Thursday, October 29, 2009
Louis Vuitton Cruise 2010 campaign preview: Isabeli Fontana, ph: Patrick Demarchelier
Patrick Demarchelier photographed Isabeli Fontana for the Louis Vuitton Resort 2010 campaign on August 26-28, 2009 on long Island with stylist Carlyne Cerf De Dudzeele.
Louis Vuitton Resort 2010 campaign
Model: Isabeli Fontana
Photographer: Patrick Demarchelier
Stylist: Carlyne Cerf De Dudzeele
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Thank you for being a friend, again
Bea Arthur is my hero - the gays loved her, still love her, and as long as The Golden Girls, Maude and All in the Family are on DVD, will always love her.
Bea loved the gays back - she generously left homeless gay teenagers $300,000!
From The Ali Forney Center web site:
The Ali Forney Center (AFC) is planning to name one of it's transitional residences in honor of Bea Arthur, as an expression of gratitude for Bea's extraordinary kindness and generosity to the homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth served by AFC.
The Ali Forney Center currently operates both emergency and transitional housing programs. The emergency housing program provides short-term shelter aimed at providing stability and guidance to youth suffering homelessness. The transitional housing program is aimed at providing longer-term housing for up to two years while residents pursue the educational and vocational goals that will allow them to live independent lives and overcome homelessness.
The Bea Arthur Residence will house 12 youths. $430K per year has been obtained from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to support it's operational funding. AFC is currently working with the Hudson Planning Group to secure government and private funds to support the acquisition of a building to provide this home. AFC is currently renting all of its transitional housing sites, and has secured a generous three year grant from the Oak Foundation to support its work with the Hudson Planning Group to purchase housing sites. AFC is currently working with Rapid Realty to identify sites in Brooklyn to purchase.
The Ali Forney Center aims to provide LGBT youth with the support and guidance that they should receive from their families. All youth residing in AFC's transitional housing program are required to find employment and finish high school. Youth are supported in pursuing higher education, and are required to save a portion of their incomes. Mental health counseling is offered to our residents to help them overcome the pain and confusion of having been rejected by their families because of their LGBT identities. An intensive Life Coaching program has been developed with dedicated volunteers who help mentor our youth in pursuing their career goals and aid them in developing the skills they need to live independently.
If you would like to support the Bea Arthur Residence CLICK HERE
From The Daily News:
'Golden Girls' star Bea Arthur leaves $300,000 in will to NY group that helps gay homeless youths
Bea Arthur left $300,000 in her will to a New York organization that aids homeless gay youth.
The Ali Fornay Center provides services to more than 1,000 each year, and is planning to buy a building to house 12 young people - and name it in honor of the "Golden Girls" actress.
The head of the center said he is thrilled with the stage and television legend's generosity.
"We work with hundreds of young people who are rejected by their families because of who they are," said Executive Director Carl Siciliano.
"We are overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person, and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them, and to help them rebuild their lives," he said.
The Ali Forney Center offers emergency shelter and transitional housing in seven residential sites in New York. It also operates two drop-in centers offering food, clothing, medical and mental health treatment, HIV testing, treatment and prevention services, and vocational and educational assistance.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
December 2009 Spur Magazine cover: Agyness Deyn, ph: Patric Shaw
Patric Shaw photographed Agyness Deyn for the cover of Spur Magazine on September 12, 2009 at Hudson Studios in NYC with her puppy Rudy
Spur December 2009 Cover
Model: Agyness Deyn & Rudy
Photographer: Patric Shaw
Stylist: Sei Ikeda
Makeup: Rie Omoto
Hair: Gavin
I never wanted to go
I was born from love
And my poor mother worked the mines
I was raised on the Good Book Jesus
Till I read between the lines
Now I don't believe I want to see the morning
Going down the stoney end
I never wanted to go
Down the stoney end
Mama let me start all over
Cradle me,
Mama, cradle me again
I can still remember him
With love light in his eyes
But the light flickered out and parted
As the sun began to rise
Now I don't believe I want to see the morning
Going down the stoney end
I never wanted to go
Down the stoney end
Mama let me start all over
Cradle me,
Mama, cradle me again
(Cradle me, mama, cradle me again
Mama, cradle me again...)
Never mind the forecast
'Cause the sky has lost control
'Cause the fury and the broken thunders
Come to match my raging soul
Now I don't believe I want to see the morning
Going down the stoney end I never wanted to go
Down the stoney end
Mama let me start all over
Cradle me,
Mama, cradle me again
Going down the stoney end...
Stoney End - Laura Nyro
Stoney End - Peggy Lipton
Stoney End - Barbra Streisand
Stoney End - Barbra Streisand - remastered
Stoney End - Linda Ronstadt
Supermodels Take It Off For Climate Change
On 24 October, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.
Cameron Russell so inspired by the pictures she saw coming in from around the world on 350.org's Global Day of Climate Action, that she wanted to help. While the one-day event was called 'the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history,' we know that not everyone reads the newspapers. So we figured we'd try to get the point across the best way we know how--with clothes, or really, with the lack of clothes. We hope you'll get the point--feel free to watch it twice in case you got distracted the first time.
350.org is an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis--the solutions that science and justice demand.
Our mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet.
Our focus is on the number 350--as in parts per million, the level scientists have identified as the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere. But 350 is more than a number--it's a symbol of where we need to head as a planet.
To tackle climate change we need to move quickly, and we need to act in unison—and 2009 will be an absolutely crucial year. This December, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark to craft a new global treaty on cutting emissions. The problem is, the treaty currently on the table doesn't meet the severity of the climate crisis—it doesn't pass the 350 test.
In order to unite the public, media, and our political leaders behind the 350 goal, we're harnessing the power of the internet to coordinate a planetary day of action on October 24, 2009. We hope to have actions at hundreds of iconic places around the world - from the Taj Mahal to the Great Barrier Reef to your community - and clear message to world leaders: the solutions to climate change must be equitable, they must be grounded in science, and they must meet the scale of the crisis.
If an international grassroots movement holds our leaders accountable to the latest climate science, we can start the global transformation we so desperately need.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Katherine Fleming
I commute to WOMEN every day from Massapequa Park. In the morning I carry my wallet, a beverage (Tab, Fresca or Diet Coke), something to read (The New Yorker or a library book) and a snack for later in the day (an apple, carrots, banana or Fruit Roll-Up).
Lately I have been carrying my belongings in a vermillion leather hobo bag.
Last night I dreamt that I purchased a maroon bowling bag from Prada's spring 2000 collection at my neighbors estate sale. For nine long years that bag has been on my mind, the bag Robert Wyatt photographed on Sierra Huisman.
But that was just a dream.
So, tell me how long before the next one ?
Bag deigner Katherine Fleming will be taking appointments for her sample sale next week.
Katherine Fleming
5 Crosby Street, #6B
New York, NY 10013
Phone # (212)226-5436
Email: Sales@KatherineFleming.com
Website: KatherineFleming.com
November 2009 German Vogue cover, Katrin Thormann, Ph: Sølve Sundsbø
Sølve Sundsbø photographed Katrin Thormann for the November 2009 German Vogue cover on April 20, 2009 in Paris.
November 2009 German Vogue cover
Model: Katrin Thormann
Photographer: Sølve Sundsbø
Stylist: Marie Chaix
Location: Paris
Justin Teodoro
Justin Teodoro, an artist and fashion designer living and working in New York City, generously donated his talent by drawing the Planet Awesome Kid logo:
Please check out his art and inspirations on his blog, justin-teodoro.blogspot.com/.
