Are you the face of Fabulous magazine?

Hi guys,
Last night I went to the launch of the 'Face of Fabulous magazine' competition. (You know Fabulous magazine: the one that comes free with the News of the World on a Sunday?) It looks like this:

The event was the usual bloggers fun: champagne, cupcakes, hair and make up, and a professional photographer (plus a very yummy male model to show us girls how to strike a pose!) All of the clothes for playing dress up were provided by New Look, although my hayfever attack and the heat meant I definitely didn't feel like dressing up, hence the lack of pics! I fell slightly in love with these amazing New Look heels though, as modelled by Jenny (of The Style PA):


Can you believe these crazy shoes cost just £49.99? Apparently they are inspired by the circus. Anyway, enough of my shoe and cupcake chat (they were delicious cupcakes) and on to the competition: its open to any female over the age of 16 who is a resident of the UK.

Obviously, I do not possess a model figure: or model good looks, so I won't be entering. If you do, you can vist the Fabulous facebook page to enter the competition. The prize includes being on the cover of Fabulous magazine, having a photo shoot in New York and being guarenteed a year’s modelling contract with Next Models: definitely worth giving it a go if you think you've got what it takes! Let me know if you enter - then I can say I found you here first!

Love, Tor xx

PS - Goly gosh! Me (who never wins anything) won the star prize at the raffle at the end of the evening: a £250 trolley dash around New Look. Obviously I will be posting all about it as soon as it happens!

Simply Be: Do you have what it takes to be a plus sized model?

Julian MacDonald (not exactly an advocate of plus sized modelling!) said that if you're a size 14 in a room full of size 10s then you're in the wrong room. I say prove him wrong and enter Simply Be's latest competition to find their new face, and the next plus-sized talent.

Simply Be are searching for the new face of plus size fashion. So if you're a size 14 or above, a natural in front of the camera and full of confidence this could be your chance to shine! I never normally post about this kind of press release, but I thought it was refreshing that a company was searching for someone normal sized that I could relate to, even if it is a plus sized fashion company (which means, to be fair, they have to use plus sized models)

The prizes are almost too good to be true. (If you want to be a model, that is!) First, the winner will be whisked away for a shoot with Best magazine. One makeover, lots of pictures and a short wait later, they’ll be named Simply Be’s Plus Size Model 2010! Then it's down to work. The new face of the Simply Be Style Files can expect more shoots, more portfolio shots and more exposure.

Simply Be’s newest model will need to look every bit the part, so, and this is the most exciting bit as far as i'm concerned, the lucky winner will also receive £10,000 to spend on fabulous Simply Be fashion! And to kick start the winner’s modelling career, Simply Be will even arrange a consultation with 12 + UK model management, a prize that money can’t buy!

How to enter

ENTRIES MUST INCLUDE: Your contact details: Email Address, Postal Address and Telephone number.

PHOTOS: Make sure you include a full length shot, a side profile and a head shot.

YOUR VITAL STATISTICS: Jot down your height and weight. Then add your waist, dress, bra and shoe sizes.

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOU: Tell us who you are, what you do, where you find fashion inspiration and anything else you think will make you stand out from the crowd.

THE REASON: Just one sentence on why you should be Simply Be's Plus Size Model 2010!

SEND YOUR ENTRIES TO: Griffin House, Lever Street, Manchester, ME60 6ESOR EMAIL THEM TO: simplybefashion@hotmail.co.uk

The deadline for entries is 27th August 2010 – don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity!

For more information visit the Simply Be website, and you can follow Simply Be on Twitter for updates: @SimplyBeUK

Good luck!

Tor xx

PS - Don't forget to keep voting for me in the Sarenza bloggers competition! Just click here to send me to Paris!

Style, naturallly.....

Thanks to my beloved blog, I receive a lot of "informative" emails telling me about new products and ideas, or asking me to review the most bizarre things: bingo wing spanks anyone? Exactly.

However, for a change, this morning I received an email I actually found pretty interesting. It directed me to www.summerrayne.net and the work and blog of model-activist Summer Rayne Oakes. The focus is on socially conscious fashion, but for a change, not in a patronising or preachy way (as is the case with many involved in the socially conscious/sustainability agenda)

Summer has also written a book called "Style, Naturally" (hence the title of the post: i'm all brains!) which you can see here.

Hero: Isabella Rossellini

Hello blogosphere,

I've been preparing this post for a little while because I wanted to do justice to my subject. Isabella Rossellini is beautiful, no duh. She's a wonderful actress with an eclectic career and she was a successful model with a famous Lancome contract and a bazillion Vogue covers to her name. This is not why I'm featuring her. No, Isabella Rossellini gets a whole post to herself not just because she's super stylish but because she is batshit crazy in the acest possible way.

Not in the diva way, unfortunately. This is an old Dolce and Gabbana campaign.

I am always on the lookout for obscure fashion-related literature so when Francine Prose alerted me to Rosellini's autobiography in her neato how-to book "Reading Like a Writer" (books about writing/reading are my porn), I cyber-schlepped over to Amazon Marketplace, paid a teeny £3 fee and lo! "Some of Me" appeared on my doormat two weeks later.

"Some of Me" as any person of substance will, know, is a play on Katherine Hepburn's autobiography "All of Me." It's so called because the author acknowledges, she ain't telling the truth for no-one:

It's a habit of mine to embellish and colour events until I lose sight of what really happened. Even when I was a child my grandmother had to say: "Verita o fantasia?" ---- "Truth or fantast?" If you want to eliminate my grandmother's kindness and to put it more bluntly, I lie. I always did.

