Crystal Fambrini

This is KOIN early morning news 11/28/08 live spot #3 of 4 titled “All About Accessories” and features the following Washington Square Center stores:  J. Crew, Ann Taylor, White House Black Market, Nordstrom.

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Crystal Fambrini

This is KOIN early morning news 11/28/08 live spot #4 of 4 titled “Picking Gifts For Little Ones” and features the following Washington Center stores:   Pottery Barns Kids, Lego, Janie and Jack, Godiva, and Build-A-Bear.

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Imagine: That could be you on the left, or right or... you get it.

Lindsay Lohan will be appearing at The Grove’s Nordstrom in Los Angeles this Monday from 6 to 8pm.

She is stepping into the public arena to push her leggings line, 6126.  Lohan named her legging line after Marilyn Monroe’s birthdate — ie 6/1/26.  Her leggings have such details as zippers, knee pads, glitter and animal print designs.  Price point is $70 – $130.

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An Amazon.com employee pulls a pallet of empty boxes past the book storage area at their Fernley, Nevada, warehouse on Monday, Dec. 1.

From:  LA Times by Times Staff Writers Alex Pham and Andrea Chang

Wooed by heavy discounts from online retailers, consumers who had been exercising restraint during this holiday shopping season finally let themselves go on Cyber Monday.

E-commerce spending on the first workday after the long Thanksgiving weekend jumped 15%, to $846 million from $733 million a year earlier, according to a ComScore report released Wednesday. Web shoppers started buying more on Thanksgiving and kept going through the weekend, the research firm said.

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 02: Singer Britney Spears and TV anchor Diane Sawyer appear on ABC's "Good Morning America" at The Big Apple Circus tent at Lincoln Center on December 2, 2008 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Tonight at 8pm EST Britney Spears one hour documentary “For The Record” will be available on demand on MTV.com.  

“I’m not gonna sugarcoat it and say I was OK, ” she reveals in the special referring to the time, around a year ago, when she shaved her head bald, used an umbrella as a weapon, and locked herself in a bathroom with her kids for several hours before authorities were forced to take her to the hospital for suicide watch.    

This is a big week of Britney — her birthday, her big documentary premiere in which she states “no question will be of limits”  (well that’s because the off camera interviewee doesn’t really ask many questions and really there’s no need to sweat over it because we will watch it either way and now this leaves something for “the autobiography” that Britney hints at in the program.  Most likely a comeback for the comeback to the comeback.  But I digress.) and ofcourse her sixth studio album “Circus” dropped on Monday too. 

The documentary is essentially another tool in the Britney Spears comeback to the comeback pr machine (MTV Music Awards 2007 ring a bell!?!) aimed at showing the world that Spears is not insane, really she’s not (in the documentary she claims people take advantage of her, it’s not her, it’s “certain people”).  Britney agreed to be documented for 60 days while she goes shopping, records her music, works on a new music video (which ofcourse you will have to watch at another time) and gives diary-like entries to the camera.

Britney Spears in her MTV documentary - available online tonight at 8pm EST.

 The show has its moments, like when producers placed a videographer inside Britney’s car to show what she sees when she looks out her car window — literally hundreds of screaming photographs all vying for a piece of that staggering $100 million a year that Britney photographs generate.  That 15 seconds alone makes this documentary worth watching.

People all around the world are always curious to see what Britney looks like — and now at age 27, can Britney keep eating her Dad’s grits with extra butter and still keep her abs rock solid?  These are the burning questions filling many minds right now… many of whom should probably be asking that question to themselves.  

Well in honor of Britney’s self reflection, and our admittance that even though she lip syncs we still love to watch her perform, let’s also take a moment and reflect on her style.  From tummy bearing attire to lace and lots of sparkle, Britney always knows how to make a statement.  But is her fashion sense matching who she claims she is now?  Hit us up with your comments below.

[Show as slideshow]

Shoppers wait outside a Best Buy store to open at 5 a.m. on Friday in Los Angeles. Thousands of shoppers went shopping early to take advantage of Black Friday,' the day after Thanksgiving ,which is considered the traditional kick-off for the Christmas shopping season. With special promotions and deep discounts, most of the year's sales in retail are made during the four weeks leading up to the annual 25 December holiday. JEWEL SAMAD.

From:  ABC News  

Deep discounts on everything from sweaters to TVs drove shoppers out of hibernation for the Thanksgiving weekend, but the buying was tempered and sales for the traditional start of the holiday season appear at best in line with stores’ low expectations.

The sales receipts, however, came at the expense of profits, and merchants are facing a big challenge exciting financially strapped shoppers for the rest of the season that’s expected to be the weakest in decades.

The nation’s retailers — who since mid-September have suffered from the most dramatic falloff in spending in decades amid a ballooning financial crisis — opened their stores as early as midnight on Thursday, holding their breath wondering if shoppers would show up for the pre-dawn specials. But while the crowds did come out, analysts say they were thinner than last year, and according to some accounts, business fell off sharply for the remainder of the weekend.

