May 2009 American Vogue: Karen Elson, Photo: Norman Jean Roy

Norman Jean Roy photographed Karen Elson for American Vogue on February 9, 2009 at Freemans Restaurant with stylist Tabitha Simmons.

May 2009 American Vogue editorial
Model: Karen Elson
Photographer: Norman Jean Roy
Stylist: Tabitha Simmons
Makeup: Mark Carrasquillo
Hair: Jimmy Paul

Bea Arthur (1991), by John Currin

Bea Arthur inspired many people, including artist John Currin. In 1991 John Currin painted "Bea Arthur Nude". I saw this painting at his solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003.

Bea Arthur Nude (1991) - cropped by myself


Did Bea Arthur ever see this painting? If so, what did Bea think of this portrait? Was she flattered?

What does it feel like to have someone you've never met paint you nude, from their imagination? And, what would it feel like to see your imaginary breasts exhibited for the world to see at the Whitney Museum?

There are many things I'd have liked to ask Bea Arthur.

John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body.

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Connecticut, where he studied painting privately with a renowned traditionally trained artist from Odessa, Ukraine, Lev Meshberg. He went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984, and received a MFA from Yale University in 1986.

In New York City in 1989 he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook, and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when political themed art works were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men and asexual divorcee's, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings. When criticized for being sexist, Currin did not deny it, but did remark that he felt that "at that time [he] didn't feel like a man and [he] didn't feel like a woman." In 1992 a subsequent exhibition focused, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s Currin's ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling "for prices in the high six figures".More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes.

He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardenand the Tate Gallery.

Currin is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife and fellow artist, Rachel Feinstein. John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, in the front row at Marc Jacobs Spring 2006 show:


from: New York Magazine

Influences: John Currin

By Karen Rosenberg
Published Nov 19, 2006

Karen Rosenberg:You famously painted a topless portrait of Bea Arthur. Were you a big fan?

John Currin:Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.

From ArtForum:

John Currin - Critical Essay

ArtForum , Sept, 2003 by David Rimanelli
Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that '70s sitcom about an uppermiddle-class do-gooder, women's libber, and suburban wit--not Arthur's later incarnation in The Golden Girls. Naked, Arthur nevertheless remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the everyday antifeminist caricature. And Currin's technique, stiff but more than adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere snide laughter. Painted in the rapidly expanding '90s context of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might collect were she part of the scene?), Bea Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the "incorrect" representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a hang over from the '80s (think "Infotainment" and all those other group shows about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.

Mariacarla Boscono and David O'Donnell on Nick Knight's set

More live updates can be seen at: http://twitter.com/showstudio:

Soft Furnishings: The Erotic House of Peter Saville - Mariacarla Boscono, Photo: Nick Knight

SHOWstudio bradcasted live to expose every intimate detail of Soft Furnishings, a fashion shoot with a difference sprung from the fertile imagination of graphic design legend Peter Saville and captured by Nick Knight for the July 2009 issue of Wallpaper* magazine. Inspired by the distinctly modish fetishisation of contemporary furniture design - and applying this to the sexualisation of an entire environment - Peter Saville has worked with set designer Gideon Ponte to construct an 'Erotic House' of Pop perversity, layering abstract and contrasting colours and textures inspired by Richard Hamilton's collages and Allen Jones' canvases. To people this post-modern dreamhome, Nick Knight and Peter Saville turned to stylist Francesca Burns, Italian model Mariacarla Boscono and Autumn/Winter 2009 fashion from the likes of Chanel, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent and Lanvin, accessorised by the less standard accoutrements of the sexual playroom.

Alongside all this will sit SHOWstudio's constant Twitter feed and frequent live updates delivered direct from each and every imaginary room of Saville's eroticised abode.

The entire process of creating and documenting Saville's 'Erotic House' can be seen real-time on SHOWstudio.com, with our broadcast streaming live from 13:00 GMT (times subject to change). Shoot highlights will be constantly available, just in case you miss anything, including interviews with mastermind Peter Saville, image-maker Nick Knight and key players Fran Burns, Gideon Ponte and Mariacarla. Alongside all this will sit SHOWstudio's constant Twitter feed and frequent live updates delivered direct from each and every imaginary room of Saville's eroticised abode.

SHOOT
Art Direction: Peter Saville
Photography: Nick Knight 

Styling: Francesca Burns at Management + Artists
Set Design: Gideon Ponte
Models: Mariacarla Boscono at Women Management, Tony Bruce at Storm, David O'Donnell

Hair: Christian Wood
Make-up: Hannah Murray at Julian Watson

Nails: Marian Newman at Streeters
Casting: Sidonie Barton
Digital Capture: Joseph Colley
Photographic Assistance: Tristan Thomson, Andy Vowles and Adam Goodison
Styling Assistance: Helen McGuckin and Rosa Maria Bertoli
Set Design Assistance: Poppy Bartlett
Make-up Assistance: Lauren Parsons
Hair Assistance: Jess Furlan
Production: Gainsbury & Whiting
Production Assistance: Stefania Farah
NK Image Production: Charlotte Wheeler
Lighting: Kinetic
Post Production: Epilogue Imaging
Location: Park Royal Studios, London



























SHOWstudio
Creative Direction: Paul Hetherington
Editorial Direction and Interviews: Alexander Fury
Editorial and Production Management: Laura Bradley
Technical Development: Ross Phillips and Dorian Moore 

Front-End Web Design and Development: Francisco Salvado
Camera Operators: Rik Patel, Antonio Silva and Andy Vowles
Vision Mixing: Jez Tozer
Film Editing: Harry Hanrahan
Design Assistance: Kate Swingler

Editorial Assistance: Isabella Burley, Lauren Fried and Caroline Legrand

Bea Arthur as Maude meets Esther Rolle as Florida Evans

Tokion May 2009 Cover - Jamie Bochert, Ph: Samantha Rapp

Samanthan Rapp photographed Jamie Bochert for Tokion Magazine on March 21st, 2009 with stylist Christian Stroble.

Tokion May 2009 Cover
Model: Jamie Bochert
Photographer: Samantha Rapp
Stylist: Christian Stroble
Hair: Andre Gunn
Makeup: Osvaldo Salvatierra

Broadway to Dim Its Lights for Bea Arthur

From The New York Times:

Broadway to Dim Its Lights for Bea Arthur

By Dave Itzkoff

The marquees of Broadway theaters will be dimmed for one minute on Tuesday at 8:00pm in honor of Bea Arthur, who died on Saturday. She was 86.

In 1966, Ms. Arthur won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of “Mame.” Her other Broadway credits include “Plain and Fancy,” “Seventh Heaven” and “Nature’s Way;” she also played Yente the Matchmaker in the original 1964 production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and appeared in Woody Allen’s 1981 play “The Floating Lightbulb.” Her one-woman show “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends” was nominated for Tony in 2002.

Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting

From the New York Times / T The Moment:

Fine Print ‘Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting’
By David Sebbah




The photographer Steven Meisel has photographed every single cover of Italian Vogue for the last 20 years and nine months. From visual parodies of super models heading into rehab, to B-listers posing on the red carpet, to photographing the artist Elizabeth Peyton for the cover way back in 1998, Meisel has used his lens to tap into the zeitgeist. This week, the photographer’s third book, “Three Hundred and Seventeen and Counting,” will be published by Mallard/Janvier. For information about purchasing the book, write to mallard.janvier@gmail.com.

WWD Japan - The Model Issue

Every Season WWD Japan interviews the top runway models of the season - this season Reiko Suga of WWD Japan interviewed Nimue Smit, Yulia Kharlapanova, Natasha Poly, and Jourdan Dunn.

Nimue Smit:


Yulia Kharlapanova:

Natasha Poly:

Jourdan Dunn:

GF by Gianfranco Ferré S/S 09 ad campaign - Viktoriya Sasonkina, Photo: Steven Meisel - behind the scenes video

Very Hollywood Michael Kors fragrance campaign - Carmen Kass, Photo: Mario Testino

Mario Testino photographed Carmen Kass for Michael Kors Very Hollywood fragrance campaign on October 22, 2008 at the Santa Monica Airport, Hanger 8 with stylist Brana Wolf.

Michael Kors Very Hollywood fragrance campaign
Model: Carmen Kass
Photographer: Mario Testino
Stylist: Brana Wolf
Hair: Orlando Pita
Makeup: Tom Pecheux



Michael Kors’ success on the small screen with “Project Runway” has fueled an even more lofty goal: a fragrance franchise inspired by Tinseltown’s movie heritage.

“Hollywood glamour is the ultimate escape,” said the designer during an interview at his Manhattan showroom Tuesday. “It is an emotional pull, no matter what your age — which gave us the idea for this fragrance. Everyone needs a little escape these days.”

The scent, dubbed Very Hollywood Michael Kors, is slated to be launched in September and is the third primary fragrance franchise for Kors.

As for Very Hollywood, “this is the indulgence. This is the gold dress!” But, he hastens to add, it’s not necessarily a nighttime fragrance. “It’s more of a mood,” he said. “This is definitely not the customer’s sporty moment.”

Very Hollywood, concocted by Kors and the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc.’s Evelyn Lauder and Trudi Loren in cooperation with International Flavors & Fragrances, is a sophisticated floral. Top notes are of mandarin and iced bergamot; the heart is of wet jasmine, ylang-ylang, raspberry and gardenia, and the drydown is of Italian orris, creamy amber, soft white moss and vetiver. “This is the most glamorous, indulgent scent we’ve ever done,” said Kors, adding that he thinks the sunny Southern California landscape adds optimism to the mix.

The bottle is glass molded to suggest the flashbulbs of Fifties and Sixties photography. Outer packaging is a rich coral with a shagreen texture and a gold border; the Very Hollywood moniker (in a font inspired by the Beverly Hills Hotel) is also in gold. “I want women to have that boudoir moment,” he said. “The texture of the packaging, the bottle — they’re all very opulent and glam, with an architectural edge.”

