Jezebel: international titocracy

Meet Italian Cabinet Member Mara Carfagna, A Woman Of Many, Um, Parts

Moe — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Usually when my little brother sends me tips they have to do with the idiocy of Bush or organized religion or... well anyway, to get to the point, I was somewhat baffled when he sent me a link to this picture on a German website. I clicked about as far as here before I was just like "We're all always searching for new sources of free porn but um now's not the time, broseph!" But as it turns out, this is a serious issue! Meet Mara Carfagna, Silvio Berlusconi's new Minister Of Equal Opportunities. A lot of hands have been wrung over why the Italians would vote for that guy again — aside, you know, from his whole King of all media thing — but until now we did not really realize he had such inspired brain trust. See, Mara Carfagna — rhymes with Barack Obama! — is one of those transcendent politicians whose rich and varied biography gives her a persona that can resonate with anyone. A photo essay of Hope (and humps!) after the jump.

Like Barry, Mara has dabbled in youthful radicalism. Here, her "the only Bush I trust is my own" pose.

In recent years she has been accused of being too refined, elitist.

But that belies her red-blooded agrarian roots!

And it's a little too, uh, "raw" for us but here she displays her willingness to bend over backwards (or anyway, bend over) to serve the people! (What are those people doing there anyway?

Former Topless Model Joins Berlusconi's Cabinet As Equalities Minister [Daily Mail]
Berlusconi's Pin-Up Ministerin [Stern]
Related: Italiy Embraces Silvio, Again And Again [Economist]

We Couldn't Have Put It Better Ourselves, Agent Provocateur

Moe — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

Prestige magazine has the "world exclusive" of the new Agent Provocateur campaign starring Kate Moss. Note the black models featured also in the shoot! They are slightly less prominent, but no worse fed. [Prestige HK]
And look her! The notoriously tight-lipped Kate Moss granted an actual interview to the Guardian! Does she have anything to say for herself? "After a long pause," the story reveals..."Not really." [Guardian]
More "authenticity" from the trailers of the upcoming Sex & The City movie: It was like being in [NY department stores] Bergdorf Goodman and Saks combined. There was an overwhelming amount of branded product...The characters were defined via their wardrobes and the products they used: Carrie, for example, was a creative, fashion-obsessed writer type, so she used an Apple Mac because of its design value and wore all these crazy clothes.... [FT]
"China is about brand, brand, brand." [NYT]
India "is a fast growing economy and with consumption so robust and with incomes rising, it's a fertile ground for the print media." And all the crap Vogue and GQ would like to sell to them! [Reuters]

Barney's "plans to grow helter-skelter in a bunch of countries." [WSJ]
"There may be a global economic slowdown, but Valentino is stepping up the pace of its expansion." [WWD]
Abercrombie & Fitch's flagship store in London grosses sales of $50 million. Holy fuck that is insane. [Fashion Week Daily]
There's a new book out tracing Estee Lauder spokesmodels, from one who was "picked from more than a thousand faces on the grounds that she possessed 'that indefinable air known as class'" to Aerin Lauder herself. Who possesses a slightly more palpable sort of class. [Telegraph]
Portfolio calculates "back of the envelope" that Chanel is worth between $10.3 billion and $14.8 billion. This is meaningful, to someone, not us. [Portfolio]

Dumb Way To Save The Environment, Part LXV

Moe — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Oxfam would like your recycled bras to send to Third World Countries. Apparently not enough women donate their old ones. (Related: the huge shortage of donated period underwear!) I know the food shortage has had a lot of ripple effects but the idealist in me really wishes a decent non-used bra, like tampon flushing could be declared a universal human right. [Times of London]

Meet Gonzalo Otalora, The Robin Hood Of Ugly People

Moe — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

I was a little skeptical when I first read about Gonzalo Otalora, a Argentinian advocate for the ugly and bestselling author of the book Feosexual, a book that, among other things, advocates taxing the attractive to help reconcile the opportunity gap that persists in rewarding the symmetrically featured with money, influence and happiness and shitting all over the dreams of the uglies. And not because his logic is somewhat screwy: "If they spend money on diets, gyms, anti-wrinkle creams and plastic surgery, surely we can wheedle even more money out of them and donate it to the ugly among us. We, the unattractive, won't squander that money because we're not compulsive consumers." (Haha, yeah, spoken like a dude.) But because the photo circulating everywhere of Mr. Otalora, taken in his pimply adolescence, is kind of cute. It shows potential. Is he just another pretty person pretending to be ugly to differentiate himself from all the "book hot" people pretending to be truly hot in the name of spreading their important humanistic messages?

Yeah, not really.

I don't speak Spanish but I am kind of in love anyway.

Tax the Beautiful [Ode Magazine]
Feosexual, The Blog
Related: In Argentina, Ugly People Strike Back
Earlier: Dear Pretty Girls Who Are Also Smart: Some Tips For Avoiding Our Antipathy

"Plump But Not Fat" For China Looks Kinda Ana To Us

Moe — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:40:22 EST

In preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government is hiring female college students to serve as "ambassadors" from each of its major cities. Would you believe appearance is apparently factoring into the hiring decisions? And it's gotten competitive: in an effort to make sure its city is remembered for the most attractive girls, Shanghai officials established a list of VERY WEIRD STRICT appearance guidelines as to who ought to be hired for the job. Recruiters were instructed to seek out girls with "elastic skin" and a "ruddy and shiny complexion." (Re the "ruddy" part =I guess they're still supposed to pretend they like, revere peasants or something in China? Jezebel Sinophiles, do you know?) Much much weirder, the rules included strict ratios governing almost all the proportions of the face, and the posession of a "plump but not fat body."

Ummmmm, so the hostesses pictured above are plump? Anyway, the best part of the story is that officials totally denied there were any physical guidelines, and a local newspaper turned around and printed the little red rulebook in detailing all the specifications, according to the blog Shanghai Scrap (The URL looks like "Shanghai is crap", which would have been a better name but still.)

really wish that I had picked up on what might be some of the weirdest Olympics news of the year, hidden - in clear view - in this sentence from Xinhua's reiteration of the Xinmin Evening News story:
It also set strict standards on facial features, including the ratio between the "width of the nose and the length of the face", "width of the mouth and width between the pupils", Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News reported.

Fans of Leonardo DaVinci and/or Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, should/could/will recognize what's going on here: the renowned Golden Ratio - 1.618 - has been enlisted to choose Shanghai's contingent of Olympic hostesses. There's a whole lot of internet literature on the Golden Ratio and its tenuous connection to Western aesthetics, so google around if you want a deeper explanation.

Oh, please Google it. And if you happen to read Chinese...click below for the rulebook itself. We are DYING for a translation.

Golden Ratios And Other Forbidden Fetishes Of Shanghai Bureaucrats [Shanghai Scrap]