French Vogue November 2009 cover & editorial preview: Isabeli Fontana, Ph: David Sims, stylist: Carine Roitfeld
French Vogue November 2009 cover
Model: Isabeli Fontana
Photographer: David Sims
Stylist: Carine Roitfeld
Hair: Guido Palau
Makeup: Lucia Pieroni
Scan: Diorette, from The Fashion Spot
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
French Vogue November 2009 cover preview - Isabeli Fontana, Ph: David Sims, Stylist: Carine Roitfeld
David Sims photographed Isabeli Fontana for the French Vogue November 2009 cover on July 19 +20, 2009 at Milk Studios, Studio #1 with stylist Carine Roitfeld.
French Vogue November 2009 cover
Model: Isabeli Fontana
Photographer: David Sims
Stylist: Carine Roitfeld
Hair: Guido Palau
Makeup: Lucia Pieroni
Scan: Francy, from The Fashion Spot
"Si le luxe et l'originalité sont deux traits de caractère de Vogue, ce mois-ci,nous allons plus loin et vivons la mode à l'extrême. Extrême dans les idées,
l'inspiration et la démesure", écrit Carine Roitfeld rédactrice en chef de Vogue Paris, dans l'édito du mois de novembre. Un numéro qui prône l'originalité assumée, les personnalités exacerbées et les prises de positions audacieuses. La haute couture rencontre le street style et le graffiti, les imprimés animaliers 'accumulent et se transforment en pelage camouflage, et le body painting
s'inspire des tags de Keith Haring dans la série Keith Me que l'on retrouve en couverture du magazine. Montres diamants et objets ultra-luxe nous donnent des envies de démesure, à l'image de la demeure des Rosen à New York, où l'on découvre à travers une visite guidée exclusive l'impressionnante collection d'œuvres pop art. Vogue numéro de novembre, en kiosques le 28 octobre.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
October 2009 Italian Vogue - Rianne ten Haken and Kasia Struss, Photo: Steven Meisel
Steven Meisel photographed Rianne ten Haken and Kasia Struss for Italian Vogue on June 10-11, 2009 with stylist Lori Goldstein.
Italian Vogue October 2009 cover
Model: Rianne ten Haken
Photographer: Steven Meisel
Stylist: Lori Goldstein
Hair: Julien D'Ys
Makeup: Pat McGrath
Yulia Kharlapanova and Jimmy Paul
Yulia Kharlapnova and Jimmy Paul backstage at the Banana Republic show, October 15, 2009:
On Friday, October 16, Joshua Jordan generously gave me his collection of Index Magazines & Another Magazines.
Joshua Jordan recently launched a comprehensive new website, StudioJordan.com
Index Magazine was a wonderful print magazine. It featured interviews with people who had experienced life, made something great happen and had something relevant to say.
In 1997, Bruce Hainley interviewed Jimmy Paul for Index Magazine:
Jimmy Paul, 1997
WITH BRUCE HAINLEY
I first met Jimmy Paul when he still worked at the Oribe salon in the back of the Parachute boutique on Columbus Avenue. Few hairdressers are in greater demand, especially for editorial work. So while he can only be found one day a week in the Garren salon at Henri Bendel, his work can be seen everywhere - Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, Arena, L'Uomo Vogue, Interview, i.e. in any fashion magazine that matters. He has had his fingers in the hair of every model worthy of the name, both men and women. The true sign of his talent might be that he is the hairdresser of choice for many models when they get their hair done for themselves. The last time I was at Garren the exquisite up-and-coming beauty, Jaimie Rishar was waiting to have her hair touched up for her birthday; a Prada frock had already been specially delivered for the occasion. Jimmy himself appears on the cover of Nan Goldin's book on drag, The Other Side, and in work by Jack Pierson. When Goldin did her beautiful shoot for Visionaire of Helmut Lang apparel, when Jack Pierson followed Naomi Campbell around for Harper's Bazaar, it was Jimmy who did hair. In his work he combines strict tonsorial skill with a keen artistic eye. He isn't afraid to take inspiration from wherever he needs it, but his greatest gifts may be humor and genuinely disarming sweetness. The true history of hairdressing has yet to be written, when it is the most winsome chapter will be devoted to Jimmy Paul.
BRUCE: What do you look for in a good haircut?
JIMMY: I like when it looks really easy. The person is comfortable. You almost think, "That person looks great!" and the fact that the hair looks good is an afterthought. I like when there's a funny charm to it: a trend or a response to a trend that comes out of specific neighborhood - a tail or some weird shelf. Haircuts that look like they've grown out are the best, and when I do a haircut I like to make it so it looks as if the person doesn't have to think about it. It suits the face and it's not really a haircut at all. I don't do that many haircuts - I mean I don't cut something in them that announces: HAIRCUT. I just try to follow the person's head.
BRUCE: I love the word hairdresser. I wonder if you could say a little about that word, how it resonates for you.
JIMMY: Beautician is a word that sounds very small town, very utilitarian. Fine. Hair Stylist always sounds like a small town person trying to be fancy. Hair Stylist, a hairdresser at the mall. Nothing wrong with that either. Hairdresser sounds humble - I don't even know why - but at the same time it shows I have respect for myself. Hairdresser has an old world connotation to it. I don't spend a lot of time dressing hair, which means flossing it, since the average person doesn't want their hair dressed. Hairdresser works for me. If anybody ever refers to me as a hair stylist, it's like, my name's Jimmy and if anybody calls me James it irks me.
BRUCE: How and when did you decide that this is what you wanted to do?
JIMMY: I have to go really early. My mother's a hairdresser. She was my first influence. My mother was also, in my opinion, a beauty and wore cosmetics. She's always created an illusion, always had amazing hairdos, always worn makeup, and always dressed up. I love my mother and I grew up thinking what she would do was magic. She had power - her beauty, creating her looks. The fantasy she would create was always an escape for me. I remember wanting to be a hairdresser - and I don't blame my mother for what I'm going to say next, because it's really just a product of society - but I wasn't encouraged to be a hairdresser. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and if you were a hairdresser in Pittsburgh, you didn't make a lot of money, you were often ostracized for being homosexual, and because most male hairdressers were homosexual and my mother always had high hopes for me, she thought I should be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that - which I never considered being.
BRUCE: So did things start to click in your teens?
JIMMY: I started to go into a pure fantasy world as a teenager. I knew I wanted to be in the fashion business or in show business, but I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do. I spent many years wanting to be a female model - complete fantasia but that's where my head was. I was going to move to New York to do whatever I had to do to be a female model but be a man. When I was growing up Way Bandy was famous for being a makeup artist. It was very exciting for me to see him on TV and in magazines. I could tell that he was an effeminate homosexual and I also saw someone famous for creating illusion, for putting his ideas of what's beautiful on women. It was exciting. I started to look at fashion magazines to the point of obsession. And there were hairdressers! I remember a picture in Vogue of John Sahag and a model together, by Dennis Piel I think. He had done her hair: and they both had similar haircuts! There was a hairdresser in Pittsburgh named Leslie Bryner. He died of AIDS and was a very flamboyant homosexual. This was when GQ was very exciting, very on edge - late '70s, Bruce Weber, Barry McKinley. I remember being really really blown away by an ad in GQ for Charivari with a guy who had an amazing new wave haircut. I went to the airport with my mother and saw this hairdresser, Leslie Bryner, in a full-length fox coat and mustard yellow leather pants and a Charivari bag. I thought: hairdresser equals fantasy.
BRUCE: Were you doing drag at this point or was that only when you came to New York?
