Rodarte [Cast]ing call: Models talk

Rodarte SS 2012 Casting Call from models.com on Vimeo.

How cute is this video? A film by Jennifer Venditti shows some of the biggest models answering the most quirky, trivial questions. Enjoy.

xxx

Girl Crush: Credit Card TV ad: yes, her name is bambi

New word of the day: tchotchkes. It generally means random knickknacks or items that mainly serve a decorative purpose and connote a sense of disposability. Sometimes used to describe pretty youthful girls [I didn't make this up, and yes I'm slightly offended at the disposable idea applying to women]. Commonly used in New York vernacular. Use it in a sentence once today. Ennehweighs...onto more frivolous things...

Model du jour: Bambi Northwood Blyth ["GUUUURL" I hear you cry. Child, Bambi is just a nickname. Her real name is....who cares? With a nickname like that? Let the outstanding journalism continue...] from Australia. Despite being 5'7" [insert inevitable comparison to Kate Moss], she has quickly risen up the ranks and walked for a slew of designers including Chanel. With brows that Sandy Cohen would be proud of. Me being the devoted fashion/ editorial acolyte that I am, I first spotted her in this photo spread by Beau Grealy. It was girl crush at first sight. I still harbour fanciful dreams of becoming a fashion photographer and these are the kinds of photos that inspire me.

Her in current CK one campaign with modeling heavyweights [figuratively not literally speaking] Lara Stone and Abbey K.

You'll have to forgive my weird mood. I literally have been up for 30 + hours straight. This started with impromptu ladies night on Thursday as a friend from uni was in town. 5 hrs, 4 sangrias, 2 jello shots and whatever else led to much tequila texting and painful hangover the next day compounded by general feeling of malaise. In all my infinite wisdom I had also agreed to be part of an overnight shoot last night, which turned out to be a credit card TV ad that was shot in Elements mall. Now, anyone who's ever watched Where The Heart Is, starring a [fictitiously] knocked up Natalie Portman who gets abandoned by her hick of a boyfriend at a Walmart in Oklahoma and ends up secretly living in the shopping centre for 6 weeks, has surreptitiously, fleetingly, harboured a desire to sneak into a mall and stay past closing hours. Don't lie. I know you have. Or at least you will when you watch the film (see trailer bottom of page). Stay with me! There is a point to this convoluted story. See glamorous setting below:And so the only thing mentally propping me up last night amidst a hangover, sleep deprivation, annoyingly chatty fellow "stars" [nah they were nice, just a bit too peppy for me in my fragile state] was the fulfillment of a dream I've had since I was 14. Staying overnight in a mall. You know what they say, dream big!! And malls in Hong Kong have stuff like cinemas, ice rinks, water fountains, and CRYSTAL-BEDAZZLED MERCEDES BENZS [benzes?!]. Yeah Walmart, suck it.

Male models being paid to repeatedly to run past me holding boxes of wine. I've had worse days at work

Very 28 days later

Spent a hefty amount of time being sprayed with confetti in this scene.

Got bored, took photos of flowers I liked in Three Sixty. [NIC: HINT]

Oh and remember Rizo from Grease? Played by Stockard Channing who also stars in this film. Kind of funny considering Natalie Portman is pregnant for real now, 11 years after this film came out.

I need a bucket of froyo and a hug. Hangovers, overnighters [this was a "working" one]: self inflicted, ever deserving of sympathy?

Am so going to watch Where the Heart is now.
xxx

Snap snap: New York Fashion Week A/W 2011 backstage / Inspiration

Harrow, just a lazy re-posting of images that tickled my fashion fancy. Snapshots of New York Fashion Week A/W 2011 Backstage and other photographs. Oh, and a video montage of models if you're feeling particularly good about yourself today and feel like being humbled.

Here are some images from New York Fashion Week A/W 2011 that I liked. All via models.com

Behold:A sea of lavender and mustard at 3.1. Phillip Lim backstage.






Dusty pink nudes at Erin Fetherston:


Backstage at Monique Lhullier:




Alexander Wang below, king of downtown off-duty model, grunge meets glam [insert other pretentious fashion lexicon adjectives here] style. New York magazine did a great piece on him here, and how he's created a luxury brand at more affordable prices. Note his niece, probably the most fashionable 1 year old in the world.







Some fashion image inspiration:

The LWD, Little White Dress, often overshadowed by her more famous sister the LBD. I love a dress with a low cut back. A simple but striking image, source here.

Image of Rumi Neely, famous fashion blogger.

