Nicole Richie is a prime example. Who needs rehab if you have fashion? Photo: Valerie Macon, Getty Images

Gossip followers were treated on Monday to a celebrity "naked tape" featuring "Grey's Anatomy" hunk Eric Dane, his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and a former Miss United States Teen called Kari Ann Peniche. ("Naked tape" being the term of art coined by Dane's attorney to mean a nudie video that falls short of showing any actual sex.)

By Thursday we learned that Peniche, a minor Hollywood player who has taped a yet-to-air season of VH1's "Celebrity Rehab," had agreed to design a line of swimwear for Los Angeles label Christian Audigier. She made this announcement to video paparazzi as the designer himself drove her around in a golf cart tricked out to look like a Hummer.

It was a suitably bizarre development in a gossip story that proves no "celebrity" is too minor to command a headline, however briefly.

Miss Peniche is not the first scandal-singed personality to seek respectability as a designer. Monica Lewinsky, you may recall, tried to reinvent herself in the late 1990s with a line of handbags called "The Real Monica." (She still has a sleek-looking dummy web site, although a pop-up informs browsers that the line is "hibernating while preparing for the next season.")

And last year, after a spate of stories questioning her sobriety, weight-loss, driving abilities and commitment to motherhood, Nicole Richie came out with a jewelry line named after her daughter, called House of Harlow 1960.

Of course, if you're in so much trouble with the tabloids that being a fashion designer seems like a more stable career choice, then it's possible you're not addressing the real problem.

But does anyone truly expect the former Miss United States Teen (whose dog was recently rushed to the vet after possibly ingesting cocaine) to sketch so much as a string bikini? Surely Christian Audigier doesn't. What's in it for him is some fleeting publicity -- such as the recent dubious announcement that Jon Gosselin would be collaborating with him on a children's line.

Only a couple years ago celebrities rushed to rehab after their public embarrassments. Now it seems the answer is to call yourself a designer. Let's hope it works out for them!