe of sinewy dancers who performed energetically entre acte, as if giving the audience a break from all the fleshy excess.

"I'd like to see those fat girls do that," harrumphed one audience member.

Indeed, the lardy lovelies whose cups runnethed over mainly waddled down the runway and left it at that.

But Mia Tyler, one of the rounder runway walkers, looked like someone attacked her sister Liv with a bicycle pump.

And chubby Kelly Osbourne, who performed her out-of-tune rendition of "Papa Don't Preach" for a finale, looked downright tiny by comparison.

As a final puzzlement, gift bags handed out after the show contained a quite petite "wife-beater"-style T-shirt that wouldn't have served as a washcloth for even the smallest of those on stage.

"I actually thought the girls were bigger this year," opined our colleague Richard Johnson, "but maybe I was just sitting closer to the stage this time."