Memo Pad: Donatella Versace's Cover... Time Style & Design on Hold...

COVERING THE SHOWS: Speaking of covering the shows, fashion Web sites and blogs in flusher times have roped in celebrities as buzzy contributors to their sites. (Remember Tinsley Mortimer and Melania Trump reporting for New York magazine?) But in a recession, fewer publications are looking to pay actors and reality TV stars to write for them, and several editors admitted that online items written by celebrities aren’t any more popular with readers than reviews and commentary by seasoned fashion critics. So this year, many are deploying their own staffs to report in timelier ways, adding Twitter and video look books to their Web sites to cover the collections. Glamour, Elle, In Style, Lucky, New York and Harper’s Bazaar are all covering the shows via Twitter, many for the first time this season.

Meanwhile, Style.com will provide “The Fashion Feed,” a one-stop shop for tweets from 40 fashion individuals and publications, including models Chanel Iman and Dree Hemingway; designers Tory Burch and Chris Benz; MTV host Alexa Chung, and blogs like The Sartorialist, The New York Times’ style blog The Moment, and WWD. Style.com’s editors will also be tweeting from the shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

But some publications will welcome back guest contributors for September fashion week. The Fug Girls will be back to New York magazine’s Web site, along with Lynn Yaeger, street style photographer Tommy Ton and video artist Jeremy Kost. The site is adding new Web features such as user-generated versions of its “Look Book” franchise, curated by their editors into slide shows, and a beefed-up model database. At Cosmopolitan, the magazine is enlisting Rachelle Hruska, founder of the party blog Guestofaguest.com, to serve as fashion week reporter for cosmopolitan.com. She’ll provide three-minute video reports that will live on cosmo.com and Guestofaguest.com. Lucky will tap Shopbop.com’s Kate Ciepluch and Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast to guest blog on its site. Meanwhile, Jezebel.com is sending Jenna Sauers, who formerly contributed as Tatiana the Anonymous Model until identifying herself in July, to cover the shows. It will be Sauers’ first time covering the shows as an observer rather than a participant.

Conversely, some editors will be guest blogging for other media outlets — Harper’s Bazaar’s editors will provide their commentary on The Huffington Post each day of fashion week. — S.D.S., Irin Carmon and Amy Wicks