photo shop of horrors
Remember the horror of that almost-unrecognizable atrocity at left? Turns out we can blame Pascal Dangin for that. Dangin, you see, is what writer Lauren Collins, in this week's issue of the New Yorker, calls "the premier retoucher of fashion photographs", a onetime hairdresser who so believes in reincarnation (symbolic, not metaphysical) that, when he moved from France to the U.S in 1989, he chose the first very flight out of Charles de Gaulle airport on the very first day of the new year.
Many women are transformed by Dangin's computer stylus, which sits in a basement laboratory at "Box", his four-story, Manhattan Photoshop fortress: In addition to Drew, there is the trophy wife with the "flat" face and "short" legs; the shoulder blade found "in a recent project at W"; the cast of the Sopranos; Prada models; "a famous actress in her late twenties"; a "crunchy"-faced model; "another well known actress"; "an actress with a movie coming out this spring"; Kate Moss; models Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman; Madonna. And then there is model Christy Turlington, who, Collins explains, "needs the least help".
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maghag
January is traditionally the month in which the fashion magazines are slimmer than usual. Not the models — the actual publications. In the post-holiday issues, advertising pages are down, and compared to December, it's a slow month in terms of projects, news and celebrities. So often, January is the month you'll find a person of color on the cover! And lo and behold, Rihanna is on
Allure, looking gorgeous. (Christina Aguilera is on
Marie Claire.) Our own Maria-Mercedes Lara did a tireless search through the January issues of
W,
Harper's Bazaar,
Vogue,
Marie Claire,
Allure,
Glamour,
Lucky,
Elle and
Cosmopolitan, looking for
women of color (she uses "ambiguous race" to describe models clearly not meant to be seen as "white.") Her tallies, after the jump.
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MagHag
Ooh! Is there going to be a rumble in Ladymagville, U.S.A.?
ELLE and
Vogue are both
having their company holiday parties at Socialista, in NYC's Meatpacking district.
ELLE beats
Vogue in getting there first (their party is Dec. 17;
Vogue's is Dec. 18.) Tension! Meanwhile, the
CosmoGIRL! staff seems to be getting short-changed as their editor-in-chief is hosting a "goofy hat exchange" at a location TBA. (Um, we would rather have an open bar kthanxbye!) while the
Self party seems equally wholesome: Bowling!
Lucky staffers are being encouraged to chow down at Pop Burger and
W is getting wasted and singing Pat Benatar all night long at a Karaoke party at East Village speakeasy Death & Co. (May we recommend the punch bowls?)
Glamour's affair is at Tillman's eatery and
Nylon is encouraging mid-day drinking by hosting a lunch at Pamplona's. [
Fashion Week Daily]
maghag
Intern Maria did the tireless work of looking for
black models, Asian models and models of any color but white in the December issues of the major women's fashion magazines. She writes, "Surprise! There were no women of color in ANY fashion spread (not counting the 'shopping' sections, since spreads are what matters in terms of 'big time modeling'). The products I noticed did use a lot of non-celebrity women of color were mostly skin companies (Aveno, Olay, Johnson and Johnson) and lower price-point companies like Payless Shoes and I.N.C. However, there were also a lot of (non-celeb) Asian women in Rock and Republic and Lord and Taylor ads. Bigger corporate companies like The Gap also threw in a few black and Asian models/celebs into the mix." After the jump, see Maria's tallies for
W,
Harper's Bazaar,
Vogue,
Marie Claire,
Allure,
Glamour,
Lucky,
Elle and
Cosmopolitan.
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Cate Blanchett is the cover of the October issue of
W. And she looks hot. In the dewy, glowy, all-American (all-Australian?) sorta way. Though we also suspect a wee bit of retouching: How else to explain the drenched white blouse and no nipple shots? [
Style.com]
between the covers
Even pre-redesign (more on that Monday!),
Elle magazine sure must be doing
something right:
Elle fared best amongst the magazines in its field for newsstand sales for the first part of 2007.
Elle's figures went up by 9.1%, while
Vogue saw only a 4.6% increase, Harper's
Bazaar only increased its sales by 2.0%, and
W suffered a 23.1% loss.
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maghag
The Beckhams: So thin! So blonde! So bedazzled! And they are all this and more, oh yes, as they grace the cover of
W magazine this month. Really, we didn't even know where to begin in deconstructing the phenomenon that is Brand Beckham. Lucky for us, (the amazingly named) Dorothy Parker over at
Media Post's Magazine Rack did with her
glorious review of the entire experience. Her most keen observation? Calling attention to this gem of a quote from David Beckham:
Of his "loveable metrosexual qualities," as the writer puts it — in England he's known as "The Prince of Ponce," he says: "I've always had a liking towards clothes, but when I met Victoria, she directed me in the right way. When she tells me something doesn't look good, I believe her. We have a connection that way."
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