Jourdan Dunn: 'Some People' In Fashion Don't Know How To Handle Black Hair

By Jenna Sauers  |  October 4, 2011 | 7:20pm
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Top model Jourdan Dunn Tweeted backstage from Paris fashion week that “some people need to learn how to do black hair/skin” — not exactly an uncommon complaint, or an unwarranted one. (Chanel Iman has in the past mentioned having to explain to hair stylists that they can’t, say, just soak her hair and straighten it with a flat iron.) The shows Dunn walked yesterday were Emanuel Ungaro and Giambattista Valli. [@MissJourdanDunn, ONTD]

Kate Winslet is on the cover of the new Harper’s Bazaar UK. She talks about her divorce from Sam Mendes, which happened at the same time she was shooting Mildred Pierce (for which she won an Emmy). “There’s no way that I’m going to allow my children to be fucked up because my marriages haven’t worked out,” says the actress. “I so wish that that wasn’t the case, that that hadn’t happened in my life, but it has. So I will make the best of it.” [ONTD]

Christian Siriano says the dress Taylor Swift wears in her perfume ads is selling out. “I have orders all day long on that dress. We can’t make them fast enough.” [ONTD]

Dior is launching a handbag collection with the artist Anselm Reyle. The brand will operate a pop-up store at Art Basel Miami, of course. “Christian Dior, before becoming a visionary couturier, was a gallerist,” says Delphine Arnault. Dior indeed founded a gallery in 1928, and ran it with his father’s money until Dior père lost his fortune. Reyle says he would like to see someone carrying one of his handbags on the street, but he doubts that will happen in his Berlin neighborhood. [WWD]

In other news of art, fashion, and the shifting ground in between: Nan Goldin shot a Jimmy Choo ad. [WWD]

Terry Richardson photographed 17-year-old Lindsey Wixson eating French fries in New Jersey and posing in Armani next to a graffito that reads “CLASSWAR” for a new Purple editorial. This is the second time in just the past few months that Richardson has published pictures of Wixson eating diner food. Get a new trope, buddy. [FGR]

V has a massive couture spread featuring Emily Baker, Aymeline Valade, Valerija Kelava, Candice Swanepoel, and Kristina Salinovic. Each sports some seriously massive hair, too. [Models.com]

Chinese new face Tian Yi, on her favorite article of clothing: “My favorite items of clothing are my socks with different animal faces on them. I have a bunch. They’re so comfy and cute.” [WWD]

Pantene made Arwen its newest face. Arwen! [Heatworld]

Refinery29 comes out and says it: American Apparel sells mom jeans. Also, dad jeans. [Refinery29]

