Memo to luxury good companies: Now is not the time to start cheapening your image or, worse yet, ripping off your wealthiest customers, like Bulgari seems to be doing. As the rich try to seem fashionably frugal, thus damaging the economy for everyone, it seems they are buying fewer emerald-and-sapphire-encrusted watches. Bulgari is loath to reduce prices — "that is totally wrong" for the brand, the CEO tells the Times — but to save money it is cutting corners on its products. Which, as Anna Wintour recently told everyone, is a dumb idea.

The best part of the video attached to the previously-mentioned Julia Allison story in the Times is when the Star editor-at-large gets ready for a date inside her apartment. Check out the wall decorations: Julia changes in front of a Warhol-style painting of... Julia Allison. Four Julia Allisons to be precise. Then, in front of a mirror in the hallway, you can spy yet another piece of Julia Allison-themed artwork behind her as she flips her hair (also seen here). But, hey, I'd be pretty into myself too if I was pulling down six figures for showing up in front of television cameras, as is the case with Allison, according to the Times:

CNN did a segment on the rise of "the famous-for-nothing celebrity," and turned of course to one of the top experts in the field, Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. Julia sounded a little alarmed about the whole trend toward vapid media personalities. "There is nowhere to go but down," she said. Then: "Kim Kardashian and Heidi Montag are extremely good at makeup and wearing dresses and at posing" — and at nothing else, implicitly. It would be easy to mock Allison, whose time at giveaway newspaper AM New York and whose smile-for-the-cameras gig at Star hardly justify her own reality show. But after scouring the blogs of would-be fameballs like Mary Rambin and Emily Brill during a three-week Allison drought, it would be disingenuous to call Julia anything other than a master of the topic on which she speaks. You made being famous-for-nothing look so easy, Jules! Watch Allison project a little in the video after the jump.