For some reason, Caroline Trentini has practically never within living memory been permitted to keep both feet on the ground in an American Vogue editorial. Anna Wintour’s favorite springy Brazilian, seemingly without regard for osteoarthritis or patellar tendonitis, casts herself nobly aloft in every season, in every setting, and in every conceivable kind of pump, flat, sandal, mule, platform, and T-strap. Sometimes in the past she's had partners in airborne crime like Elise Crombez (whatever happened to her? Did she age out of the industry at a ripe old 26?) but most often it's Carol, alone, doing what apparently comes naturally. In case you've forgotten her crucial gravity-defying role in Vogues past, they even run a June 2008 photo of her midflight in crampons and 24k gold fur on a Patagonian glacier on page 544:



So. Surprise! There's a jumping editorial in this issue. But! This time, instead of heading into mid air to sell sheath dresses to office workers (in some makebelieve world where office workers can afford Lanvin), Caroline jumps for a reason. Kind of. It took a while (in fact it took so long I'm half sure the jumping overlapped with a ready made narrative completely by accident) but Vogue finally found a story where Caroline leaping in frocks makes sense — because she's posing with the three kids who'll take turns playing Billy Elliot when it opens on Broadway October 1. Dancers! Dancers jump!


And the results are beautiful.
Seriously, the editorial is kind of breathtaking.




And then the magazine goes and ruins all the uncharacteristic pro-Vogue mojo it dredged up with that heavenly dozen pages by painting the distinctively freckled and pale Trentini the color of burnt Cheetos and giving her a vicious bikini wax so she can wear a swimsuit that makes my vulva scream and reach for the smelling salts. Oh well! The aesthetic contact high was nice while it lasted.


September Vogue to me signifies a worrisome rubicon in the gerrymandering of the definition of "model" to include any two-bit celebrity with a film or an album or a divorce to promote. (I have nothing against actors and I think Keira Knightley is a fine practitioner of her particular craft. But I don't try to do her job and I ask the same courtesy in return.) Ordinarily the actress — supposedly a ringer to drum up readership, although that paradigm appears increasingly flawed — gets the cover because she is profiled inside; the "fashion spread" accompanying the inevitable puff piece is just a bit of lifestyle-y, cult-of-celebrity-reflecting extra bang for your buck. But in this issue, there is no profile. Keira Knightley has 18 pages of this magazine to herself to illustrate a paragraph about Berlin and "the current generation of intriguing, intelligent provocateurs working there." Keira Knightley isn't an actress posing for showy portraits to illustrate, however obliquely, her own press: She's treated here like any old pretty face attached to a random (no, really random: Knightley admits she had never even been to Berlin until the shoot) concept — and a wardrobe of this season's clothes. She is, in these pages, presented more as model than actress.
So it is my judgment of her as a model and nothing less when I say she looks, on almost every page, perfectly awful. She doesn't know what to do with her hands. She doesn't know what to do with her face. She doesn't know what to do with her mouth, so in picture after picture, she lets it fall limply open. She doesn't know whether to mug for the camera or grasp for some idea of high-fashion gravitas; she sort of does both and she sort of does neither and it all comes off badly more often than not. In this jailhouse dress photo she's actually grimacing.


As one commentator noted, a propensity for holding your lips pursed and half-open makes it look like you're always blowing on an invisible bowl of soup.


Keira Knightley has more of a neck in that sketch likeness she's holding up than she does in most of this edit. One of the reasons why non-models just aren't as good at showing fashion to its best effect as models are is because they don't have the practiced photographic subject's knack for guessing how the human body will read in two dimensions from a given angle — so here I am worrying why this beautiful woman doesn't appear to have a neck, instead of thinking about either of those potentially interesting dresses.


This is her best shot and it's pretty fantastic. But is it worth the 17 other hammy, overacted, more or less off-looking lavishly produced editorial pictures full of light and color and signifying nothing? I say no.


Because, seriously, what kind of a culture are we living in that when Anna Wintour tells an Academy Award-nominated actress to tie a trash bag on her head because some art world folks are dossing in Berlin (apparently for such deep and meaningful reasons as the fact that in New York you can't smoke anywhere anymore), the Academy Award-nominated actress automatically does it? I tell you who ties trash bags on their heads because Ms. Wintour says so: Models. And we submit to the vagaries of fashion editor whims good naturedly, because it's an honest living and better than many, and because we certainly aren't inclined or empowered to question a shoot's direction like, say, a respected actress would (or should) be. And we do it because we don't have the comforts that being Hollywood's second-highest paid actress confers. Keira Knightley, you may be beautiful, but more importantly, you have at least some measure of talent; you ought to be sharing that with the world. Don't just model, because done barely adequately it's bullshit, trust me.


