A mother of two who lives in Pitman, Pa., Salmon launched the online game two months ago. And already, thousands of women have formed leagues and started to play. The site, www.fantasyfashionleague.com , averages 2 million hits - some from as far away as Turkey - a month. It's a fact not lost on the fashion world, which immediately realized the marketing potential and turned Salmon into the latest "Mrs. It."

"We believe there is a chance that this could take off like a craze," said Amy Ford Keohane, vice president of development for InStyle magazine, who is developing a promotional partnership with the Fantasy Fashion League.

Each player has a roster of designers and celebrities that make up the player's team. There are six teams in a league. Players log points for celebrity and designer sightings in three categories: red-carpet events (such as the Oscars); daily trade publications (basically Women's Wear Daily and InStyle.com); and 15 monthly fashion magazines.

The game began with the Emmys, which aired on Sept. 18, and runs till the season finale of the Academy Awards on March 5. For example, players searched for points during Tuesday's Country Music Awards. Down the road are the sure-to-be-mined People's Choice Awards and the Golden Globes.

The strategy is to choose people who are hot, so it helps to know who has a movie coming out, which celebrity is launching a clothing line, or who the prime-time darlings are.

It doesn't matter if you think Teri Hatcher is too skinny, sniveling and silly; if the stringbean has the potential to get you points because she and her "Desperate Housewives" crew are everywhere, pick her.

Celebrities and models with major endorsements are golden, too. That's why when Kate Moss got dropped from H&M and Burberry, FFL players erased her from their teams. Celebrities most likely to be on the cover of magazines are hot commodities, too. That explains the wars over Oprah.

Bernadette Lawler, 29, owner of Mixed Company, an art and home furnishings store in Philadelphia, is in a league that convenes every Friday at Tony, an Old City Philadelphia boutique, for martinis and good cheese.

"As a businessperson, I'm interested in results," Lawler said. "I want to understand how the publicists get them the publicity. It's about more than the points. It's about how they got them."

Salmon is learning something about publicity, too. Since she put the game online, she's been fielding calls from luxury shoe companies and spas vying for a promotional shout-out on her pink-wallpapered Web site with its shopping-friendly 18-to-45-year-old audience.

League winners will compete for a shopping spree at Zappos, an online shoe store. And Maryland-based life fitness trainer Melanie KefrenRae will work with Grail Springs Spa in Ontario to send a league on a weeklong, all-expense-paid trip to the spa valued at $35,000.

California-based shoe designer Taryn Rose will sponsor a party at her West Coast boutique on the Friday before the Oscars for a chosen league. The following night, Rose will take the league as her guests to an exclusive pre-Oscar event.

It's hard to believe that all of this came from Salmon's need to get back at her husband, Neil, a staunch fantasy football player who developed the skill of tuning her out for hours on end on Sundays during football season.

"We comanaged a team called the Bulldawgs and he fired me because I made him draft Eddie George (all-time leading rusher for the Tennessee Titans) as running back," said Salmon, dressed in an oversized T-shirt and shorts as she nursed a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

"He (George) was really cute and he'd just gotten married. I reasoned that he was in love and he'd have a great season. But it was his worst season ever. So, my husband fired me."

"I guess I have to take credit for having the obsession that started the idea," husband Neil said, chuckling. "But she was picking players based on emotion. ... Something had to be done."

Salmon developed FFL in the spring, testing it on a network of friends and family. At first Neil rigged up an Excel spreadsheet to help her chart the points. But that got out of hand, so Neil researched fantasy football sites online and found a program written by a Valley Forge-area company, RotoLeague. The Salmons licensed the software and hired Visual Solutions, a Web development company in Merion, to "pink it up."

Chances are you won't see Salmon, 31, decked out in the latest from Muccia Prada or Stella McCartney, but the brown-haired mom's young spirit matches her cherubic face.

Two years ago, Salmon cowrote a coffee-table book, "Dogma" (Andrews McMeel, $14.95). And she's just written a book called "The Mommy File," to be published in the spring, also by Andrews McMeel. The book is intended to help parents organize magazine articles and other random clippings.

FFL was featured on the "Today" show in September, and snippets about it have appeared in Women's Wear Daily and Sports Illustrated. Nearly a dozen newspapers, including the Detroit News, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, have carried mentions as well.

High school teacher Jessica Raynor read one of the articles and instituted the game in her fashion marketing class. At her Fairfax County, Va., school, the sports marketing classes also play fantasy football.

"It's a wonderful teaching tool," Raynor said of the game. "These kids are really into fashion, but they follow it from a consumer end, not a trade magazine end. This opens up their eyes and really shows them how business is done."

"That's the most interesting part to me, because that's the proof of how what we see on the runway translates into the real world," Salmon said.

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