Diana's wedding dress, gowns in exhibition coming to West Edmonton Mall

With news of the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy causing excitement among fans of British royalty, the late grandmother of that yet-to-born heir to the throne is the focus of an exhibition coming to West Edmonton Mall.
"Diana, A Celebration," chronicling the life and work of the Princess of Wales who died in a 1997 Paris car crash, has toured widely in the U.S. and has had only one other Canadian stop, at Toronto's Design Exchange a decade ago.
Covering almost 650 square metres, the exhibition contains 150 objects including Diana's wedding gown with its 7 1/2-metre-long train, as well as 28 of her designer dresses. It will run Feb. 9 to June 9 on Level 2 of the mall.
All profits from the show, on loan from Britain's Althorp Estate, go to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

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School Modesty Club Says Cover Up

High-school freshman Saige Hatch was sick of seeing her peers revealing too much skin when she came to school each day.
The 15-year-old saw midriff-grazing tops, exposed cleavage, short shorts.
"From elementary to middle school, and then to high school, I noticed immodesty," she told ABCNews.com. "I really wanted to start a club to bring awareness to it and bring remembrance to what modesty is."
Inspired by her brother's No Cussing Club, Hatch started the Modesty Club at South Pasadena High School in South Pasadena, Calif., in September to bring attention to her cause.
"A shift is coming, sneaking through the literal fabric of our culture," read a statement on the club's website. "Our bright heroic women are being made the fool. A fool to think that to be loved they must be naked. To be noticed they must be sexualized. To be admired they must be objectified."
While South Pasadena High School has a dress code that requires students to cover the "range of skin from armpit to 'The Bottom Line,'" defined as "a hand's width below the bottom of the buttocks," Hatch is crusading for a more traditional definition.
She said she views immodest dress as showing cleavage, showing one's midriff or one's shoulders. Immodesty also includes shorts, dresses, pants and skirts that are too short or tight, she said.
The Modesty Club only boasts 17 members at school, but Hatch said the website has helped to garner more than 1,000 members who come from all 50 states and 14 countries.
This week, Michael Cacciotti, the mayor of South Pasadena, commended Hatch for her efforts and granted her a proclamation. The city has declared Dec. 3 through the 7 "Modesty Week" in South Pasadena.
Cacciotti had granted her brother a similar proclamation when he started his own club.
"People are afraid to stand up," Hatch said. "I know there are a lot of people who wanted to start it, but sometimes it's hard to stand up and take the courage to start a club."
But Brent Hatch, Saige's father, said he was hesitant to let his daughter start the club after he saw what his son went through. When Saige's brother, McKay, started the No Cussing Club in 2009, it spurred thousands of hate messages.
"During the death threats and the bomb threats and the packages and the calls and all the chaos, my daughter said to me when she was in the fifth grade that she wanted to start a modesty club," said Hatch, who co-authored "Raising a G-Rated Family in an X-Rated World," with his wife, Phelecia. "I laughed and said it's not going to happen, especially with what McKay's going through.
"I said, 'You're going to get made fun of at school for going against the grain,'" he said. "My son, I could handle. But my daughter, I didn't know what was going to happen."
Saige was persistent, and ultimately her father caved.
He's finding that even though she has support, the mocking has returned.
"My van was egged, people graffitied on it," he said. "We had people call our house making threats again."
Saige said that as she moves forward with the club, she plans to put together an online petition to members of the film and magazine industries for more modest attire.
She has plans to write to clothing designers to make more modest clothing for women, in general, and to arrange to have a vote in school to enforce the dress code or switch to uniforms, she said.
But her biggest inspiration remains her brother.
"I want to make a change in the world, like he did," she said.

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Australian prank call radio to donate profits to nurse's family

The Australian radio station behind a prank call to a British hospital will donate its advertising revenue until the end of the year to a fund for the family of the nurse who apparently took her own life after the stunt, the company said on Tuesday.
Southern Cross Austereo , parent company of Sydney radio station 2Day FM, said it would donate all advertising revenue, with a minimum contribution of A$500,000, to a memorial fund for the nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, who answered the telephone at the hospital treating Prince William's pregnant wife, Kate.
The company has suspended the Sydney-based announcers, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, scrapped their "Hot 30" programme and suspended advertising on the station in the wake of the Saldanha's death. Southern Cross said it would resume advertising on its station from Thursday.
"It is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts continue to be with the family," Southern Cross Chief Executive Officer Rhys Holleran said in a statement.
"We hope that by contributing to a memorial fund we can help to provide the Saldanha family with the support they need at this very difficult time."