Print and TV advertising are planned for Very Hollywood, both featuring models Carmen Kass and Noah Mills and with creative direction by Mario Testino. “Carmen has been my muse for quite some time,” said Kors. “She’s such a chameleon — we can shoot her in a guy’s T-shirt or dripping in Fred Leighton jewels, and she looks fantastic in both.” The print campaign is expected to break in October fashion, beauty, lifestyle and entertainment magazines. One version, a multipage concept for entertainment magazines only, is intended to look like a tabloid section, while fashion, beauty and lifestyle books will get more traditional single- and double-page spreads (some scented) featuring the couple. Sampling vehicles include scented ribbons with gold-toned, charm-sized replicas of the fragrance bottle, in addition to the traditional vials on card and scented strips. Upward of 60 million scented impressions are being targeted.

TV plans are still being determined, although the expectation is that the bulk of the ads will run in November and December for holiday sales.

Californian optimism and a fifties look characterises the floral fragrance featuring notes of mandarin, bergamot, jasmine, ylang-ylang and gardenia, with creamy amber and vetiver.

Michael Kors Very Hollywood will be available in 30, 50 and 100 ml Eau de Parfum and 30 ml Parfum; the bottle is meant to evoke old-fashioned flashbulbs. There will also be a ballpoint pen with scented ink, a cocktail ring with solid perfume, and a matching body lotion.

Valeria Dmitrienko - Photo: Joshua Jordan

Joshua Jordan photographed Valeria Dmitrienko for German Elle on November 18, 2008 at Splashlight Studios with stylist Kathrin Seidel.

German Elle May 2009 Editorial
Model: Valeria Dmitrienko
Photographer: Joshua Jordan
Stylist: Kathrin Seidel
Hair: Fred van de Bunt
Makeup: Paco Blancas

RIP Bea Arthur

I believe that laughter is the best medicine. No matter what happens to me, as long as I have the ability to laugh, I am free. Bea Arthur brought me years of laughter, and freedom, and I will miss her very much.

Golden Girls---Best of Dorothy Seasons 1/2


Golden Girls - Blanche & Rose read Dorothy:


Clips of Bea's greatest moments can be seen here, from Newsday.com

From the New York Times:

Bea Arthur, Star of Two TV Comedies, Dies at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Bea Arthur, who used her husky voice, commanding stature and flair for the comic jab to create two of the most endearing battle-axes in television history, Maude Findlay in the groundbreaking situation comedy “Maude” and Dorothy Zbornak in “The Golden Girls,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was coy about her age, and sources give various dates for her birth, but a family spokesman, Dan Watt, said in an e-mail message she was 86.
The cause was cancer, Mr. Watt said.

Ms. Arthur received 11 Emmy Award nominations, winning twice — in 1977 for “Maude” and in 1988 for “The Golden Girls.”

She was a seasoned and accomplished theater actress and singer before she became a television star and a celebrity in midcareer, and she won a Tony Award in 1966 for playing Angela Lansbury’s best friend, the drunken actress Vera Charles, in “Mame.”

But while she was successful on stage, on television she made history. “Maude,” which was created by Norman Lear as a spinoff from “All in the Family,” was broadcast on CBS during the most turbulent years of the women’s movement, from 1972-78, and in the person of its central character, it offered feminism less as a cause than as an entertainment.



Maude Findlay was a woman in her 40s living in the suburbs with her fourth husband, Walter (played by Bill Macy), her divorced daughter, Carol (Adrienne Barbeau), and a grandson. An unabashed liberal, a bit of a loudmouth and a tough broad with a soft heart, she was, in the parlance of the time, a liberated woman, who sometimes got herself into trouble with boilerplate biases just the way her cultural opposite number, Archie Bunker, did. She was given a formidable physicality by Ms. Arthur, who was 5 feet 9 ½ inches and spoke in a distinctively brassy contralto.

The show was considered a sitcom, but like “All in the Family,” it used comedy to take on serious personal issues and thorny social ones — alcoholism, drugs, infidelity.



“We tackled everything except hemorrhoids,” Ms. Arthur said, sounding much like Maude, in a 2001 interview with the Archive of American Television, a collection of video oral histories compiled by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

In the show’s first season, Maude, at the age of 47, learned she was pregnant; her distress was evident.

“Mother, what’s wrong? You’ve got to share this with me,” Carol says. Maude’s response is typical, with barbs aimed both inward and outward, delivered by Ms. Arthur with a flash of simultaneous anger, despair and humor: “Honey, I’d give anything to share it with you.”
The two-part episode was broadcast in November 1972, two months before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that made abortion legal nationwide, was decided. By the episode’s conclusion, Maude, who lived in Westchester County in New York, where abortion was already permitted, had chosen to end the pregnancy. Two CBS affiliates refused to broadcast the program, and Ms. Arthur received a shower of angry mail.

“The reaction really knocked me for a loop,” she recalled in a 1978 interview in The New York Times. “I really hadn’t thought about the abortion issue one way or the other. The only thing we concerned ourselves with was: Was the show good? We thought we did it brilliantly; we were so very proud of not copping out with it.”

The Golden Girls Season 5-7 Opening Credits:


“The Golden Girls,” an immensely popular show that was broadcast on NBC from 1985-92 and can still be seen daily in reruns, broke ground in another way. Created by Susan Harris (who wrote the “Maude” abortion episode), it focused on four previously married women sharing a house in Miami, and with its emphasis on decidedly older characters, it ran counter to the conventional wisdom that youthful sex appeal was the key to ratings success.



Which is not to say “The Golden Girls” wasn’t sexy. Like “Maude,” it was a comedy that dealt with serious issues, especially those involved with aging, but also matters like gun control, gay rights and domestic violence. And like “Maude,” it could be bawdy. The women were all active daters and, to different degrees, openly randy. As Dorothy, Ms. Arthur was coiffed and clothed in a softer, more emphatically feminine manner than she had been in “Maude,” but she was no less sharp-tongued, and she and the show’s other stars — Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty (who, though younger than Ms. Arthur, played Dorothy’s mother) — were frequently praised for portraying the lives of older women as lively, uncertain, dramatic and passion-filled as those of college sorority sisters.

Familiarly known as Bea, Ms. Arthur was billed in the theater and on television as Beatrice, but the name was one she made up. She was born Bernice Frankel in New York City on May 13, 1922, according to Mr. Watt. But she preferred to be called B — “I changed the Bernice almost as soon as I heard it,” she said — and later expanded it to Beatrice because, she said, she imagined it would look lovely on a theater marquee. The name Arthur is a modified version of the name of her first husband, the screenwriter and producer Robert Alan Aurthur.

When she was a child, her family moved to Cambridge, Md., on the Eastern Shore, where her parents ran a small women’s clothing store, and she dreamed of being a chanteuse and an actress, and entertained her friends with imitations of Mae West. She attended Blackstone College, a two-year school in Virginia, and later studied to be a medical technician, then eventually moved to New York to study acting with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. Among her classmates were Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau and the actor and director Gene Saks, whom she married in 1950. (He directed her in “Mame.”) They divorced in 1978; their two sons, Matthew and Daniel, survive her. She had two granddaughters.

Ms. Arthur worked regularly Off Broadway and in summer stock, appearing as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in 1954. And in 1955, in a well-received musical tidbit, “Shoestring Revue,” she was seen for the first time by the man who would become a lifelong friend and professional benefactor, Norman Lear.

She also sang in nightclubs and worked occasionally on television, appearing on “Kraft Television Theater” and other shows featuring live drama. On Broadway, in 1964, she played Yente, the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the movies, she appeared in the comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970), and in a reprise of her stage performance as Vera Charles, she appeared in “Mame” (1974), again directed by her husband, this time alongside Lucille Ball.

In 1971, she was living in New York but visiting her husband, who was directing a movie, “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” in Los Angeles, when Mr. Lear persuaded her to do a guest spot on “All in the Family.” The role he created for her, Maude Findlay, was a cousin of Edith Bunker, Archie’s wife (Jean Stapleton), who arrives to care for the family when everyone gets sick. Her tart sparring with Archie (Carroll O’Connor, with whom she had worked on stage, in a play called “Ulysses in Nighttown”) was a hit with viewers. Almost immediately CBS ordered up a new series from Mr. Lear, with Ms. Arthur’s Maude at the center of it. It changed her life.

“I think we made television a little more adult,” Ms. Arthur said. “I really do.”

Sex and The City Parody, starring Bea Arthur:


Bea Arthur's Finest Final Performance - Pamela Anderson Roast:

RIP Kenneth Paul Block

It is Friday, 65°F (18°C) and Sunny and I am wrecked.

Again.

Last Summer Yves Saint Laurent passed. And now Kenneth Paul Block has passed as well.

It is getting harder and harder to find the human touch in fashion..........something that was created by a real person, that has their fingerprints on it.

How much more digital photography, copycats, misogyny, porno chic, designer t-shirts, skinny jeans, latex leggings and tranny shoes can I take?

No matter what happens, I promise to focus harder to see the tangible beauty in this world. I remain open to all positive possibilities.

Yves Saint Laurent, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian inspired dress, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Yves Saint Laurent's 1976 Ballet Russes collection, by Kenneth Paul Block:


Longtime WWD and W magazine illustrator Kenneth Paul Block, 84, a champion of the art of fashion illustration, died Thursday at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

The cause of death was complications from a fall he suffered earlier in the week, according to his nephew, Steven.