JIMMY: No, no, no. This was pre-drag. I didn't start to do drag until I was about 20. Louis Angelo, who is my oldest friend and who works at Garren too, and I started to hang around together. Our fantasies were to be male models. We were really influenced by the Avedon photographs for Gianni Versace where there were groups of male models standing like this. [Jimmy does a severe pose.] The male models had scarves wrapped around their necks into a kind of cowl - very sexy. Louis and I would go around with our scarves like that and we would do this walk we made up: the Shoom. It had a lot of shoulder.
BRUCE: Andy Warhol was from Pittsburgh. Interview was a hot magazine then, I remember devouring every issue. Was Warhol an influence, someone people talked about in your scene?
JIMMY: Around age 15 I started to go out a lot: clubpeople and nightclubbing ended up being a huge influence, my high school even. Warhol and Interview weren't what the nightclubs in Pittsburgh were about. Drugs and sex and dressing up were. I found out about Warhol's being from Pittsburgh in a book one day at the library. There was a department store where, I read, Warhol did windows and displays. I thought, Well, you know, Andy Warhol did that and look at him now. He definitely gave me a lot of hope, but I never ever thought I would ever get anywhere near models, let alone be able to do their hair. Anyway, around age 16, my uncle brought me to New York on a church-sponsored trip to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where by the grace of God we stayed on 43rd Street. All the prostitutes were still on 42nd Street. It was like a Donna Summer video - unbelievable, the most divine thing. On that trip I got my first issue of Interview.
BRUCE: Do you remember who was on the cover?
JIMMY: Yes, that actress, Rachel Ward. How exciting to see Interview put models - Rachel Ward was just a model at the time who was gorgeous gorgeous and did commercials and was doing some screen tests - without any reason on the cover. I pored over that issue of Interview: I took that thing home and I knew it cover to cover. It was my only issue for about a year and I looked at it probably every day. The Saks catalogue, Redbook, the things that filled my fantasy world were not really weird things when I look back at it. André Leon Talley once said something about how it meant so much to him, the fantasy of magazines and being able to get lost in them ... I was, you know, battered by the neighborhood and all that, but I was always able to go into complete fanstasyland via magazines. I was thinking about all of this the other day. I love any movie that has real models in it - in Klute there's a go-see that Jane Fonda goes on, and there's a big line up of real models. In Annie Hall there's a scene where there's a famous model, she's an extra. Her name is Shaun Casey. She was in an Estée Lauder ad, shot in Arizona. For some reason as a teenager I fancied I looked a little bit like her and that I should move to Arizona. My aunt lived in Arizona, and I made efforts to move there to stay with her. Luckily she found out I was gay and wouldn't let me come. At the time I was very disappointed I didn't get to go and look like Shaun Casey in Arizona in Estée Lauder ads. Instead I moved to San Francisco and met transvestites. I started to play around with makeup, I started to wear makeup as a boy. I was in a fashion show as a boy. I started to dabble. Fun, but I got so broke and hungry that I had to move back home for the summer. I met a guy and I moved to New York on my 19th birthday. My first month in New York I was go-go dancing on the bar at the Pyramid, where there was a young drag scene starting.
BRUCE: Drag queens pride themselves on their specific look. Could you describe your early drag look and the queens at the Pyramid who inspired you?
JIMMY: I was try to look like a real girl. I was even wearing my own hair, kind of spiked up, red lipstick and vintage dresses, stuff like that. Trashier and trashier. I started to wear wigs and everything else. A-flip-in-high-heels kind of look but punk. I met Tabboo!, who has been a huge influence on my life - we became roommates and friends. At the same time, I met Ethyl Eichelberger. Ethyl was the person who told me to got to beauty school. She simply said, The drag performing is one thing, but you have to have something to fall back on. She was a hairdresser and went to ...
BRUCE: Ultissima Beauty Institute
JIMMY: Yes. Hair was an income for him. Ethyl and Augusto Machado and Madame Ekathrina Sobechanskaya (a man named Larry Rée), those three people were really moms to all the young queens. They were a big part of why I didn't get into wanting to have a sex change or get into prostitution. They were doing something radical. They were performers. I was directionless, I didn't know what I wanted to be. I could have been a junkie, had a sex change, who knows what. They helped guide me to skills for how to take care of myself. Another major influence, let me not forget, was Danillo. He was a hairdresser, a beautiful man who was also into wearing makeup and dressing fabulously and going out, but he always had money - I mean always had money to take care of himself. He was somebody doing exactly what I wanted to do but he was taking care of himself and I wasn't able to. One day it hit me: go to beauty school.
BRUCE: Where did you go?
JIMMY: I went to Robert Fiance on a grant and a loan. School was great: you could skip, you could be late, people were lovely and encouraged me. Debi Mazar was in my class. There were a few people in my class who stood out - every freak like me who went to beauty school - and they're doing great. Everybody else was from the boroughs, very normal. You would think New York beauty school would be a free-for-all, but believe me big time, it's not. I started to work at a haircoloring parlor which was very trendy at the time. I got fired. Some of the places I worked in closed. It took me a while to be able to figure out to look notice credits in magazines - names of photographers, stylists, hairdressers, etc. I saw a big Steven Meisel ad for Oribe. An incredible photo. I decided to start all over again. I was maybe 23, thought I was ancient and that everybody in town would want to be an assistant at Oribe, that everybody had heard of Steven Meisel, etc. You know what? They didn't, they hadn't. Nobody. They needed an assistant, it was an emergency, and they were so happy I wanted to work there.
BRUCE: For years I thought your name was hyphenated and a single name like Cher or the big '80s male model Attila. How did you get your name?
JIMMY: I started to work for Danilo. Very tumultuous. There was a guy named Omar who was Oribe's agent and who completely took me under his wing. My drag name was Paulette, and Tanya Ransom, the head drag queen at the Pyramid, who hired the go-go dancers, came up with it. One night I was in this outfit the queens made out of tulle for me, and Tanya said I looked like a French perfume model and should have a French name. It can't be Jimmy, we'll call her Paulette. Lady Bunny, who's a dear friend, started to call me Jimmy Paulette. Then Danilo called me Jimmy Paulette. Omar started to get me photo shoots, little photo shoots for Interview, front of the book kinds of things - baby stuff. Omar had to have a name for me. My last name is Miskovich - too long. Omar said, How about Jimmy Paulette? No, that doesn't work. How about Jimmy Paul?
BRUCE: How did you come to be photographed in drag by Nan Goldin?
JIMMY: Jack Pierson and I were roommates, so I was hanging around with this Boston crowd. People would talk to me about Nan Goldin. Everybody loved her and worshipped her work. She was a notorious junkie, and she was always a Big Thing. I was working as an assistant at Oribe. I had a really big ego as a drag queen, but I did not exist the same way as a hairdresser. Drag put me on an emotional roller-coaster: I would go into full fantasy and wouldn't be prepared for the big letdown whenever I didn't get the same attention out of drag. So I made a decision: I cut with drag to concentrate on hairdressing. Around the same time, I met a guy. We were boyfriends for three years. He hated that I did drag. I would not even consider doing drag while I was with him, but the salon was going well, my freelance career was starting to click. And I met Nan.
