Stefani: Gonna make toilet water out of your culture

Gwen Stefani has long attempted to bolster her credentials as being in touch with young people by marching bands of pressganged Harajuku girls round behind her.

Now, she's decided she's going to milk some cash out of them, too by launching a range of perfumes in caricatured bottles branded Harajuku Girls.

Which, by implication, means that she's gone one step further from merely appropriating a youth culture that existed quite happily without her, and turned it into a brand name. I await her explanation of how she intends to share the money she's making out of this project with the original Harajuku - perhaps she'll use the cash to fund some more meekly walking in silence behind her.

[Thanks to Eleanor G for the story]