Men wore fedoras and women still wore gloves when Block joined Fairchild Publications Inc. in the Fifties. And none of that dash was lost on Block, whose fondness for ascots, cigarette holders and impeccable jackets never waned, nor did what one friend described as his Dorian Gray-like youthfulness. But his studied drawings were never strictly surface, always managing to capture the gesture at hand, whether it be the swing of a skirt or the tilt of the head. “I was never only interested in the clothes. I was more interested in the women in the clothes,” he once said.

One of three boys growing up, Block was the kind of kid who appreciated the chicness of his fashion editor aunt Elsie Dick’s zip-front fur jacket. He combed through Harper’s Bazaar magazines in the attic of his family’s home in Larchmont, N.Y.

At Parsons School of Design, he was drawn to what he described as the “world of immense style,” introduced by interior designer Van Day Truex. After graduating, Block’s first job was sketching for McCall’s Patterns, a post friends said he would rather have omitted from his résumé. But Block went on to cement his presence as a leading fashion illustrator during his reign at Fairchild Publications, which lasted until the fashion illustration department was disbanded in 1992. Through it all, he swiftly, yet fastidiously, captured an array of subjects with a cool and detached manner, jetting to Europe for the couture shows or sauntering just up the street to sketch unsuspecting notables at lunch (martini in hand to mask his intentions). All the while, he fulfilled what he once described as a childhood quest “to draw glamorous women in beautiful clothes.”

Block’s portfolio was packed with portraits of blue bloods such as Babe Paley, the Duchess of Windsor and Jackie Kennedy, as well as commercial work for Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor and labels such as Halston and Perry Ellis. But for Block, the end result was never just a matter of lines on a page.

“Gesture to me is everything in fashion. It is the way we stand, sit, walk and lie. It is the bone,” he once said.

Carmen Kass - Spanish Vogue May 2009 Cover & Profile

Happy Administrative Professionals Day!

June 2009 Japanese Vogue Cover - Natasha Poly, Ph: Inez Van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin

Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin photographed Natasha Poly for Japanese Vogue on February 5,2009 at Pier 59 Studios, Studio #1 with stylist George Cortina.

Japanese Vogue June 2009 Cover
Model: Natasha Poly
Photographer: Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin
Stylist: George Cortina
Hair: Eugene Souleiman
Makeup: Jeanine Lobell

Harper's Bazaar May 2009: Naty Chabanenko, Photo: Tom Munro

Tom Munro photographed Naty Chabanenko for Harper's Bazaar on February 2,2009 at Milk Studios with stylist Brana Wolf.

Harper's Bazaar May 2009 Editorial
Model: Naty Chabanenko
Photographer: Tom Munro
Stylist: Brana Wolf
Hair: Jimmy Paul
Makeup: Frank B

Agyness Dean at Coachella

Agyness Deyn dressed in the Stars and Stripes hangs with some friends on Day 1 of the Coachella Music festival in Indio, California:

Lineup: Day 1, Friday, April 17th
A Place To Bury Strangers
Alberta Cross
Bajofondo
Beirut
Buraka Som Sistema
Cage the Elephant
Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band
Craze and Klever
Crystal Castles
Dear and the Headlights
EL gran silencio
Felix da Housecat
Franz Ferdinand
Genghis Tron
Ghostland Observatory
Girl Talk
Gui Boratto
Leonard Cohen
Los Campesinos!
M. Ward
Molotov
Morrissey
N.A.S.A.
Noah and the Whale
Patton & Rahzel
Paul McCartney
Peanut Butter Wolf
People Under the Stairs
Ryan Bingham
Silversun Pickups
Steve Aoki
Switch
The Crystal Method
The Aggrolites
The Airborne Toxic Event
The Black Keys
The Bug featuring Warrior Queen
The Courteeners
The Hold Steady
The Presets
The Ting Tings
We Are Scientists
White Lies

Tsesay Campaign: Anna Kuchkina, Ph: Frances Tulk-Hart

Frances Tulk-Hart photographed and styled Anna Kuchkina for the Tsesay campaign.

May 2009 Vogue Espana Cover - Carmen Kass, Photo: Paola Kudacki

Russian Vogue May 2009 - Carmen Kass, Ph: Matt Irwin

Matt Irwin photographed Carmen Kass backstage at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, wearing her own Maria Ficalora sweater:

Suddenly Last Summer: How an obsession with Elizabeth Taylor helped make me the man I am today

Elizabeth Taylor is a real beauty. Even in black + white you can tell she has violet eyes.

Anyone who cares about beauty owes it to themselves to see Suddenly Last Summer.

Wayne took my advice, saw Suddenly Last Summer and fell under Elizabeth Taylor's spell......



Howard Rosenman credits Elizabeth Taylor for making him the man he is today. He shared his story with the LA Times Magazine:

In 1973, I met a handsome young model named Bruce Weber and a friendship was forged over a mutual obsession with Elizabeth Taylor’s beauty. He went on to become one of the world’s greatest photographers. He has shot Elizabeth many, many times (and has become a great friend). In fact, he and I exchange rare pictures of Elizabeth for Christmas and our birthdays almost every year.

The entire article can be read here.

Russian Vogue April 2009 cover - Carmen Kass + Lenny Kravitz, Photo: Terry Tsiolis

Terry Tsiolis photographed Carmen Kass and Lenny Kravitz for the April 2009 Russian Vogue Cover on December 17, 2008 in Miami, Florida.

April 2009 Russian Vogue Cover
Models: Carmen Kass and Lenny Kravitz
Photographer: Terry Tsiolis

May 2009 American Vogue Cover: Jourdan Dunn, Natasha Poly and Isabeli Fontana - Photo: Steven Meisel

Over the years, Steven Meisel has developed an extraordinary body of work, an almost impenetrable mystique—and an uncanny knack for finding fashion's favorite faces.

By Jonathan Van Meter. Photographed by Steven Meisel.

Once, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away—early-nineties, supermodel-mad Manhattan—I went to a party at music producer Shep Pettibone's midtown apartment. It was a sultry July evening, and he lived in a penthouse with a huge terrace. The party had a decadent feeling: Everyone smoked; there were well-stocked bars inside and out; the crowd was by any definition a beautiful one. I got the sense that things would still be going on long after I had gone to bed.

At one point, I noticed that Steven Meisel and his tight little clique—which on that evening included a tall, cute blond guy and Naomi Campbell—were languidly slouching about, smoking. I had just run out of cigarettes, and so I turned and asked the group if I could bum one. Meisel, who had a bandanna covering his head and dark sunglasses on, did not even glance up.

The encounter—the first of many times in my life when I would not meet Steven Meisel—left an indelible impression, which was one of intimidating inscrutability. The fact that for so many years he has worn what amounts to a hip-gay-male version of a burka has only added to my perception of him as a creature of mystery. He is always covered up! Even when it's blazing hot out, he's got on some sort of headgear and layers of black clothing. It is a look that is designed to obfuscate and to keep people away. And it works.

Over the years, Meisel has become ever more reclusive, rarely going to fashion shows or parties, almost never giving interviews. There have been no retrospectives or gallery openings or lush coffee-table books published, nothing that would require him to face the public. His friends—to a one—say that he is shy and especially reserved around strangers, and they insist that his mysteriousness is not a cultivated affectation; it is just part of his nature.

"I think that he almost has to be that way to protect himself," says Amber Valletta. "He's so extremely sensitive."

Linda Evangelista, who is one of Meisel's closest friends, sees it a bit differently. "He's just private. He's not a media whore. I bet he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do this story. But it's got nothing to do with being mysterious. Fame and glory are not going to bring him satisfaction in life."

Even Madonna agrees that there is, indeed, "a great sense of mystery" about Meisel—so much so that after all these years she feels she still doesn't really know him very well. "I know that I love him," she says. "You get sucked into his aura. He knows things."

She learned this from one of their first collaborations, which was for the cover of Like a Virgin. "Before I worked with Steven," says Madonna, "I just showed up in the clothes I was wearing, stood in front of the lights, and got my picture taken. With Steven, a team of people descended on me, started to undress me. Someone grabbed my hair, another grabbed my face, another started helping me try on various bits of clothes, and they all seemed to be speaking a language I didn't understand—the language of Steven Meisel."

To hear Madonna talk about working with Meisel is like being let in on a long-held secret. She goes on, "Steven had a vision. He had done his research. He had very specific references. I really respected the care that he took with his work, how seriously he approached it, but at the same time he has a great sense of irony. He made me feel like I was part of something important. He treated each photo shoot like it was a small film and insisted that we create a character each time we worked but then would make fun of the archetypes we created. He was the first person to introduce me to the idea of reinvention." Who knew that Madonna, the goddess of reinvention, learned it from Steven Meisel.

Meisel's nearly 30-year career as a fashion photographer has been distinguished by two things: his unusually collaborative relationships with women and an almost perverse dedication to constant change, which, come to think of it, is a good description of fashion itself. In his work for, among others, this magazine, Italian Vogue (for which he has shot every cover since 1988), and innumerable fashion-ad campaigns, he has mastered so many different styles—from stripped-down studio shots of models in action to high-concept social satires, from lush couture shoots to high-glam camp—that it can be difficult to pin down whether there is a distinctive Meisel style at all.

"One of the reasons the world has been slow to recognize his contribution is that he is an absolute chameleon," says Charlotte Cotton, the photography curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cotton, who considers Meisel the commercial photographer of our time, says he belongs in the pantheon of image-makers with Avedon, Penn, and Newton. "It's a remarkably risky position to take. It's like starting from scratch every time you go on a shoot, because it's based on whatever influences you've cherry-picked from the culture at that moment."

In preparation for this month's exhibition, "The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion," Harold Koda, curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, has been poring over Meisel images from the eighties and nineties. In doing so, he has realized that there are a couple of things about a Meisel photograph that come close to a signature. For one, Meisel is a true postmodernist. "He samples only those things from the past that can be electrified by a contemporary aesthetic," says Koda.

