BlackBook Magazine

It seems like just yesterday that I arrived at work to find a young editorial assistant wide-eyed and shaken. "Someone called for you," she gasped. "He said he was going to slit your throat." Not a normal Monday-morning message in the mag business. "He said something about hunting and demanded a Porsche or something." Ah, now it made sense. It was my friend Hunter S. Thompson. I'd been trying to convince Porsche to drive a new all-road model from Los Angeles to Woody Creek, Colorado, for Hunter to test drive and me to write up for the San Francisco Examiner Magazine. She played the message, and that familiar staccato baritone filled the conference room. "I want that Porsche. And I want it now. If I don't get it, I will hunt you down like an animal and slit your throat." Such love.

Has anyone seen Ewan McGregor lately? No? Exactly. He's been riding motorcycles around the world and occasionally adopting a baby along the way. He's also making movies again and has nine flicks in the can for next year. But there's always time to shill for scents, right? Flip through any September glossy and you'll see the Scot -- scarfed, unshaven, gazed and hairy -- pitching his new fragrance for men by Davidoff called Adventure (available at Dillards!).

Say that five times fast. More bad news for embattled retailer Steve & Barry's. As if filing for bankruptcy wasn't enough, now they're getting fouled by Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury. Marbury is suing his broke buddies for millions in royalties from his hot-selling Starbury sneaker line. Marbury launched the sneaker line two years ago with a $15 price tag so poor kids could buy them. How nice! Now that S&B has tanked, Marbury is looking for his endorsement cash, claiming he's owed $2.2 million. No worries, though. Marbury is in talks with Amazon to sell the kicks.

Metrosexuals move over. There's a new ... sexual in town. The latest buzzphrase is retrosexual, which seems to be nothing more than a backlash to exfoliating brother in arms. In the new book The Retrosexual Manual: How to Be a Real Man, Dave Besley delves into the grizzled world of manliness and machismo. Check out the book yourself and flip through the pages while watching Mad Men, or just read the Retrosexual Ten Commandments:

1. A retrosexual always pays for the date. If she tries to insist, so much the better. He still pays.

2. A retrosexual deals with it. Flat car batteries, house break-ins, cable TV malfunction, earthquake damage -- he just gets on with it.

Michael "Gilly" Phelps may want to keep to the pool. While nobody questions his swimming talents or his taste in ladies, his choice of fashion is another matter. Guest of a Guest produces this unnerving photo of Phelps spotted last night at Beijing hotspot China Doll sporting a shirt that looked as if he upchucked a banana daiquiri all over his front. His bemedaled look didn't turn out much better, however.

Abercrombie & Fitch store earnings may be down a 4% splinter, but company execs are reportedly upbeat since overall net is up 5% to $845.8 million (ch-ching!). And they have a full slate of flagship store openings for 2009: Milan, New York, Copenhagen, and Tokyo. I don't remember the last time A&F was cool outside of a college campus, but I just finished A.E. Hotchner's outstanding memoir on Ernest Hemingway, and I was reminded how awesomely outdoorsy the brand once was before they got into softcore beefcake porn.

Budget Fashionista did an interesting poll about the length of time between haircuts. You see, I go a month or two sometimes without getting haircuts. Why? Mainly because my barber -- who I think cut hair for Eisenhower Administration -- gives me a close cut no matter what I request. Then he cleans up with a straight razor that makes me tremble with fear (because he's 150 years old). So, I wait until I'm shaggy, then walk in and leave a mess of hair on the floor. Turns out I'm hardly alone. I'm not sure if this applies to both men and women, but the numbers speak for themselves: Out of the 500 people polled, 33% go between six and eight weeks between trims. Six percent go a month or less. And 12% go longer than a year. Filthy savages.

Lagerfeld in Phat Pharm? Cavalli dressing like Rhett Butler? That's the September issue of Harper's Bazaar. The mag wrangled together top designers to dress them up in fantasy outfits. "Michael Kors, Karl Lagerfeld, Donna Karan, Donatella Versace, Alessandra Facchinetti, Giorgio Armani, Alber Elbaz, Rodarte's Laura and Kate Mulleavy and Roberto Cavalli were all asked to get into character as something other than a designer. Armani played the role of Fred Astaire, Kors took on James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries character from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Elbaz reinvented himself as a Hollywood producer with James Bond flair and Cavalli went Gone with the Wind as Rhett Butler; he was shot embracing Coca Rocha as Scarlett O'Hara." Lagerfeld dressed up as a rapper, striking a pose with Phat Farm jeans and untied shoelaces. "Believe it or not, I love rap," he told Bazaar. If only he'd consented to wear his tribute T-shirt.

Death. Decomposition. They're just a shot away ... from fashion ads! Wrangler rolls out its new ad campaign in hopes of moving some serious denim. "And what better way to do that than stick your jeans on foxy murdered corpses? Or, to be precise, models who are strewn across the muddy ground or floating in a bog so as to merely look like foxy murdered corpses. And then slapping on a tagline ominously reading: "WE ARE ANIMALS." The campaign will only launch in France, because the French like that sort of stuff.

Remember what happened when Hillary Clinton crossed Anna Wintour? Right. She felt The Wrath. When Clinton pulled out of a Vogue cover shoot at the last minute, Wintour was reportedly fuming and took Clinton to task in her editor's letter last February. Later, she called her "mannish." And then Clinton lost. Well, Barack Obama's staff better start doing some backpedaling if they want to stay in favor with the bebobbed editrix.