Peter Lindbergh shot an entire editorial without recourse to that particular computer program, except for minor color-correction. Kristen McMenamy, Tatjana Patitz, Nadja Auermann, Claudia Schiffer, et. al., also posed without any hair products or makeup.

And they predictably look fantastic. Does this spread in any way address the constant barrage of unrealistically altered images of women in the fashion media? Only obliquely, at best. And the skincare peg — all the models are shilling their supposed favorite spas and products — is a little annoying. I worry sometimes that these non-Photoshopped editorials are becoming more of a stunt than a corrective; French Elle had one, also shot by Lindbergh, and even Life & Style ran a Photoshop-free cover, of Kim Kardashian. How awesome would it be for a fashion magazine to state, as a matter of editorial policy, that excessive and unrealistic retouching will never find a home in its pages? That adjusting the white balance in post-production is fine, but that rhinoplasty-by-liquify-tool and 80 gazillion layers of changes are not? That would be a magazine worth buying.

Which is not to say that it isn't still wonderful to see images of real women at a variety of ages, images that haven't been "fixed" beyond recognition, even if these spreads are annoyingly presented as the fashion equivalent of Very Special Episodes. Shalom Harlow, pictured here, has always been one of my favorite models, and shots like this prove she of all people doesn't need post-production smoothing and sculpting to look bewitchingly beautiful.

Karl Lagerfeld shot this editorial, notionally inspired by Peggy Guggenheim, in Venice with Lara Stone and his latest boytoy, Baptiste Giabiconi. (Baptiste gets to wear boy clothes in this one, amazingly: Lagerfeld has a habit of styling his favorite hot young thing in women's wear and heels.)

Lara often looks kind of severe and disapproving — Cathy Horyn once compared her to Lurch — but the Gugg-inspired blonde clown hair in this spread sure isn't helping her.

These sunglasses, which if you look closely you can see are the shape of a bat spreading its wings, belonged to La Dogaressa (real, and awesome, nickname) herself.

It wouldn't be fall without some kind of a generalist "New Shapes" spread. This one, shot by Camilla Akrans, stars Kendra Spears and Katie Fogarty, who are aged 20 and 17, respectively, and accompanies text by Suzy Menkes. Representative quote: "THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: It could be time to go green. Rethink jade."

Of course, Madonna's bunny ears get a shot.

It also wouldn't be fall without a long, studio-shot editorial of a model — Karmen Pedaru — jumping dazedly.

There is, however, a beautifully shot Glen Luchford editorial, starring the spooky Eniko Mihalik.

And Siri Tollerod turns up with Richard Burbridge to do one of those perennial accessories editorials where the fashion magazines try and convince their readers that even when it's fall and the mind turns to tweed, we will still somehow feel like wearing acid brights and neon and "pops of color."

Oh, look: Our old friend Jean-Paul "I have jungle fever" Goude. Styling Naomi Campbell in leopard print, racing a cheetah across the serengeti, really is daring and original.

Naomi rides an elephant. Like a real African Queen.

She jumps rope. With monkeys. Monkeys.

We all know that black models have been lamentably absent from mainstream fashion magazines and runways. But all that shoots like these do is draw offensive similarities between black women and wild animals, and reiterate, in pictures, the old colonialist assumption that black people are savage and uncivilizable. Naomi Campbell isn't from Tanzania, she's from Streatham; at what point does having a British woman wander around the African wilderness, performing truly awful received ideas of how African women behave, for a publication with a majority white audience, verge on minstrelsy? Having no black models represented in magazines is a problem. But is this kind of representation actually worse than being totally ignored?

Then, Naomi perched on the back of a crocodile — this shoot was obviously not Photoshop-free — while wearing a Dior haute couture crocodile jacket and pants.

Interestingly, the Jean-Paul Goude shoot is followed in the magazine by a 14-page Peter Lindbergh editorial starring Chanel Iman and Arlenis Sosa. The theme? The Harlem Renaissance. This shot of Chanel was taken just outside the iconic Lenox Lounge, on Lenox just south of 125th Street.

Chanel and Arlenis, who are photographed carrying trumpet cases and singing into old-fashioned microphones, make pretty great foxy jazz musician dames. And while the Harlem Renaissance is kind of a cliché — and the period doesn't really have much discernible connection with life in the Harlem of today — it's nice to see a period with a black cast mined for interest in a fashion magazine, rather than just another all-white editorial about the Summer of Love or Studio 54.

