Don't expect to see many black models at Paris Fashion Week. Top designers, who are doing some preemptive damage control, say so themselves. They blame the agencies, which they say have a limited selection of models and color and an overwhelming number of Eastern Europeans.

"I asked the modelling agency for black girls for our next show but there simply aren’t any," said Mario Lefranc, half of the Lefranc-Ferrant designer duo, one of 40-odd labels presenting couture collections in Paris over the coming week.

"I’m sick of blonde Russian girls," he told AFP. "Clearly the trend now is all for blue-eyed blondes."

And at Jean-Paul Gaultier’s, a designer renowned for using models of all ages, sizes, and origins, one assistant said: "It’s really very difficult at the moment. There are no black models on the market, the agencies have none."

In the last few years, she added, "there’s been an invasion of girls from Eastern Europe, of their type of beauty."

We all know there are black models, so either the agencies aren't sending them or the designers are blaming agencies for the fact that they simply don't want them. Either way, the fashion industry won't change unless it wants to. And it doesn't seem like it's particularly interested. [AFP]

• This is for the next time you're in Paris, if you should be so lucky… [USAT]

• "We don't need no stupid global UN Racism conference" — The U.S. [UNW]

• Did Will Smith get the Farrakhan treatment for daring to (innocuously) speak about Hitler? [HP]

• Lupe Fiasco's track about violence in video games is annoying the people at Wired. [Wired]

• Twenty-three percent of inner city black children are infected with roundworm. Very sad and very gross. [FOX]

Kanye West got back in the saddle this weekend, flying to Paris for a scheduled performance. But then he kind of fell off the saddle when he had a crying breakdown after trying to dedicate a song to his mother. And then, in true "Stronger" form, he got back on, and, according to an audience member, made concert magic.

"He said the word, 'Mother' and just couldn't go any further," Le Parisien journalist Meddy Magloire said. "A back-up singer, the DJ and a guitar player came over to console him. It looked like he might collapse. He just couldn't continue. He just stood there in a spotlight, crying while the band continued playing."

After a few moments of stunned silence, Magloire says, the audience of 5,000 reacted by offering calls of encouragement, which grew into applause. The band restarted the song, but West left the stage, returning after 10-15 minutes to conclude the concert with a rousing performance of "Stronger."

"He was very nervous, seemed to have gathered himself up, and had a lot of energy," Magloire says. "He kept shouting out to the audience, 'I need you… I need you right now.' and the public was screaming back. It was magic."

I wasn't expecting him to get back into performing so quickly, but it's obviously pretty cathartic for him.

Before Beverly, Iman, Veronica, Naomi and Tyra, there was Dorothea. Okay, so the name doesn't conjure up images of beauty and glamour the way the ones I just listed do. But those fashion icons all walked through the doors Dorothea opened.

In the 1950s, Dorothea Towles Church was the first black model to sweep the Paris couture scene. A favorite of Christian Dior, for whom she dyed her hair platinum blond to create "contrast," Church has said that in Paris, they saw her only as a beautiful woman. Of course, the Texas native did not have the same mainstream success in the United States, but magazines like Jet and Ebony would often publish articles detailing her Paris adventures.

But her growing fame did not eliminate prejudice on the part of some designers. At Schiaparelli, she once overheard someone describe her as Tahitian. While she worked for Pierre Balmain, she recalled, he would not allow her to borrow dresses for a photograph for Ebony magazine, fearing that would offend his white clientele. She took the clothes later on the pretext that she would wear them to a party, and the magazine then photographed them.

Church returned to the states in 1954 armed with trunk-loads of couture she had amassed through her work with different designers. She toured HBCUs, staging fashion shows with the never-before-seen designer clothes and throwing fundraisers for various branches of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Read more about the little-known Dorothea Church in Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models.

I'm well aware of how many of you feel about the Maxim Hot 100 list, which only included six black women. Apparently, those six black women weren't too thrilled with being on the list either, since none of them appeared at last night's Maxim party in NYC. My guess is they were either too A-list, too busy, too uninterested, or, in Beyonce's case, all of the above. While Lindsay Lohan was celebrating her list-topping victory at the Hotel Gansevoort, Beyonce was shopping in Paris, where she was probably far more excited about her BET Award nominations than the dubious honor of being the 13th hottest girl in Maxim's universe.

[WorldCelebs]