I knew exactly who I wanted to interview for my first Life With column as I soon as I got the job here at Fashionista, my old friend Elizabeth Kiester (pictured here with one of her besties, Loven.) I’ve been very blessed in my 11 (gasp!) year career in this business to be able to work with some amazingly talented and wickedly smart and funny people. Eliz pretty much tops that list. And I was lucky enough to get to work with her twice, at Jane and YM.

But it’s not because she’s my friend that I wanted you all to meet her. She truly has had one of the most interesting careers in fashion—going from magazines to trendspotter for A&F to creating collaborations with Stella at LeSportsac.

As of late last year, she is a full-fledged designer, selling her wares at her incredibly colorful store, Wanderlust, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Yep, Cambodia.

Unfortunately, a trip to Cambodia isn’t exactly in the Fashionista budget, so I talked to Elizabeth via email about how she ended up where she is today and how a life in fashion in Siem Reap is so very different from the one she used to live in New York.

Monday, we’ll chat more about what’s selling out in her store, what she misses most about New York, where Wanderlust is going next, and how to rock 5 inch Marni pumps in a Cambodian village.

Recently I’ve been lamenting the loss of my once stellar flea market skills.

And while I vowed to get back in the swing of all things vintage, I am still incredibly grateful to Madewell for making it even easier.

The Manhattan and East Hampton stores will be featuring finds from the Brooklyn Flea starting this Thursday and going until at least Labor Day, though possibly longer.

Fashion Director Gigi Guerra and stylist Lisa Schulner will be scouring the Ft. Greene and Brooklyn Bridge locations for pieces that will complement Madewell’s collections. And everything will be less than $100. I’ve had the pleasure of working with both of these ladies (at Jane and at YM) and I can totally vouch for the fact that they both have extremely keen eyes for hidden treasures.

We can’t wait to see what they dig up. But we still highly recommend you all make a trip to the Flea yourselves too.

If you, like us, are obsessed with magazines, welcome to phase one of the best project ever.

A friend just sent us a link to Premier Issues, a site that’s taken it upon itself to scan in debut covers of all the magazines they can get their hands on. They have obvious ones like LOVE, but hard to find, nostalgia-inducing covers, too like Cindy Crawford on the cover of George, Courtney Love on Flaunt, Drew Barrymore for Jane, Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey on Teen Vogue.

Most of the covers come with Letter from the Editor text and hopefully, soon, scans of the rest of the magazine.

For now, here’s this, from Jane Pratt in Jane’s first issue, “Drew said, ‘If you put anyone else on your first cover, I’ll kill you.’ Seriously, having one of my most beloved people on the front of the premiere issue is overwhelmingly wonderful,” because we still miss it every day.

At the moment I’m having trouble keeping track of just how many of my friends and former colleagues have seen their magazines and jobs fall victim to this “times is tough” economy. However, instead of sitting around discussing their Cobra payments, people are branching out with cool, new creative projects.

Take former Jane and Page Six Magazine fashion editor, Kelley Culp. She just launched this crazy cute line of aprons called Smocks that are literally cut like dresses thanks to Kelley’s design school background. She buys up chic fabric remnants to make the styles, so they’re all limited edition prints. And the product descriptions are perfectly editorial which we, of course, appreciate.

Stay tuned over the coming weeks as we check in on some other former magazine types to see what they’ve got in the works.

It’s been a lonely month here at Fashionista and we’re so excited to have Abby Gardner on board! I might be shy, but she’s a totally open book - so if you want to know where she’s been and what she’s done up until now, read on for a mini-Life With in which she answers questions I thought you might ask.

Hello!! So I’m the new girl here at Fashionista and I couldn’t be more excited to be here. And to finally lend Britt a hand. She’s been doing an awesome job, basically solo for weeks now. So, we were trying to think of how best to introduce me to you and decided to go with a modified “Life With” column. It’s one of my favorite new things on the site. Feel free to leave questions in the comments section.

Rachel Bilson’s landed her own InStyle column in what might be the most genius starlet-meets-fashion move we’ve heard in a long, long time.

Since The OC, Rachel’s wandered in and out of a couple of movies and launched a line with DKNY, but it’s her style that keeps her on everyone’s radar.

The magazine’s managing editor, Ariel Foxman, said that most women answer, “Rachel Bilson,” when asked whose style they admire and so they recruited the California girl to write a page or two in the magazine in which she discusses her favorite trends and what she wants to buy for the month. She’ll also answer readers’ style questions.

Rachel tells WWD, “I am not planning on quitting my day job to be a full-time fashion editor, although I am really enjoying it and it intrigues me very much.”

We’re not sure what her day job is, but we think she’d make a kind of awesome fashion editor.

Reader Christopher is either excited or repulsed by the following news:

Hilary Swank has signed on to produce a movie version of the spectacularly bad Falling Out of Fashion, the first (and hopefully only) novel by Karen Yampolsky, the former executive assistant of Jane Pratt.

The book is a thinly veiled and thinly written account of Jane Magazine, specifically the months of transition from Jane to the new (and last) editor, Brandon Holley.

Gawker had a smackingly satisfying round-up of the book, which you can read for yourself.

Meanwhile, Variety hints that Swank may also star in the movie, which is… um… silly. It’s so silly it’ll probably make a lot of money.

Is Eva Mendes fashion’s next exhibitionist?

First she posed on the cover of (now defunct) Jane with just a couple flower bunches for a bra.

Then more recently, she posed for a Vogue Italia shoot that had people writing headlines like “Eva Mendes Does Topless and Toe-lickin’ “.

And now, her new ad for Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession is (so far) banned from television networks for baring way too much of just her, once again.

All she needs now is for Juergen Teller to snap a naked Polaroid of her and she’s all set to be the next Lily Cole…

Five months after Jane closed, its super editor Brandon Holley has announced her next move:

She’s overseeing lifestyle content for Yahoo, including astrology, food, health, and technology.

Mediaweek reports that Brandon hasn’t commented on her new position, but the job certainly makes sense for the editor who added a lot of substantial content to the Jane website, and also brought a perspective to ELLEgirl that went beyond clothes and boys - they were the first magazine to put Mischa Barton on their cover, and the only teen magazine to have a dedicated music issue since Sassy.

It’s no secret that everyone at Fashionista loved Jane and ELLEgirl - we’ll be watching the Yahoo pages in hopes that some of the same spirit comes through.