• Alicia Keys has a jewelry line; her bangles and rings come engraved with the words of the Japanese pseudoscientist Masaru Emoto. You can't make this up. [WWD]
• Marie Claire has published some clear pictures of Rodarte's line for Target. [Nitrolicious]

• John Galliano's Christmas tree design for Claridge's is extraordinary and very weird. [Vogue UK]
• Madonna has rebounded from Louis Vuitton's decision not to re-hire her for a third season of ad campaigns rather well: she shot the spring Dolce & Gabbana campaign with Steven Klein in a Brooklyn studio on Friday. [WWD]
• Zac Posen has eliminated his public relations officer because of budget constraints. [WWD]
• Jamba Juice is getting into the rag trade. The maker of delicious smoothies thinks it can whip up "Jamba-inspired" t-shirts, sweatshirts, and headwear that everyone will want. No delivery date for the first collection was given. [BrandWeek]
• Express is suing Forever 21 for copyright violations concerning several plaid patterns, in what has to be the endgame for fashion originality. [WWD]
• Scarlett Johanson is apparently still doing ad campaigns for Mango. [FWD]
• Diane Von Furstenberg dropped a few dresses off with Ikram Goldman during a recent trip to Chicago. We all know what that means! [WWD]
• Thakoon Panichgul is now the creative director of the Japanese jewelry brand Tasaki. [Style.com]
• Tom Ford's profile in the Advocate is alternately touching, perhaps too revealing, and kind of crass — kind of like the man's designs. He opens up about his depression, his struggles with alcohol dependency, admits to chasing youth with Botox and Restylane, and how he once shaved his eyebrow off when he was on mescaline, but most fascinatingly of all, to our ears, is the revelation that in his adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, he gave the main character a last name after his first boyfriend, Ian Falconer. Oh! Also there's this: "Yves and his partner, Pierre Bergé, were so difficult and so evil and made my life such misery. I'd lived in France off and on and had always loved it. I went to college in France. It wasn't until I started working in France that I began to dislike it. They would call the fiscal police, and they would show up at our offices…They'd come marching in, and you had to let them in and they'd interview my secretary. And they can fine you and shut you down. Pierre was the one calling them. I've never talked about this on the record before, but it was an awful time for me. Pierre and Yves were just evil. So Yves Saint Laurent doesn't exist for me…I have letters from Yves Saint Laurent that are so mean you cannot even believe such vitriol is possible." [Advocate]
• Says Vogue/CDFA Fashion Fund finalist Flora Gill, of Ohne Titel: "My parents were always very supportive. They actually bought me books about Comme des Garçons when I was 8 years old, which I think is not…usual." Meet the other nine finalists in this video. [Style.com]
• Simon Fuller, who already holds a 51% stake in London's Storm Models, is rumored to be investigating setting up a New York agency. Posh is supposedly involved. This sounds awfully similar to the Simon-Fuller-and-Kate-Moss-are-going-to-found-an-agency rumor of a few months back. [Daily Mail]
• The woman who runs British lingerie brand Ultimo (current face: Peaches Geldof) noticed her 10-year-old daughter talking about going on a diet. So she has decided to ban excessive Photoshopping in Ultimo's advertising images. (Whether she'll ban the company from employing women like Peaches Geldof as role models is unanswered.) [Sun]
• Friday, Lady Gaga tweeted that she was visiting Nick Knight's Showstudio. The singer is apparently working with the fashion photographer/videographer on a video for her upcoming tour. The concept apparently involves "a veritable menagerie of animals." [Showstudio]
• Style.com ranked 2009's top fashion partiers; all the usual suspects — Olivier Zahm, Alex Wang, Lauren Santo-Domingo, Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, Leigh Lezark, Derek Blasberg, and Karl Lagerfeld — make the cut. But more importantly: can we never, ever refer to the Meatpacking District as "MePa" again? [Style.com]
• Cacharel, relaunched this October under Belgian designer Cedric Charlier, is returning to worldwide distribution in the spring. [WWD]
• And, just like that, it's over: Versace face, British Vogue cover model, Rimmel campaign-nabber Georgia May Jagger says she's quitting the biz. At least for the rest of the year: she's 17, so she has school, you know. [Vogue UK]
• Luella is closing. [Vogue UK]
• Former Gucci creative director Dawn Mello was allegedly run down by a bicycle messenger outside Bergdorf's. She has a shattered femur. [P6]

