Archive for March, 2008
Pointless airhead socialite and part-time model Paris Hilton has today announced that she is seeking a new best friend, of the non-canine variety, who she can trust, swap clothes and tell girly secrets to.
Former state prisoner and porn-movie star Paris feels unable to attract a best friend via the usual channels of socialising, partying and forming bonds with like-minded morons and has instead opted to launch a self-publicising competition on MTV.
Viewers will be asked to vote for the saddo who most impresses them with videos, whole sentences, useless causes etc and that person will be catapulted into the limelight alongside Paris as her new best friend.
MTV are hoping that viewers will get into the spirit of the show and not vote a freak into the position just to prove a point and make Paris look even dumber than she already does.
The 20 finalists, assuming of course that 20 people actually enter the competition, will get to live with Paris and a camera crew so that Paris can choose and so the winner can get to taste a lifestyle where vagina-flashing outside Starbucks is the norm.
Paris former best friend Nicole Ritchie commented,” She was a great friend to me until I lost weight, when we couldn’t swap clothes any more she didn’t want to know.”
Paris former best friend Tinkerbell commented,”She called me a bitch every day, when I got too big and we couldn’t swap clothes any more she dropped me.”
Paris Hilton commented,”I’m looking for someone about the same size as me who’s interested in visiting Rwanda.”
March 12th, 2008
They may not be successful models just yet, but America’s Next Top Model’s current crop of contestants apparently unleashed some diva-esque behavior on the tenth-season’s New York City loft.
“These girls not only destroyed the floors, it appears they had food fights. There’s ketchup and coffee splattered all over the landlord’s $20,000 white drapes. There’s lipstick on the walls,” an insider told The New York Post in a Monday report. “They moved in furniture and made holes all along the walls.”
Top Model production company Anisa Productions rented the Lispenard Street loft from Michael Marvisi, and the insider told The Post the landlord was promised that any damage would be minor.
Instead Top Model’s production crew and the tenth-season contestants caused an estimated total of $500,000 worth of damage to the 4,200-square-foot loft, according to The Post.
“The landlord is devastated,” the insider told The Post. “Three other shows approached him [to use the loft] and he turned them all down for Top Model. And a tenant was supposed to move in a week ago, but when the place wasn’t ready, they pulled out. Tyra Banks should be ashamed of herself.”
During their 10-week stay at the $6 million TriBeCa loft, The Post reported the contestants were responsible for damaging a $15,000 chandelier beyond repair and ruining the bathroom with water damage — causing it to be tested for mold.
“A plumber had to come fix the toilet and the water caused $90,000 worth of damage to the electrical store on the first floor,” the insider told The Post.
Top Model’s production crew is also accused of having “punched hundreds of holes in the ceiling to hang lighting equipment,” according to The Post. The crew also reportedly wrecked the loft’s Brazilian wood floors — meaning new flooring had to be installed when the contestants vacated the loft three weeks ago.
In addition, Top Model also “skipped out on” a $1,500 electrical bill, The Post reported.
While Top Model offered to settle for $125,000, the insider told The Post Marvisi has yet to be paid any money and now plans to file a lawsuit against the show.
An Anisa Productions representative offered “no comment” when contacted by The Post. A Banks’ representative did not return The Post’s calls for comment.
March 11th, 2008
Waris Dirie is the kind of woman they use the word “striking” about, with her slender 5 foot 9 frame and the face and poise of the supermodel-actress she once was. The native Somalian would be hard to overlook on a Northern European street even if she weren’t familiar from the James Bond thriller she appeared in, or the fashion, fragrance and cosmetics ads she has done.
Puzzling, then, that the wires should flash the news this morning that Ms. Dirie had disappeared in Brussels two days before and was the subject of a nationwide manhunt — only to report a few hours later that she had been found by police, walking in the main plaza in the center of the city, apparently in good health.
