Angelina To Receive $10 Million To Shill Handbags
LatestAngelina Jolie is rumored to be the face of Louis Vuitton for fall. Her fee? “Close to $10 million.” This is interesting because that piece of scuttlebutt from E! — a pretty reliable source for celebrity “news,” all things considered — directly contradicts earlier scuttlebutt from The Fashion Spot — a pretty reliable source for fashion industry news, all things considered. Sources had indicated that Steven Meisel already shot Louis Vuitton‘s fall campaign with six relatively new models, including Fei Fei Sun and Daphne Groeneveld. (New York also reported yesterday that it had “heard” Zuzanna Bijoch was in the fall Louis Vuitton campaign.) Whom to believe? Actresses v. models, celebrity news blog v. user-generated industry website, Hollywood v. Seventh Avenue, celebrity-industrial complex v. fashion-industrial complex — these are essential questions for the ages. Or could there be two different Vuitton campaigns? [E! Online, Fashionologie]
Meanwhile, in an interview, Bijoch said: “In five years, I’ll still be in the fashion industry. In ten years, I’ll be working on Wall Street.” [The Cut]
Johnny Weir is launching a capsule collection of little black dresses. They’ll retail for $198-$298, and be shown publicly for the first time at an ice skating show in Illinois. [WWD]
Scarlett Johanson, who has fronted Mango for several years, is out as the face of the brand. So, too is photographer Mario Sorrenti, who shot all of Johanson’s campaigns. They are to be replaced by Terry Richardson and Kate Moss. [CQ]
Here’s Rico “Zombie Boy” Genest shot by Steven Klein for Arena Homme Plus. [Nicola Formichetti’s Blog]
Genest spent $16,000 getting the tattoos that have covered his entire body (except for his genitals) in a trompe l’oeil skeleton. [NYPost]
Converse has glow-in-the-dark sunglasses, for those who wear their sunglasses at night and want everyone to know about it. [Racked]
Vogue has launched a 99-cent iPad app for those who want to track the Met Ball preparations very closely. [Fashionologie]
- R.J. Cutler, who directed The September Issue and The War Room, among other films, gave Grace Coddington a rather special 70th birthday present: A necklace that appears to be a tiny silver Gucci locket, but is in fact a retractable tape measure once worn by one of the house’s petites mains. [The Cut]
- Marco Zanini says he’s a fan of conceptual clothing, “Because I think some things should be preserved, like jams. But I’m afraid we’re living in a time of a global lobotomy of aesthetics, at least where I live. I’m afraid I see people looking the same, very mainstream.” He also tells Cathy Horyn, “I wish that people could get excited not just about the superficial aspects of fashion but also about the craft and all the hidden people who are never visible in those blogs and on those shows. Now everyone is so opinionated but their opinions are about trite things, the shoes on the runway or does that girl on the red carpet look better than another woman in the same dress. I mean, come on. Fashion is so much more.” [On The Runway]
- Karl Lagerfeld and Valentino Garavani touched down in their private jets around the same time and at the same airport Wednesday. The chance encounter “was a coincidence, but a funny one. They are old friends and walked down the steps of their respective planes and greeted each other warmly. Then an amazing array of luxury suitcases were unloaded, along with each designer’s beautiful entourage and quite a few dogs.” [P6]
- Prabal Gurung seemed “nervous” when asked about being named as a possible candidate to replace John Galliano at Christian Dior. “I feel extremely blessed that I’m in that lineup of designers that I’ve admired all this while . . . it’s unbelievable. It isn’t something I was expecting . . . I’m just going to say I was very humbled, grateful and thankful. I don’t want to say more.” [Fashionista]
- Anna Sui is getting a Leadership in the Arts award from Harvard. [WWD]
- Aziz Ansari says it was just coincidence that he was so ubiquitous at fashion week shows and parties in February. It happened to be “the first week in a long time that I hadn’t been working. If I have time off and I want to go out, it doesn’t take much. It could be Model Train Week and I would have been out there every night, and people would have been like ‘Aziz Ansari is the face of model trains.'” [NYObs]
Internet trollsResearchers Dr Davide Dragone and Dr Luca Savorelli, from the University of Bologna, Italy, have published a paper arguing that were heavier runway models to become a fashion industry norm, the health of the general population would suffer, because obesity would be normalized. “To promote chubby fashion models when obesity is one of the major problems of industrialised countries seems to be a paradox. Everyone has to trade off in life a number of things like the pleasure of eating and going to the gym or something as a cost. So if you just fix the average healthy weight then maybe you will throw up some incentives to be thin.” See! Skinny models are just incentives to be thin. (We’re going to ignore that rather unfortunate usage of “throw up.”) The very fact that as fashion models’ average size has dwindled, people in the West have on average gotten fatter would seem to disprove Dragone and Savorelli’s contention that the skinner the model, the skinner the populace. [Daily Mail]- Rebecca Minkoff, on starting her own business: “Every dollar I made went back in. I started with $10,000 from saving up my whole life. By the time I began to grow at a rate that was beyond dollar in, dollar out, I was in business with my brother. Luckily he had great credit and could secure a credit line. If you don’t have good credit, I would say find someone who does! The thing that we learned was to not go out and get a huge chunk of money. I have seen many people blow through it because it’s there. We saved and thought about every single penny and to my brother’s credit we are lucky in that we own 100% of the company today.” [Fashionista]
- Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. We have to stop liking Shipley & Halmos now. Jeff Halmos: “The last thing I read that I loved was The Fountainhead, around the time we started Shipley & Halmos. The idea of doing things your way and not compromising really resonated with me at that particular time.” Fuck! Ayn Rand lays waste to another promising aesthetic relationship. [Details]
- Chris Benz gives a good explanation of the weird and complicated fashion calendar — the rotation of “spring-summer” and “fall-winter” and “pre-fall” and “pre-spring” and “resort” collections, each presented six months out of season. Benz says: “We produce three collections each year, however bigger companies produce many more than that. In fact, some contemporary companies deliver more than 16 new collections per year! In fashion, its [sic] always about providing newness and excitement for the customer…Pre-collections were developed as a tool for more commercial pieces to be on the selling floor preceding the delivery of the runway collections, thereby supporting and filling out the merchandising mix on the racks. It’s not hard to imagine how more and more ‘runway’ style pieces snuck [sic] their way into the pre-collections, causing them to appear as directional collections unto themselves! Additionally, the pre-collections have the longest life retail-wise, nearly an entire month longer on the floor than the main collections prior to markdown.” [Fashionista]
- New insane made-up body thing to not worry about, courtesy of the deputy editor of British Vogue: “Ninkles are not to be confused with cankles (that’s fat ankles). Ninkles are wrinkles on our knees and they are the beginning of the end of the short skirt. Thankfully there is a welcome return of the midi. I like them fitted with a bit of stretch in the fabric so you can actually walk, such as those at the new Marc Jacobs show, or versions by Jonathan Saunders.” There ought to be one employee per Vogue whose job it is just to listen to what these editors are about to commit to print/say on television/natter about on the radio/tell a blog and screen it for total WTF-itude. Because these people clearly have lost any purchase they ever had on how they sound. [Telegraph]
- Further to yesterday’s discussion: a podiatrist says that if you must wear high heels, wedges or platforms with thick heels are more supportive of your feet. Finding a brand that suits the width of your foot is also important. And do toe exercises. [FPD]
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