  • Milla Jovovich comes across as endearing, contrarian, and slightly nutty in this long interview with the Telegraph. Some choice quotes: “Now, every client would rather work with an actress. After the supermodel thing, the clients just said, ‘We’re done with paying top dollar for girls with attitudes who are constantly late.’ These days they’ll pay them nothing so they don’t create stars — and I get that. Why have a model on the front of your magazine when you can have Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett or Hilary Swank? Because those girls are intelligent and talented, people are interested.” On her teenaged years: “My poor mum had a lot of problems with me around that time. I was young but I’d been working for years, so if she asked me to clean my room I’d say, ‘You can’t tell me what to do after I’ve worked a 12-hour day.’ It gave me a power that no one that age should have.” On actors: “I’ve tended to fall in love with the directors rather than the actors. That’s because of my mother, too, who told me actors were vain, self-centred, flighty.” On male models: “Ugh. They’re even worse than actors. I mean seriously: you’re going to model for a living? It’s embarrassing for a man to model. Because it’s not like their career can take them anywhere — except in rare exceptions, like my ex-boyfriend Mario Sorrenti.” On her daughter: “I worry about Ever. She’s the daughter of two successful people living in Beverly Hills: that’s gross. And that’s why at some point I want to take her to live in a village in Mongolia where we can help milk the yaks.” [Telegraph]
  • For fans of Mindy Kaling‘s wonderful old blog, Things I Bought That I Love, rejoice: she has launched a new website full of all kinds of new writing, and revived the series, too. [The Concerns Of Mindy Kaling]
  • Scott Schuman, whose obnoxious comments about Tavi Gevinson and how he was getting rich, rich, rich off of blogging were roundly decried as, well, obnoxious, is doing some walking-back this week. He says that the interview in question was done in 2009, although it was just posted last week, and that he has changed his mind about Gevinson since. And also that the financial information he shared about his site — he put his annual income from advertising at “more than a quarter million and less than a half a million” dollars — is out of date. He admits he sometimes includes a paid-for post on his blog in his contracts with the brands he works for on various “projects,” and won’t share his CPM (cost per thousand impressions, a measure of the cost of advertising on his blog), but will say it is above $30 for some inventory. The Business of Fashion calculates that even at $20 CPM and only selling half his inventory, Schuman could still see over $100,000 in monthly ad sales revenue from his blog alone. [BoF]
  • Marc Jacobs shot an ad for a $5700 dress and some $595 shoes by putting the dress and the shoes on a man. It’s certainly not the first time Jacobs ads have featured cross-dressing, but it is fun to watch a man in a dress vacuum a bed. [Copyranter]
  • New theory on why Kate Middleton might not follow in Diana’s footsteps and do a cover of Vogue: because she’s afraid of the Queen. “Kate is keenly conscious that while her new mother-in-law may not chide her for appearing on a Vogue cover,” says a “palace source.” “But she would definitely not be amused, and Her Majesty is a real genius at making people squirm with simply a look or a ‘tut, tut.’” A (different) anonymous source says, “To be brutally honest, a request to sit down with The Times, the BBC or one of the major American networks to discuss the monarchy in general is one thing. For Kate to be photographed draped in the latest creation of a couture house to, knowingly or otherwise, self-promote her status as some sort of fashion horse is something quite different. I’d say Architectural Digest might have stood a better chance.” [E!]
  • The exhibition of Middleton’s Alexander McQueen wedding dress at Buckingham Palace closed on October 3rd. While exact visitor numbers aren’t yet available, it’s believed to have drawn more than 600,000 viewers, breaking all previous records. [People]
  • Alice Temperley says of the Middleton sisters, “They are brilliant girls — good Brit stock. It’s refreshing, because there’s this whole world of celebrities, but they are so well mannered and polite. They are true British girls, and they are very good ambassadors for British fashion and what we represent.” [Style.com]
  • Target’s Jason Wu collection will hit stores on February 5th. Contrary to prior reports, it will not be classified as a Go! International collection, nor will it be part of Target’s Designer Collaborations series (truthfully, we’ve always been a little fuzzy on the differences between those two) — it will be its own thang. And the collection will apparently include women’s clothes, scarves, and handbags, all priced at $19.99 to $59.99. [WWD]
  • Speaking of Target: they got rid of the guy who oversaw the retailer’s website and marketing. Perhaps a long-planned move, perhaps a response to the dog’s breakfast that was the launch of the Missoni collaboration. The latest news on that, by the way, is that Target still can’t fill, and maybe will never be able to fill, many of the orders that people did manage to make when the site wasn’t crashed on launch day. [WWD]