Shoppers were also focused on bargains and smaller-ticket, practical items like blenders and video games, as they worry about layoffs, tightening credit and shrinking retirement funds.

Even online spending, once a bright spot in retailing, has been hit hard by economic woes in recent months. ComScore, an Internet research company, reported Sunday that online spending was up a modest 2 percent for the combined Thanksgiving Day and Friday, compared with the year-ago period.

“I’ve cut my budget in half. I usually have a spending limit of $50 per person, but this year, it’s $25,” said Laura Bentley, of Miami, who was at the local Dolphin Mall on Saturday, her first day of holiday shopping.

Manno and Poun Sam of Houston, who had just purchased some toys, including a Crayola coloring game and a stuffed animal, at a Wal-Mart store in suburban Houston on Saturday, said they were trying to stay within a $500 budget.

“We’re not buying anything fancy,” said Manno Sam, an assembly-line worker. “We can’t afford it.”

New York-based retail consultant Walter Loeb said he expects sales for the weekend to be below year-ago levels, based on discussions this weekend with key executives from discounters and department stores.

But he added, “It wasn’t as bad as some feared. … People were buying but they bought cheap, and the results were not as good.”

Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group, a market research group, who had a network of analysts at 53 mall locations across the country this weekend, said that “the holiday started off with some promise but quickly moved to concern.”

“It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t,” he said, noting that he estimates that the weekend’s sales were at best even with the same holiday weekend a year ago.

Karen MacDonald, a spokeswoman at Taubman Centers Inc., which operates 24 malls in 11 states, said that based on a sampling of malls, business on Friday was anywhere from unchanged to up mid-single digits. But on Saturday, sales were unchanged to down slightly.

“Friday was encouraging, but Saturday wasn’t as good as we hoped,” she said.

But Toys R Us Chief Executive Jerry Storch reported on Sunday that customer traffic was at least as strong this past weekend as the Thanksgiving weekend a year ago, and said he was “definitely pleased with sales.”

Geoffrey Webb, director of advertising and sales promotions at K-B Toys Inc., said that sales for the weekend were equal or slightly better than last year.

“We are very encouraged by the response,” he said.

A more complete sales picture of how the Thanksgiving shopping weekend fared won’t be known until Thursday when the nation’s retailers report November same-store sales, or sales at stores opened at least a year.

According to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT, a research firm that tracks total retail sales at more than 50,000 outlets, sales rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion on Friday from the Black Friday a year ago.

ShopperTrak RCT is expected to release data for the combined Friday and Saturday period on Monday. Bill Martin, ShopperTrak’s co-founder, said he wasn’t sure if the momentum was sustained through the rest of the weekend.

The day after Thanksgiving — dubbed Black Friday because it historically was the day when a surge of shoppers helped stores break into profitability for the full year — has been fading in importance.

In recent years, merchants have been pushing earlier the sales and expanded hours that were typically reserved for that day. This year, in a desperate bid to pull in shoppers, stores were even more aggressive, offering discounts of up to 70 percent in the days leading to the weekend, and widening those price cuts for a broader array of merchandise for the early morning deals.

Aside from the economy, however, Black Friday’s early morning madness has also lost some of its steam because of the abundance of bargains that shoppers can find on the Web. Cohen also noted there’s less frenzy this year because, with the exception of some isolated hard-to-find hits like Fisher-Price’s Elmo Live and Nintendo’s “Wii Fit” exercise game, there isn’t a particular gift that’s a “big standout.”

While Black Friday isn’t a predictor of the holiday season, it does act as a barometer of consumers’ willingness to spend. Complicating matters is a shorter buying season — 27 days between Black Friday and Christmas — instead of 32 last year, putting more pressure on retailers.

Clearly economic woes played a role in how shoppers bought this weekend. K-B’s Webb noted that consumers were focusing on bargains like a $30 My Happy Family dollhouse, which offered furniture and figures, as part of the retailer’s supervalue program. Taubman’s MacDonald said that practical items did well, like cookware and small home appliances, but clothing and electronics also were popular because they were deeply discounted.

The managers of Dillard’s and Macy’s departments stores at Greenspoint Mall in north Houston both said weekend crowds met expectations, though shoppers seemed to be more bargain-hungry than in recent years.

At the mall’s Macy’s, one of a dozen in the Houston area, clothing, jewelry and home items — but not high-end brands — were selling well, said manager Ron Misrack.

“People seem to be going to promotional items,” Misrack said. “If you look at our books, you can see the specials, and people seem to be going for those items.”

Sign up to become part of the Style Seen Daily Community and get on the list for the Fred Segal Fun daytime event happening this Saturday, December 6th in Santa Monica, California.  Hope to see you there.

If you are not in the Southern California area but would love to keep abreast of the latest fashion happenings, keep checking in because we will have more exclusive invites for other areas coming soon.

And if you want to share with us an upcoming style event you know about, please send us an email or write a comment below.