Kung Hey Fat Choy! It’s the year of the ox, and the symbolism is perfect: Oxen are dependable, calm and modest, and the thought of credit-card debt totally freaks them out. Ni hao, President Obama!

Ines de la Fressange at the Paris couture! Jean Paul Gaultier brought the 51-year-old model out of retirement — and she is stunning. Take that, blonde waifs! [Jezebel]

The new do’s and don’t of pregnancy: Botox is bad; drugs, not so much. According to Broadsheet, “the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to drugs are relatively small.” I am SO emulating Courtney Love’s in-utero-heroin example.

If you have ever wondered what the men’s collections have to do with reality, it’s not just you. Here’s a sampling of Queen Cathy Horyn’s bare-knuckled breakdown: “Dior Homme? Wasn’t this a cool label once? Saint Laurent? Drab and unimaginative.” Think of the position in which retailers would be today if they listened to her.

Yet another reason to boycott — and to take out a possible mob hit on — pornstached pervert, Dov Charney, the American Apparel asshole who claims: “Women initiate most domestic violence.” [Feministe] Oh wait, my one-woman boycott may be working: emails obtained by Gawker indicate AA nearly went bankrupt last week. Here’s to praying for a nice Jewish boy to take over the sweatshop-free basics niche, so I can finally acquire some well-priced leggings.

I don’t want to think about how many trees it took for Katsuyo Kamo to craft his wonderfully flammable paper hats for the Chanel show. They are totally genius. And hopefully an inspiration for Karl Lagerfeld to plant a forest near his bourgie new home in Vermont.

A Bronx cheer for Ashlee Simpson! With regard to the brouhaha over her big sister’s bigger figure, she wrote: “I find it belittling to all women to read about a woman’s weight gain on Fox News. How can we expect teenage girls to love themselves in an environment where we criticize a size 2 figure?” Motherhood has made Ashlee such a rock star. Bronx Simpson-Wentz is gonna be such a good boyfriend one day! [Broadsheet]

Have you been at a loss about how to blow the last of your severance check? Well, here’s a solution: Tom Ford is now offering $990 denim. For the fuck-it-all cojones factor alone, they are totally worth it. [The Cut]

Rest in peace, John Updike. And may you meet in the afterlife all the English teachers who never assigned me any of your books, and give them a good slap, please. I am reading the complete Rabbit set … soon. Meanwhile, how did you find the time to learn to juggle when you churned out a book per year, in addition to criticism, light verse and short stories? [The New Yorker] [NYT]

If you want to know how Caroline Kennedy lost her Senate-seat desire, read New York Mag’s post-mortem. But if you want to know why New Yorkers in particular, and Americans in general, lost an incredibly powerful advocate, check out The New Yorker’s amazing analysis of the post-pullout fallout. First off, no other freshman Senator — and very, very few Senators — has access to the President like Kennedy does. And second, if CK wants help with a project, if she wants advice, or an expert to explain something to her, “virtually anyone will make himself available to her right away.” At this point, and probably forever, Kirsten Gillibrand, New York’s new no-name Senator appointed by the idiotic David Paterson, can likely only access whomever is in charge at the NRA. Kennedy’s friend, Lawrence O’Donnell, who pretty much makes Larissa Macfarquhar’s article, put it best: “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.” Does that suck, or what?

Has the death of a magazine ever provoked such a complete absence of schadenfreude as the demise of Domino? Daily Intel called it “sad,” and the design blogs are in mourning. As a former employee — who loved that office and working for Deborah Needleman — my in-box has been flooded with messages like, “Where am I going to get my interiors porn now?” and “Domino will always be my all-time fave.” But — and please, don’t cyber-homicide me for this — when was the last time you were inspired by the magazine to tackle your own DIY home-decor project?

In the early days, there were at least a few ideas per issue I wanted to install, and one of them usually found its way into my home — most memorably Kelly Wearstler’s hanging plates, which finally put my Hermes wedding china to good use as a wonderfully tactile art project. But aside from Mary McDonald’s amazing pagoda headboard flanked by painted Chinese figures in the February issue, I haven’t ripped out anything for my “home decor” inspiration file in months. Too many of the same designers — Ruthie Sommers, most egregiously — designing too many L.A. homes for the same kind of cute girl (”cute” was the highest compliment at Domino headquarters). But also, my place, unlike my wardrobe, is as done as it needs to be.

So no wonder even an admired publisher like Beth Fuchs Brenner couldn’t sell the idea to advertisers: Most of the cute young girls at whom the magazine was targeted cannot, financially, decorate enough to be reliable clients for advertisers. The bulk of their bucks go toward food, entertainment and clothes by brands that can’t pay Conde Nast prices. Still, I was surprised by two things. First, Beth Brenner’s departure from Conde Nast. For months, there was talk that Domino was being kept open until another company position was found for her — though I suppose I should have been suspicious of her fortunes when I saw her on three separate pre-school tours in the same (very fabulous) outfit. And second, why not keep the website going? Domino was a true brand — an incredible feat achieved in such a short time — and it would only take a few freelancers to keep the thing going. The internet is how we all shop for furniture and other accessories anyway, and that’s a concept advertisers could definitely get behind.

Look who’s giving props to the white mama who raised her! Or was it an art director at Vanity Fair who decided to pull a Michael Jackson on the weirdly anti-white Ms. Keys?

Should I feel like a sucker for starting to feel sorry for Vogue? The economy puts the mag is such an awkward, damned-if-they-do-or-don’t position that it’s getting to be pathetic. Take the February issue, with its sincere, if predictably ridiculous crap-economy effort, reporting on Plum Sykes’s new “forever wardrobe” — consisting of a $3,600 bespoke suit and a $4,915 Giambattista Valli dress — as well as a clothing swap featuring Vogue’s regular cast of socialites “seizing the zeitgeist” — by trading Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen in a huge, richly decorated Greenwich Village home.

Now, getting offended by rich girls making fun and games out of what is a desperate situation for many is a wasteful bore in this context. But the evening’s whimsy sure makes it look like these privileged ladies want, more than anything else, to be seen “seizing the zeitgest.” Any savings incurred are more cute than necessary. Yich.

For the big picture, you wonder how long this budget-consciousness can go on before there come outside calls for Vogue to start playing the role that cover girl Blake Lively assigns to “Gossip Girl”: “It’s an escape, watching these sparkly lives.” Of course, “Gossip Girl”’s advantage is that it’s fiction. But that also points to a solution for Vogue: get rid of the non-staff, lucky-sperm-club Voguettes like the anemic Poppy Delevingne and the seasonal accounts of their wardrobe desires that make everybody despise them — and the magazine. Concentrate instead on the clothes, models, designers and other creative working stiffs, as well as the fabulously cool professionals flocking to D.C. at the moment. These are the people we want to know about — and whose presence in Vogue needs no justification.