Now. Back to sublime: It's Sasha time.


Sasha Pivovarova is a goddess. The lithe Russian elf (who, as a part-time artist, would've been a much better fit for that Berlin story than Knightley) is nevertheless the perfect foil for McQueen's clothes, which can skate close to excessively baroque territory. She wears these dainty little embellished slippers in every shot and it makes for a really nice change from the ubiquitous 4 lb heavy, 7" tall editorial platforms.


I don't dig the waxed-candyfloss hair and I know it must have been painful to achieve. But, I think, thoroughly worth it.


For future reference, Anna Wintour: This is your cover shot.

Doing 20 editorial looks, solo, against a grey studio backdrop, with nary a prop in sight and no organizing principle to the clothes other than “Fall silhouettes!” probably approaches my idea of hell. You're not playing a character, you don't have an evocative setting, and there isn't even a particular mood or feel the editorial is intended to convey — it's just you and your basic posing repertoire, alone in a brightly lit box. No wonder Anna Rachford of Woodstock, IL, is sporting basically the same position and expression in three of the above shots; there’s no story here. What unites this spread other than the fact that it's fall, and, yes, this might necessitate the donning of coats and knitwear? We see this editorial every season. It's the fashion equivalent of those insipid freshmen-oriented survey classes where the reading list is such a ragbag (you know, Middlemarch and Fielding and Frankenstein and Borges for good measure) that you wonder just what in hell the professor was thinking. Probably that delivering lectures that attained their mature form in 1973 is a hoot when you have tenure. And probably that an appreciation for literature is an admirable social grace suitable for the weekend delectation of young ladies' minds. I'm not much given to puffery in my novels and I like it even less in my fashion.



Oh, no, tights! Once I did a fall lookbook for an Asian client and we had to shoot two dozen some outfits in one day — and every single get-up came with a different pair of brightly colored tights. And, because the client’s line was designed with its shorter-legged market in mind, the tights went up only about as far as my knees, and what with the quick changing and the many layers, I was already sweating from every pore since of course it was July, and I sensed even at the time that this epic struggle of Model v. Unyielding Spandex, times 24, was, even if I prevailed (and, you'll be glad to know, I did live to model another day!), going to become the stuff of panicked flashbacks. At one point there was an assistant stylist poised at each thigh, firmly yanking at the waistband of a pair of aubergine wool-blend tights while I sort of jumped up and down in place and the photographer's assistant tried to look like he wasn't peeping. Tights, oh God. You weren't there, man!



I have no idea what Anna’s doing in that green psychedelic drum majorette getup, either. Sending imaginary semaphore for “Send Help Trapped In Photoshoot”? Directing the landings of nearby aircraft? Unseen shadow puppets? Let's chalk it up to studio daze and move on.



Eva Poloniová says that the hardest thing about modeling is “Wearing beautiful clothes without being able to keep them.” Funny you should say so, Eva, given you’ve shimmied into a $3,040 Prada dress — and I’m guessing your paycheck for the edit was $100 or so for the day. Before agency commission, natch! Keep trawling those sample sales, darling. You never know.



This next story is all about female fashion icons who wore pants: for some reason, someone decided Meg Ryan belonged on the list with Marlene Dietrich and Diane Keaton, and, also for some reason, someone determined that a blonde Russian was qualified to impersonate every “iconic” woman who wore pants, ever. Nevermind; I kind of can’t dislike the girl. Valerie Avdeyeva said her most memorable experience was posing on an Argentine glacier — cool! (There’s nothing that drives me deeper into apoplexy than a model who gets to go to Morocco or Iceland or Papua New Guinea for an editorial who comes back and shrugs, “It was okay, I guess. The food was, like, really weird.”) And Valerie parried back a stupid question about which celebrity she’d most like to meet with a cheery reference to the author of Franny and Zooey! Plus she said she couldn’t function without her iPod and her eyelash curler — that’s a practicality/frivolity ratio I can get behind. Even if she doesn’t give me any Jane Birkin in this picture, it's not her fault Birkin was an incorrigible brunette.



Seriously?



Whoa. She eats candy bars. Valerie is officially new favorite model material!



Oh God. Janis Joplin sings a song called “Rose” — so we have to represent the (brunette!) hippie idol (in $1395 pants and a $2055 blouse!) swaying beatifically and staring at a prop rose? Weak.

Is it just me or does Raquel Zimmerman's makeup look caked on? I think Raquel has noticed. I think this makes Raquel unhappy.

Editors love this shot. Where the model allows food to approach her mouth area, but displays no other sign of an appetite. Such beautiful restraint, Ms. Z!

