We saw Coco Rocha a few weeks ago. She was gorgeous and awesome, and also very talkative.

“I just got back from Paris,” she smiled, “Like, this morning.”

“Oh yeah?” We grinned back. “Bet you were shooting Chanel.”

“You bet wroooong!” She said. She did a little dance. It was almost like a gloat, probably because she was really shooting Dior, which made us even more confused.

Coco opened the Chanel show. Coco starred in the Chanel look book. Then who else would be in the Chanel ads?

Claudia Schiffer, that’s who. We hear the buttered blonde replaces Freja as the official face of the brand, just in time for Spring ‘08. Claudia was front and center at Chanel this month, and she was so pretty, we had to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination.

Meanwhile, we got word yesterday that Kate Moss is taking over for Gisele in the Spring ‘08 campaign for YSL.

We’re sure she’ll be perfect, but this is also important:

Two huge brands are going back to the Big Girls of the ’90s. Meanwhile, in America and Europe, real conversations are starting to happen about how the fashion industry should portray and promote beauty.

A lot of the focus is on girls as blank slates - they’re too young, they’re too interchangeable. That’s the argument anyway, but aside from the occasional Sasha / Gemma mix-up, we think the new crop is mostly amazing, too.

Still, the way two major campaigns are reaching backwards for a face is worth noting, and also this:

We saw Gemma in Soho yesterday. She wore black skinny jeans and a big wool hoodie.

She was prettier than ever.