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Dry Cleaning Mix-Up Leaves Woman with Wrong Wedding Dress

Many women love to shop, and there is one particular shopping occasion that they'll never forget -- the day they buy their wedding gown. After the wedding, some brides have their dress cleaned and preserved by a professional dry-cleaning company and put into a preservation box forever, or at least until they are ready to pass the dress to their daughter, granddaughter, or other close relative.
Kim Jones of Georgia and her daughter Emily opened the box containing what she thought was her wedding dress, 26 years after it was originally preserved. What she found inside was not her dress. It was an entirely different dress that had sleeves and was a completely different color than the dress she had worn on her wedding day. Understandably, Kim and her daughter were stunned and upset by what they found. She had hoped to pass down her dress to her daughter to wear on her wedding day. Emily told the Tennessean, "As the only girl in the family, this is the one thing that my mother had for me. She took the time to keep it and preserve it. And to find out that it wasn't hers after all these years was very disappointing."
Kim believes that the mix-up of her dress and someone else's must have taken place at the dry cleaner. The ticket number for her dress was just one digit off from the one on the dress in the box. She tried to contact White Way Cleaners in Brentwood, Tennessee, but found the store was no longer in business. Kim is still searching for her wedding gown.
If you have any information that could help Kim find her missing gown, please contact Bonnie Burch at The Tennessean who first reported the story. You can e-mail her at bburch@tennessean.com. Hopefully, our stories and word-of-mouth will help Kim locate her lost dress.

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Teen fashion blogger branches out with book

Tavi Gevinson has accomplished more in her 16 years than most people double her age.
The style blogger, writer and darling of the fashion set launched a fashion blog from her suburban Chicago home before she turned 12. Two years later it was getting 50,000 hits a day and she was a fixture in the front row of fashion shows in New York, Paris and Tokyo.
Profiles of the young fashionista followed in the New York Times and the New Yorker, along with stories in French Vogue and in teen magazines.
Gevinson has added editor to her credits with the publication of "Rookie Yearbook One," a compilation of articles, photographs and drawings from her Rookie website, which she started about 15 months ago.
"I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to do a print component. Each month on the site is a different theme. I eventually realized that to do a yearly book, and call it a yearbook, would be the best format," she said.
The second book, due next September, is already in the works.
Despite its young audience, the yearbook claims it is not a guide to being a teenager. But with topics ranging from family, friends, relationships, to fashion and school its appeal is obvious.
And Gevinson admits she started the website, which focuses less on fashion and more on teen life, because there wasn't an online magazine for adolescent girls that respected its readers' intelligence.
"I decided to make a website and now a book that didn't talk down to teenagers and had beautiful art, fine articles about TV and all of that."
FROM BEDROOM BLOGGER TO BOOMING BUSINESS
With more than 300 pages, 80 contributors, and articles ranging from "How to Bitchface" to "Breakup Breakdown" and "How to Approach the Person You Like Without Throwing Up," the book navigates teenage angst and a range of other topics and includes photos and graphics.
"Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl," is how Gevinson described it.
It has also attracted some star power, namely online interviews with "Mad Men's" Jon Hamm giving advice about love and guys, and wise words from actor Paul Rudd and producer/director Judd Apatow.
When Gevinson started her blog at 11 she saw it as an outlet that helped her get through middle school. She never expected it to mushroom into a website and the business it is today with a huge fan base.
The youngest of three children, Gevinson recently completed a tour to Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Toronto and other cities to promote the book and still manages to keep up with her school work.
Her father, a retired English teacher, oversees the business side of Rookie, and there is a staff of paid adult editors, photographers and designers who work on the website and manage its contributors.
Despite it all, Gevinson seems unfazed by her success and the celebrity status that has come with it.
"I've enjoyed feeling I make something and people understand it, and that there are other people going through the things that I go through," she said. "That to me is the most valuable thing -- being heard by people who understand it.

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