It's interesting that in this off-the-cuff video, where she speaks with apparently minimal editing, Austria appears her most alert and engaged. I often got the sense during this series that Austria might be the girl whom the constant presence of cameras irritated the most; sure, Madeline was the only one to ever actually tell anyone to stop filming, but her natural showmanship always shone through, and Cato's blithe confidence never let her appear less than secure. (On screen, Cato moves with the un-self-awareness of someone who couldn't even conceive of a reason why anyone would dislike her.) But Austria, I thought, sometimes seemed a little weirded out by this whole starring in a show of herself thing. Seeing her perky and smiling and happy instead of sullen and withdrawn—wasn't Paris where she missed more than half her castings and sank to the pavement in a dejected moment?—makes me wonder just how much Sad Austria was a character created by editing, and therefore what IMG and Vogue's interest was in making their youngest and most vulnerable new model appear close to the edge. She always did look magisterial on the runway.

The girls explain that they're not sure if the series will return to follow them, or others from IMG's development board. The next show season, of course, begins in New York next February.

Earlier:
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "You Really Have To Give Up Stuff"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "I Feel Like My Confidence, More And More. This Is My Place."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Shows Don't Even Pay. At All. Zero. Zip."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Don't Change, Just Improve"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related:

Austria's Goodbye Video
Madeline's Goodbye Video
Cato's Goodbye Video
Vogue.tv's 'Model.Live' Channel
'Model.Live' on Bebo

This kind of peek at a girl-on-the-verge reminds me of nothing so much as novelist Jennifer Egan's wonderful 1996 New York Times Magazine cover story about the first European season of a certain 16-year-old from Omaha who went by James. James got shingles on her back from the stress.

So because of this strange moment, we get to see Cato — who walked in 37 shows in four cities, and, yes, that is her in the brand new D&G cruise campaign—thinking out loud about her future in the business at a time when she is still sometimes uneasy at having to think of herself in the third person. And we get to see her parents expressing their reservations about her choices. Her mother calls her burgeoning career "bittersweet" since Cato's rarely home in the Netherlands these days. Her father seems disappointed that she is delaying university, saying, sternly, "You've gotta finish an education."

On this week's episode, Cato is moved from the development board — the home of the young, the inexperienced, the rising stars who could go either way — to the main women's board, which is for those who have more or less arrived. Cato's reaction, in the full clip, when her agents sit her down for the news is unruffled: "I was thinking that at any moment it could happen," she says, evenly. She's not stupid; anyone with an inkling how this industry works would know it's time for a girl like Cato to graduate, though not in the way her dad would wish.

'Model.Live' must be taking off on a Cato-ish trajectory for IMG and Vogue. What was originally conceived as a one-off series with a 12-episode arc has somehow stretched the 4-week ready-to-wear season into 14 weekly episodes, with the last set to go live next Friday. I had been wondering if the success would lead IMG to develop the idea further — for instance, if there would be any follow-up with Madeline, Austria, and Cato when the Fall/Winter 09 shows roll around. But this episode ends with the revelation that there will be a second season. Maybe sometime soon Cato will take Caroline Trentini and Catherine McNeil's places over at Express.com. She was all over competitor H&M's online home earlier this fall.

Earlier: Vogue's 'Model.Live': "I Feel Like My Confidence, More And More. This Is My Place."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Shows Don't Even Pay. At All. Zero. Zip."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Don't Change, Just Improve"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 13 [Vogue.tv]

Austria books 12 shows at Dominican Moda. For a small fashion week, that's a blockbuster act, and the irony is that a girl who's worked internationally, like Austria, can because of that patina skip to the top of the local payscale. To be sure, it's a fish/pond question—nobody, least of all Austria herself, is under any illusion that opening and closing shows for designers whose profile on the world circuit is nil will do much for her career—but it's nice to think that in addition to getting to eat her mother's cooking, our girl is probably making more money this week than she did in a month of nonstop hustling to book shows that pay models like her only in clothes.