Ksubi image, unknown source. Weird, edgy, random. I love it. Don't we all love hanging out topless on our toy horses wearing a cone hat?

From a bride editorial, source unknown. Included not due to any wedding urges I harbour but purely for aesthetic reasons, image wise. There's something very beautiful about hedge mazes. Very Alice in Wonderland.

Blue and white, big ring. Via B Elle at tumblr. (Am very tempted to switch from blogspot to tumblr, it seems more image friendly, and they recently sent 20 fashion bloggers to fashion week, paying for flights and accomodation whilst sending them to lunches and cocktail parties with big name designers. Very. Jealous.)

NYFW AW2011 model montage.



Have a quiksilver fitting tomorrow, so off to see the sandman.
Ciao ciao
xxx

Mamma mia

Allow me to prefice this blog entry with the necessary holiday cheer of MERRY CHRISTMAS! I finally joined the smartphone market with the gift of a samsung galaxy (ha iphonites! eat your heart out, you haven't managed to brainwash me just yet..). Goodbye productivity, hello angry birds and other pointless apps.

Basically, I was thinking about my love of fashion/ photography/ ketchup on pancakes (the latter being irrelevant to this blog entry but just thought I'd slide that one in there), and it made me think of my mum (again, not the pancakes bit. lol). Perhaps she was an early inspiration into a world I would one day covet to be a part of. I love the retro look of these old photographs. Something about the over-perfection of digital cameras has a habit of erasing the character of certain images.When my mum moved to Holland from Brazil with her first husband, she became a model, modelling in places like Paris, Germany, and Poland. I remember as a child in Holland playing between racks of clothes that she was working with, or stumbling upon designer sketches of clothes. At 4/5 years of age I was more into eating sand than shopping per se, but come to think of it I vaguely remember how cool those illustrations were. All shoulder pads and power dressing captured in strokes of ink (yup, you guessed it, eighties...). In my childhood I couldn't care less about these pictures, but it would be interesting to find them again and appreciate them with a more mature, fashion-focused eye.

She would tell me all these hilarious modelling stories about how the girls would play pranks on each other. Mind you, she worked as an in house model for one fashion house, and they tended to use the same girls over and over again. Even to this day, she counts some of her modelling 'coworkers' as her best friends, so the tricks they played on each other were more tongue-in-cheek versus backstabbing bitchiness. Things like removing the elastic bands of trousers right before they went on the runway so that they would fall right off (can you imagine that happening at Gucci or something today? Fashion suicide!)

She would tell me about fabulous parties in Paris, where she would be allowed to stay at some designer friends' place and host a get-together. I can't even imagine what it was like to plan parties pre-facebook/ texting/ smartphones. Suffice to say, she can now speak about 7 different languages, not perfectly, but enough to get by. Apparently she was once in a charity fashion show that Princess Diana was watching. Bananas.

How Diana Ross is this picture? Below, my parents Diomar and Sam, circa eighties. Circa BIG HAIR. I seriously don't know anyone else, in any other decade, that could pull off a pink jumpsuit with green boots!

I remember looking at these old photos early in my adolescence, smugly laughing at how old fashioned they were as I stood there in my (hideous!) 90s uniform of baggy jeans , spaghetti straps and kohl rimmed eyes (curse you All Saints for making me think that look was cool!). But looking at them now, as the eighties have come into fashion time and time again, the outfits in these images look classic, but still relevant and fresh. Erm, perhaps not the pink jumpsuit with the green boots combo though, don't think I can pull that one off.. But fashion inspiration no less.

xx

Jaded fantasy: ."The cusp of womanhood? She's hardly on the cusp of prom."

Inspiration. Do you find it is the real or the surreal that inspires you, or a mixture of both? I love fashion and photography, but there are aspects of the industry that at times makes me uncomfortable or question the whole validity and place of it in our society. Such as, the predominance of pre-pubescent young girls having to model ludicrously expensive clothes that few teenagers can ever afford for themselves. Clearly aimed at an older market. So, can a 15 year old really inspire a 50 yr old to invest in Prada? I suppose it's the whole aspirational thing, where one aspires to the dream of youth and beauty proposed by these campaigns. I'm 24, and even I have trouble finding young teenagers in ad campaigns aspirational. If I can barely relate, what does that mean for a career woman in her 30s/40s etc? Why is our culture so obsessed with youth?

