Update: John Galliano has now been dismissed from Dior. Read the full story here.

We all know the story by now. Last Thursday, John Galliano was arrested at a bar for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks to a couple drinking at a nearby table. Then Dior made an official statement and suspended its creative director pending further enquiries. Then, yesterday, police ordered Galliano to face his accusers to “find out the truth”, but in the meantime, a video of Galliano spurring racist remarks was leaked onto the internet (below). Then Natalie Portman, face of Miss Dior Cherie, made a statement condemning the designer and saying she was “deeply shocked and disgusted” by his actions and “will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way.”

It’s an exceptionally strange occurrence. But what we want to know is where this leaves Dior and, more importantly, Galliano.

The industry, for the most part, is praising Dior’s decision to suspend dismiss its chief designer (except Franca Sozzani, whose defence piece has now been edited, but we all know she says some stupid stuff) – Dior, after all, has roots steeped in Jewish history and, we suspect, has a fair few Jewish employees, and if the house didn’t react to Galliano’s actions as a PR stunt, you can bet it did on principle.

But we wonder if there’s a hidden motive beneath all of this. Galliano’s collections for Dior have taken an increasingly questionable creative path and after years of relative quiet, he’s apparently returned to partying again. So is this controversy a convenient cover up for Dior to oust the British enfant terrible while it can?

Perhaps. But perhaps Galliano knows only too well the problems bubbling beneath the surface of the brand and decided to fleet before he was fired; self-destruction of his own genius. If that’s the case, and he wanted to kick Dior in the teeth while he did it, his recent actions have been a resounding success.

Sunday night’s Oscars saw almost no sign of Dior anywhere on the red carpet, save for a single Nicole Kidman. Natalie Portman, face of Parfums Christian Dior, was rumoured to wear a custom-made Dior gown for her final appearance this award season, but dropped the dress last minute following Galliano’s controversy. And now she wants nothing to do with the designer, her contract with Dior is looking vulnerable to say the least.

But what we do know is this: Galliano’s comments are racist and ludicrous, and no amount of alcohol or provocation can excuse them – though what him sitting alone and drunk in a bar at night says about his state of mind is, perhaps, sadder still. For many, Galliano is Dior, but with the house’s autumn/winter 2011 show at Paris Fashion Week just days away, it’s likely the label will present its first collection without him for 15 years.

Fact is, Dior’s going to have some rebuilding to do after this, but if it handles the situation correctly, it can repair any temporary damage. For Galliano, on the other hand, it’s game over.

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We’ll be honest, we’re a little sick of hearing old school editors slag off bloggers, and we’re growing increasingly tired of them showing their inability to get on board with the real tech world. There, we said it.

Sure, this topic may seem a little old itself now – hell, how many more times will we be reminded of Tavi’s bow blocking Grazia’s view? – but it’s done a big fat full circle and landed right back into topical conversation again, thanks to a certain Franca Sozzani.

This old school ed seems to be licking the Balenciaga boot that kicks her after unleashing a tirade on tumblers and typepads on her own blog – oh, come on – calling bloggers naïve, unprofessional, short-lived and a disease – “an epidemic”.

“There are many questions about this invasion of fashion bloggers,” Sozzani writes – nay, blogs. “Why do they have so much credit? Why do they sit in the front row? Why does the National Chamber of Italian Fashion account them so much so as to arrive to provide them with car drivers to watch the shows, as happened during the men’s fashion?”

Oops, did someone get stuck behind a blogger in a traffic jam? She continues:

“Are they important to Vogue? Do we really need all these bloggers? They don’t have points of view, but they speak only of themselves, photographing absurd outfits. What is the meaning? Meanwhile I do not even know who they are, aside from a few, because they are so many and all the same, and so caught up in what to wear to get noticed, that to my eyes they automatically become a group and not individuals.

“They crave to be recognised during the shows. I meet a lot of them who tell me their names, or I ask, because they’re sitting in the front row, and I do not remember one. They are called bloggers as tissues are called tissues, but no one knows the proper name. It is a category. Anonymous, yet present.

“They don’t do great damage because most live the life of a moth. A single night. And those that last longer are not necessarily the most talented or have a blog more interesting. It is certainly a fad and like all trends, especially in the world of fashion, they’re followed and enhanced.”

You know what’s more worrying than a blogger sitting front row or, horror, taking a picture? Someone as knowledgeable, as experienced and as talented as Sozzani sounding a little insecure.

Her rhetorical questions spell fear – fear of a world unknown to her, of change and of digital direction. Surely of all industries, fashion is key to change and staying one step ahead? And for the record, we can real off a roster of blogs who can put words more eloquently than some mainstream print media.

“Their comments are naive and enthusiastic,” she says. “They have no real weight and value for professionals. Of course not.”

Perhaps bloggers’ opinions aren’t rooted in years of traditional training and experience, but they’re valid, and hell, they have power – we know it, and so do brands.

