With her platinum curls, monochrome bathing suit and white Raybans, Eva Herzigova looks like a glamorous throwback to Cannes’ heyday.
Gone are the traffic-stopping curves that caused road accidents when she was the face of Wonderbra in the 1990s.
And in their place, a slender, ice-cool ‘Hitchcock blonde’ look, inspired by the glacial beauty of Grace Kelly, Kim Novak or Tippi Hedren – all favourites of legendary director Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s and 60s.
Eva was seen aboard designer Roberto Cavalli’s yacht during a photoshoot, which clearly took inspiration from the days when Cannes played host to the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.
The 36-year-old model is in Cannes as an ambassador for the Chopard jewellery company and she revealed her tips for day-to-day glamour at the festival.
She told Women’s Wear Daily: ‘Cannes has this amazing glamour and amazing movies. It’s the combination of the two that’s very appealing.
‘The only thing is it’s not relaxing, but you don’t go there to relax’.
‘You don’t go on the beach, you just go to the boats. You can’t sunbathe on the beach in your bikini, you have to hide.’
She said she would pack a ‘Balmain dress’ as her must-have outfit for Cannes.
But as our pictures show, she also managed to squeeze in a stunning white prom dress and a sexy black LBD as she posed aboard the yacht.
In between takes, Eva snuggled up to her multi-millionaire Italian boyfriend Gregorio Marsiaj, 30.
She met him in 2001 after her plane back to New York was grounded in Italy.
The pair have been in a relationship since then and are now proud parents to son, George, 23 months.
With an estimated ?10 million fortune in the bank, Eva has now retired from the catwalk but is still doing magazine editorial shoots for designers Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs.
She recently joined supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell on the cover of W magazine, and along with Naomi and Claudia Schiffer, will become a face of Dolce & Gabbana’s new Fragrance Anthology.
The fragrance collection features five non-gender specific scents rather than the traditional male and female offering.
Each of the five scents, which are named after tarot cards, will be represented by a different model. Eva – The Wheel of Fortune – and the other models will pose naked for the campaign photographs, which will be taken by Mario Testino.
‘We chose Claudia, Naomi and Eva for the iconic value they have in the minds of everybody,’ Dolce told WWD.
‘They are icons,’ Gabbana added, ‘not just for young women but older women too.
Sometimes they are better known than actresses. People need to create icons, to see people they recognise.’
source: dailymail.co.uk
May 19th, 2009
They’re both famous for their family name and attract more attention for their colourful love lives than their so-called ‘careers’.
And last night, Paris Hilton and Peaches Geldof finally crossed paths at the Hollywood Domino party at Cannes.
Given their notoriety and love of partying, its somewhat surprising the two partygirls didn’t meet sooner.
Meeting last night at the star-studded party at the House of Cannes, the two socialites from opposite sides of the Atlantic were spotted huddled in deep conversation in the corner.
No doubt planning club-hopping sessions around London in the near future, Peaches and Paris swapped mobile numbers.
Since arriving on the French Riviera on Saturday, Peaches has swapped her grungy, eclectic wardrobe for smooth and sleek, which she proved last night in a red Dolce & Gabbana satin dress and heels.
Looking equally smart was her new friend Paris, who was typically flamboyant in a strapless silver Zuhair Murad bandeau dress with an oversized bow.
The two women have plenty in common – as well as growing up in a famous family, they also ‘model’ and have dabbled in music.
Paris released an eponymous album and single ‘Stars Go Blind’ in 2006, while Peaches has spun records with DJ duo Trash Pussies and is currently looking for a record label to launch her rock career.
At just 20, Peaches has already married and divorced American husband Max Drummey, while 28-year-old Paris is currently dating reality TV star Doug Reinhardt after two failed engagements to model Jason Shaw and Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis.
While Peaches arrived alone at the Hollywood casino bash, before moving on to the nearby Chopard party, Paris had her latest boyfriend Doug on her arm.
The couple, who have been dating since February, were inseparable throughout the evening and enjoyed a spot of dominoes.
Also at the bash was Oscar winner Penelope Cruz, English model Lily Cole, actor Orlando Bloom and his model girlfriend Miranda Kerr, Spanish actress Elsa Pataky and Sir Elton John’s husband David Furnish.
The event, sponsored by Akvinta vodka, was hosted by Penelope to raise money for her friend Bono’s (Red) Aids charity.
The Spanish actress, who is in Cannes to promote her new film Broken Embraces, nearly missed Monday’s party after being struck down with food poisoning earlier that day.
The 35-year-old missed a press conference for the upcoming musical Nine earlier that day, but did want to let down organisers of the Hollywood Domino bash and made a 30 minute appearance.
A Cannes source told Us Weekly magazine: ‘She left after 30 minutes because she wasn’t feeling great.
‘The priority is to get better for (Tuesday)) night. No one wants to lose their Cannes moment.’