This episode also mentions some of the economic issues that encourage models like Austria to put up with the industry's caprices and demands at an age when others are pondering high school class offerings. Shortly after finishing her show season, Austria books a campaign (the client isn't named) in New York City. Socrates McKinney, ever diplomatic, lets slip that her pay rate for the day was $9,000. In the Dominican Republic, unemployment hovers around 15%, and 42% of the population lives below the poverty line. To even have the chance to earn more than the average annual income of an adult in your country in a single day is not something one can easily turn down. Even if, given her recent expenses and consequent debt—rent at agency apartments, that car service she used in London, her composite cards, plane tickets, food, assorted MetroCards and cartes oranges, photo tests and portfolio pictures, etc—I'm sure that Austria's payment for this job went entirely to IMG.

I, and most other girls of first-world birth, generally model because it's the most interesting of our present options. It's sobering to remember that there are plenty of girls who model because they have few other options at all.

Earlier:
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Shows Don't Even Pay. At All. Zero. Zip."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Don't Change, Just Improve"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 12 [Vogue.tv]

Modeling is just like Madeline says. (And, to their credit, what Vogue and IMG allow her to say so clearly and directly.) Agencies deduct so many expenses — rent, any advances you've taken, messenger fees, laser copies of the images in your portfolio, composite card printings, airfares, et cetera — that your wages arrive so garnished you could mistake them for canapés. (I remember the first time I spent a whole summer in one market. It was my big break, with a big agency, in a big city — and I worked solidly, doing mainly editorials, and look books for designers who'd keep me for 10 hours and then say, "Now you get to pick out....A dress!" I was dismayed to find that by the end of the season, despite working regularly, I owed my agency $1000. For what amounted to photocopying.)

You sink into debt so deeply that your only hope of earning it back is to stay in the game. But then when the nice money job, the $5,000-a-day catalog or the campaign for the South American mall brand you've never heard of, does come through, you don't see a penny because you technically spent it three months prior, when you had to pay your $325 weekly rent to stay in the agency-owned apartment and buy your $25 MetroCard and eat and reprint your cards to the tune of $500 — and all you'd booked back then was a lousy editorial that paid $100. Less your agency's customary 20%.

But, eventually, the campaigns and the catalogs come a little thicker, and occasionally your ledger even nudges into the black, because it turns out that during all those poorly paid editorials and look books, you were learning how to model. You were learning how to pose, how to give the client what he wants, how to ease the tension between the panicky fashion editor and the self-conscious photographer when it's only Look 7 and the light is going, how to make clothes look good in two dimensions, how to take cues from the makeup and styling and setting and form yourself into a kind of character. Madeline says in this episode, "I think I'm a really good model, and I can give any photographer what they want." That's a sentiment I can relate to; and while nobody pretends modeling is the most important job in the world, I do believe everyone has the right to take pride in their work. The hard part remains getting the opportunity to demonstrate one's skill. But if it were easy, I'd probably enjoy it less. I suspect Madeline might feel the same.

Earlier:
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Don't Change, Just Improve"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 11 [Vogue.tv]

The ready-to-wear fashion season takes four weeks. Model.Live was slated to air for eight. This episode is the tenth — and it closes with a reminder to tune in next week, which makes me wonder just how long the show about the shows plans to linger, and whether something that might have been a good idea in a short format has now overstayed its welcome.

It's not really a question of finding the series' length disproportionate to its drama, since it's been clear from the start that wringing drama out of the fashion grind is not IMG's goal. (That might "embarrass" someone.)

Failing understandably to find in the calendar blip of a single show season a ready-made narrative with any surprising arc, and choosing not to overlay a fake narrative (except to occasionally and half-heartedly rig the proceedings for sponsorship reasons), it's tough to engage with the material. Model.Live is animated mainly by a strong sense of what it's not: every shot seems to telegraph a sense of sober reflection and purpose that would be fine if it weren't wholly incongruous with the frothiness of fashion in general, and the draining whirligig activity of shows in particular. Merely not giving in to the temptations of overshare-y cast commentary and hokey Hills-style narrative manipulations isn't enough to justify a series if its content isn't fresh and interesting on its own. Model.Live has about it more than a whiff of genre hauteur, like a Pulitzer winner writing pulp, and that unwillingness to actually dirty the knuckles is crippling.

