Fashion’s Favorite Twink to Head UngaroFrench design-house Emanuel Ungaro is expected to announce today that they’ve appointed New York design whiz kid Esteban Cortazar as womenswear chief. The choice of Cortazar, who says he’s 23 years old, is sure to surprise many in the fashion world because of his relative inexperience (though he’s been showing in New York since he was 18) and the fact that he’s been taking a break from fashion lately. He didn’t show last season, and you’re more likely to see him posing for pictures on the red carpet than one of his designs. (Or see him on Top Chef!) “Ungaro chief executive officer Mounir Moufarrige has a knack for making surprising designer choices,” reports WWD. “As president of Chloé, he picked the then 25-year-old Stella McCartney to succeed Karl Lagerfeld in 1997.” Ugh: young, cute, talented, and given opportunities beyond his years? We’re so resentful. He didn’t even have to date Harvey Weinstein!
Ungaro Taps Cortazar [WWD]
company town
‘Times’ Editorial Chief Andy Rosenthal, UnpluggedMEDIA
• Incoming Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes may well spin off the company’s huge cable unit, but a sale of Time Inc. looks unlikely since the small potential proceeds (and big tax penalty) would little benefit a company of Time Warner’s size. [NYT]
• Times editorial-page editor Andy Rosenthal calls all executive editors, including Bill Keller and his own father, crazy. Sweet. [Radar]
• Rupert Murdoch is confirming to all his friends he plans to bring in Times of London editor Robert Thomson to become the Journal’s publisher as part of an “Aussie invasion” in the first few months of next year. [Guardian via Media Mob/NYO]
company town
Greg Larkin Was the Al Gore of the Subprime MessFINANCE
• Alan Greenspan was giddy when old buds Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney took over the White House. But it turned out they were bad boys and not his friends at all. Check out this and more in Greenspan’s new bio. [
in other news
Sheryl Crow Will Save the Newspaper Industry!
So there are all the standard problems newspapers are having with their readerships — that they’re too old, that they’re moving online, that they never call or write anymore — and at the Wall Street Journal there’s a whole other set on top of that: Long seen as only the businessman’s paper, the Journal has a readership that’s particularly old and significantly male. How to bring younger, womaner readers to the paper? With a new ad campaign, of course. People like the New York Giants, Alice Waters, and Sheryl Crow will be depicted talking about why the Journal is important to them, according to a reporting today’s Times. For example:
Ms. Crow, 44, for example, learned last year that she had breast cancer; the ad with her includes part of a Journal article about breast cancer.
You know, as opposed to all those old Journal ads featuring men talking about their prostate cancer.
Newspaper Readers of a Different Kind [NYT]