JIMMY: I broke up with the guy who hated drag. Lady Bunny called me and asked, Do you want to be on this float we're doing for Gay Pride Day? On the spur of the moment, I said yes. I went out and bought all new stuff, new high heels. I had some wigs, but I bought an outfit. I invited Nan to come over. I lived near where the float was going to meet, so Tabboo! and Miss Demeanor, friends of mine, also came over to get ready at my little apartment. Nan brought her camera. I had never been photographed by Nan before, so I didn't really realize what might go on. I thought she was taking snapshots. Tabboo! and I were putting our makeup on in the same mirror. There's a famous photograph by Diane Arbus of these two transvestites backstage, their shirts off, their wigs off. All of sudden Tabboo! and I had our shirts off and our wigs off, our makeup on. Nan said, This is the best picture I've ever taken in my life. We were like, Wow, great, not thinking anything of it. When you're in drag, it's fantasia. To the point where you don't really even think, Oh, I've got my wig on and I ain't got my shirt - I'm gorgeous! Nan was just taking pictures, we were just camping. Little did I know that one day the pictures would be great.
BRUCE: She chose that photo for the cover of The Other Side.
JIMMY: Oh my god, yes! But as with hairdressing, some people know models have hairdressers doing their hair, some people think that's the way they look all the time. Some people have never heard of this book, some amazing people have. I'm proud to be a part of it and that the efforts that I put into drag as a young man have been so rewarded. But the thing that I'm most proud of - this might sound strange - my favorite thing about the pictures in the book is that there's an idea that we're friends. I love the fact that Tabboo! and I are together but we're not having sex: we're doing this fun thing, it doesn't really have anything to do with sex per se or anything like that. In the book you can tell that we're actually having fun and that we're not tragic. Sometimes people think that's what I do every day, that maybe I am a prostitute. I do look like a prostitute in the book. Thank God there are transvestite prostitutes, I get tremendous inspiration from them! The fact is: I hadn't done drag in years when the pictures were taken, it was my first time back at it, and I probably did drag maybe only two other times after that.
BRUCE: Let's shift gears a bit. You are in great demand for photo shoots. How did you start to really understand how hair works, especially when photographed?
JIMMY: Steven Klein was the first photographer I ever worked with who was a perfectionist: he cared about the hair. In any fashion photograph, even though you might do something with clothes, the hair is a really big part. It fills up a lot of the picture. It determines the way a girl looks. Not to say that a girl in a hat can't be fantastic, that a girl with slicked back hair can't be can't be fantastic. A lot of times I work with hats and slicked back hair. But if the hair is showing at all, it might be secondary, it might not be that big of a deal, but bad hair can ruin a photograph. I should also mention fashion stylists Victoria Bartlett and Joe McKenna, from whom I learned a great deal. The fashion stylist is probably the most unsung person on a fashion shoot. Grunge was a big help for me. I got grunge. A lot of hairdressers didn't. Danilo said I was one of the first queens to do rock drag. Rock fashion has been a huge influence on my esthetic. My career began to kickstart because I got grunge: using grease in hair.
BRUCE: Could you give me a few words to describe a grunge haircut?
JIMMY: A grunge haircut is something dirty: you might put grease and powder and stuff in the hair to make it look like that. Kurt Cobain had perfect hair - it was colored, it was damaged, it was broken on the ends. I would raise the hair to make it look like Kurt Cobain's, put oil in it, color it. If anyone has hair like Kurt Cobain - don't change it! It's the ultimate. Because of grunge I met Steven Meisel. He gave me a big chance. I got to do Vogue with him. I worshipped everything he did for years, and it was great to work with him and, on that shoot, the legendary model of the '50s, Donna Mitchell.
BRUCE: What is it like to have your hands in Donna Mitchell's hair?
JIMMY: A complete fantasy. I adore the history of models and makeup and hair. I can spot a model by her hair and makeup alone. I think I have a great ability to get excited by a talent like Donna Mitchell's: the power of looks. I mean I just sort of did something that maybe anybody could do - any hairdresser could do - but I was also able to help her, to give her emotional support. I believe that's what a hairdresser does, besides doing technical work. You're able to give people support. They see you putting effort into what they look like and that helps them gather up their strength and put their beauty across - to feel powerful. They get excited by the way they look and they're able to use that. I'm excited that Jackie Onassis went to Kenneth, that Billy Baldwin decorated Kenneth's salon, and that they both knew Truman Capote. That is why I want to do this: to be in this long line of queens - in public! Everybody I named was a small town queen just like me. I'm the furthest thing from an aristocrat, but I could do an aristocrat lady's hair, or I could do the hair of a hooker who goes out with an aristocrat. It's a laugh, we could be going out to a fancy restaurant and the most beautiful women in the world could come up and give me a kiss and say, Jimmy!, know my name like the back of their hand because I've helped them get their look across. It's just a complete giggle. I think I'm able to give that to people, maybe not every time but ... Usually a barber won't give you the boost that a queen with some humor can.
BRUCE: You said to me that for the longest time you felt doing men's hair would be a bore. Then you did the Italian's men's fashion week and it was a blast. Could you talk about the difference - the shift or the similarity - between working with sexy guys and beautiful women?
JIMMY: Well I went to Milan with Steven Klein to do L'Uomo Vogue and Arena. The flamboyance of what was going on was incredible. Dandy freestyle! Blown dry hair! The hair and clothes were super and so funny. It's a very tricky time for women's fashion. It's a bit transitional, things are very serious - and the hair is very serious. Editors are very strict about what you're doing. Whereas with men, right now, on some of the shoots, they've allowed me to have a sense of humor. Big '70s hair: it's hysterical. You're allowed to get a giggle out of looking at it. Working with women's hair is what I mostly do, but to do guys - although I'm not really attracted to straight guys, you know I can't deny that I think the guys are sexy because they are, they're beautiful, and they're always playful - but my favorite things are like a shoot I did for Italian Vogue. A bikini store. The models had suntan oil all over them, bikinis, big bouffant hairdos, and full faces of makeup. Something like that gives people some respite from their daily drudgery. That's what I think the job is in fashion, its service to the world, what gives it integrity: it's a break from the doldrums.
BRUCE: Sexy too.
JIMMY: It is sexy: seeing people doing their own things.
BRUCE: What do you think of Shampoo?
JIMMY: Shampoo! Julie Christy! A straight hairdresser always makes me giggle. There are actually a lot of them. A lot of European hairdressers are straight - it's a European tradition, hairdressing.
BRUCE: Hair words are so great. Could you just give me a few words for certain hairdos, to describe certain haircuts?
JIMMY: OK. There's the bob. Very, very boring. But if you say, the '60s Sassoon bob ... You could say the gamine look, but better to say the Jean Seberg gamine look or the Mia Farrow gamine look. Shag is an over-used word that was sort of a big trend a year ago. But if you say the Klute shag, the Jane Fonda Klute shag, or if you say Warren Beatty's hair in Shampoo - his shag! - you really conjure something up. The Cher look: her bangs in the '60s with the side chunks - I mean there's nothing more divine. I definitely always have a reference, but words like "bob," "shag" alone don't give much to me. I would say instead Shelley Duvall - incredible movie hair woman. Nashville and Annie Hall. Shelley Duvall means meticulous braids and stuff I can't even believe! In Shampoo Julie Christy means frosting. I think Jon Peters did a lot of the hair for Shampoo. I'm not 100% sure, but what he did for Barbra Streisand - the Superstar perm look is beyond! I mean a lot of people might think that's an abomination, but not me. I think it's heaven. When I first started to be on the gay scene, the cruising scene or whatever, I would always think, Well maybe I shouldn't tell people I'm a hairdresser, maybe I should tell them I'm a plumber. But now I'd never deny what I do: I get to make my dreams come true on a daily basis.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Planet Awesome Kid
Casting Director Julia Samersova recently launched a new blog, Planet Awesome Kid, a more personal Sartorialist for kids:
On June 2, 2009, Betty Sze at Models.com interviewed Julia Samersova:
We ask casting director Julia Samersova / Cast Inc., who just launched her website, 5 questions.