Earlier:
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 10 [Vogue.tv]

Madeline, you'll remember, struck out with the casting agents in Milan, and earlier failed to even reach British soil after misunderstanding her visa requirements. She sets out confidently in Paris, a city whose client base she knows from several previous stints working there, but although plenty of casting agents and designers act interested in her, greet her warmly, and try their clothes on her, she gets to the offices of IMG Paris to find that nobody's actually planning on booking her for any shows. Not even Fatima Lopes, a designer she's walked for before, who makes our girl try on seven different outfits at the casting.

It is entirely true what Madeline says: not being booked by a given client, or any clients, always says more about them than it does about you. Clients' preferences change from season to season, and are always so subjective that they sometimes seem capriciously random. But knowing this doesn't always make it easier to be constantly hearing, "We love you, you're perfect, you're just not right for us right now." There's nothing you can change in that situation: you just suffer from some apparent innate wrongness that no amount of pavement-pounding can fix. You go from being on top of the world — Vivienne Westwood loved me! — to crashing down — neither she nor Issey Miyake books Mad — and it all happens without any discernable reason or logic.

Speaking of pavement-pounding, we get another rare glimpse of my favorite real model-reality Actual True Thing this episode: public transportation usage. Austria, demoted from her London car service privileges, rides the 1 train, alone — how and why she's ditched her cloying mother agent, Sokrates McKinney, and her wannabe-model mom, is unexplained. She is given 12 castings, aims to reach a more reasonable 8, but finds herself struggling to see just five casting agents at the end of one day.

The agency's conclusion is that, shucks, the girl may just be too young to profit from these "opportunities." Cato even weighs in, opining that modeling is a pretty intense full-time job, and that she herself wouldn't have been capable of doing it at 16. (Which is funny-but-not because a. Cato was doing it at 16 — she just had parents who kept her from over-committing to the biz at that early stage and b. Austria, as I simply cannot forget, was said in at least one print venue in her native Dominican Republic to be not even close to age 16 earlier this year).

I've been advocating a little fashion time-out for Austria since, well, this series began. The girl is beautiful, but she needs, and deserves, a chance to grow up a little before she makes the hundreds of thousands that I still think will be her eventual due selling makeup and overpriced handbags. She can get to all that after, you know, finishing high school. Or at least after actually turning 16.

Paris fashion week is in reality almost over, but strangely, Model.Live will return next week to show us Paris Part II, and, presumably, How It All Ends. I know I'll be on the edge of my seat. And probably rubbing my feet and plotting ways to meet Madeline and buy her a well-deserved beer.

Earlier:
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 9 [Vogue.tv]

It is hard to break into the show circuit. Designers are so given to rotating their regular crop of supes among themselves that they will make audiences wait for the top girls to rush over from the previous show rather than settle for a newbie. The big catwalks are awash with the Catherine McNeils and Lily Donaldsons of this world, meaning that thousands of hopefuls — who have already run the gauntlet of getting agency representation, building their books up to competitive standard, and developing a runway body by any means necessary — are competing for just a couple of spots in the shows people notice. Most new (Austria) and newish (Madeline) models need to get lucky to even book one of the tiny, overlooked shows that crowd the penumbra of the main fashion week calendars.

And then there's Cato Van Ee. I really want to like Cato. She seems intelligent. She has cool parents — parents who wisely got their daughter to finish high school despite the interruption of covers for L'Officiel and Dutch Elle and, oh yeah, that Prada/Miu Miu show exclusive. Maybe I've just been having a blah time with the clients since leaving my beloved New York, or maybe it's just the general fatigue of so many time zones and jets and trams and buses and tiny models apartments. Maybe I am an incorrigible grump. But I recognize a sort of Patrician smugness in Cato's face when she collapses in gales of ohmaigawds when her booker tells her the news that, yes, she has booked Prada for a second season, and that makes me want to kick her in the shins.

