JCPenney

Rashida Jones is OK with you wearing eyeglasses, so long as they're prescription.

Vera Wang's team responds to the allegations that its Shanghai store is charging women to try on wedding gowns. {Refinery29} Terry Richardson gets Brad Goreski to take off his shirt (but not his glasses!). {Terry's Diary} Spain-based retailer Mango is emulating Zara in its business model. {Business of Fashion} Giorgio Armani is donating $5 from each bottle sold of his Acqua di Giò and Acqua Di Gioia fragrances this month to help fund UNICEF's clean water initiative. {Elle}

Do you have designer collaboration fatigue yet? You better not, because there's another one to look forward to. JCPenney just announced a "seasonal collaboration" with London-based--and First Lady-approved--designer Duro Olowu.

When H&M announced its latest designer collaboration with Maison Martin Margiela, we'll admit we were a little surprised. Margiela is so avant-garde, so cult-y, and with little name recognition (OK, more than a little thanks to Kanye) we'd have figured them the last brand to do a collaboration with a mass retailer. But then again, H&M got Karl Lagerfeld to do a line for it in 2004, and then, somehow, the retailer convinced the most reclusive and enigmatic of designers, Rei Kawakubo, to do a Comme des Garcons collaboration in 2008. So maybe it's not so surprising that Maison Martin Margiela is doing a mass collab--maybe it's even obvious. It seems like every major designer has done a lower-priced collaboration with any number of mass retailers recently.

JCPenney is in major restructuring mode this year and we can’t blame them--other mass retailers and department stores are constantly pushing new collaborations and retail concepts and Penney’s has always been a little stale by comparison. In January, the company announced a slew of new measures, which included reorganizing the store layout to function more like shop-in-shops, with various collaborations with other labels--not unlike Target’s new concept. And they’ve just announced even more changes. But is it working? Not yet--yesterday, the company logged a $163 million loss for the first quarter of 2012, which is a bigger hit than executives and investors expected and probably not good considering their restructuring plan is supposed to set them back $800 million this year--especially when much of that restructuring is probably dependent on cash flow from investors.

Cindy Crawford recently said that her 10-year-old daughter Kaia, who had starred in a Young Versace campaign, was too young to pursue modeling. Luck

JCPenney has been in the news a lot lately; the retailer is very publicly trying to change its stodgy image and bring exciting brands to the store, with the ultimate goal of, naturally, getting people to shop there again. A Target-esque merchandising strategy was rolled out by JCP's new-ish CEO Ron Johnson at the beginning of the year, featuring collaborations with established designers and a new shop-in-shop format instead of an open selling floor. But will it work?