The line on Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree is that it, uh, hurts her blue collar cred. It's not very "Joe the Plumber" to spend more than three times the median American household income on a month's worth of clothes from elitist high-end stores. The woman's Real American authenticity has been her best asset, but that huge number, those receipts, the stores, all of those shocked everyone. Because she still looks exactly the same! Which is why this story isn't as simple as it's been painted. She's not beer heiress Cindy McCain pretending to be a woman of the people (which Cindy has obviously never done)—Palin was handed a blank check to go shopping, and she shopped exactly like a typical upper-middle class suburban mom would've shopped. And all the criticisms of her shopping are actually elitist! Seriously! Always hilarious Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan wrote all about Sarah Palin's "exceptionally ordinary" style just last month.

Nina Garcia, the erstwhile Project Runway judge and former Elle fashion director, is truly a force of nature. We told you last week that during her final months at Elle, Garcia was getting paid a hefty fee for making public appearances for Anne Klein. But a source tells us that the Anne Klein endorsement, an angry publisher, and Garcia's own strange sense of ethics helped get her booted from Elle in the first place!

The New York Times writes today about the big impact that New York teen soap Gossip Girl has had on the fashion industry. Sure no one really watches the damn thing, but somehow legions of girls, having gawped at the show's fashions, have run shrieking to the internet to purchase fancy handbags online or trundle, ripped-out pages from magazines clutched in hand, up to their favorite boutique to wrap a super chic kilt around their processed-food-fed hips. It's truly a sensation! But just as Chuck would say to some lovelorn young lady: baby, you're not the first. Yes indeed movies and television have long dictated new fashion trends, whether on the design or the commerce end, for years and years now. After the jump take a look at a few other bits and pieces of the sartorial world that were influenced by those flickering images.

Tom Ford is using nudity in his advertising! Hard to believe, I know. Mr. Ford may be one of the world's most influential designers, but his latest ads have largely completed the evolution from provocative to simply boring. Which is a difficult stunt to pull off, considering the subject matter. But these three spots, starring Brazilian Alex Schultz, are so in-your-face that they lose the sense of allure which should, ideally, accompany any fashion ad—penis-showing or otherwise. Also hard to pull off when using naked people: making your target audience think about clothes. See the disconnect there? We're ready for the cultural needle to swing back towards fully clothed models, thank you. After the jump, the three ads—which are all, predictably, NSFW.

Remember those weird meatheaded tools in Abercrombie gear who distracted everyone during Obama's rally in Evansville? Well, now you can be one of them! Sort of! By buying these Obamacrombie shirts, which are not licensed or sanctioned by either Obama or Abercrombie and Fitch so they'll probably be shut down in minutes. [Obamacrombie]

Fantastic news! CNN Anchor Don Lemon was finally given permission by his new boss to wear a vest! Everyone at CNN is so excited about this that they spent like 20 minutes talking about how great vests are, and Lemon also showed off his reading glasses. Then he said an amazing aphorism that we are having embroidered on the dress shirt we've just torn the sleeves off of.

From the May 2007 Anthropologie catalog, page 4.

Ad Age Media Guy Simon Dumenco is, as always, angry. This time it's at Jared Paul Stern — who else? — and, interestingly, it's not that Simon is mad at Jared for his journalistic ethics or his crudely miscalculated shakedown attempt or his subsequent spin campaign. Simon is mad at Jared for his clothes — which Stern claims was the real reason he was asking Ron Burkle for money:

The state portion of sales tax on clothes and shoes disappeared Saturday, at least on clothes or shoes that cost less than $110. Coming a year after the city removed its portion of the tax, clothes are shoes are now entirely sales tax-free in New York City. Yippee! To celebrate, we thought we'd go out and buy ourselves what we've really been needing: a fancy new cell phone. Until we realized there'd still be tax on that, because it's not clothes or shoes. Then we thought maybe we'd get something else we could really use: a good pair of jeans. Until we realized good jeans wouldn't be cheap enough to go untaxed, either. How to celebrate, then? Finally it hit us. We needed new socks. Celebratory, sales tax-free socks. Woo-hoo.

While we always love to see exposé upon exposé of the already over-exposéd skeezy Dov Charney and his American Apparel-branded clothing, we're slightly saddened that this piece in the Guardian falls under the category of "Special Report: United States of America." We don't expect the rest of the world to think fondly of us, but we'd much rather have foreign perception of American fuckitude revolve around the foibles of our Playskool government and not, you know, some random kosher-perv.