Every year moms are stuck on what costumes would be either worth making or buying for their children. It gets especially difficult because the child is apt to change his mind many times before he gets out the door on Halloween night. So what is a mother to do? Make the decision for him. Little children have it easy. They can be kitty cats, witches, ballet dancers or whatever and whatever they choose they all look adorable. This year one of the favorites just might be Max from the “Where The Wild Things Are”. Making the costume is quite easy for the mom. It is as non-frills as burning cork and rubbing it over the little’s one face making him a hobo for the night. But if your love one wants to be a princess it will be hard to convince her out of it. After all it’s her fashion statement.

To the naked eye it first looks strange, then it gets weirder the more time you spend staring at it. And then you ask yourself what were they thinking? Fashion designer Ralph Lauren recently apologized for retouching one of his models wearing his clothing. The model Filippa Hamilton, a size 4 to begin with said she was fired by the designer for being too fat. What they did to her photo was a little more than the usual nip and tuck retouchers do before many fashion photos appear in ads or in magazines. This time they went to ridiculous extremes. They made her body at the waist look freakishly small as well as her head.

Eating disorder advocates as well as moms with young teenage daughters are up in arms against companies selling their products this way and for good reason. Anorexia, bulimia, general low self-esteem and other eating and food disorders continue to be an enormous issue with young girls and teens and they are the ones really paying attention to what advertising is saying. What do these ads say to them? That looking skeletal, emaciated, and sickly is not only acceptable but that this is the only way they’ll look good in these clothes.

Another retouched Ralph Lauren ad has surfaced and this time with model Valentina Zelyaeva. And again the photo looks bizarre. It looks as if Valentina’s head is smaller than her pelvis. No comment by Lauren as yet, but is he doing this for publicity?

To all those budding photography students across the land you should take special note of the recent loss of a giant in the world of photography. Irving Penn first known as a fashion photographer and later evolved into a commercial art photographer has died at the age of 92. Before computers came along that would change how we saw photographs, photographers like Penn only had their creative eye and their intuition to transform beauty on a two dimensional level.

His works became iconic no matter if he shot portraits of celebrities to fashion models. From everyday tradesmen like a milkman to the tribesmen of Africa, to the culture of beauty products. For over forty years he was the man that shot the simple, clean graphic visuals to the Clinique cosmetic line. And in the world of commercial advertising that would seem like an historic record for any photographer to retain such a client. The same can be said of his collaboration with Vogue Magazine. Obviously, Vogue showed fashion through Penn eyes through decades.

Penn understood the world of commerce and art. He photographed a series of discarded cigarette butts that were once exhibited in the New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He leaves this world a perfectionist unbridled by modern technology.

Well, at least Top Chef is. If you are a food junkie how can you not sit and watch the drama that unfolds on this hit cable show? Granted the action is in the kitchen and not so much outside of it. And that’s a good thing, because what’s not to like about competing chefs going at it under the clock. Sure the producers of the show make it interesting with setting up the game rules each week and it doesn’t hurt to take the chefs out of their comfort zone now and then. That is why talent alone may not get the chef to the top.

Granted the dishes these chefs create each week are not the kind of dishes the average home cook whips up at home. These chefs are talented. They may not have all studied in France or have gain wisdom from apprenticing in some other culinary country, but they do know their way around the kitchen. A great feature of the show that points this out is the opening quick fire challenge. Here chefs bust their butts to put out a dish in the shortest of time often making do with what they have to work with on foods that may not be familiar to them.

What the show is not is a how-to-cooking show. If you want that you’ll have to switch over to the Food Channel.