The celebrity guests were whisked to the event in a ?750,000 Bugatti Veyron convertible and a fleet of luxurious Maybach limousines.
Paris originally requested the Bugatti to pick her up from the Hotel du Cap, but was forced to arrive in the Maybach are realising there wasn’t enough room for her entourage.
The guests sipped on Akvinta vodka cocktail served in glasses made of ice and feasted on canapés of sesame crusted salmon, parmesan muffins topped with goats cheese and tasting spoon of beef tartare topped with cr?me fraiche and caviar.
source: dailymail.co.uk
May 19th, 2009
High heels, low hems, no botox. With the fashion world learning that you can look good at 40, a model of 56 could lose heart. Not this one
Lisa Armstrong
David Bailey, Marie Helvin’s first and, coincidentally, last husband (you have to wonder whether there’s some connection with what follows) used to poke her in the ribs muttering “mighty meaty matey” when he saw her tucking into something tasty. This alone could be grounds for becoming a screw-up about your looks, even without being 56 in an industry that is just getting its head around the idea that a woman can be attractive in her 40s.
But Helvin, balancing one knee on a red plastic cube while arranging the rest of her angular body with draughtsmanlike precision for the lens and sending her left cheekbone into orbit, is not only a glowing example of 56-year-old womanhood but probably one of the least neurotic beauties of our time (and one of the least worked on — she doesn’t do Botox and get this, she even uses soap and water).
Then again, she’s not short of public affirmation. The Marks & Spencer campaign this season confirmed her commercial appeal, while Stephen Meisel, arguably the most powerful fashion photographer in the world, wants to shoot with her. But since when did public affirmation ever appease the average goddess?
In a way, it’s the Marks & Spencer campaign that has led us to this studio in West London, with its red plastic and bouncy soundtrack. The photographs, for M&S’s Limited Collection, were aimed at the over-35s (we are still in thrall to numbers in the fashion industry) but since Helvin could wear anything — or, let’s face it, nothing — I was curious to know what her own taste is like and whether there were lessons to be learnt by other women of her age.
Turns out there are. For, like many models who have been forced to scrutinise themselves day in and out for years, she has developed a flinty eye for what works and what doesn’t. The formula includes: slim silhouettes; 4in heels (but not higher); pencil skirts that graze the knee (“it’s not that I don’t like my legs, but I would never wear short any more, except on the beach. I like that 1950s, just-below-the-knee length”); tailoring (Antonio Berardi and the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton are favourites); white shirts (“they make everything look smarter and you can get great ones on the high street); the best trousers she can afford (she used to go to Jane Norman, but their trousers got too short so now she goes to Maria Grachvogel); fitted cocktail dresses and her Rock & Republic drainpipe jeans.
She’d love to cut her hair, but on the two previous occasions when she chopped it off the work dried up and now Karen, her agent, has banned her from going short.
To keep things from looking too strict she knots her shirts and shows well-judged amounts of skin — she likes V-necks and bare legs. She was pioneering the “bare legs in winter” look long before Michael Kors put it on the catwalk and Anna Wintour allegedly decreed it mandatory for her staff. (“Unless you spend a lot of time outside, you only freeze for a few minutes at a time.”).
She would never wear leggings again (“too little girl on the prairie for me”) or high waists, or anything too tight. She’s about to auction off her old Alaia, Ossie Clarke and Anthony Price dresses. “Kate (Moss) will probably snap them up for Topshop. Hah! But you know, I don’t think it’s appropriate to dress too sexily at my age. Anyway, I can’t get into them any more.” Yes, incredibly, there was a time when she was even thinner — by 20lb or 30lb, so God knows what Bailey was on about. She was grateful he kept an eye on her since her body was her professional ticket, and while supermodels in the Seventies didn’t earn the millions they later bagged, she was still getting paid ?5,000 a show, which was worth staying thin for.
She has, she says, her share of insecurities, but they don’t appear to overwhelm her. A few years ago she discovered that she had a thyroid problem. “My dentist found this growth on my neck and finally I knew why I hadn’t been able to lose weight for a while, even though I wasn’t eating”. She was whipped into hospital and operated on.
These days she takes thyroxine. “In a strange way, modelling is like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “You become hyper-aware of what you look like, but it’s as though you’re looking at someone else. If there’s a problem, you find the solution.”
Nor is Helvin the irritating type to claim that you can retain a model-like figure and peachy skin in your sixth decade without any effort. But the perma-diet and the running, the vitamin drips and disciplined approach to eating are borne stoically. They go with the job, and she needs the job. Post 9/11, she lost all her money in the stock market crash — “and I mean everything. I even had to move out of my house and stay with friends.”
Being a supermodel, those friends included Salman Rushdie. Even so, it can’t have been pleasant for someone who had been proudly independent since she was 16. Her pragmatism is a legacy of a Hawaiian upbringing in which, she says, the body is on show all the time — school uniform was a pair of shorts and a bikini. Apart from pronouncing Hawaii with four syllables, she sounds uncannily like Marilyn Monroe, which must have been lethal as she developed into a free-spirited teenager with giraffe legs and, as she puts it, “amazing tits”.