The other quality that characterizes Meisel's work is a strange kind of precision. "The thing that looks like Steven is an obsessiveness with an almost chilly perfection," says Koda. "Even if the models are meant to look tousled, they are perfectly tousled," he says. "There's never a moment where there isn't this intrusion of the photographer into a very controlled image."

He brings up Meisel's infamous Versace campaign, shot in over-the-top mansions in Beverly Hills with Amber Valletta and Georgina Grenville, who are made up and posed to look like the most glamorous sixties Stepford wives imaginable. "I think that's Steven at his best, when he has inserted his own imagination of reality into the photograph and it becomes this kind of hyperreality," says Koda. "I really see a directorial role in the way he takes photographs."

If Steven Meisel is like a film director, then his movie stars are, of course, the supermodels. The term was coined by an agent in the 1940s, but if we are to give one person credit for our idea of Supermodels, capital S, that credit would have to go to Meisel. Christy, Linda, and Naomi—no last names necessary. Of course, there were famous models before, but none who permeated every aspect of the culture—and embodied it—in quite the same way.

As Koda says, "He really is a kind of a Svengali in terms of being able to take a range of beautiful women and transform their particular look into the look of the moment. And he has the business savvy to be able to create careers."

I spent a goodly part of my winter tracking down many of the women Meisel "made." Naomi rang from a car as a fellow named Yuri drove her around Moscow (she yelled at him only once during our talk). I interviewed Linda while I was sick with the flu. (She offered to have chicken soup sent over.) Christy almost didn't call me at all, because she was busy studying for her master's degree in public health at Columbia University. I found Carolyn Murphy living nearly off the grid somewhere in Southern California; Liya Kebede in New York; Coco Rocha in Australia; Amber Valletta in Santa Monica. Stella Tennant called from Scotland, and Kristen McMenamy from a closet in her house in London, where she had to hide so her kids couldn't hear her.

The first thing you realize is how similarly articulate, funny, and intense these women are. The second thing you notice is that they all view Meisel as the opposite of inscrutable—as a nurturing father figure. "He makes you feel so safe," says Linda. Carolyn Murphy describes Meisel as a "proud papa. He pays attention, and you know that he's really interested in you." Valletta says, "He always inspired me to care about what I was doing."

McMenamy believes that Meisel empathizes with women, models in particular. "I think pretty much all models have got a hang-up about one thing or another. I have a huge hang-up about my looks. I was always the outcast growing up. When I first worked with him, he made me feel beautiful and comfortable. And there's this certain magic in that he makes you feel part of the team. He makes you feel as important as he is."

"He has this incredible gift for being able to find the diamond in the rough," says Liya Kebede. "He sees you when you first arrive on the set and you look unpolished, and then he finds the girl inside."

All of the women say that they "owe their careers" to Meisel. "It's a very strange thing," says Stella Tennant. "He's a bit like my fairy godfather, I suppose." She laughs. "But it was like that! You shall go to the ball! And you shall be on the cover of American Vogue! Because that's quite a power to have. There are other photographers who have it to some degree, but I don't think any other photographer can project a model so far and so high into the business." Meisel's most recent muse, Coco Rocha, agrees: "If he says it's so, it's so. And that makes your career. He's the Godfather of all models."

Full disclosure: I have never met Steven Meisel. I have been to a few of his photo shoots over the years, where he works literally behind a scrim. A couple of years ago, I think I might have clapped eyes on him as he scurried from the designated hair-and-makeup area (where I could hear gales of laughter coming from Pat McGrath and Garren) and then ducked back behind the curtain. At a Linda Evangelista shoot I went to, he was working inside what seemed like a black box. I could hear his voice, a barely audible murmur, as he gave Linda direction or expressed his pleasure over something she was doing with her upper lip or her hand.

When I first contacted his office, he agreed to a phone interview, which we decided should be an hour long. We picked a Tuesday at noon and then, weirdly enough, stuck with Tuesdays at noon for several weeks, like it was ironclad and I was his shrink whom he couldn't bear to see in person.

Meisel was surprisingly forthcoming on the phone—willing to entertain pretty much any question. But he was also brusque and impatient—sort of perpetually annoyed with the idea of doing an interview at all. Because he has such a thick outer-borough New York accent, I sometimes felt as if I were talking to a cranky but very funny old Jewish grandmother. I noticed that he seemed to want to take control of the interview; for example, he would answer one of my questions and then ask himself a follow-up question. And then answer it! At other times he completely relaxed into the process and just talked.

I began to enjoy this unusual process, partly for its novelty but mostly for its strange intimacy. There's something lovely and old-fashioned about talking on the phone once a week for a month. Who does that anymore?

Turns out Meisel does. "I used to spend hours on the phone with him," says Anna Sui, who has known him since they went to Parsons together in the seventies. "He loves that." Turlington also mentions their marathon sessions. "I would talk to him on the phone as I would to a girlfriend in high school, both watching the same TV show, talking through the whole thing."

It's clear that, as with everything he does, Meisel likes to be in charge. He insisted on taking me through things chronologically. If I jumped ahead in time, he would stop, put a mental marker on the subject, and then address it when we'd arrived at the appropriate place for it in his story.

Steven Meisel was born in Manhattan in 1954, but he was essentially raised on Long Island. His parents, Sarah and Leonard, moved him and his sister, Robin, to Port Washington when he was about three. (When I ask if his parents are still living, he says, "Still alive! Still married!") Leonard is 95 ("still cantankerous!"); he is of Russian-Jewish descent; Sarah, who is Irish-English, is 85 and still comes into the city once a week to have lunch with her son.

Though he didn't appreciate it at the time, he was introduced to a sort of glitzy nighttime world at an early age. His maternal grandfather was Nat Simon, the songwriter whose standard "Poinciana" was a hit for Bing Crosby. Meisel's mother was for a while a big-band singer; she went to Hollywood for a screen test, hoping to sign a contract with one of the film studios, but Leonard didn't like the idea, so she quit and became a housewife. ("My grandfather never forgave her," says Meisel. "He always hated my father.")

Leonard worked for London Records. "Artists would come from Europe, and my father would take them around the city to concerts and radio stations," says Meisel. Tom Jones once stayed at their house for four days. Leonard would sometimes take young Steven to Jilly's, where they would see Frank Sinatra at the bar, or to the Copacabana, where he remembers sitting so close to the stage the night the Supremes performed that he could practically touch them. When the Beatles came to Shea Stadium in 1965, the Meisels went backstage and met them before the show. "Now I see that it was very glamorous," he says.

Meisel's cousin was Diane Rothschild, the legendary advertising executive. When Meisel was about twelve, she took him to an advertising shoot the fashion photographer Melvin Sokolsky was doing for a fabric company. What he remembers most is that he watched the models—not the photographer—because he knew who they were from his constant reading of fashion magazines. "I was obsessed even then," he says.

His mother and sister were stunners in their own right. Sarah, who took Steven along when she had her hair colored at Kenneth, was an icy-blonde beauty—in old photographs, she looks like she could have stepped out of a Meisel shoot. His sister, who shared her brother's dark good looks, let him experiment with hair and makeup and photograph her. He went shopping with them every Saturday to Saks and Bergdorf and then later to boutiques like Paraphernalia and Abracadabra on the Upper East Side. "I had to go to the stores!" says Meisel. "It seemed like the world that I was looking at in the magazines come to life."

Meisel soon figured out that he wanted to attend the High School of Art & Design, on East Fifty-seventh Street. It was quite a scene. In the back of the lunchroom there was a table where, according to Meisel, "the groovy crowd" sat. Meisel eventually worked his way into the group, one that included the model Pat Cleveland, future Warhol superstar Donna Jordan, and none other than Harvey Fierstein. "We called him Little Stevie," says Fierstein. "I was sort of on the very edge of the cool crowd because I had no business being there…trust me!" What about Little Stevie? "Oh, I think he was snapping at their heels," he says in that basso profundo. "I remember him as a dark-haired, very sweet Jewish boy."

Even in a school well stocked with creative oddballs, Meisel managed to stand out, says Cleveland, whom Meisel would photograph years later, most recently for the black issue of Italian Vogue. "He had this long, silky black hair down to the bottom of his derriere. He wore really tight little jeans and beautiful shirts. He wasn't wild. But, you know, when you see someone who is that beautiful, they don't have to be outrageous and loud. He didn't have to push his way into anything."

It was the end of the sixties, and he made a place for himself just as easily in New York's nightlife. A photographer friend of his sister's took him to Max's Kansas City when he was fourteen—he became nearly delirious on the phone one day as he recalled the lighting in great detail, as only a photographer could. That early exposure to the theatrical aesthetic of the demimonde has had a profound influence on his work. When he conjures glamour, as Charlotte Cotton points out, "his frame of reference could be a transsexual's glamour rather than the real Marilyn Monroe's glamour."

One also gets the sense that it was a period in which this famously controlling man cut loose. "Yes. I went to every single club, every single hangout, every single after-hours drug place. There wasn't one thing that I didn't do; there wasn't one place that I didn't go to."

After high school, Meisel went to Parsons to study fashion illustration. Along the way, he worked at Halston for a summer, his very first job, where he met Stephen Sprouse, who became a lifelong friend (until his death in 2004); they bonded over their disdain for the older designer. "Everyone would be called into this room, and he would stand there like…like…Kay Thompson. 'Think Pink!' Oh, he drove me crazy." Worse yet, Halston designed a uniform for his young charge to wear: a black ribbed short-sleeved shirt and black slacks. "He would yell at me and say, 'Don't just sit around, Pocahontas! You have to do something!' "

In 1974, Meisel, drawings in hand, went literally across the street from Parsons to Fairchild Publications, where Women's Wear Daily's offices were, and met with the art director, who hired him. Ben Brantley, André Leon Talley, and Bonnie Fuller all worked there.

