Here are more questions from all of you. Many thanks for the kind emails and posts.

1. Would it be sometimes more profitable for a parent company to let aging, dead, or fizzled out fashion houses go out in style rather than hire a new designer on board and try to replicate the glory days?

I find the news that Phillips-Van Heusen(NYSE: PVH), the parent company of Calvin Klein, now considers making more luxury acquisitions its first priority kind of heartening. After more than five years of being priced out of the market, so-called strategic buyers -- the luxury goods groups, and others who work in the realm -- are finally seeing valuations drop to a point where buying brands isn't just for the wildly well-financed private equity players. (I'm sure the credit crunch helps too, since private equity relies on debt.)

I've got no problem with the P.E. guys -- some of them are good friends -- but I am convinced that strategic partners offer the best opportunity for young brands. There are exceptions, of course. Jimmy Choo has done fantastically well with its private equity parents. But they already had a solid manager in place when those deals were done. For younger brands looking for leadership as well as money, I think the groups are the place to be. Just look at how Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen were nurtured along.

Yes, the economy is stagnating. And yes, even rich people are nervous about spending money. But is it all bad news for U.S. designers? Maybe not. Several of the big names -- Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen, Oscar de la Renta -- do some if not all of their manufacturing in America.

Yes, really. That means that their costs are significantly lower than the brands that have to manufacture in Europe. (Bearing in mind that almost all the luxury brands buy their fabrics in Italy, in euros.) As retailers from across the world sit in showrooms all over New York this week matching their budgets to their orders, it would seem to make sense to stock up on the U.S. names. Earlier in the week, we spoke to some of the experts in New York to find out what, if any, was the upside to the weak dollar. They were, Alex Bolen, the C.E.O. of Oscar de la Renta, Robert Burke who runs his own consultancy and formerly was the fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman and analyst Dana Tesley.

So Macy's is consolidating its divisions. I feel badly for the people involved who have families and things, but to be honest, I don't feel that bad for the company. This Christmas, I did an almost unheard of thing in the fashion industry. I went shopping in a suburban mall. Namely, Westfield Montgomery Mall in Rockville, Maryland where I grew up. It used to be just Montgomery Mall, but the Westfield Group is buying up as many malls as it can -- they're also launching Europe's biggest mall in London, annoyingly close to where I live -- and renaming them all Westfield, thereby eliminating the only the only trace of individuality or character a mall has. But I digress.

I went shopping at Westfield Montgomery and the nearby White Flint mall, which I think is still just White Flint, and I was shocked, shocked!, at how bad it was. I went to Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom's, Lord & Taylor and honestly couldn't tell which store I was in once I crossed the threshold. (Though Nordstrom's was the best of the lot.) The same product, the same brands, the same horrible lighting and dingy dressing rooms. But mostly it was the product that depressed me. How many pairs of cheap, made in China, ballet-flats with giant baubles stuck to them do they think we need? Wanted a coat for winer? Well, you'd better have wanted a down puffa jacket with a faux fur hood or you were out of luck. If you did want one, you could find them by CK, DKNY, Kors by Michael Kors, but with little, if any, difference between them. I got the eerie sense that they were coming out of the same factory, with a little Chinese man at the end putting different tags into them with willy-nilly.

Iconix Brands (ICON), run by Neil Cole, brother of Kenneth is one of the retail companies that's doing well despite the economic climate. Why? Because, as Cole explains in this CNBC video, they are isolated from the consumer. They have guaranteed fees from the companies that license use of their brand names. They don't make or sell the products that come from the brands they control (Including Badgley Mischka and Candie's). It was a strategy was that Cole put in place with a financier, Bob D'Loren.

Now D'Loren is the C.E.O. of NexCen (NEXC). At NexCen, he's taken the concept a step further by also buying retail shop concepts, the stores of which are run by franchisees. He recently bought a small New York based chain of luxury shoe stores called The Shoe Box and he plans to roll them out across the country, once he's had his team tinker with the design. I had never heard of Shoe Box or of a national multi-brand luxury shoe store, so I was eager to see the concept. Here are some shots, courtesy NexCen:

I was speaking with Eric Beder, a retail analyst from Brean Murray, Carret & Co., about NexCen (NEXC) recently and he told me, "they can make good deals, but now we need to see if they can make good on their promises."

The biggest NexCen acquisition to date has been the Athlete's Foot -- a troubled brand which declared bankruptcy in 2004. NexCen recently introduced two new concepts for the chain. One is a new look for the performance stores and the other is a fashion-driven concept for urban centers.