Jenna’s Model Life

This is the best piece of Internet flotsam I’ve seen in some time:

“And now, our soap opera of Terror and Fashion, SIGNÉ ANNA! So, what’s new in the life of Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of U.S. Vogue, the most POWERFUL woman in the world?

This incredible week, Anna showed her bare arms in the front row. Even more unusually, the woman whom colleagues call “the Ice Queen” smiled.

[Ominous music]

What odious plot was in the air? She was even…laughing. Why these unnatural expressions? The answer lies in this camera, which followed her everywhere, and this microphone boom, which captured all of her conversations. She is being filmed for a documentary, a work which promises to be more frightening than Ben Hur and Deep Throat combined. But as soon as she thought the camera was no longer filming, she relaxed her zygomaticus.

[Brief flash of a pink-and-white striped test pattern]

But who was this woman with the same hairstyle as Anna? A body double?
No, it was Amy Astley, the editor-in-chief of the high school version of U.S. Vogue, Teen Vogue. AMY! NEW CHARACTER!

[Black screen with Amy waving]

[Amy explains in English interview footage that the idea for her magazine came from Anna's daughter, Bea]

Anna, who continues to extend her empire with the launch of the American version of Vogue Men — which contains on page 184 an excellent article on safes — is now launching Vogue Living, a home-decorating magazine so atrociously chic that the editor-in-chief is Hamish Bowles, whom our experts have spotted in the party scene in Marie Antoinette.

[Marie Antoinette clip]

HAMISH! NEW CHARACTER! In this saga of furious whim!

So what’s up with Vogue USA after its cover where Renee Zellwegger looked like she was having a number two? Anna then gave her first page to Dreamgirls actress Jennifer Hudson — the 11th black woman on the cover since 1892.

Most importantly, she’s also the first “curvy” — perhaps we could even say “fat” — woman to get the front, that is, the first woman who was not required to submit to an anorectic’s diet prior to the photo shoot. And on the cover for the “Embrace Your Shape” issue? It’s Scarlett Johanson! Inside are plenty of puffed-up articles.

[Image of model with padded chest posing beneath car]

But nothing, NOTHING, nothing!

Prepared us for the enormous SCANDAL which erupted this week, in fact, on Sunday morning. At the Nina RICCI show, see our exclusive images!

Miss Agnès was absolutely floored by SHOCK when she discovered that:

‘Anna Wintour, she’s wearing the same dress she wore to Balenciaga…’

SUNDAY! [image of Wintour in the dress, blaring sounds]

TUESDAY! [image of Wintour in the dress, blaring sounds]

SUNDAY! [image of Wintour in the dress, blaring sounds]

TUESDAY! [image of Wintour in the dress, blaring sounds]

In fact, our footage shows how the scandal erupted: Tuesday morning, she wore the same dress to Balenciaga that she would wear Sunday to Nina Ricci!

SAME DRESS! SAME PRINT! SAME NECKLACE SAME SUNGLASSES SAME JACKET!!!!!!

We are so disappointed. Either everything at Vogue has gone to hell and Anna’s star is no longer in the ascent,

OR,

Our theory — she may have worn the same dress for continuity reasons relating to her documentary, making the entire exercise an IMMENSE and vain fraud! They haven’t even finished the film but we are already demanding our refunds!

See you soon. For the next in our soap opera of Fashion and Terror, remember to tune in to SIGNÉ ANNA!”

Loïc Prigent, the voice you hear, is an excellent straight documentarian — this is the first funny piece I’ve seen from him. The work he’s parodying here is his own superb Signé Chanel, a five-part series that followed the creation of Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2004 couture collection. I recommend it because Prigent and his team chooses the wise option of following the actual seamstresses more closely than he concentrates on Karl Lagerfeld, the designer. Sure Karl Lagerfeld is a crazy genius, but he’s not particularly interesting in his filmed scenes, and I’d take listening to the couturières share their age-old catalogue of workroom superstitions over watching Lagerfeld sketch the detail of a pocket, crumple the paper, and toss it in one repeated robotic motion any day.

Plus Signé Chanel has almost a whole episode on the 75-year-old farmer who makes the trim on all the Chanel tweeds. She is one of the few trim-weavers left in France, and the only person on earth who understands the loom she designed and built herself: Chanel has sent 10 assistants to her to learn her method, and she’s dispatched each empty-handed. In her first scene, a Chanel lackey drives a package of the new season’s cloth all the way out to her farm so he can hand-deliver it (she needs the fabrics so she can tease out threads and create perfectly matched custom trims). The trim lady looks incredulously at at the henchman, watches him drive off, and then dumps the cloth so she can go bale hay. “Chanel can wait,” she says, “it’s going to rain tomorrow and then what will I do about the hay, eh?”

Plus there’s an awesome scene where Lagerfeld, in his booming Teutonic monotone, tells André Leon Talley that an immense Chanel flower-shaped ring has a compartment that can be used to hide “Cocaine, condoms, whatever.” And when Prigent catches the seamstresses crying over rejected dresses and slippery fabrics, it makes me cry, too.