  • There’s a rumor that Chanel Iman and Kanye West are dating. The evidence? Iman walked in Kanye West’s (ridiculous) debut fashion show and attended a Paris fashion week dinner as his guest (while wearing a look from his collection). Professional obligation, favor for a friend, romantic connection, unholy combination of the above? You decide. [Fashionista]
  • Here’s a novel idea for relaunching a brand that’s well-loved for its iconic and highly collectible vintage designs: start things off with a sale of a few pieces from the design archives. Well played, Courrèges. [WWD]
  • Chris March always used to say that Lady Gaga was his dream client — but now he’s made her a studded black leather coat, which she wore in Vegas. Meryl Streep remains his favorite client, however: “She’s very savvy about what she wants to wear, and she pays very close attention to what you’re doing,” says the designer. “And she’s just soooo nice.” [Styleite]
  • Catherine Malandrino‘s troubled fashion company may be acquired by Elie Tahari. Malandrino ran into trouble when it took on debt to fund a retail expansion in 2007-08, which proved to be rather poorly timed in light of the whole recession thing. It’s been looking for investment since 2010, and earlier this year it seemed that Kellwood was poised to take over. But those talks broke down, and this season Malandino did not show at fashion week. Its New York boutique has now been closed “for inventory” for several weeks. Elie Tahari is that relatively rare combination of a designer who also has a canny sense of business; Tahari co-founded Theory with Andrew Rosen, and when they sold the company, Tahari became a very wealthy man. Tahari has invested primarily in his own brand, which now does over $500 million in wholesale per year, but has made plays for other fashion interests — he even tried to acquire Barneys New York in 2004. (Given how Barneys has performed, he’s probably glad he lost out on that one.) [WWD]
  • Bill Gaytten, who has been steering Dior since John Galliano was fired, says the criticism of his couture collection in July was “deserved and fair.” “I could have happily stayed a pattern cutter. I didn’t have a great plan, unlike John, who was the Napoleon of the fashion business. Had this not happened with John, I would have been happy to stay as his second in the background.” As for Galliano making a return to fashion, Gaytten will only say, “It’s not over ’til it’s over. I can’t say any more than that right now.” [FT]
  • Here are some disturbing video stills of raccoon dogs being skinned alive in China, allegedly to make knock-off Ugg boots. [Sun]
  • That was quick: just after his spring collection walked in Paris, Vionnet designer Rodolfo Paglialunga has been shown the door. The C.E.O. of the recently revived brand describes the decision, oddly, as “consensual.” The new designers will be twins from Italy named Barbara and Lucia Croce. [WWD]
  • This is a long and somewhat tedious item about fashion week scheduling conflicts, of interest to dedicated followers of fashion industry arcana only (probably). So there are four major semi-annual fashion weeks that attract the interest of the world’s major retailers and publications. They are, in calendar order, New York, London, Milan, and Paris. These series of fashion weeks start in February and September. By international agreement, New York’s Spring shows start on the second Thursday of September; this year, that meant that the shows were the earliest they will ever be, kicking off three days after Labor Day weekend. But next year, the second Thursday of September is going to fall on just about the latest possible day of the month, September 13, and Milan is worried that its fashion week is therefore going to be too late to suit designers’ production deadlines. (Strangely, Paris does not seem to share this concern, even though its fashion week is after Milan’s.) Milan’s idea of a “solution” is, apparently, to unilaterally decide that its fashion week is going to start on September 19th — leap-frogging over London in the queue. London, which is already the smallest fashion week of the bunch, both in terms of the number of designers who show and the amount of revenue generated, is really pissed about this. Actually, everybody’s pissed. Paris says that if Milan does that, then it’ll start its shows on the 25th, which would ordinarily be Milan’s slot. The world’s two major luxury-goods conglomerates, PPR and LVMH, are both headquartered in Paris, so no matter how this gets adjudicated, the decision will probably be handed down from Paris. < /insideryness > [WWD, Telegraph]
  • And now, a moment with Lynn Yaeger. The fashion writer has had an interesting week. She was disinvited from Balenciaga, reacted with horror when she saw a $93,000 Chanel bag in a shop window, and found Comme des Garçons disappointing. Here she is on the disjunct between fashion and the current political mood:
  • At this point, after a solid four weeks on the fashion-show circuit, incongruity rules the day — there are people living in tents all over Paris, the Occupy Wall Streeters are gaining in numbers, and yet two standout collections in Paris, Nina Ricci and Rochas, look back longingly and affectionately at the pre-liberation doyenne of the fifties, with her perfect tailleur, her matchy-match ensembles, her frankly pretty, subdued, appropriate wardrobe.
  • [The Cut]

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