Especially when she does her "Wooo! Prada + Cato, best team ever!" hand jive in the back seat of her private car.

Things aren't going so well for Madeline and Austria. Austria looks sullen and exhausted at her castings — something which I can confirm was not simply due to editing. In person, Austria looks so much like a little girl, albeit a tall one, it's anybody's guess why IMG is pushing the child whose age was given as 14 in February so hard right now — with a few more years education and maturity, she could be, well, a humbler but no less successful Cato. Madeline glows and her body is phenomenal, but Milan just isn't much of a market for unknown girls with short hair.

So Madeline and Austria cut out for Paris castings early, while Cato walks Prada, Just Cavalli, Dolce And Gabbana, Allessandro Dell'Acqua, and probably 23 other well-regarded shows in her unperspiring, non-acneic spare time.

Bitch.

Next week: the light at the end of the tunnel... Paris.

Earlier: Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 8

Madeline — whose hipsterish, short-haired look struck me as likely to suit the client imagination better in London than perhaps any other stop on the fashion circuit, fails to get her work visa papers stamped in advance of her trip. So British immigration puts our favorite Hoosier on a plane back to New York. Her booker looks at her like she's an idiot for forgetting the notarization of her visa — and it is a rookie error. But doesn't Madeline also pay IMG to keep her up to speed on such details of duck order? It strikes me as almost as much their fuck-up as her own, since I'm guessing, like every model I know, that Madeline relies on her agencies for all her immigration arrangements. Her booker should have been reminding her about the visa stamp daily. He should have put that shit on the girl's chart. If there's even a chance it was your bad or incomplete advice that put her in that position, it's passive aggressive in the extreme to go all philosophical-shrug on a girl who's still too young to drink and who, having just done a trans-Atlantic round trip and missed her chance to even be in the London shows, is no doubt feeling entirely bad enough. Weaksauce, IMG.


But London proves difficult even for those who make it off the plane. Austria and Socrates McKinney, her Santo Domingo mother agent, have a hard time navigating their way to castings — even with a driver. (Now wise to the trap of agency debt, I can barely look at a driver without seeing dollar signs spinning like on a slot machine. That luxury must be costing the poor teen a fortune — far more than she could make back in a month of shows. And he's not even getting her to her castings.)


In one scene, Socrates makes Austria take over his call with IMG London and write down her own new casting information because, he says as she wearily takes the ball point, writing gives him headaches. Oh, mother agents! They all work so hard for their lifelong, exclusive, worldwide, multi-agency kickbacks.


Cato reconnects with the man who is possibly the world's most influential casting director, Russell Marsh, who determines the lineups for clients that include Prada and Miu Miu. (Cato got last season's much-sought show exclusives for those.) (Marsh was accused earlier this year of accepting bribes from both IMG and the agency Women to cast their girls in Prada: strangely enough, Model.Live doesn't mention this particular scuttlebutt.) Marsh likes Cato, London likes Cato, Cato walks ten shows.


Austria does three. Including one where a harried fast-talking show director insists on calling all the models by their runway order numbers — as in, Number 3, Number 4, get over here now — because "It's just the easiest way." Austria's sad, perfectly still face in the chair as the makeup and hair artists tug and turn her this way and that speaks volumes. She looks magisterial on the runway, though, so I can't help but suspect the girl is enjoying herself a little bit. At least that's what I hope.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark

Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 7

Model.Live on Bebo

Austria is heading to London with her mother agent, the amazingly named and arguably patronizing Socrates McKnney, instead of her visa-less mother — a ritual of teenaged (non-Western) model abandonment that seems to cheer her bookers at IMG, since the maybe-15-year-old seems to "allow" her mom to be "a comfort zone" and it might be good for the tyke to stand on her own two feet. Madeline books (a respectable but not earth-shattering) seven shows and tries to contemplate the bright side in a meeting with her agents. Cato is last glimpsed, in a fake-reality fake-cliffhanger that might as well be lifted from that wonky first season of The Hills, supposedly trying to hail a cab to take her to the airport for her flight to London. Apparently the entire documentary film team with her can't offer her transport, and nor can the many yellow cabs that pass behind her on the adjacent street. Her single biggest piece of luggage? A large paper bag from a certain mall store show sponsor.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 6

Model.Live on Bebo

I've been there. (Literally: I did my thing at most of the castings in this episode.) But then, I did it on public transportation. And until someone is reduced to eating breakfast food from a box at 11:30 p.m. I won't feel that my modeling experience has been faithfully rendered.