It was here that Meisel met the fashion illustrator Kenneth Paul Block, the closest he has ever come to a mentor. "He taught me so much about everything," says Meisel. "He would sit there with this long cigarette holder and a polka-dot bow tie, always a sports jacket, immaculate. He never lost his temper. He had so much style, so much class, so much chic." Block would sometimes draw Meisel, whose androgynous good looks allowed him to stand in for a woman. (In Block's fantastic book, Drawing Fashion, which came out in 2008, there is a spread devoted to Meisel that is titled simply "Steven.")

While at WWD, Meisel started traveling back across the street to Parsons to teach illustration. A young student named Marc Jacobs tried to take his class. "I had seen Steven out and about in New York with his little entourage—Teri Toye and Stephen Sprouse and Anna Sui—but I didn't know him," says Jacobs. "But I was such a fan of his drawings and just thought he had a really great eye. I was very disappointed because the first night when I showed up, it was announced that he wasn't going to be teaching it, because he was off on a photography assignment for W. He had just started taking pictures."

By the early eighties, Meisel intuited that fashion illustration was on its way out. "I needed to do more," he says. He started by snapping pictures of his girlfriends. One day, he met a girl shopping and asked if she would sit for him. She was Valerie Cates, the sister of Phoebe Cates, then a model represented by Elite. "So I would shoot Valerie and Phoebe on the weekends," says Meisel. The B-girls—the bookers—at Elite loved Meisel's photographs, so they asked him to do test shoots with other newly signed girls. Elite supplied him with film and processing, and Meisel began to hone his craft—while also learning how to make fourteen-year-old girls feel comfortable posing as women. From the very beginning, he did the hair, makeup, and styling all by himself. "I didn't know any different," he says.

An editor at Seventeen saw his pictures in a model's portfolio and called to offer him an assignment. His first magazine shoot was at a country house in Connecticut. "I took these sweet little pictures," he says. In quick succession he started shooting for W, Mademoiselle, Self, and then finally Vogue. "I was still at WWD, and teaching," he says. "And there was an editor at Vogue, Mary Russell, and she just loved my work. I went up to the offices and she introduced me to art director Alex Liberman, and he asked if I would go to Europe to do the collections." Meisel took some time off from WWD to go to Paris and Milan with a model he chose, Marisa Indri. "I didn't have any assistants; there was no hair and makeup. We would go to Saint Laurent, knock on the door, and they looked at us like, Who are these people? But we went into the different houses, they gave us the clothes; sometimes Marisa and I would go out on the streets. I would do her hair at their cabines, and she would get dressed." When he got back, Vogue asked him to do the New York collections. "We were in a natural-light studio, and all of a sudden we had hair and makeup. I said, 'Hmm. OK.' That was my first job at Vogue."

Before long, Meisel began working with Polly Mellen, and that is when things really began to click. "It was very, very exciting to work with her," he says. "The way that she treated models was unbelievable. To her, your model was gold. She was everything. Your girls felt that. They felt like stars." Meisel is a very good mimic. Here, suddenly, he does a dead-on imitation of Polly Mellen's singular whispery war cry: "You are work-ing with Tur-ling-ton to-daaaaaay." He goes on, "Sometimes, looking at the girl as I was working, she would actually cry. She was that moved. It was incredible! It was what I thought it would be. It was what I wanted."

With surprising swiftness, he established his very collaborative creative process, one that almost always involved inventing a narrative persona for his subjects. As Turlington says, "We started to work, honestly, three quarters of each month. I felt like a house model. We used to work at this place on lower Broadway. I'd come in every day and go into the makeup room and it was like, What are we going to do? What are we going to create today?"

Meisel remembers in glorious detail his first shoot with Linda Evangelista. "I had seen some European magazine that was absolutely nothing, and there was a little picture of her. I remember thinking, This girl has amazing line." He booked her for a Vogue shoot with several other girls. "I was working with François Nars and Oribe at the time, and they were like, 'Oh, this girl! We're crazy about her!' They were very inspired. François was painting her and painting her, and Oribe kept making the hair bigger and bigger. She came out and she glistened. It was like crystal, like champagne corks popping. That smile! Her gums! Her eyes just twinkled! I decided to shoot the story on just Linda, and we sent all the other girls home. We were just very, very inspired and in love."

The feeling was mutual. "It was the beginning of our story," Evangelista says. "I remember I heard something about how they loved my knees. As a model, you are never referred to as a whole person. You are dissected into little pieces. I thought maybe they were being sarcastic, because I got teased my whole life about my knees. There were also comments about my gums. I was like, 'My gums?' I didn't think that my gums would stand out." She laughs. "So, there you go. My knees and my gums."

The day of the photo shoot for this piece with all of the women Meisel "made" happened to fall on a Tuesday, which meant that we would miss our standing phone appointment for that week in February. And since I failed to persuade him to let me be a fly on the wall at the shoot—but, oh, how I tried!—I had to wait until the following Tuesday at noon to find out how it all went. "Chaotic but fine," he said when we get on the phone. "Fun," he added after a few seconds. "Nice to see everybody." Another long pause. "Lovely!" he finally shouted. "I mean, I love all of them so much, so it was great."

It must have been strange for this Svengali to have all of his women together in the same place. He says the day felt a bit like a reunion, replete with hugs and tears and the showing off of baby pictures. He was also struck by the fact that the younger girls had never met most of the older girls. "It was very sweet and very touching," he says. "Because for some of these women, modeling changed their whole life. It really, really did! For me to sit there and remember the sixteen-year-old girls that I met, some of whom came in with a tattered coat and $3, and then to think that now some of them are married to billionaires.…This job in particular has a tendency to change lives more than most."

It changed his life, too. He now splits his time (with a boyfriend he won't discuss) between a mansion in Beverly Hills—like one of those "sick" (by which he means cool) houses he used to stage those Versace ads several years ago—and "a big old prewar monster" on the Upper East Side. When I ask him what his Peter Marino-designed place in New York looks like, he says, "It's a major apartment. That's what I wanted. That's why I work so much: to give myself some of the things that make me feel comfortable. My drapes are heavy velvet. It's kind of a little…I don't know…Saint Laurent, a little Chanel. A lot of crystal, a lot of mirrors. One of the rooms has a mirrored ceiling. I know it sounds bad, but it's so working." He laughs. "To me, that's what growing up here…that's what my city is…or, was, all about." One almost gets the sense that if he himself could go to Kenneth, as his mother used to, he would.

Of course, the passage of time has meant other changes. The man who is obsessed with retouching to the point of plasticine immortal beauty has complicated feelings about aging. In some ways, his reclusiveness has the whiff of the Hollywood star who cannot bear to show her no-longer-gorgeous face. "Would I rather look 20 again?" he asks. "Uh…yeah? I think anyone who says no would be crazy. It's difficult. It's also difficult physically. I don't have the stamina I once did." He pauses. "But the other stuff? What are you going to do? I love plastic surgery. I haven't had any, because it's very hit or miss. Even with the best doctors…there's no guarantee." Here Meisel asks himself a follow-up question. "OK, am I getting plastic surgery?" And then answers it. "I don't think so."

A few people suggested to me that one reason Meisel did not want to see me in person might be that he has become self-conscious about his weight. At one point, when I ask him if he has any vices left, he answers with one word—"food"—which seems to confirm this theory. "This week I even tried hypnosis," he says, laughing. "Still, I see the cookie!"

More than anything, one senses that he misses the time when he was closer in age to his subjects. "What am I going to talk about with a teenage Russian girl who barely speaks English?" he complains one day. It occurs to me that perhaps Meisel doesn't like to be interviewed because it's hard for him to dredge up the past. "I definitely don't live in the past," he says. "I definitely live in the present. I know people probably think of me as just living in the past. I do like certain periods in fashion. But I don't live in the past at all. I'm very much now and tomorrow. But when I go through old pictures, yes, I cry. It's not a sad cry. It's a melancholy one, but mixed with happiness, too."

Photo: For his self-portrait, the photographer gathered together the superstars, past and present, whose careers he launched. Clockwise from left, Carolyn Murphy, Liya Kebede, Kristen McMenamy, Coco Rocha, Jessica Stam, Amber Valletta, Linda Evangelista, Gisele Bündchen, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Karen Elson, Natalia Vodianova, Guinevere Van Seenus, Stella Tennant, and Agyness Deyn.

Women Loves Robert Nethery

Robert Nethery was born in Amityville, New York on the south shore of Long Island. Amityville is the town immediately to the east of where I grew up. At 2 years old he relocated to Miami, Florida. He grew up around the beach and sun of South Florida, becoming obsessed with skateboarding and then with surfing.

During middle school he started listening to punk music when all the other kids were listening to freestyle and the booty bass of Luther Campbell. He loved the good stuff as well so he became the surfer kid who listened to punk music but could still go to a house party and get down dancing to Stacey Q and 2 Live Crew. Working at the surf shop was his high school job. Going out at night in Miami at an early age exposed him to decadent people living the glamorous life.

Robert studied Graphic Design at the New England School of Art and Design in Boston. After school he returned to Miami. Through connections he made working at the surf shop in high school he started assisting photographers shooting editorial (as well as German catalogs) in Miami.

In Robert's own words:

Then one day I got a phone call from my good friend and ex boss Scott from the surfshop and he was telling me this guy Bruce was in the store and he is a photographer and that he had told him about me doing photo assisting and that if he ever needed an assistant he should call me. I didn't think much of it because we always had photographers shop there. Then about a week later I got a phone call from Bruce Weber I couldn't believe it he asked me if I was interested in working with him and that if so I should come meet his assistants in Miami. I went to meet them and did a job with them that weekend I ended up working with him for 2 years as his full time assistant traveling and having the experience of my life. I got to meet amazing people and see places that most likely I would have never visited. I also learned not only the technical aspect of photography but how to use a medium to tell a story and convey an idea from one of the best photographers in the world. I left Bruce's camp about a year and a half ago and now I'm working on my own photographs for fashion publications, other clients and always trying to capture what I remember growing up and trying to create the fantasy that I always wanted to live in but couldn't outside of my photographs.

