Don’t scare the straighties! As if the readers of Harper’s Bazaar didn’t know that most fashion designers are — horrors! — gay, and — double horrors! — cohabitating with their boyfriends, the magazine shot a shelter story on cutie-pie Derek Lam in the most hetero manner possible (Lam’s ball-hugging denim, notwithstanding). For what other “Fashionable Life” feature has ever included a friend that’s a girl in addition to a female employee? Flat-out suggesting to a casual peruser that there’s no gayness happening whatsoever? C’mon, Stephen Gan! Know thyself and embrace!

Magazines are the new blogs! If you are a print believer like me, then a super-exciting story in today’s New York Times will give you great ammo when defending your territory against the online apostles. Hewlett Packard, of all companies, has come up with a revolutionary web service called MagCloud, which allows anybody to make their own glossy magazines for a fraction of what it costs to run photocopies at the local printshop. Let the Magazine MILF empire commence!

If you were an alien who touched down on planet Earth for the first time this week, and someone gave you the last two issues of Vogue as a guide to elite and aspirational American women, would you think brown-skinned women ruled — and that these brown-skinned women have very straight hair? Or that this American magazine with the French title is a very democratic enterprise, with pronouncements such as, “The First Lady the World’s Been Waiting For” and “Fashion for Every Figure”? Of course, there may be some confusion, too, from all those distracting directives. Like, are certain women with very long names such as Queen Rania of Jordan and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy endowed with special “Super Powers!”, and the single-named of the species “real” and in possession of “curves”? And why are the latter women commanded to “Work It!” — whatever “It” is — into something “leaner” that will make them “sexier,” if “power” was the goal last month? Then there’s that thing about “Designing a Perfect Body”: Are humans making terminators? Uh oh. But the real confusion will likely come to our friendly alien when she opens up the magazine. Why, she may wonder, if brown-skinned people are so dominant that they front this very influential magazine, are there mostly whiteys without curves in the interior? A stab at equality for the light-skinned fembot servants, perhaps?

What do you do when you are one of the most powerful people in fashion, and you are guaranteed NOT to receive an invite to the biggest fashion party of the year? (Rivalries will do that.) If you are Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar, you take your rival’s party theme and shamelessly run with it in your own pages. Ergo “Gisele: Supermodel Muse,” a supremely literal take on the “Model as Muse” party/exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute, which is sponsored by — you guessed it — Vogue. Not incidentally, the Met/Vogue event is being co-chaired by Kate Moss. And Gisele, the one model who truly competes with Moss on the world stage, is not slated for Vogue’s annual multi-major-model May cover, which is pegged to the gala. For Bailey, putting Gisele on her April cover — so sneaky, one month early! — means treading that ballsy-slash-pathetic line that must be so familiar to her at this point. But if you take out the insidery politics, as Bailey knows most readers remain unaware, then I think she’s largely succeeded. The Gisele story is a fantastic testament to the model’s versatility, with images inspired by styles of the 1950s onward. And carrying the model theme through the rest of the book, the feature well hopefully — fingers crossed! — closes the door on the celeb-dominated spreads of the past decade, with five models-only fashion stories. Here’s hoping Vogue can similary resist its dark socialite and celebrity urges next month.

Now that W is the puppet chronicler of the Jolie-Pitts — see the wrinkles-and-all Brad cover, the Angie breastfeeding cover and the 60-page “Domestic Bliss” portfolio, for starters — I’m wondering when we can expect sanctioned solo headshots of the rest of the family. With six kids, a cover apiece would fill up half the editorial calendar. Throw in Pitt’s parents, Jon Voight, a Whatever-Happened-to-Angie’s-Brother/Boyfriend cover, an Is-Jenny-Shimizu-Still-Angie’s-Girl cover, and Jennifer Aniston — and you’ve got 11 months all set! That leaves just one issue devoted to fashion. Which sounds about right for fashion mag with an identity crisis in These Economic Times.