“I think the goal is 5 percent, and there is not a lot of leniency,” a Condé Nast source told the Post. So far, no magazine has been asked to cut more than the mandatory 5 percent, but this cut is is addition to the ten percent that most Condé mags had to cut from the current budget over the summer. Most, but not all. During that round of cuts, The New Yorker remained untouched. But this time, not even The New Yorker is going to be spared.

As with all news of budget cuts, rumors of layoffs are sure to follow. Although none have been announced yet, it may be a matter of time and some open jobs are going unfilled in order to avoid the inevitable.

One position that will have to be filled is that of publisher of luxury fashion mag W in the wake of Nina Lawrence's surprise announcement yesterday. Ms. Lawrence is leaving her post at W to go to The Wall Street Journal as vice president of global marketing and advertising sales.

You can't shop these cheekbones.

Ever since print advertising went south and magazine companies started shopping around for a revenue plan B, the glossies have publicly struggled to figure out the ecommerce puzzle.

E-retail shops like Esquire’s Clad opened and shuttered, and flash sale partnerships fizzled. (Vogue x Gilt Groupe, anyone?) Shopping the magazine was an alluring idea—and doable in the age of the iPad—but it was complicated by the fact that the most luxurious were filled with price-upon-request pieces not meant for us plebes.

All that might be changing. Condé Nast’s arty fashion title, W, has unveiled a plan to juggle the dual new media mandates of “social sharing” and “e-tail,” and it’s surprisingly democratic.

On Tuesday, W announced that it had picked ten of its favorite up-and-coming street style bloggers (including Candice Lake, Craig Arend, and Amy Creyer) and given them the keys to their own W vertical. Using a photo crowdsourcing app called Olapic (the Daily News employs it to collect reader photos of parades and protests), the bloggers can update instantly with photos from the field—or runway—providing a steady stream of stuff for W readers to repin, reblog, and retweet.

“We’re always looking for ways to drive social engagement with the brand,” W online director Christina Caldwell told Off the Record. “And W is known for fostering young talent in photographers specifically.”

Enter ecommerce. Starting later this summer, W market editors will give online readers the ability to “shop the looks” in selected street style photos using Lyst.com. The hipper cousin of ShopStyle, Lyst is a social shopping network featuring only a carefully edited list of designers and department stores.

“Like many people, we’ve been thinking about the ecommerce angle for our sites, but I personally didn’t like the shop-the-look idea for W when the fashion writers picked it,” Ms. Caldwell explained. The outfits were rarely available for sale, and their nearest approximations paled in comparison.

“If I can’t offer that exact outfit I don’t think that’s a very good experience for users,” she said.

The ensembles worn by off-duty models and industry types who turn up on style blogs, on the other hand, are no problem for Lyst’s roster of retailers. And because the style is dictated by real people, not W’s fashion editors, the magazine can maintain editorial integrity while taking a bounty on any online sales they facilitate. Not that W has set up a revenue share yet.

“We haven’t exactly worked out what the financial opportunity will be,” Ms. Caldwell explained.

But if it sticks, it could be one of the least brand-damaging attempts at the unseemly business of magazine ecommerce to date. Except, perhaps, when one thinks of the street style bloggers, who are not paid contributors, making their photographs at best, free labor and and worst, free advertising for another company.

But, as Ms. Caldwell tells it, the arrangement works out for them too. Some of the photographers have opted into a sponsorship agreement with W, allowing Condé Nast to sell W-caliber advertisements on their own personal blogs.

“And we can always use them for online editorial assignments,” she added.

See you at the Met Ball, Rooney!

Although it launched in conjunction with the October issue, the app is unrelated to W print editions. It is "a daily offering of exquisite 'must sees' and 'must haves' carefully curated by the editors of W," including exclusive video content. It's all shoppable and will reward users who are first to share content over social media with designer giveaways.

“The Daily W is an incredible expression of W’s DNA made for a completely different medium.  We are very excited about the new daily relationship this app will establish with our readers,” W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi said in a statement.

The app is sponsored exclusively by Calvin Klein, which seems to be the preferred strategy for brands dabbling in tablet media. Ralph Lauren bought solo sponsorship of The New York Times iPad app for September.

Mr. Klein, Ms. Love

The man in the suit pulled back the curtain and the deep hum boomed out from the Park Avenue Armory, a porcelain bar glowing faintly in the middle of the darkness, ten screens lit bright with the projected images. It's how W editor-in-chief Stefano Tonchi and artist Steven Klein had chosen to display "Time Capsule," a video installation Mr. Klein had screen-shot in the September issue of the magazine. It displays model and actress Amber Valletta in different stages of extreme aging, her skin drying and folding over itself, her body shriveling, yet always with an exquisitely dressed man placing his stubbled cheek near hers, for a kiss.

As if this wasn't jarring enough -- the hushed gala in a stadium-sized lit only with these images of a model's mortality -- Ms. Valletta herself was present, slinking her delicate frame through the crowd of fashion editors and fashion designers, artists and art collectors, the same crew from all the other parties, only now draped in the light of the silver screens. Where really was she -- on the floor, on the screen, both, neither.

The Honourable Daphne Guinness, who has aged in years before the eyes of society -- though not in beauty, and certainly not in personal style -- gazed up at Mr. Klein's moving stills above her.

"I think it gives everyone hope!" Ms. Guinness said to The Observer. "There's nothing wrong with getting old, it happens to everybody. We're all headed to the same place."

