Paulina Porizkova: Modeling Is A "Shitty Career"
Latest- The always worth-reading Paulina Porizkova really hit it out of the, uh, tents yesterday in her Huffington Post column, on longevity, personality, and the nature of work in the modeling industry: “The sexpot may be as sweet and bland as baby cereal, the sporty sunny girl is a heavy smoker and the lady swears like a truck driver. My particular blessings were — I was told — elegant, icy features, popular in the Eighties after the sunny blond Seventies. Estee Lauder put their money where my mouth was, and lived to regret it. They hired me despite my outspoken reputation in the press, probably hoping a nice paycheck would check my personality. After all, I looked right. But instead of turning into the lady I appeared to be, I just modified my beauty advice from ‘Sex and Water’ to ‘Sex and Water and Estee Lauder.’ I don’t think they were amused. I couldn’t have cared less. Anyone could buy my body and my face; no one, I was determined, should be able to buy my soul. I told the truth as I saw it from the moment I was first asked for an opinion.” Go on, click. Read. [HuffPo]
- The Times gives a good breakdown of the Marc Jacobs show by the numbers. Excerpt: “In the managed pandemonium of backstage, there were, among other salaried people, 50 hairdressers; 35 makeup artists, including François Nars; the first 10 of the 63 models; 70 dressers; Joseph Carter, Mr. Jacobs’s head designer and the handful of people who work with him to create the collections; the designer’s longtime stylist Venetia Scott; the bald, impish milliner Stephen Jones, who made the show’s acorn berets; and Elisa Ferri, a manicurist who brought a team of four with her to supply the short, rounded nails that Mr. Jacobs favors for his models and who pointed out brightly that “it truly takes a village” to stage a fashion show.” Lasting just over nine minutes, the entire production cost at least $1 million to mount. [NYTimes]
- Anna Wintour gave an interview to Hilary Alexander of the Telegraph, and said of Alexander McQueen, “I remember being in New York when I heard the sad news and Olivier Theyskens said to me that as a student he was very much influenced by Alexander’s work — his creativity and rebelliousness inspired him to realise that the catwalk is a place to break the rules, as well as make them. McQueen is similar to Galliano in terms of his imagination. I very much hope that we at the museum do him justice.” Wintour was referring to this year’s Met Costume Institute show, which will focus on the designer’s life and works. [Telegraph]
- Vogue‘s iPad app goes live today, with some “exclusive content” related to current cover girl Lady Gaga. [Vogue]
- Meanwhile, someone Tweeted that Alexander is retiring in June. To file under “unconfirmed random assertions from people on Twitter,” for the time being, we guess. [Fashion Etc]
- Riding In Cars With André Leon Talley! So jealous right now. [The Cut]
- The Washington Post profiled 18-year-old model Karlie Kloss, analyzed her “magnetism and sex appeal.” [WaPo]
- Arizona Muse appears on four covers of the new Dazed & Confused. [Dazed & Confused]
- Lea T‘s episode of Oprah airs today. [Oprah]
- Crystal Renn and Sara Ziff talk modeling, body image, and health in this video. [The Cut]
- Blind Item: “What established writer shared some harsh words about a young blogger at the Narciso Rodriguez show? She complained to her seatmates, ‘Doesn’t she have math class to go to, or something? I don’t care what she says. She doesn’t even write that stuff anyway?’” Fashion, always an industry invested in the encouragement of bright, ambitious young women. [Fashionista]
- Kelly Osbourne, on only going to one show — Badgley Mischka — at fashion week: “I don’t know how to say this without being a dick, but I’m contracted to only go to this one. And I really wanted to because I’m looking for a dress for the Oscars because I’m doing the red-carpet thingy.” [Elle]
- Jeremy Scott‘s show yesterday was in certain ways just like a rave in 1998. (Or watching the criminally underrated Go.) Called “Candy Flip” — taking ecstasy and LSD at the same time, duh — the main sartorial food groups were neon, fur, silver, and plastic. And also neon-and-silver fur, under plastic. The omnipresent Kanye West was there, but we sadly didn’t get the chance to thank him for our Kanye cash. The after-party was pretty fun, too. At least, from what we remember.