That's when I began working with Robert. In October he emailed me an image that inspired him: a beautiful woman wearing a bodysuit with spaghetti straps and black hosiery. The image inspired me as well, and we discussed the idea of myself styling a shoot with him. We also discussed who was the right woman to photograph, and the right time.

Ana Mihajlovic is that woman that inspired us. She has all the essential qualities that good models have: symmetrical features, clear soft skin, lush hair, emeralds for eyes. What makes Ana a great model is her charm, her gentle ways, her strength, her patience, her body language, her sexyness, and her true love for fashion. This is my 2nd sitting working with Ana. For this shoot we collaborated - Ana brought the fringed sheer top/minidress and several other amazing pieces. Ana is a modern woman - she collects vintage fashion that flatters her and appeals to her sense of whimsy. Her discreet elegance and natural beauty make it impossible to take your eyes off of her.

Robert photographed Ana Mihajlovic on March 8th, 2009. It was a small, intimate shoot: just Robert, Ana, myself and Christian MacDonald assisting Robert. No hair & makeup - just a camera, light and Ana.

I look forward to working with Robert again this Saturday.

Ana Mihajlovic, Ph: Robert Nethery:


Ana Mihajlovic, Ph: Robert Nethery:


Ana Mihajlovic, Ph: Robert Nethery:


Ana Mihajlovic, Ph: Robert Nethery:


Ana Mihajlovic, Ph: Robert Nethery:

The flag of equal marriage

Cameron Russell alerted me a to a new symbol for patriotism AND gay rights - The Flag of equal marriage.

I love America, and I love Cameron Russell. Unfortunately, at this moment I can marry her, but can't marry the man of my dreams.

Someday, someway...I'll meet him. He'll be kind of shy, and semi good looking too.
And I'll be certain, he's my guy by the things he'll like to do. Like:

1. walking in the rain
2. wishing on the stars up above
3. and being so in love

The flag of equal marriage was designed by Carl Tashian, you can read about it here on his site.
Not allowing same-sex marriage is a violation of basic civil rights (which include protection from discrimination). Under United States law marriage grants couples many rights. Read up on thse rights and find out what same-sex couples are being excluded from.
Tax Benefits

* Filing joint income tax returns with the IRS and state taxing authorities.
* Creating a "family partnership" under federal tax laws, which allows you to divide business income among family members.

Estate Planning Benefits

* Inheriting a share of your spouse's estate.
* Receiving an exemption from both estate taxes and gift taxes for all property you give or leave to your spouse.
* Creating life estate trusts that are restricted to married couples, including QTIP trusts, QDOT trusts, and marital deduction trusts.
* Obtaining priority if a conservator needs to be appointed for your spouse -- that is, someone to make financial and/or medical decisions on your spouse’s behalf.

Government Benefits

* Receiving Social Security, Medicare, and disability benefits for spouses.
* Receiving veterans' and military benefits for spouses, such as those for education, medical care, or special loans.
* Receiving public assistance benefits.

Employment Benefits

* Obtaining insurance benefits through a spouse's employer.
* Taking family leave to care for your spouse during an illness.
* Receiving wages, workers' compensation, and retirement plan benefits for a deceased spouse.
* Taking bereavement leave if your spouse or one of your spouse’s close relatives dies.

Medical Benefits

* Visiting your spouse in a hospital intensive care unit or during restricted visiting hours in other parts of a medical facility.
* Making medical decisions for your spouse if he or she becomes incapacitated and unable to express wishes for treatment.

Death Benefits

* Consenting to after-death examinations and procedures.
* Making burial or other final arrangements.

Family Benefits

* Filing for stepparent or joint adoption.
* Applying for joint foster care rights.
* Receiving equitable division of property if you divorce.
* Receiving spousal or child support, child custody, and visitation rights if you divorce.

Housing Benefits

* Living in neighborhoods zoned for "families only."
* Automatically renewing leases signed by your spouse.

Consumer Benefits

* Receiving family rates for health, homeowners', auto, and other types of insurance.
* Receiving tuition discounts and permission to use school facilities.
* Other consumer discounts and incentives offered only to married couples or families.

Other Legal Benefits and Protections

* Suing a third person for wrongful death of your spouse and loss of consortium (loss of intimacy).
* Suing a third person for offenses that interfere with the success of your marriage, such as alienation of affection and criminal conversation (these laws are available in only a few states).
* Claiming the marital communications privilege, which means a court can’t force you to disclose the contents of confidential communications between you and your spouse during your marriage.
* Receiving crime victims' recovery benefits if your spouse is the victim of a crime.
* Obtaining immigration and residency benefits for noncitizen spouse.
* Visiting rights in jails and other places where visitors are restricted to immediate family.

The back story:

In 1902, when the women's suffrage movement was just getting warmed up, the American flag had 45 stars :


In protest, the suffragists created their own US flag with only four stars, representing the four states that allowed women to vote:


(source: The Oldest and Largest Herstory Site on the Internet)

This flag flew at the podium of the First International Womens Suffrage Conference in 1902, and it was Carl Tashian's inspiration for a 2004 re-appropriation of the American flag. Unfortunately, three of the four states that were so progressive regarding women's suffrage in 1902 have state-wide same-sex marriage bans today. Carl Tashian feels that today's American flag is co-opted as a logo for pro-war nationalism and conservative "family values". So he is taking it back for gay marriage.

Karen Elson - Venus and Mars: The Showroom

Blackbook reveals Karen Elson's newest venture: Venus and Mars: The Showroom

Supermodel Karen Elson & Amy Patterson, Vintage Chic Freaks
By
Libby Callaway
April 07, 2009



On a cold, rainy afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee, supermodel Karen Elson, sequestered in the upstairs quarters of a pink-walled boutique, happily shows off a few favorite pieces. She pulls a long white tulle overdress from a rack laden with velvet bias-cut slip dresses from the 1930s.

This is the dress I would wear if Jack [White, lead singer of the White Stripes and the Raconteurs, and Elson’s husband of almost four years] and I ever renew our vows,” says Elson, who opened her boutique, Venus and Mars: The Showroom, last October with partner Amy Patterson, a Nashville wardrobe stylist. Holding the garment up to her long, elegant body (clothed today in wide-legged jeans, orange suede Biba platforms and a peach satin camisole worn under a pink-and-green tulle overblouse), she swishes the skirt around her ankles, then finds another frock: a sheer, floor-length black lace number in immaculate condition. “I got this at the Paris flea market,” she says. “I was running late, the proprietor was about to close and I begged him to let me shop. This is what I found!”



V&M is a fashion lover’s paradise. It covers two floors of a small house packed with carefully curated men’s and women’s pieces dating from the late 1800s to the early 1980s—many of them picked up by Elson on international modeling gigs.

Elson didn’t move to Nashville with the intention of opening a vintage boutique. But three-and-a-half years after moving to the middle of Tennessee with White, the redheaded mother of two is spending her scant free time at her new store, playing matchmaker between customers and the vintage finery that she adores.

More than a few shoppers drop by to see what happens when a supermodel decides to open a store in a conservative town where the term “high fashion” translates as a rhinestone-covered Western suit. (Mind you, Elson has nothing against the folks who wear those suits. When White performs with the Raconteurs, as he did last September at the Ryman Auditorium downtown, he often sports ornate custom-made suits by local couturier to Nashville’s country stars—and Nudie protégé—Manuel.)

“I’m not judging people,” Elson says of the fashion climate in her new hometown. “I moved from New York to get away from all that. I really feel like style is whatever you want to be; it doesn’t have to be so black and white.”



Between Elson and Patterson, they’ve got the style gamut covered. Patterson, small, pretty and blonde, is dressed a bit more low-key today, wearing pale jeans, a floral wrap top and dark blue 1940s pumps with pale pink fishnet stockings. Elson’s and Patterson’s styles complement each other, as do their personalities. Elson is chatty and decidedly girlie, while Patterson is more reserved and business-like, having spent eight years running her own local vintage store—the original Venus and Mars (the name comes from an old Wings album) in the city’s funky Berry Hill neighborhood.

Though Patterson has been a thrifter since her childhood growing up in Detroit (she visited Nashville on her way to Florida via a Greyhound bus 15 years and decided to stay), Manchester-born Elson’s vintage education came courtesy of some chic teachers.

“There were always designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna [Sui] telling me where to shop,” she says. “Anna—God bless her—would always be grabbing things for me at flea markets. ‘I found this dress that would look great on you.’ I’ve got to give her credit: she really got me into it.”

The two partners met while Elson was shopping at the old V&M, not long after she moved to town. “I remember I came in and went, Oh, thank God!” Elson recalls. “I was feeling really desperate for vintage clothing and I just didn’t know my way around town.”



Nashville is one of those proverbial “big small towns” (the population of Music City is only about 650,000). Both women have connections inside music circles; they’d bump into each other while seeing a band at downtown’s Mercy Lounge or having dinner at Margo, a bistro in East Nashville. Early last year, Patterson announced that she was about to close her old shop. When Elson heard the news, she was disappointed that her favorite vintage haunt was going away. Then she got an idea.

“She sent me the longest text message I’ve ever gotten,” says Patterson. “‘It’s Karen Elson. I’m at the park with the kids… would you call me? I want to talk to you… ’”



Initially, the pair discussed having an appointment-only salon that would rent outfits for special occasions, catering to the town’s stylists who outfit musicians for videos and photo shoots. Ultimately, they decided to go with a more democratic business model, one where customers could find a great 1960s mini dress for $30 on the downstairs racks, or drop a few hundred dollars on a special-occasion splurge, like a 1940s Christian Dior dress.