Lest that sound like a gratuitous mention of the female breast, I should perhaps mention that she keeps them amazing by moisturising them every day and staying out of the sun, having prodigiously abused it in the past. “When I used to do all those shoots for Vogue, they’d give me one day to get brown.There were no fake bronzers. I used to lie out for ten hours.” She also used to smoke and walk everywhere barefoot, even London.“I could stub cigarettes out on the soles of my feet, that’s how hard the skin was.” Oh, the cavalier approach to skincare of the young.
Looking at pictures of that extraordinary 20-year-old body now fills her not with nostalgia but with wonder. “I don’t keep pictures of myself around the house. That would be like living in a mausoleum.” Meanwhile, she’s been doing the moisturising thing for 20 years. “Whatever I use on my face I take right down there. They’re my best asset. Not that anyone really sees them any more,” she adds, wistfully. “But I do”.
“Free-spirited” is frequently a euphemism for promiscuous, but in Helvin’s case the free spirit seems to have taken the form of a heroic tolerance in the face of Bailey’s priapic infidelity. “Of course he had other women,” she says cheerfully. “What would I expect?”
As befits the photographer who inspired Antonioni’s Blow-up, Bailey kept an unorthodox household, with a carousel of the era’s famous and notorious trooping through their lives, from Bob Marley and the McCartneys to the Krays and Marianne Faithfull, who was living as a down and out when Helvin first met her. Waking up with flu to find Catherine Deneuve, her husband’s previous wife, sitting on her bed, must have seemed par for the course.
In the event, the parrots were worse than the women. Bailey kept about 70 and they flew around the house in Primrose Hill, “shitting here there and everwhere,” Helvin gesticulates effusively. There were free-range rabbits, too. Once, when Helvin caught Bailey canoodling with another woman, she added some droppings to his nightly bowl of peanuts — not that he appeared to notice.
Eventually, however, Helvin learnt to cook properly, and turned Bailey, who like her was already a vegetarian, sort of, relatively health conscious. He lost 30lbs. “Which of course made him ten times more attractive to all the models. As long as they weren’t serious, I was fine about it.” Even when it was serious — after ten years their marriage broke up and Bailey married the English model Catherine Dyer — Helvin was fine.
Miraculously she, Bailey and Catherine became friends. Catherine took over as the chatelaine of Primrose Hill. “I said, don’t be surprised if a snake crawls out from under a sofa and actually you know, a tortoise did appear from somewhere.”
Helvin moved on to a four year relationship with Mark Shand, the travel writer, conservationist and brother of the Duchess of Cornwall. And for a while all four of them lived in the Primrose Hill house.
That she has remained in these chilly climes for almost four decades is down to that plucky tomboy spirit. Hawaii, where she grew up with two sisters, a brother, a Japanese mother and an American GI father who forbade his children from going to church, sounds wonderful. But of course she left, as free-spirited teenagers tend to. She became a top model in Japan, got bored and begged the designer Kansai Yamamoto to bring her to London, where he was putting on a fashion show. Yamamoto was initially unenthusiastic because Helvin was only half Japanese and he needed the real thing for his extravaganza. But she went off to learn the rudiments of Kabuki movement, promised not to open her mouth in front of any journalists and duly touched down at Heathrow in 1971.
She is, she says, still coming to terms with the weather here. “I’m not mad about coats. I hate feeling bundled up.” And as we know, she doesn’t do tights.
When pundits talk about a model’s versatility, they’re usually referring to an ability to wear MaxMara one minute and Martin Margiela the next. But Helvin has turned her hand to a variety of careers. For four years in the Nineties she had her own clothing label, which did well until the craze for Lycra leggings and stretch-wear died. She will probably go on working for ever, although not as a model.
“Please shoot me if I’m doing this in my 80s. Anyway,” she says contentedly, “one day I won’t be able to. My mother always said that Japanese women look youthful for years and then one morning they wake up and they’ve aged like 100 years. And she’s right. It happened to her when she was 79.” She sounds remarkably unfazed by the prospect. “I’ve had an amazing life, done lots of fantastic things. I never wanted children, so that’s not an issue.” She is very clear on this point, having once had an abortion when she lived in Japan. “I think the fact that I never wanted to talk babies was why Jerry (Hall) and I eventually grew apart,” she says.
She probably has enough on her plate keeping an eye on her father, who is currently planning to go on holiday alone with a giant bottle of Viagra. “Let’s not even think about it,” she shrugs, resignedly. Until she does hit 80, she’ll keep on doing the jobs, as long as good jobs come in, still turning her best side to the camera, and still dreaming of returning to Hawaii, wearing baggy clothes and eating pizza.
source: women.timesonline.co.uk
May 19th, 2009