Besides, the setting is the perfect way to set off the 1940s looks so many designers have turned out for this coming fall.

Can anyone identify this block? I want to say it's one of those gorgeous brownstone streets south of Marcus Garvey Park, but it also could be Strivers' Row. Either way, it's gorgeous.

The commitment to period realism does falter slightly in places: Sylvia's restaurant was founded in 1962.

And if you look really closely in the magazine, you can see the Fairway supermarket, just under the elevated rail line. In all, though, it's a beautiful shoot.

I don't think I even want to investigate the subtext of Harper's Bazaar using a milk-pale blonde British model as a stand-in for a black American pop megastar; let's just reiterate that this spread, which was obviously thrown together at the last minute, unfolds like an uninspired afterthought. And also the clothes suck.

Jessica Stam and Benjamin Alexander Huseby pop in for an editorial all about gardening, and fall tweeds of the sort that Little Edie would have loved.

Nobody does sublime eccentricity like Stam.

And Magdalena Frackowiak has an editorial all about shopping, photographed by Terry Richardson. Seeing her play a ditzy society lady with more credit than sense would be funny, if the photos weren't desperately captioned things like "SHOP: SAVE JOBS!"

In an accompanying article, by Derek Blasberg, about the macroeconomic imperative of increasing consumer spending, Margherita Missoni says: "It was cool to talk about the recession — which I found extremely annoying. But it seems not that people are no longer embarrassed to have good things." Thank god that recession thing is so over! God, that was such a drag!

I will leave you with images from Harper's Bazaar's Sesame Street-themed shoot, which features models Sessilee Lopez and Tao Okamoto. It's Sesame Street's 40th anniversary this year, so the magazine sent designers down to where the air is sweet.

This shot of Oscar de la Renta with Oscar the Grouch might actually top Harper's Bazaar's awesome The Simpsons fashion spread. Maybe.

It wasn't even that hard, especially once the folks at Evil Beet Gossip showed it was possible. Unfortunately, the security loophole has now been closed. But I came away with plenty of screen grabs for your delectation.



Just look at fashion maven Mario, nobly presiding over his new online domain! And he already snagged corporate sponsorship.

CocoPerez is billed as a blog with longer-form writing — presumably, in the context of Perezland, that means the unbylined ghostwriters will be permitted one trisyllabic word per 58 posts — with more fashion news content than the mothership. And indeed, when I looked, there was a refreshing absence of acontextual paparazzi photos of stars with cum MS Paint-ed on their faces; the lead story was about Molly Sims' just-announced jewelry line for the Home Shopping Network, and there were two posted spreads from the September issue of Harper's Bazaar, Peter Lindbergh's PhotoShop-free supermodels editorial, and Terry Richardson's bizarre Michael Jackson tribute shoot with Agyness Deyn (their verdict: "Ferosh!")


The content reads like free-association stream-of-consciousness MadLibs, celebumodel edition. It's as though the writers are having a very hard time trying to come up with more than 40 words' worth of copy. (The Sims item throws in mention of Heidi Klum's jewelry line failure, the supposed "big score" of appearing on HSN, and Sims' apparent "love of photography," as though a thesis might magically appear out of sheer topical friction.)


And unfortunately, a lot of the site is pretty out-of-date. That Project Runway trailer hit the Internet almost a month ago; Audrey Tautou's Chanel No. 5 ad came out at the start of May; Anne Hathaway's Magnifique commercial dates from the summer of last year; and Madonna's behind-the-scenes Louis Vuitton video was released back in January.


And that's without mentioning these slideshows, which feature such up-to-the-minute subjects as Angelina Jolie's old modeling photos — saw those in In Touch last April — and Marc Jacobs' Fall 2009 collection, which walked at New York Fashion Week last February. What, Resort is too fresh for them?

The whole idea of Perez Hilton launching a site aimed specifically at young women — a demographic he otherwise shows little respect for or interest in — is pretty laughable. I'm sure women will see right through his bullshit for the marketing ploy it is.

Speaking of bull! Just in case you were worried about the proceedings getting too classy, what with the longer-form writing and the cutting-edge high-fashion sensibility, here's a post, titled "A Load Of Bull," which gives Perez a chance to do what he does best: crack jokes about Viagra and bull jizz.

CocoPerez [Official Site]
Perez Hilton: Tastemaker And Troublemaker [LATimes]

Want A First Look At Perez Hilton's New Site? [EvilBeetGossip]

Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me."