The fate of their business plan was sealed when they saw their current space, a 1906 stone–and–clapboard cottage on Belmont Boulevard. It’s directly across the street from Belmont University, and in close proximity to the South district, which is home to several other vintage boutiques including Local Honey and Savant. Elson and Patterson did the decorating themselves—including painting each room, floor to ceiling, a different color. (In keeping with the store’s rock star associations, the main room is painted a Benjamin Moore hue called Purple Rain.) Though it’s far from an intimidating place, there is a definite rock-star vibe to the “new” Venus and Mars.

The downstairs men’s room, painted bright green, is brimming with stellar finds like star-printed ’70s silk shirts and fitted velvet jackets that would easily work into the stage wardrobes of local bands like Kings of Leon or (yes) the Raconteurs. The women’s area, also downstairs, holds both simple cotton day dresses and showgirl-worthy finds like a lavender marabou Lillie Rubin chubby.



Upstairs, in the dusty pink confines of the private salon, are the kinds of show-stopping antique lace and beaded gowns that Nashville’s cabal of country music stylists have long dreamed of having at their disposal for their clients’ red carpet appearances.

At first, the work was slow going. “We definitely had a good couple of months when we were just scratching our heads,” Elson recalls. “We’d come in for four or five hours a day and just move piles all over the floor, from one spot to another.”

“We’d do that at least five times,” Patterson adds, “and then we’d be like, Okay! You wanna go to lunch?”



Elson names the fabulously stuffed-to-the-gills women’s boutique Geminola, in Manhattan’s West Village, as a direct inspiration for the look of V&M. “I think it’s just so gorgeous in there,” she says. “I’d ultimately like to get into doing the kind of customizing and dyeing that they do. But first things first: we’ve just got to get this up and running.”

They claim the store remains a work in progress, but to an outsider it appears to be perfectly put together. There’s a bit of kitsch to the décor, with vintage paint-by-numbers paintings hanging in second-hand frames, and retro lamps with wonderful homemade shades bearing the names of legendary style icons like Coco Chanel and Marlene Dietrich. Victorian love seats and chairs are covered in a velvety, dark rose fabric.

Elson’s penchant for the flapper era is realized with papier-mâché mannequins with wide eyes and pursed red lips wearing dramatic ostrich feather headpieces. The lighting is moody and dark, courtesy of several small chandeliers hanging from the ceiling in each room.



“It’s a bit like an early 19th-century French bordello,” she says. But the women know they have to be mindful of not going overboard on feminine decor. “I think if I just made it exactly how I wanted, people would walk in and be like, ‘Huh?’” she says. “We’re trying to do this in a way that works well for Nashville. There are a lot of different things going on in this town. There are the Belle Meade ladies, who are almost like those Long Island ladies in New York, with their blow-dried hair and whatnot—very high maintenance, but they’ve got style. It’s definitely not mine, but I get it: it’s like the kind of stuff I wear in American Vogue.

“But then there’s this other style, this scene of real punky little girls and women who are into burlesque.” (The burlesque movement in Nashville is strong, and has produced two popular troupes: Music City Burlesque and Panty Raid.)



Elson has a soft spot for this saucy subculture—one of her other jobs is Creative Director of the cabaret troupe known as the Citizens Band, an international group of liberal-minded entertainers with whom she also sings and dances.

“I’d love to do a Citizens Band double bill with some of the burlesque girls here,” she says, but demurs when asked about whether she’d perform with the local troupes. “I have my cabaret moves down”—she says, making jazz hands—“but for burlesque, you need a bit more of a figure, and I just look too lanky, with my nonexistent boobs.”

Her burlesque role model, she says, is Dita Von Teese, in both performance style as well as the work Von Teese puts into her period-perfect public persona. “In my dreams, I wake up and do exactly what she does,” says Elson. “But I’ve got two kids and that brings time limits to putting on makeup.”

KAREN’S FAVORITE BISTRO: Margo, Nashville.

24 Hours From Tulsa

Last night my friend Liz Rywelski was in town to see Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum. Ryan Trecartin's films Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B), featuring Liz, debuted at the show. In January I (minimally) worked as a PA on these films - it was exciting to see Ryan's vision come to fruition. Ryan is a modern Cassandra - his prophecies about the economy are coming true every single day.

Ryan Trecartin's videos are included in “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation”, which is slated to run from May 22 to Aug. 9 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It recounts the French luxury firm’s long association with the art world, from the Art Deco designers who collaborated with the founder’s grandson on trunks to more recent hook-ups on leather goods with contemporary art stars such as Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. His videos are amongst Vuitton's permanant collection.

Ryan Trecartin, photographed by Moris Moreno for The New York Times


Composite image from Ryan Trecartin's Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B):


Liz Rywelski Portraits: Kmart, Walmart, and Olan Mills, Suits 1, 2 and 3 2002-present:


Before the show, Liz and I visited my new neighbor on Lafayette Street: Baby Grand, a cocktail lounge with a karaoke machine.

Liz performed Smells Like Booty - she requested Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit", and sang the lyrics to Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious". Her voice and dance moves turned the mother out.





I sang Gene Pitney's 24 Hours From Tulsa. I didn't turn the mother out, but a great time was had by all. 24 Hours From Tulsa, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is a very hard song to sing. All of Burt Bacharach's songs are epic (in every sense of the word)

Burt always had a cinematic vision:

"When I was doing songs with Dionne, I was thinking in terms of miniature
movies, you know? Three-and-a-half-minute movies, with peak moments and not one
intensity level the whole way through. ... You can tell a story and be able to
be explosive one minute, then get quiet as kind of a satisfying resolution."

- Burt Bacharach

24 Hours From Tulsa is the story of a man (or a woman) who was travelling home (to a lover in Tulsa, Oklahoma) when he met someone else, had a one night stand, fell in love, and can never go home to Tulsa. I do believe in love at first sight.



Gene Pitney version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:


Dearest, darling
I had to write to say that I won't be home, any more
For something happened, to me
While I was driving home
And I'm not the same any more

Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I saw a welcoming light
And stopped to rest for the night
And that is when I, saw her
As I pulled in outside of a small hotel, she was there
And so I walked up, to her
Asked where I could get something to eat
And she, showed me where

Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
She took me to the café
I asked her if she would stay
She said, "okay"

(instrumental)

Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
A juke box started to play
And that turned into today
As we were dancing, closely
All of a sudden I lost control as I, held her charms
And I caressed her, kissed her
Told her I'd die before I would let her out, of my arms

Oh, I was only, twenty-four hours from Tulsa
Ah, only, one day away from your arms
I hate to do this to you
But I love somebody new
What can, I do?
And I can never, never, never, go home again



Dusty Springfield version of 24 Hours From Tulsa:

Aline Weber new polaroids

These polaroids of Aline Weber werer taken at Women on Tuesday April 7, 2009.

W Korea April 2009 Cover - Natasha Poly - Ph: David Byun

W Magazine Korea Cover & Editorial
Model: Natasha Poly
Photographer: David Byun
Stylist: Yahaira Familia

Japanese Vogue May 2009 - Naty Chabanenko + Valeria Dmitrienko, Ph: Daniel Jackson

Daniel Jackson photographed Valeria Dmitrienko & Naty Chabanenko for Japanese Vogue on February 12, 2009 at Pier 59, Studio #2 with stylist Marie Chaix.

Japanese Vogue May 2009 Editorial
Models:Naty Chabanenko & Valeria Dmitrienko
Photographer:Daniel Jackson
Stylist: Marie Chaix
Makeup:Linda Cantello
Hair: Esther Langham

Valeria Dmitrienko:


Valeria Dmitrienko & Naty Chabanenko:


Naty Chabanenko:


Naty Chabanenko

Rainy Days and Mondays

Today in New York, it is currently 46°F (8°C) and rainy.

Karen Karpener has the most beautiful voice ever. I could listen to her every day. She sang with exposed vulnerability, tempered with a genuine sweetness. Sometimes she makes me incredibly happy and optimistic, and sometimes she breaks my heart.

On rainy Mondays like today, I immediately think of her song, Rainy Days and Mondays. This song perfectly captures the mood of the weather.



"Rainy Days and Mondays" is a 1971 song by The Carpenters that went to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and was certified Gold by the RIAA. It was also the duo's fourth #1 song on the Adult Contemporary singles chart.

The song was composed in 1971 by then fairly unheard-of composers Roger Nichols and Paul Williams. It was released as the first track on the album Carpenters.

Paul Williams wrote this with Roger Nichols. It was an early effort for the duo, who went on to write hits for Three Dog Night and separately wrote popular TV themes: Williams for The Love Boat and Nichols for Hart To Hart. Says Williams: "As I examine my psyche, when I was an out-of-work actor, I had a movie called The Chase. I wasn't even writing songs yet. I was an actor before I was a songwriter. I did a movie called The Loved One with Jonathan Winters, then two years later I got another movie just like that, called The Chase. I worked three months on it, I think. My mom was a little widow lady living in Denver. And I brought her out to live with me. I said, 'Mom, you're never going to have to work again. This movie's going to really make me, it's going to be the big break I've been waiting for. My career as an actor is gonna just fly.' The movie came out and I'm not in it. I've got two lines, I think, the way it turned out. Big movie starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall, huge film. So I worked on it, but I've got a little, really small part. So the career didn't take off, eventually the phone stopped ringing, eventually they took the phone out, eventually Mom got a job.So I'd stay up all night, I'd started to plunk out writing songs. My mother would get up in the morning, and she's like, 'Don't worry, my son, God has a plan.' And she'd talk to herself, she'd mumble. And she'd walk away, 'oh jesus, I hope so...' I'd go, 'Mom, what's the matter?' She'd say, 'You wouldn't understand. I'm just feeling old. Just feeling old.' So she'd talk to herself. So I think that's probably where, 'Talking to myself and feeling old' came from, because she would jabber to herself, and whenever you'd ask her she'd say, 'I'm just feeling old today. I'm not sad, I'm just feeling old.'"