1-Why do you love casting?
The thing I adore about casting the most is finding a raw talent first and watching the model blossom into a star. It is an amazing feeling to know that you possess an eye and have your finger on the pulse of what is to come next. I love meeting all these young kids and listening to their “stories”. I also really love understanding what my clients need and providing them with the best model possible for their brand or project.
2- Name an inspirational person in fashion to you.
My mother. As a hair stylist in the 1980’s, she would always bring home magazines from the salon. Vogue, Harper’s etc. I was a very young girl at the time and fascinated with models. I went on to make HUGE collages out of cut up Vogues. They still hang in my mother’s house. Linda, Christy, Naomi, Cindy, etc. All over the walls. When I applied for an internship at Company Management in 1993, I actually knew how to answer the questions of “who is your favorite photographer and stylist” etc. I owe the worship of models and fashion to my mother and Michael Flutie for hiring a 17 year old girl from Brooklyn. He had a vision and I am eternally grateful to him for my entire career.
3- Favorite new faces of this past season.
Katie Fogarty. Her professionalism and high energy and smile. I just love her and so do all my clients. Tabea Kobach, for her otherworldly presence and eyes. Madisyn Ritland is just gorgeous. Constance Jablonski, because she is a throw back to a real SUPERMODEL. Imogen Morris-Clarke, because she is the epitome of cool to me.
4- All time favorite model.
Renee Simonsen. Because she is the 1st model I was obsessed with when I was very very young and she reminds me of Rianne Ten Haken, who is one of my all time faves. Models who actually knew how to model and gave 100% of themselves every single time. They shine! They are aspirational to women all over the world.
5- In these times of recession, why is it still so important for clients to use a casting director?
Because in the long run, a casting director, with their knowledge and expertise and relationships, can save the client a lot of money by knowing the market place and how to negotiate rates.
Saving a few thousand on a shoot and hiring the wrong model, can end up costing the client thousands in reshoots and production costs. The most important part of casting is not only to find a beautiful face, but a model that can really perform for a client. A good CD should be connected enough and experienced enough where they can recommend only those types of models.
Check out Julia’s brand new websites , Planet Awesome Kid & Castinnyc.com.
Friday, October 16, 2009
L Eau Ambrée by Prada commercial
L Eau Ambrée by Prada commercial
Photographer: Steven Meisel
Models: Toni Garrn & Viktoriya Sasonkina
Makeup: Pat McGrath
Hair: Guido Palau
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Ghost (Natasha Poly: Multiple Exposure) 2009
An exclusive excerpt of the Marco Brambilla / Muse Magazine video: Ghost (Natasha Poly: Multiple Exposure) 2009, as seen on Models.com:
all I ask of living is to have no chains on me
"And When I Die" was one of the first songs written by Laura Nyro, who was 17 when she wrote it. The song was first recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1966. Nyro included it on her first album in 1967 - More Than A New Discovery. Blood, Sweat & Tears covered it in 1969.
AND WHEN I DIE
I'm not scared of dying,
And I don't really care.
If it's peace you find in dying,
Well then let the time be near.
If it's peace you find in dying,
And if dying time is here,
Just bundle up my coffin
'Cause it's cold way down there.
I hear that its cold way down their.
Yeah, crazy cold way down their.
Chorus:
And when I die, and when I'm gone,
There'll be one child born
In this world to carry on,
to carry on.
Now troubles are many, they're as deep as a well.
I can swear there ain't no heaven but I pray there ain't no hell.
Swear there ain't no heaven and I pray there ain't no hell,
But I'll never know by living, only my dying will tell.
Yes only my dying will tell.
Yeah, only my dying will tell.
Chorus
Give me my freedom for as long as I be.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
And all I ask of dying is to go naturally.
Oh I want to go naturally.
Here I go,
Hey Hey!
Here comes the devil,
Right Behind.
Look out children,
Here he comes!
Here he comes! Hey...
Don't want to go by the devil.
Don't want to go by demon.
Don't want to go by Satan,
Don't want to die uneasy.
Just let me go naturally.
and when I die,
When I'm dead, dead and gone,
There'll be one child born in our world to carry on,
To carry on.
Yeah, yeah
Mary Travers - And When I Die, performed in Mama Cass television program -1969
Laura Nyro- And When I Die
Blood, Sweat & Tears - And When I Die
Burberry Blue Label Fall 2009 Campaign - Dorothea Barth Jorgensen, ph: Lachlan Bailey
Lachlan Bailey photographed Dorothea Barth Jorgensen for Burberry Blue Label Fall 2009 campaign on June 3, 2009 in London with stylist Elliot Smedley.
Burberry Blue Label Fall 2009 campaign
Model: Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Photographer: Lachlan Bailey
Stylist: Elliot Smedley
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
but it feels so right
Cuts Like A Knife lyrics:
Drivin' home this evening
I coulda sworn we had it all worked out
You had this boy believin'
Way beyond the shadow of a doubt
Then I heard it on the street
I heard you mighta found somebody new
Well who is he baby - who is he
And tell me what he means to you
I took it all for granted
But how was I to know
That you'd be letting go
Now it cuts like a knife
But it feels so right
It cuts like a knife
But it feels so right
There's times I've 'bin mistaken
There's times I thought I'd 'bin misunderstood
So wait a minute darlin'
Can't you see we did the best we could
This wouldn't be the first time
Things have gone astray
Now you've thrown it all away
Now it cuts like a knife
But It feels so right
It cuts like a knife
But it feels so right
Cuts Like A Knife - ph: Hugh Lippe
Hugh Lippe photographed Tyler Riggs for Contributing Editor on Friday October 2nd at 5:30pm.
The entire series can be seen at contributingeditor.blogspot.com
I love how strong Tyler looks in the series - however the light on his torso highlights his rib cage, illuminating his vulnerability, like Achilles.
In Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.
Achilles also has the attributes of being the most handsome of the heroes assembled against Troy.
Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. Since he died due to a poisoned arrow shot into his heel, the "Achilles' heel" has come to mean a person's principal weakness.
According to a fragment of an Achilleis— the Achilleid, written by Statius in the first century AD, when Achilles was born Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx. However, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body she held him by, his heel. (See Achilles heel, Achilles' tendon.)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
RIP Irving Penn
From The New York Times:
Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92
By ANDY GRUNDBERG
Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His death was announced by Peter MacGill, his friend and representative.
Mr. Penn’s talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of readers of Vogue during his long association with the magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries and are prized by collectors.
His long career at Vogue spanned a number of radical transformations in fashion and its depiction, but his style remained remarkably constant. Imbued with calm and decorum, his photographs often seemed intent on defying fashion. His models and portrait subjects were never seen leaping or running or turning themselves into blurs. Even the rough-and-ready members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, photographed in San Francisco in 1967, were transformed within the quieting frame of his studio camera into the graphic equivalent of a Greek frieze.
Instead of spontaneity, Mr. Penn provided the illusion of a seance, his gaze precisely describing the profile of a Balenciaga coat or of a Moroccan jalaba in a way that could almost mesmerize the viewer. Nothing escaped the edges of his photographs unless he commanded it. Except for a series of close-up portraits that cut his subjects’ heads off at the forehead, and another, stranger suite of overripe nudes, his subjects were usually shown whole, apparently enjoying a splendid isolation from the real world.
