For the New York Times
More Colors, More Profit — June 30, 2011
Over the past generation or so, nails became an industry, and any industry concerned with fashion and beauty naturally seeks to create trends — otherwise people might just buy one bottle of polish and stick with that color forever. In order to profit, having done nails had to become a social imperative for women, it had to become standard, part of good grooming. (“If you’re a fly gal, then get your nails done,” rapped Missy Elliott, all the way back in 2002. “Get a pedicure, get your hair did.”) The industry had to make women feel a need to change their nail color frequently, and to pay attention to “nail art” and “seasonal” colors.
For DIS magazine’s Labor Issue
What I Owe — April, 2011
My “career” as a model became a kind of shell game: could I get a new agency in a new market to take a chance on me, and, at the conclusion of one or two deeply mutually fiscally unsatisfactory months, could I get another new agency in another new market to take a chance on me? Markets went dead progressively, like a body undergoing organ death; a disastrous incursion into the spleen of Milan would be followed by a retreat to the break-even liver of Sydney, or the strike-it-lucky heart of New York, which for some reason always beat for me, however faintly. I needed to continue modeling because the deeper I sank into debt, the more I needed to at least have a chance of booking the ridiculous, unjustifiable, almost-criminal day rates only modeling offered — the $15,000 television commercial, the $10,000 catalog, or even the $40,000 campaign. I had to keep playing the game not in spite but because of the fact that I was losing the game.
For Jezebel
I Am The Anonymous Model — July 21, 2009
Yes, there were parties, often very strange ones. (The fashion industry relies on an astounding number and variety of externalities to make the investments it demands appear, to its principals, worth it.) I decided to stop seeing a dude when he pleaded, in the doorway of a Carroll Gardens townhouse, “Don’t leave, baby, I just scored cocaine.” A curly-haired Scientologist teen sitcom actor who carried a wad of hundreds secured with a rubber band lectured me in a night club about the additive contents of Red Bull. I remember once hanging out in Los Angeles with a born-again Ultimate Fighting champion and his Playmate girlfriend — “She shot her issue before she met me, you know,” explained the champion — at the home of a Texan introduced to me as Anna Wintour’s de facto stepson. The Texan worked — naturally — in the West Coast office of Men’s Vogue, and he kept a loaded handgun in his kitchen drawer, next to the aluminum foil. I started talking to the Texan’s fraternity brother, who moved to Los Angeles from New York at 25 because, he said, he felt one couldn’t move to Los Angeles at 28 or 29. If it didn’t work out and you had to go back East, it would be too late.
“Do you miss New York?” I asked the fraternity brother.
The man looked at me for a second. In the kitchen, the Texan removed the magazine from his pistol and handed it to a makeup artist.
“New York is the best place in the world to be,” he said.
At the time, I interpreted this as a straightforward endorsement of the city. New York is simply where you live if you have any choice in the matter! But I am no longer so sure of the judgment.
Modeling and the Tragedy of Karen Mulder — July 1, 2009
How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say “has it all,” could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it’s got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It’s always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy “they,” isn’t always its most credible narrator. It’s the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.
It’s the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, “about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world’s top agency owners.”(Halperin characterized the segment as “shocking.”) It’s the story of the BBC’s undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as “alarming” and “surprising.”) It’s the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff‘s documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both “shocking” and “surprising.”)
What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one’s own credulity to insist on being “surprised,” “alarmed” and “shocked” by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such underground media as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.
For The New York Observer
Watching The Rugby World Cup With Mickey Rourke — October 25, 2011
Now that the cover band had cleared the stage, middle-aged men in sports jerseys jostled one another in the crowd. A young woman leaned in and drew a fern, the symbol of New Zealand, on someone’s cheek with a Sharpie. A table full of French fans, several in cockscomb hats, was an island of tricolor in a sea of black. A waitress made desultory rounds. If you’d wanted a table, you’d have had to be there by 2 at the latest.
Mickey Rourke had not been there by 2 A.M. Mickey Rourke was standing.
“Well, I was hoping to see New Zealand play Wales,” said Mr. Rourke, wistfully. (The Welsh had been eliminated by France in the semi-finals.) Mr. Rourke’s interest in rugby is a recent one. The wizened actor—who this late evening was dressed in V-neck T-shirt, and a blazer with a fob chain bisecting the breast—is set to play the lead in a biopic about Welsh fullback Gareth Thomas, the first, and to date only, rugby player to come out as gay.
