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The remains of Guinean ex-top-model, Kadiatou Katoucha Niane, whose lifeless body was retrieved 28 February in the waters of the Seine river in Paris, France, were buried Friday afternoon at the cemetery of Kameroun, Guinea.
The Pan African News Agency observed a large crowd of sympathisers, fans, relati ves, close associates and friends, who went to pay their last respect to the departed.
The remains of 47 year-old Katoucha, the muse of the French great makes in desig n, arrived Wednesday evening from Paris at the Conakry (Gbessia) International A i rport, through the support of the Guinean government.
March 16th, 2008
Beyond the chic façade and haute attires, models with hectic jam-packed schedules and back to back shows, are stressed and fatigued, several of them revealed on Saturday at the ongoing Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in New Delhi.
Models have the toughest time every year at this time of the season because of hundred shows lined up for Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week, running virtually all day from
12.15 p. m. to 9 p. m.
The sheer need to look best on the ramp after hours of waiting and dress dos, a model has more than one show. And day after day for seven days, fashion week becomes a stress week.
“During the Fashion Week it is quite stressful with 3-4 shows a day. After every show we have to run for our hair make up and there is less time between each show. There is hardly any time to eat, it is very stressful it’s a stress week during the fashion week,” said Priya, a Mumbai model.
Seasoned models like Nina Manuel cannot escape this grind either but after countless rounds of the ramp over the years, they have devised their own de-stressing formula.
“Right now it’s a de-stressing moment for me when I’m sitting on the chair while they (make up men) are ironing my hair to overcome stress. I’ll recommend just breathe and drink lots of water,” says Nina Manuel.
But then as a model, dealing with the day-to-day stress becomes a part and parcel of your life.
“As a model its your job to put your best foot forward and deal with this daily stress you just have to understand that. These are stresses that will happen but you have to overcome them and carry on and just put a good show,” said Tina Chatwal.
With 82 designers lining up to showcase their collections in 40 shows spread across five days, one must not be blamed for collapsing due to fashion fatigue!
March 15th, 2008
Canada’s first Top Model says she was violently attacked while on vacation in the Caribbean last week.
The sun was shining last Thursday in St. Lucia when Andrea Muizelaar, who won the televised Canada’s Next Top Model competition in 2006, and a friend ventured off their cruise ship and up a hill.
On the way down, they were assaulted by three men with knives, said Muizelaar, 21, from Whitby, Ont. Her friend was punched and had a knife put to his throat.
“All I know is I remember him breathing on my neck,” she said, “but I got loose because I was screaming, screaming out of control.”
She has cuts and bruises on her arm.
Muizelaar said she ran as fast as she could, slammed into a car that was coming up the street and begged the driver for help. Some women came out of their homes and to her defence with baseball bats. But the culprits had fled.
Muizelaar has set aside modelling and returned to school to take business administration.
March 14th, 2008
Kate Moss is convinced that she is being stalked by two obsessed female fans, a report says.
The supermodel is growing increasingly concerned after the same blue Renault Clio was frequently seen outside her Cotswolds home when she visited with daughter Lila Grace and boyfriend Jamie Hince.
According to The Mirror, she told friends: “I’m really scared… I think they are stalking me. They’re always here, doing nothing. It’s freaking me out.”
Although the girls said their car had broken down, Moss asked neighbours to send them away when they were spotted outside the property in Little Farringdon for the sixth time.
A source said: “It’s really spooky and totally freaking Kate out. The girls are just weird. There are often a couple of photographers outside the house, and even they are suspicious of these girls.
“They just sit and stare at the house for hours on end. And if anyone approaches them, they drive around the back of the house and then come back.
“Kate has thought about calling the police, but they can’t be prosecuted for just sitting on the road. It’s started to get really unnerving.”
It was recently reported that Moss has been terrifying guests at her London home by placing two skeletons in the entrance hall.
March 13th, 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
Milan Fashion week is here and started off with a chilly start. Nevertheless the collections that were featured today gave avant-garde a new name.
Missoni unveiled large necklines which is a twist from their usual knitwear to Giorgio Armani who brought the flavor of aristocratic glam with some 80’s flair with his Emporio Armani collection.
While designer Francesco Scognamiglio made clear that bows are still in for Fall and Roberto Cavalli brought the animals back on track with his line Just Cavalli.
Thats the fashion scoop fresh from Milan. Make sure to check back this week everyday as we give you the Fashion scoop on Milan Fashion week.
February 18th, 2008
Kate Moss planned a 34-hour-long 34th birthday bash for herself last Wednesday. She didn’t plan on a tabloid ruining the party.
But that’s just what happened - luckily, it was ruined retroactively (the party went down without a hitch) - and now the supermodel is striking back.
Moss’s legal team is filing a suit, claiming “false and defamatory” allegations, against Britain’s News of the World after the paper published a report claiming Moss got down and dirty in a foursome for her birthday.
News of the World quoted a ’source’ as saying Moss joined two female models and an unknown male on a bed at London’s Dorchester Hotel, where “they teasingly took it in turns to snog each other.”
“Then the kissing became fondling,” the source adds, “and everything except full sex followed. Once word got out, everyone was desperate for a peep of Kate.”
Moss’s current boyfriend, The Kills’ member Jamie Hince, reportedly stayed in the other room while the supermodel allegedly did her thing.
Kate Moss isn’t saying whether or not the menage-a-quatre actually went down, but the legal action certainly insinuates that it didn’t.
We’re not so sure. It may be that News of the World fabricated the scoop and pulled the ‘eye-witness’ out of thin air. Or it may be that it all really did go down as reported.
Moss has done crazier, and far more controversial things before. Who can forget the cocaine scandal of 2005 when the model was photographed putting a number of white lines up her schnoz. Moss lost a number of lucrative modeling contracts soon after that, although her career has since rebounded nicely. Perhaps even more controversial than getting caught with blow in the first place was her long-term relationship and subsequent engagement to perennial crack-head Pete Doherty - it was that relationship which led to the 2005 scandal in the first place.
Luckily, Moss - who at one time was seeing Johnny Depp, and who is the Godmother to Sadie Frost and Jude Law’s daughter - has since moved on.
But perhaps this 34-year-old supermodel is still getting a little freaky…
January 23rd, 2008
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