He was probably most famous for photographing Parisian fashion models and the world’s great cultural figures, but he seemed equally at home photographing Peruvian peasants or bunion pads. Merry Foresta, co-organizer of a 1990 retrospective of his work at the National Museum of American Art, wrote that his pictures exhibited “the control of an art director fused with the process of an artist.”
A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Mr. Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs. Although schooled in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping his early canvases of paint so that they might serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.
He was also a refined conversationalist and a devoted husband and friend. His marriage to Lisa Fonssagrives, a beautiful model, artist and his sometime collaborator, lasted 42 years, ending with her death at the age of 80 in 1992. Mr. Penn’s photographs of Ms. Fonssagrives not only captured a slim woman of lofty sophistication and radiant good health; they also set the esthetic standard for the elegant fashion photography of the 1940s and ’50s.
Ms. Fonssagrives became a sculptor after her modeling career ended. In 1994, Mr. Penn and their son, Tom, a metal designer, arranged the printing of a book that reproduced his wife’s sculpture, prints and drawings. In addition to his son, Mr. Penn is survived by his stepdaughter, Mia Fonssagrives.Solow (who renders her name with a dot), a sculptor and jewelry designer; his younger brother, Arthur, the well-known director of such films as “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nine grandchildren.
Mr. Penn had the good fortune of working for and collaborating with two of the 20th century’s most inventive and influential magazine art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. He studied with Mr. Brodovitch in Philadelphia as a young man and came to New York in 1937 as his unpaid design assistant at Harper’s Bazaar, the most provocative fashion magazine of the day. But it was under Mr. Liberman, at Vogue, that Mr. Penn forged his career as a photographer.
In the book “Irving Penn: Passage” (1991), a compilation of the photographer’s career, Mr. Liberman wrote of meeting Mr. Penn for the first time in 1941: “Here was a young American who seemed unspoiled by European mannerisms or culture. I remember he wore sneakers and no tie. I was struck by his directness and a curious unworldliness, a clarity of purpose, and a freedom of decision. What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials.”
Irving Penn was also a consummate technician, known equally for the immaculate descriptive quality of his still-life arrangements of cosmetics and other consumer goods and for his masterly exploration of photographic materials. Not content with the conventions of the darkroom or with the standard appearance of commercial prints, he was willing to experiment. He resorted to bleaching the prints of his nudes series, eliminating skin tones and making female flesh appear harsh and unforgiving but nonetheless sexually charged.
At the height of the cultural convulsions of the 1960s Mr. Penn taught himself to print his own pictures using a turn-of-the-century process that relies on platinum instead of more conventional silver. The process produces beautiful, velvety tones in the image and is among the most permanent of photographic processes, although it requires time-consuming preparation and precise control in the darkroom.
Over the next 30 years Mr. Penn labored to print all his new work, as well as to reprint much of his earlier work, using this platinum process, which requires that a photographer mix a recipe of exotic chemicals and then hand-coat them onto a sheet of drawing paper. Mr. Penn, who almost single-handedly brought the process back into popularity among photographic artists, perfected a method of coating the paper with multiple layers of metallic salts, greatly increasing the depth and luminosity of the final print.
Mr. Penn’s concern with the longevity of his prints was one aspect of an enduring career. Not only was he the photographer with the longest tenure in the history of Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue; he also created timeless images of fashion and celebrity, two arenas characterized by constant change. At the same time, he took pains to acknowledge mortality and decay in his photographs, focusing his more personal work on cigarette butts, sidewalk detritus and, while in his 70s, on the skulls of wild animals.
In his catalog essay for a 1984 retrospective of Mr. Penn’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, then the museum’s director of photography, wrote, “The grace, wit, and inventiveness of his pattern-making, the lively and surprising elegance of his line, and his sensitivity to the character, the idiosyncratic humors, of light make Penn’s pictures, even the slighter ones, a pleasure for our eyes.”
Irving Penn was born June 16, 1917, in Plainfield, N. J. His father, Harry, was a watchmaker and his mother, Sonia, a nurse. As a student at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, later to be known as the Philadelphia College of Art (and now the University of the Arts), from 1934 to 1938, Mr. Penn studied drawing, painting and graphic and industrial design. His most influential teacher was the designer Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian émigré by way of Paris who was familiar with vanguard developments in European art and design.
Although Mr. Brodovitch worked in New York City for Harper’s Bazaar, he traveled to Philadelphia on Saturdays to meet with his students and to evaluate their work. Mr. Penn’s graphic talent impressed Mr. Brodovitch, and he chose him to be his unpaid assistant at Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and 1938.
After finishing school and moving to New York, Mr. Penn worked as a free-lance designer and illustrator for Bazaar and other clients. He also bought a camera and began to photograph storefronts and signs he saw in Manhattan. In 1940 he inherited Mr. Brodovitch’s position as director of advertising design for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store, but within a year he decided to travel to Mexico and attempt a career as a painter.
Before leaving for Mexico Mr. Penn, at Mr. Brodovitch’s suggestion, offered his position at Saks to another Russian émigré designer, Alexander Liberman. Mr. Liberman declined, but by the time Mr. Penn returned to New York in 1943, with his canvases scraped totally clean, Mr. Liberman was the art director of Vogue, and he returned the younger man’s favor by offering Mr. Penn a job as his assistant.
Mr. Penn’s first assignment was to supervise the design of Vogue’s covers, and he obliged by sketching out several possible photographic scenes. Unable to interest any of the staff photographers in taking them, he took to the photo studio himself, at Mr. Liberman’s suggestion. The first result of this opportunity was a color still-life photograph of a glove, belt and pocketbook, which was published as the cover of Vogue’s Oct. 1, 1943, issue. Mr. Penn’s photographs would appear on more than 150 Vogue covers over the next 50 years.
During World War II, Mr. Penn joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Italy, where he got a taste of European culture. Arriving in Rome in 1944, he spied the artist Giorgio de Chirico carrying a shopping bag of vegetables home from the market.
“I rushed up and embraced him,” Mr. Penn recalled in “Passage,” the 1991 compilation of his life’s work. “To me he was the heroic de Chirico; to him I was a total stranger, probably demented. Still, he was moved and said, come home and have lunch with us. For two days he showed me his Rome.”
During those two days Mr. Penn made his first black-and-white portraits, beginning what would become a celebrated archive of the leading artists, writers and performers of the second half of the 20th century.
Returning to Vogue in 1946 as a staff photographer, Mr. Penn went on to fill the magazine’s pages with portraits of cultural figures like Edmund Wilson and W. H. Auden, still lifes of accessories and graphic fashion photographs. His 1947 image “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period,” a group portrait, includes, at its center, Lisa Fonssagrives.
Ms. Fonssagrives would later appear in some of Mr. Penn’s most memorable fashion images, among them “Rochas ‘Mermaid Dress,’ Paris” and “Woman with Roses, Paris,” both taken in 1950, the year she became his wife.
Those pictures were made during Mr. Penn’s first assignment to photograph the Paris collections for Vogue. Using a discarded theater curtain for a backdrop and a borrowed studio filled with daylight, he choreographed some of the most spare and delicate fashion photographs yet produced, treating the clothes less as dresses to be worn than as shapes to be perceived in silhouette.
Unlike Richard Avedon, the other important new fashion photographer of the postwar period, Mr. Penn expressed himself and his subjects best through a Shaker-style restraint. In 1948, for example, he began to pose his portrait subjects by wedging them between two plain walls that met in a sharply angled vee, a scene offset only by a scrap of fraying carpet, on which subjects as prominent as Spencer Tracy, Joe Louis and the Duchess of Windsor stood, crouched or leaned.