On a different note, I have to wonder if this series has found, or will find, a significant audience. I think it's fascinating — but that's because this is my job, I'm naturally sensitive to how it's portrayed in other media, and I would watch almost anything modeling-related just out of pure curiosity. (Most models are this way: basically every English-speaking girl I know has a secret ANTM addiction, which we generally process by talking, together, about how ridiculous and tragic the series is. It's much the way I imagine architects are with Ayn Rand.) But if the greatest intrigue this vastly more realistic show can serve up is "Will Madeline find her lost book?" (and even then, it seemingly drops the question for lack of interest), then perhaps the reality is that my job just isn't necessarily interesting to watch. In fact it's almost as repetitive to see the same string of introductions, abortive small-talk, Polaroid posing, and demonstration walking on my laptop as it is to live through. It occurs to me that the process of getting a modeling gig just isn't that dynamic, that it doesn't scream "online reality-documentary with unprecedented sponsorship backing deals and $31,000/minute production values!" Can Model.Live continue just by fanning the flames of native teen girl model worship? (Sample from Cato's Bebo page comments: "I want to be a model when i am older, how do you get your thighs so thin?") I suppose we'll find out.


Because, possibly to its credit, Model.Live is certainly not doing anything much to trick out the storyline. The models themselves seem fairly vanilla; in the full episode, Cato shares her castings philosophy ("You might think it goes good, but it goes bad, or you think it goes bad but it goes good, you never know") and Austria passive-aggressively quizzes her about real estate. (Austria: "You have your own apartment? You buy one?" Cato: "No, renting." Pause. "It's not...that...expensive." Austria: "Oh." Glance with raised eyebrow. "Okay.") It's the kind of subtle/banal moment I'd sooner expect from a David Mamet play than an online series brought to me by Express.com.


Speaking of which, in the middle of this episode, for no reason I can discern, Madeline and Austria go to an Express store. (Shop for fast fashion, why, that's just what I would do in the middle of a 20-appointment day!) There is a montage where they each try on a lot of outfits. Because at castings, as in life, you only get one chance to make a first impression.


I would say something pithy here about how Model.Live's first impression on me is fading, but...that probably doesn't make sense, and I'm beat. Excuse me, I believe I need to go subject my hair to some flat-ironing and assorted sprayings and gunkings. I have appointments to keep.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 5

Model.Live on Bebo

• Anna Wintour claims she is very concerned about how "pale and thin" the models look nowadays. Don't worry, Anna, next to you they look vibrant and full of color! [WWD, 4th item]
  
• Here's your public service announcement of the day: The ingredient 1,4-Dioxane, which is found in many organic beauty and cleaning products, has been found to be carcinogenic. Go de-green your home now. Just don't mix any ammonia with chlorine in the process! [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• "You could say the baseball cap comes from a jockey cap worn by a Russian princess in the 1760s," says milliner Nasir Mazhar. [Vogue UK]
  
• Designer Giles Deacon says if he wasn't a designer he would be a zookeeper. [Independent]
  
• Ghanian businessman Kwabena Osei Bonsu making handbags from plastic litter he finds strewn throughout Accra. We don't normally endorse "handbag designer" as a profession, but that's kind of cool. I wonder if you could make handbags out of "space junk"? [Independent]

