Archive for September 7th, 2008
The in-demand model teams with surf/skate brand RVCA in an unlikely partnership to introduce her own line.
HEIDI AND Tyra, make room for Erin — as in Erin Wasson, the next top model to be having a pop-culture moment. Wasson appeared as the down South Bonnie to Justin Timberlake’s Clyde in the first-ever ad campaign for his William Rast label this fall, and she’s been modeling for Victoria’s Secret, H&M and Maybelline cosmetics, designing jewelry and negotiating an upcoming reality series with MTV.
Now the 26-year-old bicoastal beatnik beauty is kicking off Fashion Week here by rolling out her first capsule collection of Erin Wasson X RVCA clothing — the first beat of a three-year collaboration with surf-skate brand RVCA. At first blush, that teaming seems like a fashion mismatch, but it’s the opposite.
And that’s the point
“It’s a real yin-yang thing, which is RVCA’s whole mantra,” Wasson said Thursday, hours before her debut as a designer.
Costa Mesa-based RVCA (pronounced “ROO-kah”) represents the avant-garde of the action sports arena, and is known for its support of athletes and artists from outside the mainstream. But until now its bread and butter has been in the board sport basics — shorts and graphic Ts. And that makes the upscale collaboration with Wasson a major departure.
“It’s like all these divine interventions have followed me around,” she says, sitting in an overstuffed chair in the funky Lower East Side apartment that serves as her New York live-work space. She is barefoot with her legs crossed, wearing a pair of silver lamé cutoffs and a blousy black top with tiny lightning bolts, both from the new line.
Wasson calls Santa Monica home, but grew up in Dallas and spends much of her time working in New York. Her personal style, East Coast-meets-West Coast hippie grunge, has had far-reaching influence of late — the cutoff shorts, the men’s vests, even the slouchy boyfriend jeans that are making their way back into fashion are all Wasson signatures.
Her first “divine intervention” was meeting up-and-coming designer Alexander Wang, who lives just three floors below her in New York. She credits her experience styling his last two runway shows, with their distinctive menswear-hits-the-street look, with giving her the skills she used at RVCA.
Wasson met RVCA founder and creative director Pat Tenore’s 15-year-old son during a Huntington Beach on-location shoot for French Vogue, which led to a meeting with Tenore and an invitation to work on a line.
That was a year ago.
“He wanted to meet and I literally walked in with a box of vintage clothes and all these ideas, and Pat said, ‘Wow, you know exactly what you want to do.’ ” Wasson gets inspired, like so many designers, from vintage shopping — at the flea market off Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, Catwalk on Fairfax Avenue.
The 16-piece capsule collection hitting stores in January (the only confirmed boutique to date is Opening Ceremony in New York and L.A.) is a modern take on stoner chic — dark denim shorts with the word “LOVER” spelled out on the waistband in studs mimicking a belt; a blue-and-white striped romper; distressed, rolled-cuff boyfriend jeans; and a black-and-white color-blocked jacket with a zipper up the back that’s like the center vent on a men’s jacket. Prices range from $50 for a tank top to $115 for a dress and $230 for denim cutoffs.
Her favorite piece is the lightning-bolt print top she’s wearing. It’s called the Zeppelin, “as in the band.”
Her path to California
Wasson started modeling at age 16 after winning a local contest in Dallas. She went to New York the next year, and was being shot for Vogue by Mario Testino “within three weeks.”
In 2003, about five years in, she got burned out and tired of the drama. A road trip brought her to California.
These days, she says, she likes balancing the pace of New York life with the simplicity of, say, riding her bike to the farmers market in Santa Monica. But now that she’s got a TV show in the works with MTV about being a stylist (she’s reluctant to discuss it because the “ink isn’t dry yet”), it sounds as if her life is only going to get more chaotic.
“I just tell myself, ‘Never get too cheesy,’ you know what I mean? I think celebrities become complacent, and say, ‘Oh, OK, you guys want me to be your puppet, I’ll be your puppet.’ ”
She sees her MTV project as more approachable than “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model” because the model-hosts of those shows, Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks, are “inaccessible girls. I’m looking at the show to be an opportunity to be a mentor to these kids. . . . I think that hopefully I can be a voice for youth culture that’s just not on TV right now. Maybe something that’s a little more blunt, a little less edited, a little less cookie cutter. I want to say how it really is.”
She’s especially interested in communicating “the spiritual and emotional terror you have to deal with every day” as a model.
