Olivia Palermo Finally Does Something Right
By Betsey Morgenstern
New York Social Diary Staff Writer

Yesterday, Olivia Palermo finally learned what it was like to be a working girl, and it had nothing to do with being a hooker or Melanie Griffith. Socialite Palermo, who is now an accessories editor at Elle magazine, the fashion bible that lives to support any reality television program that appeals to a young female demographic, finally pleased her boss, Joe Zee, the chipper head of Elle.

"I was beginning to have my doubts, because every five minutes Erin, our head of publicity, is coming to me and telling me how horrible and incompetent Olivia is, but I knew she could do it," Zee told us in an exclusive interview. "She made my A to Z feature amazing with all the awesome accessories she pulled. I loved everything. She's going to be a star. And not like a crappy reality star, like a real magazine star!"

Palermo, who would not be interviewed for this story, made her victory lap thanks to meetings with Badgely Mischka, Rachel Roy, and Roberta Feymann and they gave her all the cool stuff to bring back to Joe Zee. She even took pictures of the their sunglasses, handbags, and necklaces and printed them out like real old pictures. Palermo's retro touch seemed to win over the boss.

"She's just so refined and elegant, and I would never give up the chance to have my goods appear in Elle," says Rachel Roy, one of New York's hottest designers.

"I'm the one who got her that meeting at Mischka," says Erin Kaplan, head of PR for Elle. "She couldn't have done this without me. Listen here, Betsey, I hate Olivia because she's prettier and richer than me and I had to work for everything in my life. I am going to get her fired. That's all I want. That and a coat made out of 101 dalmatians. And maybe half of my hair dyed black."

Maybe Whitney Port, who works at People's Revolution, the fashion PR firm headed up by batty-headed publicity maven Kelly Kutrone, could learn a thing or two from Palermo. After she showed Kutrone, who has no background in design, the sketches for her fashion line, Kutrone said not to show them to anyone. Roxy Carmichael, the gravelly voiced toxic friend who lives with Port convinced her to show the sketches to a buyer at Bergorf Goodman.

"I wanted to just laugh in her face, but there were all these cameras there, and I find it hard to laugh these days because of all the Botox," said the buyer, who would only give her first name, Sunni.

After her humiliation Kutrone scolded Port in her office and told her that she was talented, but she needs to know how to work her connections like Palermo. "Being a rich, beautiful socialite like Olivia Palermo will get you everywhere in life," says Kutrone. "I love Whitney, she's going to take off, but I'm not going to let her embarrass me before she does."

Roxy Carmichael would not return calls or emails requesting comment, but she was spotted smoking a cigarette in front of the People's Revolution office. When asked about her decision to convince Whitney to go to Bergdorf with the sketches, Carmichael said, "Fuck off," flicking a cigarette at a reporter.

Now that is a low-class movie that Olivia would never tolerate.

First of all, you would have think they've gotten the technique down by now. I mean, we can land a man on the moon, but we can't do a subtle-yet-miraculous Photoshop job? In fact, we probably can. It's just that the people working at fashion magazines are so divorced from reality that they're not even sure what a good/bad/reasonable Photoshop job/human body is even supposed to look like anymore.

Secondly, one might think that women's magazines would be more aware that their audience is on to them by now—if only because a variety of blogs, including this one, now run Photoshop hatchet jobs as a matter of course. Their audiences may not have any control over the images they're fed, but they can at least comment and call attention to their mistakes in a large forum.

("I didn't know nothin', I was stupid, I was foolish, I was lying to myself..."-Mariah Carey)

In the piece, MK spends most of her time discussing how incredibly eccentric and fabulous her style is, with designer Giambattista Valli popping in to let readers know he'd love nothing more than to just dress her up in a "fantastic sleeping bag," the "artsier" Olsen waffles a bit when asked about how she differs from her outwardly more formal sister Ashley: “'We don’t agree all the time...There’s such a strength, but that also makes it…' Her voice trails off. 'When there’s that much love there’s…' Again she stops. She gives me a wan smile." Oops! After the "wan smile," which we imagine looked very similar to that of those frizzy-haired troll tchotchkes we children of the 80s used to collect, MK parlays into an example: "I do know I can’t work in an office. Ashley, on the other hand, loves going to an office.” So essentially, MK and Ashley are growing apart because Mary Kate's "work" involves fleeing to the Far East to swing around on high bars, while Ashley, well, "works" in an office doing "work." Well done, Olsen Twins ... somehow, you managed to make the Kardashians look like a united front.