Sometimes song lyrics are written on the fly, and that was the case with a line in this song. Says Williams: "On 'Rainy Days And Mondays' Chuck Kay, who was head of publishing at A&M, said, 'That's a perfect song for The 5th Dimension, let's play it for them.' I said, 'Well, there are a couple of lines that aren't done yet.' He said, 'You'll finish it in the car.' So in the car going over there, I came up with a fill line, which was 'What I've got they used to call the blues.' I didn't have that line done yet, so I wrote it as just a quick fill line, because I wanted to mention the blues, but it was such a hackneyed expression, 'I've got the blues.' So I just wrote, 'What I've got they used to call the blues.' And it actually became my favorite line in the song. I think it's the best line in the song. I met Johnny Mercer once at A&M Records, and he sat down and I introduced myself, 'Paul Williams,' and he shook my hand. And he walked back into the studio where he was mixing, then he stuck his head back out into the hall and he went, 'Paul Williams, 'what I've got they used to call the blues,' that Paul Williams?' I said, 'Yes, sir.' It was funny. It was one of the great moments of my life, to meet Johnny Mercer, who I think was the lyricist's lyricist."

The 5th Dimension passed on this song, but The Carpenters picked it up, giving them their second hit written by Williams and Nichols, who also wrote "We've Only Just Begun." William's acting career took off, as he landed roles in Battle For The Planet Of The Apes and Smokey And The Bandit. He also appeared in The Muppet Movie and wrote songs for the film, including the classic "Rainbow Connection."



Talkin' to myself and feelin' old
Sometimes I'd like to quit
Nothing ever seems to fit
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

What I've got they used to call the blues
Nothin' is really wrong
Feelin' like I don't belong
Walkin' around
Some kind of lonely clown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

Funny but it seems I always wind up here with you
Nice to know somebody loves me
Funny but it seems that it's the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me.

What I feel has come and gone before
No need to talk it out
We know what it's all about
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

Another Magazine Spring 2009 - Mariacarla Boscono Ph: Lina Scheynius

Lina Scheynius photographed Mariacarla Boscono for Another Magazine on November 24 + 25 with stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington at Maxim's Hotel in Paris.

Another Magazine Spring 2009 editorial
Model: Mariacarla Boscono
Photographer: Lina Scheynius at Fred & Associates
Stylist: Camille Bidault-Waddington
Makeup: Karim Rahman
Hair: Laurent Phillipon

Francisco Costa, Calvin Klein Collection designer & the WOMEN at Parsons Fashion Benefit 2009 Pre-Party

Francisco Costa, Women's Creative Director for Calvin Klein Collection, hosted a reception previewing the top fashion collections of Parsons graduates at the Calvin Klein Collection boutique last night.

Kasia Struss, Francisco Costa, Nimue Smit, Alana Zimmer and Cameron Russell:

Louise Looks Back

Janelle at models.com caught up with Louise Pedersen:



One of the standout moments of the Fall/ Winter shows was the epic resurgence of supermodels at Givenchy. Nearly every fondly remembered face from the recent past was front and center on Riccardo Tisci’s catwalk and one of the most memorable ladies to strut down the runway was of course Danish stunner Louise Pedersen.

With her hypnotic feline looks and dramatic presence Louise has long been a favorite of designers and editors alike. Her resume reads like a who’s who of high fashion powerhouses but what was going on behind the scenes of those iconic editorials and campaigns? MDC catches up with the legendary beauty to take a trip down memory lane as she shares muses on Lagerfeld, traveling around the world, being a mother and of course returning to the runway.


Gucci - ph. Mario Testino

The Gucci campaign was my first big job. One of my favorite photographers, Mario Testino shot it. It was Mario that got me started, I remember the first time I went to see him he asked me to walk. Obviously I wasn’t very good at it and he smirked. Tom Ford had the great idea to shave a G in my pubic hair, I knew both Tom Pecheux and Orlando Pita from the shows, and they definitely knew me a little better at the end of the day…The ad was banned in a few countries, and some people argued that it was degrading to women. I think, if anything, it was quite the opposite.


Numero ph. Peter Lindbergh

Peter Lindbergh is another favorite of mine, we’ve worked together on many occasions. The first shoot we ever did was at this broken down warehouse outside Paris. I was feeling really jet lagged and a bit fragile but I was trying my best to hide it. Peter almost made me cry when he hugged me, and told me I’d done well once the shoot was over. Peter is not only a great photographer, but he’s an amazing person.


Chanel Eyewear ph. Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld once told me that he’d seen me walking down the street in Paris, and that is how I got to open his show. He also told me, I looked like a perverted school teacher, wearing my glasses! A week later he booked me for the Chanel eyewear campaign. We have worked together many times, he is so intelligent, and enormously talented. I actually found him a tad shy, he took my hand as he was to do his walk on the runway after one show, and said a little nervously “you know the way.”


i-D August 2003 ph. Ellen von Unwerth

Another Lady I’ve enjoyed working with is Ellen von Unwerth. She is definitely a character of her own! She is so into the moment of the picture, that you get lost in it yourself. This shoot became a great story, with some very real pictures of Will Chalker and myself, and my very own i-D. cover.


Vogue Germany June 2005 ph. Enrique Badulescu

Shooting on the beach and at a hidden lake in Mexico, with Enrique Badulescu for German Vogue, is one of my best memories. Or traveling for 24 hours with my husband, to get from Denmark to Motu Tane, Francois Nars private island in the French Polynesia, to shoot the Nars campaign. We got to stay for a whole week though we only worked 2 short days, it was just such a beautiful place, filled with great people.


Hugo Boss ph. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

Of course it’s not always warm sunny beaches. The first Hugo Boss campaign I shot with Mert & Marcus was done in the ocean, outside Cornwall in October. I flew from NY to London and drove 6 hours, to wear little shorts on the freezing beach. After the shoot there was no hot food left and they still had me half-naked on a rock but hey, anything for a beautiful photo by Mert & Marcus!


La Perla ph. Camilla Akrans

I’ve worked with a lot of different people, but not many female photographers. Camilla Akrans is an amazing woman, she is made of steel, and one of the best photographers I’ve ever worked alongside. Her eye for strong feminine beauty is incredible. We shot a La Perla campaign, and she managed to keep everybody, including me, on their toes till 2 am. At one point during the shoot there was a creative disagreement but she never backed down. I thought that was admirable, artistic integrity is something you should fight hard for.


DKNY Be Delicious Fragrance ph. Mikael Jansson

The DKNY ‘Be Delicious’ ads are my claim to fame so to speak, I think the whole world has seen them by now (we going on the 5th year). Mikael Jansson shot the green and the red, Regan Cameron did the pink. We shot the stills for the ‘green one’ in Universal Studios LA, but filmed the commercial in the streets of NY. I thought that was kinda funny.


With Husband, Arthur & and Daughter Maya

2 and a half years ago we (my husband and I) decided it was time for a break, and got pregnant. Maya was born in may 2007, obviously she’s the coolest thing we’ve ever made! It turned out not be so much a break, as a full time job! But so much fun. What a wonderful thing it is, to have your own family. Can’t believe she’s almost 2, time really flies!


Givenchy F/W 09

When I got a call to do the Givenchy Fall/Winter 09 show exclusive I got very excited. It was great fun being back on the runway with old friends. Riccardo Tisci is amazing, he has done such a great job giving the brand a new edge. The clothes where so beautiful - as were the shoes .. and high! The runway was long and at the end of it my legs where shaking, I was just a little out of practice but I really enjoyed every bit of it.

Italian vogue July/August 1988 - Robin MacKintosh, Photographer: Steven Meisel

Italian Vogue July/Agust 1988
Model: Robin MacKintosh/Women
Photographed by Steven Meisel
Art Director: Fabien Baron
Makeup: Laura Mercier
Hair: Oribe

Thank you for being a friend

Casting Director James Scully recently moved, and generously donated his magazine collection to me.

I am completely overwhelmed.

The collection includes Italian Vogue (the Fabien Baron years), British Vogue (the Liz Tilberis years), French Glamour, Lei Magazine, Per Lui, Jill Magazine, and more.

The jewel of the collection is the July/August 1988 issue of Italian Vogue. Robin MacKintosh is on the cover. Robin MacKintosh was the first Women model to be on the cover of Italian Vogue. This was also the first Italian Vogue cover photographed by Steven Meisel & art directed by Fabien Baron.

July/August 1988 Italian Vogue cover
Model: Robin MacKintosh/Women
Photographed by Steven Meisel
Art Director: Fabien Baron
Makeup: Laura Mercier
Hair: Oribe

Robin MacKintosh, Photo: Steven Meisel:


Women has recently undergone extensive renovations to improve the presentation our collection of fashion magazines and related art and photography books. James Scully's benevolent expression of kindness will be enjoyed by everyone.

Isabeli Fontana - Numero Tokyo May 2009 Cover - Ph: Alex Cayley

Numero Tokyo May 2009 Cover
Model: Isabeli Fontana
Photographer: Alex Cayley
Stylist: Sarah Gore Reeves
Makeup: Tyron Machhausen
Hair: Dennis Gots

Spur Magazine May 2009 Cover: Naty Chabanenko, Ph:Dan Martensen

Dan Martensen photographed Naty Chabanenko for the cover of Spur Magazine on February 21, 2009 at Gary's Loft Studio in NYC.

Spur May 2009 Cover
Model: Naty Chabanenko
Photographer: Dan Martensen
Stylist: Clyde Ray Brual
Makeup: Ayako
Hair: Kevin Woon