“There are a lot of egos involved and you have to swallow your pride a lot, and know when it is a good time to speak up. . . . It’s lonely and it’s an emotional roller coaster, there is no preparation.”
She should know. “I didn’t know how to deal with it in the beginning. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. There was so much expected of me and I kind of resented it. Then I got a reality check and realized I was the luckiest girl in the world.”
source: latimes.com
September 7th, 2008
Gerren Taylor was still playing with Barbie dolls when she walked the runway for the first time at Los Angeles Fashion Week in 2003. Just 12 at the time, she was the youngest person ever to be represented by the runway division of L.A. Models. Although most agencies require girls to be 14, it’s not unheard of for 12-year-olds to get work. Actress Milla Jovovich made the cover of the Italian fashion magazine Lei at 12, and Brooke Shields, Gisele Bündchen and Kate Moss were stars before they turned 16.
With her long legs and confident walk, Taylor looked as though she would follow in their footsteps. Then, during Richard Tyler’s show, the last one of the week that April, she stepped onto the runway in a wedding gown and stumbled hard. She tripped once, then again on the train that was in front of her because the dress was accidentally put on backward. When her eyes welled up with tears, even the most hardened fashionistas wanted to give her a hug.
That moment made Taylor a novelty — the 12-year-old, plucked from the crowd on an L.A. street corner, who tripped on the high-fashion runway. It made for a good story. Oprah Winfrey came calling, and designers lined up to book her.
That September, she went to New York to see if she could make it on the world stage, and walked in the Tommy Hilfiger, Betsey Johnson and Tracy Reese shows. Hilfiger even paid to have her teeth fixed, telling Taylor she was going to be a top model. Making enough money for college seemed a sure bet after she became the first African-American in a Marc Jacobs ad campaign. “We’re all expecting her to be a big star,” Jacobs said.
Then she disappeared. A year later, Taylor didn’t book a single runway job. The advertising work dried up, too, and so did the magazine editorials. She went to Europe to try her luck at the fashion weeks there, but was told by booking agents in Paris that 38-inch hips on a pole-thin 6-foot frame made her too big to model. (They wanted her to diet down to 35 inches.) In less than two years, her career had come to a halt.
That’s where the story ends for most. Fashion designers and editors move on to the next girl and the next. It’s just the way of an industry built on selling a fantasy that depends on novelty and impossible ideals. Women try to intellectualize the constant stream of airbrushed images, skinny models and too-expensive products, but the allure is too strong. So we go on searching for some notion of beauty that is always just out of reach. And we don’t think much about what happened to last year’s model.
Except with Taylor, documentary filmmaker Darryl Roberts was there to pick up where the industry left off.
His film America the Beautiful (in limited release), follows the arc of her brief career, trying to understand why we are obsessed with physical beauty. We see Taylor and her mom, Michele Gerren, struggling to navigate the sexualized world of fashion, while arguing about whether it’s too soon for the young model to start wearing a bra. We hear from Taylor’s school principal, who says with prescience, “How can you comprehend at 12 or 13 that you’re going to be discarded?”
Then, in 2005, when Taylor returns from Europe humiliated, we watch her hit rock bottom. Agonizing over the flaws she perceives in her pancake flat stomach, her flawless face looks straight into the camera and she says, “I’m ugly.”
She had written herself off at 15.
Today, Taylor is about to start her senior year of high school in Santa Monica, Calif., where she’s a volleyball star. She never did make enough money for college, but she’s applying anyway, to study psychology. Some kids would have gone to therapy to cope, but Taylor went to church and found support from peers who had the same issues with their bodies, even as they had envied hers in teen magazines.
“It was going so well. Then when it stopped I didn’t know what I had done wrong,” she said over a recent lunch, her Yorkie, Arlington, sleeping at her feet. “I was always so nice to people; I never turned my back on people.”
Of course, she knows now that success in fashion has nothing to do with being nice.
Taylor is still stunningly beautiful, with perfect skin and legs so long they stick out from the other side of the table. She is wearing jeans that are a little short, even with the bottom seams ripped out, a tank top, sheer shirt and ballet flats. Her mom is close by, as she always was, making sure Taylor wasn’t wearing anything too revealing on the runway or risking a future paycheck by saying on camera she doesn’t like soy milk.
It’s difficult to know why Taylor’s career ended so soon — whether she got lost in the politics of moving from one agency to another, or if at 6 feet and a size 4 after she grew into her teenage body, she was too big for industry standards.