The same year, while on assignment for Vogue in Peru, Mr. Penn ventured on his own to Cuzco and photographed the exotically dressed families who lived in the mountainous countryside, presenting them nonjudgmentally.
Two decades later he expanded on these portraits during trips to Dahomey (now called Benin), to Morocco, to New Guinea and elsewhere, using a portable studio to provide a textured but seamless background. The pictures, in color as well as black and white, were featured annually in Vogue. In 1974 they were published in a book, “Worlds in a Small Room,” which seemed to emphasize the perseverance of cultural diversity.
Mr. Penn was also capable of making Western culture seem strange and fascinating. In the early 1950s he made a series of portraits of small tradesmen (“Petit Métiers,” in French) working in Paris, London and New York. Again relying on his spare studio to separate his subjects from their surroundings, he nevertheless insisted that the tradesmen wear the clothes and tools of their work: two pastry chiefs in white aprons and toches hold rolling pins; a fishmonger carries a fish in one hand and a rag in the other.
In 1949 and 1950, Mr. Penn produced images of female nudes as a personal project, using fleshy artists’ models and focusing exclusively on their torsos. In the process of printing he attacked the light-sensitive paper with bleach and other chemicals to remove most of the skin tones, creating a rough chiaroscuro effect antithetical to then-prevailing notions of corporeal beauty. These unsettling pictures were not exhibited or published until 30 years later, in 1980, when the Marlborough Gallery mounted a show called “Earthly Bodies.” The critic Rosalind Krauss, writing in the catalog, called the nudes “a kind of privately launched and personally experienced kamikaze attack on his own public identity as a photographer of fashion.”
The quest to undercut fashion’s standards of perfection, and to find beauty in the disdained, overlooked or overripe, runs throughout Mr. Penn’s career. In an otherwise pristine still life of food, he included a house fly, and in a 1959 close-up, he placed a beetle in a model’s ear. From 1967 to 1973 he produced color essays of flowers, published each year in Vogue’s Christmas issue; in each case the blooms are past their prime, their leaves wilted, tinged with brown and falling.
Mr. Penn acquired a reputation for perfectionism at all costs. In the book “Passage,” Mr. Liberman recounts that when Mr. Penn was asked to take a picture of glasses falling from a serving tray, the photographer insisted that for authenticity’s sake Baccarat crystal be used. The art director ruefully remembered that several dozens of the glasses were shattered before the photograph was made to Mr. Penn’s standard.
In the mid-1960s, just as Mr. Penn began to be consumed by his experiments with platinum printing, fashion and fashion photography switched gears decisively. Neither his style nor his manner matched the era’s spirit of sexual liberation and spontaneous, sometimes drug-assisted creativity. The public image of a fashion photographer came to be exemplified by the anything-goes protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow Up,” played by David Hemming.
Mr. Penn observed the rebelliousness of the ’60s with a curious eye, even taking an assignment from Look magazine to photograph the “summer of love” scene in San Francisco. But his stylistic confidence seemed to falter when it came to portraying the minimally structured garments and ultra-thin models of the time. His photograph of the model Marisa Berenson, wearing a breast-plate-size peace sign and little else, suggests the photographer’s ambivalence about an era in which no clothes often seemed the preferable fashion. Not surprisingly, he concentrated on producing photographs intended to be viewed as art.
In 1975, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a small exhibition of his recent work printed using the platinum process: a series of greatly magnified images of cigarette butts. Transformed from gutter discards to iconic status, the mashed and bent cylinders again showed Mr. Penn’s penchant for straying far from the politesse of his fashion and portrait pictures. The cigarette butts were followed by a series focused on other forms of sidewalk debris, including flattened paper cups, deli containers and rags; these photographs, presented in platinum, were exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977 in a show called “Street Material.”
As a result of the two museum exhibitions, Mr. Penn’s work played a significant role in the rise of photography’s fortunes in the art world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s his pictures were exhibited several times at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. In 1984 a 160-print traveling retrospective of his career was organized by Szarkowski. Since 1987 his pictures have been exhibited on a regular basis at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, which now represents his work.
Passing the age of 65 without a thought of retirement, Mr. Penn devoted himself increasingly to still-lifes, on assignments for Vogue and for advertising clients like Clinique cosmetics, and in photographs for exhibition. On his own time he constructed arrangements of bones, steel blocks and bleached animal skulls. These table-top compositions recall Dutch vanitas still-lifes as well as Giorgio Morandi paintings. At the same time, Mr. Penn produced several memorable portraits for Vogue of older artists of his own generation, like Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi and Italo Calvino, and began contributing portraits to the fledgling Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair. In 1985 he began to draw and paint again, after a hiatus of 43 years.
A collection of many of his most important images, in a variety of genres, was acquired jointly by the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in 1990; the museums, both branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, also mounted an exhibition of the collection titled “Irving Penn: Master Images.” In its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York acquired 67 of Penn’s portraits in 2007 and exhibited them last year. Another major show opened in September at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles.
In 1996 Mr. Penn donated the bulk of his archives and 130 of his prints to the Chicago Art Institute. An exhibition of these prints, “Irving Penn: A Career in Photography,” organized by Colin Westerbeck, opened at the Art Institute the following year and subsequently toured the country. In 2005 the National Gallery in Washington mounted a smaller retrospective of Penn’s career that consisted entirely of his platinum prints.
The critic Richard Woodward, writing in 1990, argued that Mr. Penn would be best remembered for the work he did for the museum wall, not the printed page. “The steely unity of Irving Penn’s career, the severity and constructed rigor of his work can best be appreciated when he seems to break away from the dictates of fashion for magazines,” he wrote. “Only then is it clear how everything he photographs — or, at least, prints — is the product of a remarkably undivided conscience. There are no breaks; only different subjects.”
Shannan Click, Photo: Irving Penn:
surely that ain't right
Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight,
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel, this wrong,
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong.
Storm,
In the morning light,
I feel,
No more can I say,
Frozen to myself.
I got nobody on my side,
And surely that ain't right,
Surely that ain't right.
Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight,
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel, this wrong,
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong.
How can it feel this wrong,
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong.
Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight,
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel, this wrong,
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong.
Miu Miu Spring 2010 Show
Miu Miu Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 7,2009
Designer: Miuccia Prada
Casting Director: Russell Marsh
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Vlada Roslyakova
Ginta Lapina
Alexa Yudina
Kasia Struss
Natasha Poly
Mirte Maas
Louis Vuitton Spring 2010 Show
Louis Vuitton Spring 2010 Show
Designer: Marc Jacobs
Date: October 7, 2009 at 2:30pm
Natasha Poly
Kasia Struss
Mirte Maas
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Nimue Smit
Heloise Guerin
Vlada Roslyakova
Ginta Lapina (closed)
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
October 2009 Italian Vogue video preview
Steven Meisel photographed Rianne ten Haken, Dorothea Barth Jorgensen, and Kasia Struss
for Italian Vogue on June 10-11, 2009 with stylist Lori Goldstein.