• Whoah USB port engagement rings; I totally want one. For my right hand of course. [Chic Report]
• Oh phew: Hermes profits are up. [WWD, sub req'd]
• MAC and Heatherette: Doing a makeup line together. Oh, Lydia Hearst is going to be all over this shit. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Former Chloe designer Phoebe Philo is apparently itching for a new design gig. [WWD, 2nd item]
• And 6267 designers Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi are rumored to be taking over the reins at Gianfranco Ferre. [WWD, 5th item]
• Ossie Clark's widow Celia Birtwell is designing a limited-edition capsule collection for...Express. Uh, yeah, that'll save your languishing business, Express. [WWD, sub req'd]
• OMG the suspense is killing us; Will Carla Bruni wear Chanel or Dior when visiting UK PM Gordon Brown and his wife with new husband French president Nicolas Sarkozy next week? [WWD, 3rd item]
• Hot deal alert: A $3,509 python skin laptop bag. [Chic Report]

• Marc Jacobs eats breakfast? Does he throw it up afterwards? [WWD, last item]
  
• Super-nice Australian dude Napoleon Perdis (yes, that's really his name) and his eponymous makeup line to become official beauty sponsor of this year's Emmy Awards. The guy is so genuinely nice, we don't even have anything snarky to say about this. [WWD, 2nd item]
  
• Jessica Biel wears Express? Can she not even spring for, like, the Gap? [People via Fab Sugar]
  
• Why are we not at all surprised that Thom Brown, designer of menswear for douchebags, loves Ayn Rand and Gustav Mahler? [The Fashion Informer]

• Explaining how she developed her personal style, English socialite Daphne Guinness responds, "I grew up in an artists' colony near Barcelona with Salvador Dali and the Surrealists, so my dress sense is very coloured by my youth. Everybody knew that Dali was the most crazy; you'd go to his house and he would have lobsters in his pool." [Vogue UK]
• The latest line of accessories by Temperley London are supposed to be inspired by Russia in the early 1900's. We're not sure what burgeoning communism has to do with outrageously expensive leather handbags. [Vogue UK]
• More opportunities to buy Urban Outfitters stuff online? Wow. We're so excited we can barely contain ourselves. [The Budget Fashionista]

• Sarah Silverman is going to be in ads for The Gap. What are the odds this genius plan was hatched in a corporate marketing meeting during which someone employed the term "edgy"? [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• Menswear designer Thom Browne: Now bringing his shrunken jacket, cropped pant stylings to (lord help us) a womenswear line. Ugh. [WWD, sub req'd]
  
• How cute! Readers of Seventeen and CosmoGIRL! can "connect" with the mags' advertisers through a special website! If only we could have developed a deep, personal, virtual relationship with J.C. Penney when we were in middle school! Jealous! [WWD, 3rd item]
  
• Hubert Givenchy? A little bitter! The retired designer says that "Fashion is over!" because the whole business now revolves around making giant, ugly handbags. Also bitter? One of our favorite fashion bitches, resigned Bill Blass designer Michael Vollbracht, who says, "When making big handbags is the only thing that will save your business, then designing clothes is finished!" [LizSmith]
  
• Diane von Furstenberg: Likes to hike! [Vogue UK]

• In a business move effecting tween girls everywhere, Limited Brands (parent company of The Limited, Victoria's Secret, and Bath & Bodyworks) has sold a 67% stake of the Express brand to a private equity firm. Meaning: Middle school girls can still buy their stretch capris at both The Limited and Express, but now they're just owned by different people. [WWD]
• Ralph Lauren (nee Lipschitz!) gives a backhanded compliment to Russian people at the launch of his first flagship store in Moscow: "I didn't think they would get it...[but] I think they get it now. Russian people have a history of a lot of elegance and a lot of class." [WWD]

• British fashion icon Isabella Blow was laid to rest — in her favorite Philip Treacy headpiece, no less — at the very church in Gloucestershire, England at which she was married. [WWD, 1st item]
• Karl Lagerfeld loves the smell of global warming in the morning: His resort collection will be shown on Friday in Santa Monica with his models joining the mile-high club and using the aisle of an airplane in lieu of a catwalk. [The Guradian]
• The UK's Fashion Fringe competition has taped former Gucci-boy Tom Ford and Burberry's Christopher Bailey — as its lead judges. Cute, but this would be much, much cooler if Tim Gunn and Nina Garcia showed up. [Vogue UK]