Sometimes, these ad campaigns appear to me like young kids just playing dress up. I've met models out and about in Hong Kong, and know that sometimes the girl in that icecream campaign is 19 and actually suffering from anorexia at the time. No joke. I've assisted at photoshoots where the 18 yr old girl from Holland feels pressured to pose topless in front of a room of strangers for fear of not being booked again by the same photographer. [side note: she wasn't really forced into it, but felt it would have been awkward not to go along with it. Apparently modeling was her way of saving up money for medical school. In post editing her twins were pretty much covered up. But still...]I've spoken to male models who say that the best way to make it in the industry is if one happens to be gay and thus become the lover/ muse of a top gay photographer. I had a (very) brief fling once with an italian model years ago who would sometimes lament the fact that he was straight (hopefully for career reasons otherwise that may have been a seriously backhanded insult). And hadn't eaten carbs since he was 15. Seriously. I once watched him eat a Sausage Mcmuffin sans muffin (he really did spoil me with swanky places). Suffice to say, I felt slightly sorry for him in that moment [I think he's in Milan now, so pity is definitely not something one should bestow upon him by any means]. I've had friends encounter sleazy photographers as well. I'm sure there are far more interesting and eye-opening tales of the shady side of the fashion industry, these are just the tip of the iceberg and some of my own accounts. For more scary modelling stories, see here.
My point is, is the fantasy worth the reality? There is all the debate about the improbable perfection of women in the media creating all sorts of problems for the 99% of women not represented, such as eating disorders, low self esteem etc etc. The more we find out about the reality behind the gilded facade, about how young the models are, how photoshopped they are, how sick some of them are, however shady the circumstances (the archetypal sleazy photographer Terry Richardson's sex scandal) the less convincing a campaign might become. In this technological age of mass media, real-time communcation and all-pervasive internet, we now have all this information. The illusion is now crumbling. Do we choose to accept it with a pinch of salt? Is this denial? Or merely an innocent love of beauty which is acceptable as long as it isn't taken too far?

Case in point: the 2010 Miu Miu campaign starring 15 year old Lindsey Wixson. Gorgeous campaign, with an enigmatic beauty. But, so heartbreakingly young. I found a great quote on the subject here:

' A press release about the campaign calls Wixson the "emodiment of a
free-spirit on the cusp of womanhood". The cusp of womanhood? She's
hardly on the cusp of prom.'

What inspired me to write this blog is the timeless beauty of Lauren Hutton. In the first picture she is, in her mid sixties, gracing the cover of Love magazine (one of my favorite quarterly fashion publications). That is what I call inspiring. Quite honestly I have trouble being inspired to purchase expensive skin products when I know that the model in the campaign is in her teens, half asian (ah how I envy the asian/ eurasian ageless skintones...) and has clearly hit the genetic lottery as despite her insultingly gleaming stratified squamous epithelium (say it ten times real fast!) she probably smokes like a chimney and is the inspiration behind that nose candy themed N.E.R.D song. All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom? Yes I'm hating a little. Major white girl skin envy, that's what. I'm not judging what people do for recreational activities, just that I feel my intellect insulted somewhat that I'm supposed to believe that type of ad.



A woman becomes a muse when she is unique, when her beauty is timeless, and when she can age with grace and still look magnificent.

"I'd like to be the first model who becomes a woman. We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals through the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be".

To me, Lauren Hutton is an aspirational figure. She makes me want to grow old (somewhat) gracefully and to embrace the natural beauty within. Even today, she is regularly booked for campaigns such as Badgeley Mischka and H&M. She is much more exciting to me than a 14 year old Russian girl in Chloe. Purely as I think it's more difficult to look THAT good in your 6os than it is when one is a teen.

One must also note the rise of the use of the eigthies supermodel in many of the recent ad campaigns: Christy Turlington for Bally, Naomi Campbell for Yves Saint Laurent, Claudia Schiffer for Chanel, Linda Evangelista for L'Oreal. Perhaps in times of recession and economic uncertainty, consumers are comforted by the familiar. Plus, the girls from the eighties are now career women (and trophy wives?) and still look up to these women. And who wouldn't? Many of them are now in their 30s/ 40s and looking great. Their fabulousness is not down to teen skin but to a certain je ne sais quoi (with a little help from photoshop, copious workouts etc, I mean who are we kidding?). But at least it's more real than a teen. Which is why I loved the recent Fall 2010 Louis Vuitton campaign starring Karen Elson, Natalia Vodianova and Christy Turlington, perhaps not really that representative of the female population, but a good halfway point between fantasy and reality.

Wow, this little blog about gushing my love for Lauren Hutton turned into quite a hefty long one! Apologies for my liberal use of parentheses - once again I got a little carried away :)

Nat xx