"That's a bit morbid," we said.

"I do that occasionally," she responded.

After a few more cocktails and one or two of the, um, trout macarons -- sounds fishy to us! -- we had a quick smoke beside the giggling Courtin-Clarins sisters, and then soon hopped a cab to the yet-to-open Hotel Americano, where W hosted a small, late-night get-together. The artist and muse sat around; Andre Balazs showed up, as did one presumably uninvited guest.

"You see her, right there, the brunette?" a attendee told The Observer. "I know her. She's an escort. My friend knows her or something..."

"Is that so," we said.

We didn't recognize the man who brought her, but we did end up standing next to them as we got another glass of Casa Dragones tequila. We didn't say anything -- why spoil the illusion?

And Courtney Love, who we've discovered is probably always the smartest person in the room, came as well, with director Paul Haggis in tow. After we had ran into Mr. Tonchi, whom had to leave relatively early, conversation turned to magazines. She was astute, as usual.

"But honey," Ms. Love said to us. "You weren't even alive when Spy was around."

We told he we'd read the issues on Google Books, but she still shook her head, saddened by what we had missed.

Raquel Zimmermann, in W

Kristen Stewart's unrecognizably glam turn on the cover of W may have everyone talking, but a Steven Meisel spread tucked inside may start stealing the spotlight.

Today, WWD, made the connection between the famed photographer's contribution to W -- a then-and-now frivolity that dresses a model up on the left page and down on the right -- and a project he undertook for the August issue of Italian Vogue. The spreads have a nearly identical concept and model Raquel Zimmermann is used both times.

John Koblin at Women's Wear takes a look at the possible consequences.

The fallout will be worth watching. If it damages W’s relationship with Meisel, Tonchi will lose out on a big-name photographer he’s craved for the magazine. If Tonchi doesn’t act, it will demonstrate the lengths a fashion magazine editor will go to appease a photographer who holds considerable influence in the industry.

All this on the eve of Fashion Week, no less!

The Observer finally made our way through the September issue of W yesterday, waiting for a friend at Schiller's. The Meisel spread looked perfectly fine to us -- absorbing, even -- but then again Keith McNally doesn't stock Italian Vogue in his Lower East Side boîte, so we couldn't trace the similarities.

A Mexican hotel room. A chair.

Midmorningish.

Klaus, sitting on the floor, is trying to remove the phone jack from the wall. He pulls with both hands, panting.

Enter housekeeper.

Housekeeper: Nothing to be done.

Klaus: [Gloomily] Why not?

Housekeeper: [He looks around the room.] Well there's nothing to clean, is there?

Klaus:  I hate small objects. [He stops pulling at the jack.] I thought you were gone forever.

Housekeeper: [Irritated] Our hotel offers daily room cleaning as well as nightly turndown service, that was all laid out with your assistant James Franco when he booked the room. What happened to all the furniture?

Klaus: I put everything in the closet. It's too much for one man. [Pause. Cheerfully.] On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

Housekeeper: [Hurt, coldly] May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

Klaus: On the terrace.

Housekeeper: The terrace? Where?

Klaus [In Teutonic monotone]: Over there.

Housekeeper: Didn’t they beat you?

Klaus: They? The college students on Spring Break? [Pause] Certainly they beat me.

Housekeeper: Why didn't you take off your boots? The room is filthy. Boots must be taken off every day, I’m tired of telling you that. Why don’t you listen to me?

Klaus: I’m going.

He does not move.

W

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The breach sounded pretty simple:

Ulrich said he discovered via a Google search a list of compromised servers that had been posted online. This list of FTP addresses and related passwords allowed Ulrich to spend time "poking around," he said, "without having to brute force anything.

Ulrich posted an early stolen image--a W cover with Demi Moore--to an invitation-only fashion chatroom, where it was quickly discovered and removed by Conde Nast. Ulrich then opted to post the hot jpegs on his own blog, FashionZag, including the entire December 2009 issue of GQ and images from Vogue, Lucky, and Teen Vogue.

An internal Conde Nast investigation led the police to an IP address owned by Ulrich's father. Ulrich has agreed to pay Conde Nast $12,500 to settle a copyright suit.

Like James Kurisunkal and Jay Gatz before him, it's always the young Midwestern men who fall hardest for New York's glossy girls.

If the cover is any indication, Mr. Tonchi's changes are radical. The September cover is a triple gatefold,"which they’d never done," Mr. Tonchi told Memo Pad. He has also changed the magazine's logo to an italic W set in Benton. "It’s kind of skinny, it’s very vertical. It’s very elegant and it is italic, with a sense of movement, evolution," he said. He has also added a tagline to the cover — "the who, the what, the where, the when and the why in the world of style" — and begun showing author's bylines on the cover, beginning with editor-at-large Lynn Hirschberg for September. 

Ad pages for September are up to 249 from 192 last year, according to The New York Times. An iPad app for the magazine is scheduled to launch in February, and a redesigned wmagazine.com will go live in the coming weeks.

In an editor's note titled "Expect More" with the August issue, the first issue that Mr. Tonchi worked on, he wrote that with the redesign of the September issue, "we will learn from one another what a magazine is and what it can be, in our always changing new world." Mr. Tonchi gave September, his second issue, the title “Great Expectations."

"I wanted to have some self-irony," Mr. Tonchi told Memo Pad, "because there are so many expectations about what this W will be, so it refers to these eight great new girls, but also to the pressure that we feel to satisfy the expectations that people have for the magazine."