The whole episode attracted even more attention than your average ex-supermodel disappearance because of what the French police found in the Seine a week ago — the body of another African-born former model, Katoucha Niane — and because of the high-profile human-rights cause they had in common: the fight against the practice of female genital mutilation.Ms. Dirie, in fact, has written several books on the issue and serves as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. She missed a scheduled speaking appearance on Thursday at a European Union women’s rights conference, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in attendance, and was supposed to travel to the Netherlands today to receive an award.
The French police said that an autopsy found no signs of foul play in Ms. Katoucha’s death, and suggested that she may have accidentally fallen into the river from the houseboat where she lived. Family members aren’t satisfied.
The Belgian police were interviewing Ms. Dirie this evening to find out what had become of her since the curious events in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, when she had last been seen. Few details have emerged at this writing. The Associated Press reports:
Dirie’s manager, Walter Lutschinger, said she had been involved in an altercation in a hotel reception area after a taxi driver took her to the wrong branch of the Sofitel hotel chain. The police were called and drove Dirie around Brussels looking for the correct hotel because she had apparently forgotten where she was staying.
At one hotel, while staff and police were checking for her name on a computer, [Jean-Marc] Meilleur said Dirie stepped out, saying she planned to buy cigarettes from an all-night kiosk, but instead climbed into a taxi and drove away.
(Mr. Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels public prosecutor’s office, later declined to comment further on the episode, the A.P. said.)
For Ms. Dirie, who now lives in Austria, threats to personal safety are more than theoretical: She was attacked in 2004 by a Portuguese handyman who was stalking her, the A.P. reported.
March 7th, 2008
The lifeless body of Katoucha Niane, the former supermodel muse of fashion legend Yves Saint Laurent, has been fished out of the River Seine near Paris.
Detectives are investigating whether the beautiful 47-year-old - nicknamed “The Black Princess” - was the victim of a murder plot, although all the signs point towards an accidental death.
Seen as a forerunner of Naomi Campbell - the world’s most successful black model - Katoucha once commanded hundreds of thousands of pounds for her appearances on the catwalk.
In the 1980s she modelled for Christian Lacroix, Paco Rabanne and Thierry Mugler.
Until Thursday’s gruesome find, she had not been seen since disappearing from her upmarket houseboat on a central stretch of the river by the Alexander III Bridge on February 1st.
The mother-of-three disappeared after being dropped off from a late night party organised by others from the world of Paris fashion, in which she still worked as a consultant.
Police believe she had been drinking heavily, and may have fallen into the water after losing her footing in a tragic accident.
Katoucha’s handbag was later recovered near her houseboat.
Her body was pulled from the Seine in Boulogne, just west of the capital, according to one detective, who said investigators were yesterday afternoon still at the scene gathering evidence.
“This may have been a tragic accident after a night out with friends, but we cannot rule out any form of foul play at this stage, up to and including murder,” the detective added.
He said the body, which was spotted under a bridge by a passer-by, and which was thought to have been in the water for close to a month, was still clothed in a designer dress.
An autopsy was in progress, with numerous people attending Paris Fashion Week being spoken to about Katoucha’s disappearance.
Although a French national, Katoucha was born in Conakry, Guinea, and was hugely proud of her African background.
Her father was the playwright and historian Djibril Tamsir Niane. Katoucha worked with the greatest haute couture stars at the height of her career in the 1980s, including Saint Laurent, to whom she was always close.
Katoucha left the catwalk for good in 1994, but in recent years became an outspoken critic of female circumcision, launching a foundation to campaign against practice.
Excised at the age of nine in Guinea, Katoucha recounted the ordeal in a recent book entitled “In My Flesh”. She said she saw her career as a top model as a form of “revenge” for the horror of excision.
Katoucha wrote: “I grew up surrounded by hibiscus and ylang-ylang flowers. I used to get drunk on the richest perfumes and saw myself as a perfumer or a model.
“But one day, mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie. An unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote ‘In My flesh’.
“I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished,” she wrote.
The Seine, despite its beautiful bridges and cobbled riverbanks, is a legendary dumping ground for the bodies of murder and suicide victims.
Last year, 55 corpses were retrieved from its murky depths, and around 150 people were rescued alive.
March 1st, 2008
Next Posts