[Photo credit: Elle.com]

• THE TAO OF MARY KATE [Elle]

First of all, the layoffs. There is no official word yet, but we're hearing from inside that up to 20 people have gone, including executive Matthew Rosenberg; Joyann King, fashion editor at ElleGirl.com; Holly Seigal, senior editor of Ellegirl.com; and Dei Lewison, producer of the Elle websites. (There's no word on the former store salesman boyfriend whom insiders said Elle's self-promoting creative director, Joe Zee, installed at the fashion magazine's website.) The casualties were called to a meeting at 10.30 and then left to stew for quarter of an hour before digital boss Todd Anderman breezed in to fire them.

Another casualty is Glenn Kenny, whom Kliger talked up so much when he shut down the US edition of Premiere, the entertainment magazine. When the title was shuttered, Kliger said Kenny—the magazine's "most recognizable name"—would remain as an online movie critic and blogger. Kliger told the Wall Street Journal: "We saw trend lines for both ELLEgirl.com and Premiere.com moving in very positive, healthy directions, and we didn't necessarily feel that the print versions, which were not trending in a reasonable timeline toward profitability, enhanced what the digital versions were providing." So, why the cutbacks at a division which Kliger said would provide Hachette with over 20% of its revenues and most of its advertising growth?

First of all, Hachette has always been an abortion of a magazine company. It was a rag-tag collection of also-ran titles put together by David Pecker, now busy losing money at American Media. The company is owned by a dysfunctional French conglomerate, which never gave Kliger the resources or authority he needed to make the group a significant player. Much of Kliger's talk—about grand web plans—was just designed to bamboozle credulous journalists who might otherwise see a marginal magazine group in decline. Earlier in his tenure, Kliger was said to be much loved by his French bosses. More recently, we heard the relationship had broken down. "I'd heard the French were rats," he's known to complain. "But now I know."

Second, it's experiencing the same pressure to cut costs that is affecting other print publishing groups—except more so. Lagardere, the French company which owns Hachette, recently disclosed its US revenues were flat—and that was not even counting the revenues sacrificed when Premiere folded. The firm is moving out of the 40th floor of its Manhattan headquarters to save on rent; business trips have been curtailed; and editors are forced to print stories from inventory because editorial budgets do not allow new commissions.

Third, the grand multimedia experiment has been an utter failure. The early experiments with interactive TV were dismal, predictably. But nor have Kliger's more recent investments in branded web titles such as Premiere.com fulfilled the promise he saw for them. Hachette recently allowed Quantcast, a web measurement firm, to monitor traffic. Those numbers are not protected by a password. All the Hachette website put together garner no more than 200-250,ooo unique visitors per day; one of the biggest, Elle's website, only attracts of the order of 60,000. Embarrassing.

Hachette hasn't said whether it will be replacing any of the staff let go today. "There is no stability here, no one knows what's going on or what is happening," says a tipster. Elle, Car and Driver and various other titles certainly have some sort of following, even if exaggerated by pay-for-praise public relations interns. Their economic value may be better realized in some other media group, if anyone is still buying. As for Kliger himself, the tittle-tattle is that his contract is coming up for renewal—and it won't be.

[Photo shows Kliger with his former mistress, speaking coach Amy Griggs, and daughter.]

So wait, Nicole Richie was not America's gateway heroin addict celebrity? Also, is Owen Wilson the universe's most unlikely despondent suicide attempter? Or the world's most unlikely junkie? Whatever the case, he is at the very least consistent in his desire for privacy: reportedly the interview — of which poor, beaten-down human condition-plagued Owen could only endure half the appointed ninety minutes — steered clear of all topics Goldie-spawned. And when it briefly ventured into the realm of hypothetical maybe future pairings with highly stable other famous people (he's promoting a movie with Jennifer Aniston) he complained to his publicist that the question was "tabloid-y." Famous attempted last words!