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile.

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.

Supermodel Karen Mulder Arrested For Threatening To Attack Plastic Surgeon
"We Need To See You Without Your Bra, He Told Me. I Was 14. I Didn't Even Have Breasts Yet."

Earlier: The Not-Rape Epidemic: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune
Suicide And Abuse In Fashion's Top Echelon
Ruslana Korshynova, No Longer Anonymous

You might be able to tell from what I've written here that I'm not in the former camp. And although I bless their hearts and respect their particular, luck-paved paths to riches (not least because the Ali Stephenses of this world serve as a reminder that modeling isn't actually all a shell game), I'll always identify more with the girls who make it as supes only after splitting a one-bedroom apartment five ways in Milan, getting chewed out by bookers for their measurements or their dorky walks, and being sent home from the occasional market for not making enough bookings. (As Lara Stone was from Sydney, once upon a time.) Sometimes it takes years of patience and work and occasional moments of despair to crack into the echelon where you get to work with the best photographers and stylists, and have a hand in creating images of beauty that are going to live on in the scrapbooks and bulletin boards and imaginations of young women who see fashion as a field for the projection of their dreams. And it's more than nice when the dues paying has its reward.

Lara Stone, who is Dutch, was kicked out of high school at the age of 16, and went to Paris to try to model instead. More than five years of struggle followed — she didn't make it in the French capital, so she spent a lot of time shuffling through secondary markets to build her book and try to work off agency debt — before a change of representation from Elite to IMG suddenly changed the game. IMG marketed their old/new find very selectively, pushed her to a few key industry players, and got her in front of the right casting directors. Then Ricardo Tisci picked her to open the Givenchy haute couture show, and the rest is pretty much history.

An entire issue of French Vogue dedicated to her is a nice reward for that difficult categorical jump.

Editor Carine Roitfeld, who's featured Stone in editorials and on two covers before, had Stone work with Peter Lindbergh, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Hedi Slimane, Steven Klein, Patrick Demarchelier, Terry Richardson, and, in one genuine surprise of the hotly-awaited issue, Nan Goldin, who almost never shoots fashion. Roitfeld also solicited artists, including Marco Perego, Rupert Shrive, and Francesco Vezzoli, to imagine Lara's likeness in their own styles — for instance as a nude figurine among S&M-y pencil drawings of Minnie Mouse and Tinkerbell (Perego's contribution). The whole issue makes for a weird, wild trip around the art world and the world of fashion photography, and it contains a subversive (though perhaps inadvertent) statement about the former that some of the images in the actual editorials — most notably Klein's, which I'm saving for another post — are more visually powerful and psychologically disturbing than anything the ostensible artists dreamed up. (Perhaps it's not fair to judge the artists' contributions against the fashion photographers': after all, Perego et. al. don't work primarily creating decorative interludes for women's fashion magazines while Klein and company are obviously in their element.)

This and the next two images are from Hedi Slimane's editorial, called "Lara by Night." I love the natural softness of the series. Stone's look is fabulously fluid, but always recognizable.

She's simultaneously sexual and androgynous, with the combination of her gorgeous full breasts with boyishly narrow hips, and her Brigitte Bardot lips that are set in a face as chiseled as Grace Jones'.

The gap in her teeth upsets her symmetry but adds to her beauty. (Hilariously, she once told i-D, "Now every time I go to the dentist they always say, 'You really need to fix that gap of yours' I'm like, 'My gap is paying your dentist bills.'")

Peter Lindbergh's contribution is an 8-page editorial called "Lara a la Mer." I feel like the black-and-white model-on-a-beach thing is a bit of a retread for him, but I'll give the man a pass because it is a good looking edit. Gender fluidity is an old idea in fashion, but it's pretty perfectly suited to Lara.

It must be said: although she is extraordinarily tall and thin, and although she has the measurements of almost any fashion model, she doesn't have the stereotypical model shape. Lara Stone is unmistakable womanly; her body has soft curves where, even I have to admit, most models have angles.

Never in any of her pictures does Stone, 25, look like anything less than a grown adult — girlish innocence might be the one look she can't do.

And, mostly, I just love her face. You can see it in her eyes just as much as it's written in the lines of her body: this is a woman who's been around, who's cracked a few jokes, broken a few hearts, and had hers broken in turn. This is the face of a woman who knows. Am I projecting? Sure. But that's what the profession invites. The fact remains that she looks like a person, with an identity. No photogenic teenager has her kind of magnetism.