Italian Vogue October 2009 cover
Models: Rianne ten Haken, Dorothea Barth Jorgensen, and Kasia Struss
Photographer: Steven Meisel
Stylist: Lori Goldstein
Hair: Julien D'Ys
Makeup: Pat McGrath
There's a little black spot on the sun today
Theres a little black spot on the sun today
Its the same old thing as yesterday
Theres a black hat caught in a high tree top
Theres a flag pole rag and the wind wont stop
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running round my brain
I guess Im always hoping that youll end this reign
But its my destiny to be the king of pain
Theres a little black spot on the sun today
Thats my soul up there
Its the same old thing as yesterday
Thats my soul up there
Theres a black hat caught in a high tree top
Thats my soul up there
Theres a flag pole rag and the wind wont stop
Thats my soul up there
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running round my brain
I guess Im always hoping that youll end this reign
But its my destiny to be the king of pain
Theres a fossil thats trapped in a high cliff wall
Thats my soul up there
Theres a dead salmon frozen in a waterfall
Thats my soul up there
Theres a blue whale beached by a springtides ebb
Thats my soul up there
Theres a butterfly trapped in a spiders web
Thats my soul up there
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running round my brain
I guess Im always hoping that youll end this reign
But its my destiny to be the king of pain
Theres a king on a throne with his eyes torn out
Theres a blind man looking for a shadow of doubt
Thers a rich man sleeping on a golden bed
Theres a skeleton choking on a crust of bread
King of pain
Theres a red fox thorn by a huntsmans pack
Thats my soul up there
Theres a black winged gull with a broken back
Thats my soul up there
Theres a little black spot on the sun today
Its the same old thing as yesterday
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running round my brain
I guess Im always hoping that youll end this reign
But its my destiny to be the king of pain
King of pain
King of pain
King of pain
Ill always be king of pain
Ill always be king of pain
I will always be king of pain...
It was released as a worldwide single by A&M Records. It was the second single from Synchronicity in the US and the fourth single in the UK.
Reaching #3 in the US charts in October 1983, and #1 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart for five weeks in August 1983, the single is The Police's most successful US single (together with "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic") after "Every Breath You Take" based on chart position. In the UK, it reached #17 in the charts in January 1984.
"King of Pain" was the only single from Synchronicity that did not have an accompanying music video.
Sting - Lead vocals, bass guitar, piano, backing vocals
Andy Summers - Backing vocals, guitars
Stewart Copeland - Drums
Other versions:
Alanis Morissette covered this song during her MTV Unplugged performance (released on the 1999 album Alanis Unplugged).
"King of Pain" - The Police:
"King of Pain" - Alanis Morissette:
Yves Saint Laurent Spring 2010 Show
Yves Saint Laurent Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 5, 2009 at 7:30pm
Location: Palais de Tokyo - 13 avenue du Président Wilson - Paris 16e
Designer: Stefano Pilati
Mirte Maas (opened)
Mirte Maas (opened)
Kasia Struss
Kasia Struss
Mina Cvetkovic
Mina Cvetkovic
Vlada Roslyakova
Aline Weber
Aline Weber
Valeria Dmitrienko
Valeria Dmitrienko
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Ginta Lapina
Ginta Lapina
Ginta Lapina
Sheila Marquez
Sheila Marquez
Yulia Kharlapanova (closed)
Yulia Kharlapanova (closed)
Yulia Kharlapanova (closed)
Monday, October 5, 2009
Celine Spring 2010 Show
Celine Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 5, 2009 at 4:00pm
Designer: Phoebe Philo
Mirte Maas
Kasia Struss
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Kasia Struss
Iselin Steiro
Yohji Yamamoto Spring 2010 Show
Yohji Yamamoto Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 2, 2009 at 8:30pm
Location: 155 rue Saint-Martin - Paris 3e
Heloise Guerin
Anna Kuchkina
Heloise Guerin
Anna Kuchkina (closed)
Givenchy Spring 2010 Show
Givenchy Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 4, 2009 at 6:30pm
Designer: Riccardo Tisci
Makeup: Aaron de Mey
Hair: Luigi Murenu
Natasha Poly
Katrin Thormann
Kasia Struss
Mirte Maas
Iselin Steiro
Kasia Struss
Iselin Steiro
Iselin Steiro
Katrin Thormann
Iselin Steiro
Stella McCartney Spring 2010 Show
Stella McCartney Spring 2010 show
Time: Monday October 5, 2009 at 10:00 am
Location: Palais de Tokyo - 13 avenue du Président Wilson - Paris 16e
Natasha Poly
Aline Weber
Kasia Struss
Yulia Kharlapanova
Iselin Steiro
Natasha Poly
Kasia Struss
Aline Weber
Iselin Steiro
Yulia Kharlapanova
Natasha Poly
Friday, October 2, 2009
Teen Vogue November 2009 cover - Jourdan Dunn, ph: Patrick Demarchelier
Paterick Demarchelier photographed Jourdan Dunn for the cover of Teen Vogue on June 23, 2009 at Catalina Beach Club, in Atlantic Beach with stylist Jillian Davison.
Teen Vogue November 2009 cover
Model: Jourdan Dunn
Photographer: Patrick Demarchelier
Stylist: Jillian Davison
Hair: Teddy Charles
Makeup: Gucci Westman
Gucci Resort 2010 Campaign: Snejana Onopka & Natasha Poly, Photo: Mert Alas + Marcus Piggott
Mert Alas + Marcus Piggott photographed Snejana Onopka, and Natasha Poly for the fall 2009 Gucci campaign on July 15 2009 with stylist Emmanuelle Alt.
Fall 2009 Gucci campaign
Models: Snejana Onopka & Natasha Poly
Photographers: Mert Alas + Marcus Piggott
Stylist: Emmanuelle Alt
Hair: Luigi Murenu
Makeup: Tom Pecheux
Isabel Marant Spring 2010 show
Isabel Marant Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 2, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Location: Couvent des Cordeliers - 15 rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, 6e
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Carmen Kass
Snejana Onopka
Isabeli Fontana
Kasia Struss
Aline Weber
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Carmen Kass
Snejana Onopka
Isabeli Fontana
Kasia Struss
Aline Weber
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Carmen Kass (closed)
October 2009 Italian Vogue cover: Rianne ten Haken, Photo: Steven Meisel
Steven Meisel photographed Rianne ten Haken for Italian Vogue on June 10-11, 2009 with stylist Lori Goldstein.
Italian Vogue October 2009 cover
Model: Rianne ten Haken
Photographer: Steven Meisel
Stylist: Lori Goldstein
Hair: Julien D'Ys
Makeup: Pat McGrath
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Nina Ricci Spring 2010 Show
Nina Ricci Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 1, 2009 at 8:00pm
Ginta Lapina (opened)
Natasha Poly
Viktoriya Sasonkina
Vlada Roslyakova
Mirte Maas
Snejana Onopka
Dorothea Barth Jorgensen
Kasia Struss
Iselin Steiro (closed)
Rick Owens Spring 2010 Show
Rick Owens Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 1, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Location: Les Beaux-Arts de Paris - salle Mélpomène - 13 quai Malaquais - Paris 6e
Kasia Struss
Katrin Thormann
Olga Sherer
Vlada Roslyakova
Mirte Maas
Kasia Struss
Katrin Thormann
Olga Sherer
Vlada Roslyakova
Balmain Spring 2010 Show
Balmain Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 1, 2009 at 3:00pm
Location: Intercontinental Paris Le Grand Hotel - 2 rue Scribe - paris 9e
Designer: Christophe Decarnin
Stylist: Emmanuelle Alt
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Isabeli Fontana
Kasia Struss
Snejana Onopka
Carmen Kass
Natasha Poly
Iselin Steiro
Isabeli Fontana
Kasia Struss
Snejana Onopka
Carmen Kass
Balenciaga Spring 2010 Show
Balenciaga Spring 2010 Show
Time: October 1, 2009 at 10:00 am
Designer: Nicolas Ghesquière
Stylist: Marie Amelie Sauve
Casting Director: Ashley Brokaw
Kasia Struss (opened)
Ginta Lapina
Iselin Steiro
Sheila Marquez
Mirte Maas