- Vanessa Hudgens — whom we actually failed to even notice at the show, such was the incandescence of Yeezy — said later of Jeremy Scott, “I sat next to Kanye West. It was awesome. We totally talked for a minute, he was so nice. He was Kanye. I felt like a baller.” At the Marchesa presentation, two of the models (who were directed to pose motionless under hot lights, wearing incredibly tall shoes) started to keel over. Guest Irina Lazareanu came to their aid. “It’s so scary, this is so hard. I’ve been there. They’re just babies. It’s crazy,” she said. “They’re just 16-year-olds. They’ve been here over an hour already. It’s heartbreaking.” [The Cut]
- And the award for most incredibly random of all fashion week celebrity guests goes to: 3.1 Phillip Lim, which welcomed Salman Rushdie to its front row. He’s working on a memoir, as he previously told Phillip Lopate. [The Cut]
- Last night at the Blonds, which is actually far and away our favorite fashion show ever, the show that makes Richie Rich want to hang up his bedazzler and cry hot tears of frustration and defeat, the show opened with actual dragon dancers — two two-person teams, who strutted down the runway and play-fought each other. The production was like a red lacquered box of Chinoiserie kitsch, and the atmosphere — unpretentious, enjoyable, with nobody bothering to clear the runway until forty-five minutes after show time or tell photographers not to take pictures of the front-row guests, including Eve, Keri Hilson, Aurey O’Day (yeah, random), Amanda Lepore, and some dude who appeared to be wearing a kind of Black Swan-gorilla suit corset — was out of this world. As for the corsets the Blonds are known for, we hope to see Katy Perry wearing a certain number entirely covered in googly eyes sometime very soon. Going to Proenza Schouler afterwards and plunging into a mood of dimly-lit high fashion dudgeon was strangely kind of a downer after all that exuberance, though obviously the two labels are so different that they do not merit comparison (and we liked seeing the Navajo psychedelica, and liked that Tara Gill opened). The Blonds after-party was also awesome (from what we remember). (All of our fashion week nights have a “from what we remember” caveat.)
- Rodarte‘s after-party boasted cocktails in coconut shells. [WWD]
- Lauren Conrad has a new fashion line called Paper Crown. (This is the thing she was doing that was “too high-brow” for MTV, you will recall.) [Catwalk Queen]
- Target plans to open the first of many planned smaller stores for urban areas in Chicago next year. The new format will be called CityTarget. [WWD]
- The Times critically shopped Shareen’s, which is basically our favorite Manhattan vintage store where nearly everything is under $50 and the Charles Shaw is free to browsers after 5 p.m. and the candy-bowls are free all the time. (We went there most recently with Lux Alptraum, who found a gorgeous dress for the AVN Awards.) And Shareen’s was well received: “One of the problems with vintage stores is that they tend to cater to a limited range of looks, usually the one personally worn by the hipster-owner. The Shareen inventory, however, covers an impressively broad spectrum: billowy shirtdresses in Kool-Aid-colored silks and Dynasty-era shoulder pads (most around $52); pouffy Lacroix-knockoff prom dresses in taffeta and sequins; Gunne Sax dresses for that Australian girls’-school picnic at Hanging Rock; a rack of fringed suede and multicolored leathers.” [NYTimes]
- There’s a woman who is 6’8″ and does some modeling work; the Guinness Book Of World Records intends to evaluate her claim of being “The World’s Tallest Model” later this month. [AOL]
- Abercrombie & Fitch — which battled persistently crummy sales for all of about eighteen months during the recession, before finally beginning to right itself, financially speaking — shares are up 7% following positive quarterly results. [WWD]
- On underground walk-offs: “I hear they’re pretty brutal actually. The loser usually just gets killed right there and then. Usually if a model hasn’t been seen for a while, he’s probably dead in the New York sewers, because his walk wasn’t good enough.” Male models will just tell reporters anything, it turns out! And we love that. [GoaG]
- Douglas Hannant wants old-school socialites to buy his fragrance, is what we took away from this article. Also, a “novelty handset” exists to make an iPhone look like a thing Zack Morris spoke into on Saved By The Bell. This is troubling. [NYTimes]
- Fur prices are expected to rise 15 to 20% at wholesale this year. [NYPost]
- Meanwhile, Diane Kruger appears nude, strategically covered by a fur wrap and fur boots, in the new issue of GQ (which you should totally read if only for Jessica Pressler’s extraordinary Channing Tatum profile). [NYPost]
- Stella McCartney is launching a children’s line — you will perhaps recall that her one-off collection for Gap Kids had grown-up fashion editors struggling into the larger sizes — and has announced that Ryan McGinley is shooting the first campaign. [WWD]
- Here are 1,719 words on some seriously inside-baseball New York nightlife photography shit. [NYTimes]
- J. Crew‘s extended go-shop period for entertaining competing leveraged buy-out offers has expired, with no counteroffers materializing. The retailer wants to go private and has an investment bank signed up; shareholders sued, alleging that the price offered per share was too low because J. Crew had not sought competing bids. [WWD]
- Swizz Beatz is the new face of Reebok Classics, obviously. [WWD]
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