Three good things about this photograph:
1. The composition and colors
2. The dress/shoe juxtaposition
3. Lucy's muscles
Three terrible things about this photo:
1. The earrings are $25,000
2. Surely if she puts her foot down that heel will sink into the grassy ground and she'll be trapped or hurt?
3. Is this an homage to or a mockery of the sport of javelin throwing?

Girl looks fierce until you think about the fact that she's on a balance beam in a gown and heels, which is ridiculous.

Get it? Shotput. With a $2800 Chanel bag. Dumb.

Okay, actually, this is cool. No, really. The foxy Robin Hood vibe, like the Disney film. Oodelally, golly what a day.

Lifting weights is for brawny dudes. Ladies pick up $3100 Gucci bags and barely break a sweat! Osteoporosis, shmosteoporosis.

LOL. Chariots of ire.

Earlier: The Asian Model In Allure: Stereotyped?
Teen Vogue Gives Summer Olympians A Sliiight Makeover
More Of Vogue's "World's Best Bodies"

• OMG: Rachel Zoe has been disinvited from the Anna Wintour-hosted Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Gala, taking place Monday night in New York. This is what you get when you tempt the gods and proclaim yourself more important than Vogue. [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• Also, Wintour has instructed Vogue staffers that they may only wear white, silver, or other "pale shades." Just like the colors of faces that she likes to see on her magazine's cover! [Fashion Week Daily]
  
• French Vogue editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld and designer/Chanel creative director "Krazy" Karl Lagerfeld were both named to the Time 100 List, as influential members of the fashion community. Something about the way they both made fashion about "the street" or something. [Vogue UK]
  
• Gisele Bundchen is still the top-paid model, according to Forbes. Heidi Klum is the second. Take that, Moss. [Sassybella]

• Agyness Deyn: The mannequin. [BlackBook]
• The Rogan for Target collection is also going to be sold at Barneys. Which is not Target at all. [WSJ]
• Steve & Barry's is going to be shilling Sex and the City movie merchandise, which will be licensed for the store under Sarah Jessica Parker's "Bitten" label. [Sassybella]
• Uh oh: Seems the women behind the red carpet label Marchesa are having a bit of a tiff. While Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig used to be knows as the label's "co-designers", their titles have been changed on their website: Chapman is now listed as "designer" and Craig is noted as "co-founder." [Page Six]
• Dockers: Trying to reach out to the hip and the young. LOL. [MediaPost]
• Christian Siriano: Designed a dress for Puma. [Chic Report]
• Helena Christensen on why she loves photographer Peter Lindbergh: "Even when I looked pretty funny back in the day with my baby fat, perm, and hippie clothes, he put me on the cover of British Vogue!" Oh, models. [Fashion Week Daily]
• The latest beauty tool you didn't know you needed: An eyelash comb. [BellaSugar]
• The Versace resort in Dubai is... sorta exactly what you would expect a Versace resort in Dubai to be. [Chic Report]
• Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana, Oscar de la Renta, Akira Isogawa, the members of Coldplay, Jeff Koons, Philippe Starck and Tory Burch have all been asked to create "themes" for iGoogle's new customized homepage thingies. [Sassybella]
• Vanessa Paradis: The new face of Miu Miu? [Glaumrama]
• Calvin Klein went on a little field trip to Dubai last week. Blah blah, models behind plexiglass. The usual. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Jones New York: Stock is up, profits are down. The usual. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Kohl's: Gonna slow down its expansion plan 'cause their scared of the economy. The usual. [WWD, sub req'd]
• If you want to wear a pantsuit, make sure it's not double-breasted. [WSJ]
• Blue's Clues's: The shoes — at a Payless near you. [BrandWeek]

The Good:
Helena Christensen: Picture perfect. (Note to self: Buy hot pink lipstick. )


Selita Ebanks' dress is black and white and beautiful all over.


I love how model Valentina's dress insists on it being spring.


Sure the whole leather skirt and sweater is slightly 1988, but I can't help but love Ashley Olsen's entire vibe. Also go ahead and crucify me: Love the gladiator sandals.




The Bad:
Oh, come on Isabella. Really?


Socialite Jamee Gregory is wearing windowpanes as a skirt.


Peter Lindbergh just woke up.




The Ugly:
Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey: A couture Cruella de Vil?

[Images via Getty and Bauer-Griffin.]