She says she has no regrets because she has a story to tell. And the film has become its own kind of opportunity. Taylor and her mom have traveled with Roberts to promote it. At the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa, Taylor participated in a seminar for girls about self-esteem. She also modeled in a runway show.
Which brings us back to the fashion fantasy, and whether she could fall into it again.
“I still haven’t given it up for good,” she says. “It’s still fun for me. But if I ever do another runway show, I’m going to be walking for the empowerment of women, not just walking on a stage.”
And somehow, I believe her.
source: chron.com
September 7th, 2008
HEATH Ledger’s co-star, British model Lily Cole has revealed her sorrow at the death of the Aussie actor so soon after befriending him on the set of his last movie.
Cole, one of the world’s leading catwalk queens, had been helped by Ledger in stepping off the runway and in front of the film cameras for her start in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
The pair had spent time together in the days before his death from an accidental drug overdose, going to gigs around London, between scenes for the Terry Gilliam flick.
“When he died it was one of the hardest, most devastating experiences. It was for everyone on set,” Cole said.
“When the three actors came to replace him it must have been hard for them too. What was amazing was the things they did came from being friends with Heath.”
Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law answered a call from Gilliam to continue in Ledger’s role. Cole told UK magazine, Now, the experience of working alongside Ledger, who plays the Joker in Batman sequel The Dark Knight, had inspired her to focus more on her acting career.
“I’d always been very interested in an acting career, and that is taking priority over modelling now,” she said.
Images of Cole and Ledger on the set of Imaginarium were among the last photos of the acclaimed actor released before his death in January this year.
She has made a committment to her next film role, playing Alice in Wonderland, in Marilyn Manson’s Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.
source: news.com.au
September 7th, 2008
THE only way now is UP for Agyness DEYN after she was shot for POP Magazine dropping from a New York building.The Lancashire lass, 25, stripped off before leaping from a fire escape.
POP Magazine’s editor- in-chief Katie Grand said: “There was no retouching — Agyness was really scared of heights. The photographer jumped too —everyone jumped. She was black and blue afterwards and the people in the flats got a real shock.”
Pop Magazine ‘The 80s Excess’ issue is out now.
source: newsoftheworld.co.uk
September 7th, 2008
Gisele Bündchen can’t understand why people are interested in her love life.
The catwalk queen who is dating NBL star Tom Brady insists she is just having “fun” and doesn’t know why people care if she’s getting married or not.
She tells Spanish Vogue, “I’m happy as I am.
“Why is the whole world worked up about my getting married? I’m having a great time and I want to enjoy it.”
Bündchen, 28, isn’t a fan of being called a ’supermodel’, either.
She adds, “‘Super’ is for heroes and those who do extraordinary things.”
And the model — who reportedly earned $33 million in 2007 (according to Forbes magazine) — also opened up about how she maintains her sexy, svelte figure.
She said, “I eat meat, usually a bit with supper.
“I try to limit it to three times a week and preferably it’s chicken. Other days I’ll have fish and vegetables. But I’m not obsessed with diet rules and nothing stops me from enjoying a calorific pastry.
“The question is balance. I like to eat, but I compensate with exercise [including surfing, Pilates, yoga, and dancing].”
source: showbizspy.com
September 7th, 2008
Mississauga supermodel Daria Werbowy was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame last night in Toronto.
Fashion Television’s Jeanne Beker introduced Werbowy, the 25-year-old from Mississauga who’s been on the cover of Vogue 25 times. Now she has her own star. The model, who moved to Mississauga at age three and attended St. Sofia Elementary and Cawthra Park Secondary schools first hit the runway in 2003.
And at the ripe old age of 25, she seems to be preparing to retire from the runway in favour of a career in retail.
Last summer, Werbowy launched a miniature collection of makeup created for Lancôme, available exclusively at Holt Renfrew in Canada. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Centro Espacial Vik Muniz, a charity founded by Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz.
Shutting down a stretch of Queen Street just east of Etalk’s massive film festival party, Canada’s Walk of Fame designated their newest stars to Bryan Adams, Frances Bay, James Cameron, kd Lang, the Kids in the Hall, Steve Nash, Michael J. Fox and Werbowy.
The Walk of Fame includes more than 100 Canadian superstars of sports, arts and entertainment.
The 10th annual Canada’s Walk of Fame awards will be broadcast tonight on CTV at 7 p.m.
source: mississauganews.com
September 7th, 2008