She does try to backtrack a little:

“Personally I’d like to know what they, to understand another point of view and not just rely on journalists who “know everything because I’ve been here for thirty years!”. Having no preconceptions sometimes helps to see what the insiders do not see anymore.”

But then she says this:

“The only thing we can say with certainty is that if it [bloggers] were a disease, we would call it a ‘viral cold’. In fact, an epidemic!”

Frankly, Franca, it’s clear you probably never will get to understand another point of view with such a closed-minded attitude. You just don’t get it. Bloggers aren’t trying to compete with the print mags. A blogspot will never compare to Vogue. The point is that the two coincide, and they do so to form a better service, a better entertainment for consumers – print provides the fantasy, blogs provide the accessibility.

10 years ago, no one would’ve believed how far fashion blogs could come. They certainly wouldn’t believe they could scare Vogue Italia’s editor.

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Find out how Valentino had his bank details stolen, see Mulberry‘s latest ‘it’ bag up close and personal, and should fashion and Twitter ever mix?…

Valentino and Gianni Bulgari have reportedly had their bank account details stolen by former HSBC employee Hervé Falciani – Vogue UK

British actress Gemma Arterton has landed a new role as the face of G-Star – Fashionista.com

Has Mulberry created another ‘it’ bag with the its new Tillie Satchel? – Purseblog

Should fashion and Twitter ever mix? It seems to be the cause of more than a few problems, especially for Courtney Love – The Guardian

Catch a sneak peek at how Dame Vivienne Westwood has re-modelled the Brit Award trophy this year – Sky Showbiz

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The old weight debate has been around for as long as we can remember, but when did fashion become so thin? Has everyone forgotten the likes of Marilyn Monroe? No, they haven’t, but when Calvin Klein and Kate Moss created the waif-like models of the 90s, they also developed a pattern for the future shape of fashion. Now, however, it seems the industry may be ready for a re-jig, a curve toward something bigger – more so than ever, plus-size is in the spotlight.

Cast your minds back to the past few months in fashion: we’ve had Karl Lagerfeld, the very man who said all women want to be skinny, shoot an all-plus-size spread; Mark Fast has sent plus-size models down the runway; Crystal Renn has landed her first ever Chanel campaign; hell, even Marc Jacobs has declared plans for a plus-size line – and to top it off, yesterday, New York Fashion Week played host to the world’s first ever plus-size-only fashion show. So what’s the deal? Is it just a way of democratising shoppers in a difficult economic climate?

Well, yes, in a nutshell. If the average UK dress size is a 16, and the US a 14, that’s your mass market right there. Sure, 15-year-old girls look great down the runway, but put them in the middle of a street and they look frail at best – they don’t represent your average woman. Then again, since when has fashion been about normal?

In an industry that strives on creativity, fantasy and idealism, isn’t democratising fashion to appeal to the wider (no pun intended) audience waving goodbye to its escapist appeal? Well, perhaps, but who’s to say that plus-size fashion can’t be fantastical, too?

If fashion plays such an important part in most women’s and men’s lives – and in the global economy, in fact – doesn’t it actually make sense to appeal to the bigger (again, sorry) collective? Is it really any different to designers launching a children’s collection, or a men’s/women’s line? After all, it’s about expanding the brand to appeal to a different customer, isn’t it?

That may be well and true, but alas, the problem is the plus-size market is tricky one to tackle. Your average woman doesn’t want to buy plus-size clothing, she wants to buy ordinary clothing. She doesn’t want to buy Marc Jacobs Extra Big, or whatever it’ll be called, she wants to buy Marc Jacobs. Let’s face it, no woman likes to be made to feel bigger than she is, which herein actually poses the more ambiguous question of what actually determines plus-size. Anything over a UK 10 gets the coin in the fashion world, but that doesn’t translate to reality in quite the same way.

Still, that’s one to leave for market analysts or something, we’re sure. Maybe fashion will see this fad through and other designers will follow in Marc Jacobs’s plus-size footsteps; perhaps fashion will go back to the glamorous heydays of yesteryear when women were represented with healthy shapes and bodyweight. We don’t know, but come on – wouldn’t it be nice for curvy to mean Crystal Renn and not a super-skinny model with slightly rounded boobs?

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Nudes are in this season, but be careful saying that in public – as one Associated Press journalist will tell you, when he described Michelle Obama‘s dress as ‘flesh’, it can cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Little did the First Lady know that the dress she wore to meet the Indian Prime Minister would cause such a fuss. For the dress in question – a “sterling-silver sequin, abstract floral, nude strapless gown” as the designer Naeem Khan himself described it – has now become the centre of a racism debate over the terminology of its colour.

“Whose flesh? Not hers,” was one fashion editors response to the ‘flesh’ description, that swiftly got swapped for the less precarious ‘champagne’. So what are supposed to call this season’s hottest shade?