Whereas in every other picture, Raquel could be that lovely secretary your Mom had in the 1980s, frizzy perm, ill-fitting rayon turtlenecks and all, in this one shot she's suddenly vamping it up in evening wear and wanting to show us her tits. Strange. And have you noticed her rainbow of manicures? Budget 20 minutes in the chair for every hue (in addition to this page's basic red, I count gold, nude, hot pink, and dead skin taupe.)


This isn’t an editorial, it’s just an illustration for Allure’s helpful beauty story about how everyone could probably do with a peel, and you should totally forget that whole off-putting Samantha-on-SATC thing. But I’d like to say, having posed for illustrations like this, that standing stock still with goop on your face is never fun. The cream is drying uncomfortably on your skin, it always takes forever for the assistants to light it, and getting the shot depends on such an infinite range of minutae — move the brush 1/8” to the left, now down, no, back over a tad, okay now open your mouth, no, less open, somebody fix her eyebrow now, okay the hair thing I said, yeah, it's in the way again — that it can be downright maddening. Which is ironic, because this shot is always for a beauty story, and beauty stories are supposed to be about zen and centredness and the feminine transcendent! But what really sucks is the images are so servicey and decontextualized that they are worthless for your modeling portfolio. Also: Now I’m pretty sure I “need” a peel. Thanks for nothing, Allure.


The essence of successful modeling can sometimes be the model’s ability to melt so completely into one picture that you don’t recognize her in the next. It took me a minute to even see that it was Inguna Butane here; this is a good start.


And here's her masterstroke. Without resorting to goofy expressions or gimmicks, purely by playing the angles of her face, Inguna so transforms within this series that at first I thought the edit had two models. Seriously. Look back real quick. Are you even sure it's the same person? Latvians. So spooky.


Julia Stegner is bravely standing in 5" heels on the edge of a cliff in Maine. For fashion. As the photographer said in his contributor's note, "We were lucky the wind cooperated." Lucky, indeed! Now that’s dedication to the craft.

Lily Donaldson gives a tutorial in how to behave around the native Other. This is an eternal fashion meme: the Other might be Masai tribesmen or Indian schoolchildren or checkout clerks in one of those palatial, fluorescent-lit Midwestern hypermarkets. Or, like here, 10-gallon-hatted rodeogoers. Whatever the conditions on the ground, it’s your job as the model to look fabulously distinct from the human backdrop; you have to be both an ornament and a foil while maintaining your self-consciously alien presence. Sometimes you interact with the Other, but only in ways that highlight your essential difference. Watch how Lily does it.


It’s okay if you make the Other nervous, like that small blonde child who looks like she’s too frightened to move. These are parables of cultural interaction, and the rule of thumb is always that they’re as scared of you as you are of them.


Exhibit 1: The dude in the black hat is totally more comfortable looking at that horse’s ass than at the ass of the supermodel two feet away from him. Nice.


Posing with things in your mouth isn’t fun (although Masha Novoselova pulls this one off nicely). Rather than take a Freudian field-trip, I’m concentrating on the practical here: these shots are hard to light, the lipstick takes 15 minutes and you have to hold your lips in pretty much the same wide spread smile from the second the makeup artist starts lacquering you up to the instant the last frame is shot. Your teeth hurt from almost biting the metal and your tongue goes dry. Depending on the angle the photographer’s shooting from, you might have to roll your bottom lip under a little, or stick your upper lip out, so that your pout reads as evenly plump in the picture. Don’t let any random lines form across your philtrum or at the corners of your mouth! The jewelry wants to smear the lipstick. The lipstick wants nothing more than to jump all over your teeth. (And, should that happen, the makeup artist will jump in to scrub your pearlies with a Q-tip. Fun!) Getting the jewelry to lie just so without casting any weird shadows or looking “strange” takes minutes that feel like hours. It’s often the simplest seeming shots that are the most like keyhole surgery to achieve.


And anything involving feathers being stuck to your lids with eyelash glue is gonna tickle.

Freja Beha Erichsen is one of my favorite models for projecting pure androgynous, languid, jolie laide attitude. Look at her: she’s wearing insane double-pleated clown pants and an absurd ruffled shirt, both in red leather — but she makes the outfit seem normal, a given, even. Her pose isn’t a pose so much as a had-a-long-day slump that is also, somehow, effortlessly elegant. Yes, I said it! Elegant. In red leather clown pants.


Wow. Just wow.


Nobody, but nobody, does the open-mouthed, eyes narrowed, angry-cute face like Coco Rocha. I always picture her at a restaurant where some idiot dude has kept her waiting for 20 minutes and she’s just seen him walk in the door and is about to deliver the emphatic dressing-down she's spent the time mentally rehearsing. But she’s probably just channeling the scalp pain of that tacky black wig.