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Troubled singer Amy Winehouse is reportedly in talks with British fashion house Fred Perry to design her own clothing collection and has already begun sketching some of her ideas. [Vogue UK]

Gedalio Grinberg, chairman of the Movado Group (where he had worked since the '60s), died on Sunday in Manhattan at age 77. [WWD]

Women who have scored invitations to the inaugural balls have started "registering" their dresses on special websites to make sure no one else will be wearing their gown. [NY Daily News] 

Designer John Galliano has been appointed a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, previously bestowed upon Yves Saint Laurent and Azzedine Alaia. [WWD] 

Some obvious fashion casualties of the recession: young designers, celebrity lines, very expensive designer labels with limited distribution, and $20,000 handbags. [WWD] 

Some bright news on an otherwise gray Monday afternoon: this coming weekend, Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting Saturday Night Live! We used to dream about Mr. Harris when he played Doogie (in fact, yours truly mentioned this in print a few years ago). We loved his speed-freak cameos in Harold and Kumar. These days we laugh so hard we cry at his portrayal of Barney Stinson, the over-the-top-but-still-believable womanizing scotch-swiller-catchphrase-maker on CBS's How I Met Your Mother. (And yes, yes, we know Mr. Harris plays for the other team.) Fingers crossed he drags HIMYM co-star Jason Segal on for a few sketches. The two are known to do duets now and then; we'd like to see what they'd whip up with Andy Samberg for a digital short. ‘Jizz In My Pants' part two?

Are you ready for all Lincoln all the time? Do you worry that you’ll need some help in cutting through the bicentennial blather? If you’re looking for a quick refresher (as opposed, say, to the two-part, six volume mythologizing biography Carl Sandburg completed in 1939), try The Best American History Essays on Lincoln (Palgrave Macmillan, $16.95), a selection of 11 essays from the past 60 years edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians. All the essays (with the exception of a chapter from Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore) are by eminent professors of history, among them Richard Hofstadter, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin and James M.  read more »

Author and social fixture Jay McInerney's new book, The Last Bachelor, is being released in the UK this month; it's a short-story collection about the morally complicated relationships of middle-class Manhattanites. In a piece in the Telegraph, Mr. McInerney comes off as certainly "the last" of something--perhaps the last author to establish a writing career based on the hedonistic lifestyles of New York yuppies--even though his new collection of stories takes a look at a decidedly more current, post-9/11 city.

Some of the article's highlights include Mr. McInerney on his first novel, which he still enjoys re-reading occasionally:

"I hadn't thought about it. I recently re-read it. It's sort of like reading a book by somebody else. I thought, 'Wow, that's pretty damn good. Where did I come up with that?'

"Sometimes it seems an albatross, because it remains not necessarily my best but definitely my most successful book. When I die the words Bright Lights, Big City will be in the headlines. Probably not The Good Life, probably not Brightness Falls, probably not Story of My Life."

 read more »

When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States on Jan. 20, all of this "change" we've been hearing so much about will be measurable by a number of factors: His race. His persona. His vast departure from the policies of George W. Bush and his superior ability to form a complete sentence. But perhaps more than anything, we'll be able to measure that change by the fact that seminal indie rockers Ted Leo and Tortoise (plus a handful of other performers who are not quite as hip) are headlining a big inauguration bash in Washington D.C. the prior evening, because let's face it—that SO would never have happened for the Bush Administration!  read more »

We have a well-documented love of Doctor Who here at the Observer, so we'd be remiss if we didn't comment on the announcement from this weekend that a replacement for beloved fop David Tennant, who will leave the show after filming a few specials this year, has finally been found. And the winner is.....26-year-old Matt Smith, a young man with a suitably angular face and slender frame to take over from Mr. Tennant (might he continue the pin-striped look?). No one seems to know too much about the guy—The Guardian reported on his slight on-screen history—though British folks seem to be up in arms anyway (apparently wishing that a woman or person of color were cast in the role).  read more »

Against all odds, the first book out of the gate on the 2008 election comes not from The Washington Post’s Daniel Balz, Time’s Mark Halperin, or Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, but Niall Stanage of Ireland’s Sunday Business Post, whose account of Barack Obama’s fight for the nomination and his victory in the general election has been available in bookstores on the other side of the ocean since early December.

Mr. Stanage, who regularly filed pieces from the campaign trail for this paper in addition to the reporting he did for the Sunday Business Post, said his book—entitled Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign—is being officially released in the United States today.

How did Mr. Stanage get it done so fast?

"Around February, I realized that there was something fairly special going on with Obama," he said, "but I knew that no publisher would take it on until he was the nominee, or at least the overwhelming favorite to be the nominee."

In May, he secured an agent, and flew to Ireland to meet with publishers the following month after the primaries ended. A few were interested, according to Mr. Stanage, but in the end a decision was made to go with a relatively young but well-established independent house called Liberties Press.

"I started actually writing the book on the weekend of July the 4th, and by election day I had everything but the final chapter and the preface written," Mr. Stanage said. "Those were submitted exactly a week after election day."  read more »

Everyone's favorite Upper East Side teenagers return from their holiday break tonight, as Gossip Girl gears up for the second half of its sophomore season. For those keeping score at home, our cable guide says the episode is titled "In the Realm of the Basses", a probable play on the controversial 1976 Franco-Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses that deals with death by erotic asphyxiation and castration. Yikes! We doubt any such shenanigans will take place at Constance Billard, but fans can expect to see Chuck's Uncle Jack show up to help the younger Bass in the wake of his father's death. (Here's guessing he's just as nefarious as every other Bass man that we've encountered thus far.) Meanwhile, Uncle Jack won't be the only person visiting the friendly confines of Manhattan in the upcoming months. Michael Ausiello over at Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Michelle Trachtenberg has signed on to return for multiple episodes as the duplicitous cokehead Georgina Sparks.  read more »

Ambitious twenty- and thirty-somethings in New York working in creative fields are living with their parents instead of getting a place of their own, reports Page Six Magazine. The magazine cites the celebrity examples of socialites Fabiola Beracasa, 32, and Charlotte Ronson, 31, who just this year left their respective parents' lush residences--socialite Veronica Hearst's on the Upper East Side and Ann Dexter-Jones's duplex in the West Village.

But since Ms. Ronson, a successful designer, and Ms. Beracasa, creative director of the jewelry company Circa, have in fact taken steps to establish their domestic independence, they seem to contradict the magazine's argument that this sort of thing is on the rise.  read more »

Laura Bush will write a memoir for the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, it was announced this morning. The book, which will include details of Mrs. Bush's eight years in the White House, will be edited by Scribner's editor-in-chief, Nan Graham, and is scheduled for publication in 2010.

No word just yet on how much they paid, but the two-day auction took place during late December. The soon-to-be-former first lady is quoted in the release as saying she is "very pleased to be associated with Scribner, the distinguished publishing house of many of [her] favorite books.”

Mrs. Bush's memoir was the subject of a recent  read more »