“We talk of nude now and there is no one colour. It’s politically incorrect,” Gale Epstein, founder of the US lingerie brand Hanky Panky, told the Telegraph. “There is a wide range for skin tone colours. Human skins tones are a whole colour palette unto themselves.”

But Indian designer Vijay Arora, for one, disagrees: “‘Nude’ covers an array of shades like whites, pinks, yellows, beiges, ivories and browns, so why get bogged down by terminology?”

While we sit here weighing up the ins and outs, we want to know what you think. Is this political correctness gone mad? Or can the term nude really be offensive? We know which way we we’re leaning…

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Other than rumours that have cropped up a couple of times that he’s set to replace Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel – he’s not, in his own words, FYI – Alber Elbaz has stayed relatively quiet, but we knew that wouldn’t last too long: today he’s thrown caution to the wind and weighed in on thin models and fashion bloggers debates.

And for the Lanvin designer, the problem with thin models is not his, nor another fashion designer’s, because everybody wants to be skinny.

“We are being accused that some models are anorexic, but we as fashion designers cannot be blamed, because you know, when I talk to women around the world, rich and poor and young and old and intellectual and not, what they want to be is skinny,” he tells Style.com. “You ask them, what is your dream? It’s to be skinny. That’s all they want, so this is something that’s happening in the world. And you know what? Me, as a designer that is not exactly skinny, all I want is comfortable clothes. All I want is beautiful. I mean, I like grey hair, I love wrinkles. But this is me. That’s why our logo is the mother and the daughter. I always feel that I have the ability or I have the luxury to design for younger and for older and for skinnier and less skinny. I feel more versatile about it.”

And his love for everyone doesn’t stop there, it reaches out to the blogosphere, too.

“I have to tell you, I love bloggers. And I’m not telling you that because I’m [trying to] bribe them. Every morning I wake up and I see the blogs,” Elbaz confesses. “There is something very innocent. There is something very honest. You can say, OK, they didn’t have the experience of seeing things. But again it’s another medium. That’s their opinion and it’s interesting to see how politically incorrect they are. Of course, when they say, “Oh my God, I love it,” I’m extremely happy. And when they say, “Oh my God, it’s a piece of shit,” I hate it.”

Read the full interview at Style.com – there’s plenty more gems where that came from.

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At last! Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue and, therefore, one of the most important individuals in the fashion world, has said what we’ve all been thinking.

Yes, Shulman has spoken out against the ‘jutting bones and no breasts or hips look’ that designers have been increasingly pushing down the catwalks since the advent of the waif in the 90s.

In a letter to a variety of fashion designers and houses – including Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Prada, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga – Shulman said that Vogue was being supplied with minuscule sample garments which forced them to hire tiny models which the magazine then had to airbrush to look larger and appeal to readers.

“We have now reached the point where many of the sample sizes don’t comfortably fit even the established star models, said Shulman in the letter which was not intended for publication but seen by The Times newspaper.

“Look at the young scene girls. The Geldof girls, Alexa Chung. They are not the kind of thin that the girls we need to use are. Daisy Lowe is a good example. She wouldn’t fit into these samples,” said Shulman, adding that her readers did not want to see very thin models anymore.

Vogue typically uses the catwalk samples made by designers up to six months before the clothes are put into production for the ‘normal sized’ market.

Shulman’s letter has won her a legion of supporters and raised her profile on the international stage. Supermodel Erin O’Connor described her comments as a “huge breakthrough

Hilary Alexander, the Telegraph’s fashion director, said:

“I totally support Alex and addressing this issue is long overdue.

“Her call now needs to be backed by all the other glossy magazine editors, who must join the chorus if they want to see a change within the fashion industry. One lone voice will not be enough.

Never-the-less it’s a brave move from Shulman, who will have won few friends among the design houses upon whom she relies for advertising revenue for British Vogue.

Of course she is right, and the shocking illustration in The Times of how models are filled out for print superbly illustrated her point.

Can there really be anybody who has sat in the audience at London Fashion Week and not felt uncomfortable at the never-ending parade of coat-hangar collar bones and toothpick thighs.

But Shulman’s stand will count for nothing if she does not receive vocal support form other big players. Will her famously blase counterparts, Anna Wintour at America Vogue and Carine Roitfeld at French Vogue, neither of whom look like they regularly chow down on a big hearty home cooked meal, support her?

Truthfully, I think it’s unlikely, although I would very happily be proven wrong.

And what about the designers?

Well, thus far, they have refused to touch this debate with a barge pole. This is the same world that celebrated the relatively normal sized Sophie Dahl but made her feel so bad about herself that within years she was a whippet thin size 8.

Shulman’s letter is a huge step forward, but won’t overcome the kind of comment I once heard made about a model in a shoot for a very well known weekly glossy about a stick thin model with ‘fat’ thighs…

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