Uniqlo Opens Massive Manhattan Flagship, Plots Global Domination — October 18, 2011
“They’re an incredible company to work with,” said designer Robert Tagliapietra. “They’re so meticulous. It’s pretty incredible that they’re able to do what they do at their price point.”
As he was talking about meticulousness, a large nail fell out of an exposed ceiling duct and onto Jeffrey Costello’s shoulder. Mr. Costello picked it up and inspected it. Mr. Tagliapietra glanced at the nail, and decided to continue. “They really respect design.”
André Leon Talley’s Weirdo Salons — February 15, 2011
“People say don’t judge a book by its cover,” said Peter Brant Jr., between sips from a Champagne coupe. “But designing book covers is a multimillion-dollar business.”
For Jalouse magazine
Epris de Diane — March, 2011
Born in Brussels to Holocaust survivors — her mother was imprisoned at Auschwitz — Diane Halfin began a degree in economics at the University of Geneva, though she spent May 1968 in Paris, with the protesters. Mid-way through her studies, she became pregnant by a boyfriend who happened to be an Austrian prince and an heir to the Fiat fortune. She offered to have an abortion, but Egon Von Fürstenberg argued they should wed. Their dynastic marriage joined her to parents-in-law who had attended the Berlin Olympics as Hitler’s guests.
Von Furstenberg is not one to rest on her laurels. (In fact, she literally rarely ceases moving — yoga-lithe at 64, she is likely to begin a sentence with her feet on the floor, extrapolate her point while stretching her neck to one side, and conclude while drawing her legs up underneath her, like a cat. She makes a point of looking comfortable.) She started her dress line, because, she has said, “The minute I knew I was about to be Egon’s wife, I decided to have a career. I wanted to be someone of my own.”
For Bookforum
Holiday Escapism — Dec-Jan, 2011
In 1968, a suggested gift for the lady of the house was a device called the Telequote III, a stock-tracking computer. “No more dinner conversations about what happened at the grocery store,” Neiman Marcus promised, for “she’ll have fascinating tidbits about another market.” Little wifey is shown disinterestedly tapping at her Telequote while dressed in a caftan and slippers.
Leather Report — Apr/May, 2010
Miuccia Prada has found success making clothes that, though often beautiful, are rarely nice to look at—or as longtime New York Times critic Cathy Horyn once wrote, clothes that “almost dared you to call them ugly.” Although founded in 1913 by Mario Prada, who believed that women had no place in business, the company’s golden age has come under the leadership of his granddaughter. Not that Miuccia, born Maria Bianchi in 1949, ever intended to take over the family company. She is a self-identified feminist who used her inherited wealth to fund various escapes from the family fold—a student flirtation with Communism, a doctorate in political science, five years of training in mime at the Piccolo Teatro—before she deigned to begin designing handbags in the late 1970s. There are not many refugees from academia in the rag trade, but Miuccia made the transition with panache.
For NO Magazine
Profile: Irina Lazareanu — Issue 10, Winter 2010
“Yoko’s gonna do ‘Give Peace A Chance’ with us as a finale,” says Lazareanu. Sean Lennon, her frequent collaborator and the producer of that still-pending album, Moldy Peaches singer Adam Green, Pete Doherty, and the Strokes’ Albert Hammond, Jr., will make up the band. All of the collaborators save for Doherty, who will be in London until days before the concert, have been holed up together at Green’s place to rehearse — and to do a healthy amount of shit-shooting, joking around, and tangential noodling. (Also, notes Lazareanu, Lennon keeps slipping off into empty rooms to hook up with his girlfriend, model/singer Charlotte Kemp Muhl.) “It’s like musical kindergarten,” Lazareanu says wryly, after 48 hours at Green’s apartment. “Sometimes Auntie Rini has to put her foot down and say, Okay, we’re doing this now!”
For The Sunday Star-Times
Access All Areas — September 27, 2009
Richie Rich and Pamela Anderson, who was wearing a long, loose pink scarf as a dress, had already entertained queries ranging from the mundane (a Television New Zealand reporter asked, “What’s the next big revolution from Pamela Anderson?” The actress quipped, “Revolution? This revolution will not be televised”) to the bizarre (the Woman’s Weekly wanted to know if “Pammie” was planning to drop in on Temuera Morrison, her co-star from the 1996 B-movie Barb Wire — “He’s from New Zealand, he’s a Maori,” the reporter explained) to the judgmental (“How would you like to see your daughter dressing? As little as you?”).
