Tyra Banks Says Writing A Book Gave Her Alopecia
LatestTyra Banks says it took five years to write her New York Times best-selling sci-fi Young Adult novel, Modelland. Characters like Tookie de la Creme don’t name themselves, ladies! (Seriously though: her poor, ignored ghost-writer.) Ty-Ty got the idea while in the back of a car, wrote it down on a piece of paper, and promptly lost the piece of paper until she cleaned out her purse. Once she got serious, it sounds like she really got into the research. “I love Roald Dahl. On my nightstand right now is James and the Giant Peach, which I’m reading for the second time. I just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I read three Twilights.” Now we’re picturing Tyra Banks in bed with her banker boyfriend, furiously reading all the YA she missed out on as a kid. She worked on the book while shooting Top Model and initially produced a draft of over 1000 pages. She says the stress made her hair fall out. [WSJ]
Everybody! Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra, who together make beautiful clothing under the name Costello Tagliapietra, got married yesterday, on their 17th anniversary as a couple. [DFR]
None other than Alan Cumming sent his regards on the Twitter. [@AlanCumming]
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is on the cover of November’s German Vogue. [DS]
Shena Moulton is a 17-year-old high school graduate, and a model who has just finished her sixth show season. The Jamaican has been working since she was 13. “Before I was a model, I always wore bright colors and patterns but as a model, you’re encouraged to wear more classic stuff. My closet now is all black and gray. I wish I could dress like Rihanna. She doesn’t care. She dresses how she wants. That’s her style. No one can say, ‘Rihanna you must dress like this today, you must dress like that tomorrow.’ In this industry, you always have to look the part. You never know when your agency will call you and say, hey, you have a shoot or hey, you have a casting.” [WWD]
Meanwhile, Miss Piggy was featured in a shoot for InStyle. [Fashionista]
And Marie Claire editor and frequent street-style subject Taylor Tomasi-Hill makes her modeling debut in a spread for Block magazine. [FGR]
For its 15th anniversary, Russian Harper’s Bazaar asked 15 designers to do limited-edition covers for the magazine. Among the results is this portrait of
The Associated Press picked up the Urban Outfitters/Navajo Nation trademark story (click here for background, a history of the “trend,” and some legal perspective). And the New York Post ran the AP’s story with this truly stupendous headline. We’re just surprised they passed up an opportunity to use “panties” in a hed. [NYPost]
- On November 6, Christy Turlington will be running the New York marathon to raise money for maternal and child health. She’s been training, and regularly goes on 21-mile runs. “One thing you have to do is carb-loading. That is something I had always heard about but never really knew what it involved,” says the supermodel. “It’s kind of nice to say you have to eat carbs. That’s my job right now.” [WWD]
- Gemma Ward‘s role in the Baz Luhrmann adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been announced, and as predicted, she’s not playing Nick Carraway’s demoniac Finn: she will be Catherine Wilson, sister of Tom Buchanan’s mistress, Myrtle. In the book, she appears just twice. She is described as having bright red hair, and her sister says, “She’s said to be very beautiful by those who ought to know.” In Chapter 2, Catherine attends at a small party at the Morningside Heights apartment Buchanan keeps for his affair, and she tells Nick that she’s heard Jay Gatsby is related to Kaiser Willhelm. Then Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose. And when Myrtle dies, she comes to the scene of the accident “stupid with liquor” and has to be driven to Flushing to see the body. [Fashion Copious]
- In other crossover news, jewelry designer Waris Ahluwalia says he used to work for the Secret Service. “That should have led me into a nice career in politics — how I ended up in fashion is beyond me.” [Interview]
- Lifetime is pushing back the air dates of Project Runway: All-Stars by one year. [Reality Blurred]
- France’s wealthiest woman, the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, has been placed under the guardianship of her family by a judge. Bettencourt is just four days shy of her 89th birthday. She is vowing to fight the ruling. [WWD]
- In this security camera footage, you can allegedly make out how two men dressed as women stole some vintage Chanel handbags from a Lower East Side boutique. [Fox]
- Maker of waxed jackets (and hipster favorite as of late) Belstaff is opening a store in New York City in February. [WWD]
- Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy says its revenues increased by 15% during the quarter just ended, compared with the same period last year. Group-wide sales in the nine months to September 30 topped $23 billion. [WWD]
- And now, a moment with former head of New York fashion week Fern Mallis. Mallis offers some historical perspective on the Big Four show season. Next spring, Milan has announced it is unilaterally moving up its show dates to conflict with both London fashion week and New York fashion week. Until the late 1990s, New York designers showed after London, Milan and Paris (Jennifer Egan’s superlative 1996 profile of Jaime King mentions the model doing shows in New York in October, after Paris). Mallis says that reversal was brought about by Helmut Lang, and suggests that in some ways the Europeans haven’t yet gotten over the shift:
- There’s quite a brouhaha about which fashion week comes first. I lived through that shift once. New York was last, always until Helmut Lang moved his business from Belgium to America and set up headquarters here. And he said, “I don’t want to show after Europe, I want to show first.” Talk about a seismic shift. Europe wasn’t terribly happy about that, they loved being able to say they did everything first. But we’ve shifted in the past. On the one-year anniversary of 9/11, we made a deal with London because no one wanted to show. Ultimately the dates are what caused fashion week to be evicted from Bryant Park. If I put my money on it and guess, I think maybe they will get together and move New York up a few days.
- [WSJ]
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