Friends, this is the finest celebrity memoir I have ever encountered. Better then that one Groucho Marx tried to ban because he was old and drunk and bitched and libelled up the ying-yang. This book is chock full of glossy photos, famous ex-boyfriends, philosophy and batshit conversations she has with her dead father.

Even the glossy stuff of Rossellini as super-gorgeous model is undercut by humour and a sense of the macabre.

Caption: The first advert where I did not have to use the wax from the undertakers to fix my broken teeth.

Oh god, oh god, I love the beauty industry. And I love Isabella Rossellini even more. On reading in the New York Times about the pristine condition of Lenin's head as preserved by Doctor Sergei Lubov (the doctor was quoted: "If a pathologist looked at samples of skin from Lenin and a fresh corpse, he could not tell which is which, it is so well preserved."), Rossellini cut out the article and sent it Lancome with a note: "Doctor Debov may be of some use to us." But, she adds, I got no response.

Bitch has 28 Vogue covers to her name. 78% have surprised eyes.

And have we even talked about Martin Scorsese and David Lynch? She married Scorsese and dated Lynch for about 7 years. How would we even deal with that in our celebrity-obsessed culture? If it happened today, we'd be forced to refer to them by some awful amalgamation of their names. Scor-bella or Isnch or some shit.

Scorbella

Isnch

I really really have to do a "David Lynch Women" post - there's an insane amount of fashiony stuff to talk about in his films, his collaboration with Christian Louboutin and his latest adverts for Gucci perfumes. Still, this ain't his post, it's Isabella's and that bastard broke her heart. However, h did give her a couple of kick-ass roles in the meantime.

Dorothy in Blue Velvet - the film with "the severed ear in the heart of suburbia" as my A-Level film studies tutors were fond of saying INCESSANTLY

Perdita Durango in Wild At Heart

In addition to all of this eyebrow work, Lynch also gave Rossellini several pieces of his art. This one is my favourite - it's called "How to Assemble a Chicken"

I mean, don't you instinctively warm to a women who lovingly displays a rotted chicken carcass in her home? THAT'S frickin' style in my book.

However, among the many awesome attributes of "Some of Me,' one of the standout chapters concerns Isabella's obsession with insects' sex lives. Truly, I was edu-tained reading about spider masturbation, earthworm self-impregnation and snails that change gender.

"Don't think it was the frequent divorces, the homosexuality, the extra marital affais with the creation of half-brothers and sisters around the world all taking place within my family that forceme into being disrespectful of tradition and adopting unconventional attitudes. My pets helped a great deal. Once you've lived with dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, pig, you've seen it all.... Pets make you face the darkest, most hidden facts of nature. There have been sex crossings, species crossings, even sex with inanimate objects. Spanky, my pig, humped the living room furniture every night."

Isabella with Spanky and his canine companion.

This obsession this the sex lives of animals has taken a completely ace turn recently as Rossellini has just turned director and produced a number of shorts subtitled 'Green Porno' where she stars as a series of insects looking for love. The entire shorts aren't online but you can see an interview with clips here:

If this doesn't convince you that this woman is worthy of worship, then I don't know what to say to you. She dresses as a giant spider and simulates sex with a paper cut-out. What moe do you want? She's fearless, weird, cinema royalty* and she has a sensible haircut. A total out-and-out style hero.

Bug-out, friends,
Becky.


*if I have to tell you she's Ingrid Bergman's daughter, I'll cry.

Chanel - that look is so Mao (couture)

Hey blogosphere - more couture and, more crucially, more Karl.

A great deal has already been blogged about the A/W 08 Chanel couture just shown. Me, I've always had a soft spot for this particular time of year, especially after devouring the amazing Chanel Storyville documentary shown on BBC4 on the talented artisans who actually put the damn clothes together. If I know nothing else, I know this: I'd rather hang out with the housewives/craftswomen extraordinaire in the embroidery room than 20 Amanda Harlechs. We would wear pristine white work dresses, laugh like sailors and collect our Chanel bag on retirement - it is a dream of mine.

You can start watching the whole 6 episode extravaganza here. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it already but if you haven't, I advise you put some time aside and wallow in the sheer lovely crazed Frenchness of it all.

Anyway, back to this year's couture. It seems all the brou-ha-ha centres around the tower o' power or Le Chanel Robe Gargatua:

Hey, it ain't just me thinking along these lines. Even Women's Wear Daily online was muttering darkly about 'Madame Mao' (strangely I can't find that phrase in their new review dated today...mainstream fashion writers have to watch their commercial ps and qs much more then we dirty online independents) and the wonderfully astute Le Style Sauvage reads the big jacket as Chanel's assertion of economic untouchability even as the nature of world economics changes:
"The size of the jacket sent a different message: Chanel is poised to take over the world. Not the world as we know it--that world is shrinking like wool in a dryer--but the new world."
-- Suzanna Mars, Le Style Sauvage (read her, she's ace)

Although a symbol that visually riffs on a Chinese Communist leader's iconography might seem contrary to Mars's reading of the jacket as a paean to luxury's marketplace longevity, it is not as contradictory as it might first appear. Women in rapidly developing countries, especially those with a communist history (Russia, China etc), these children of Mao - these are the socialites and couture customers of tomorrow. And they better have the legs for minis and ballet flats.

Lots of lovely stuff to be seen however. I enjoy Karl's ability to twist Chanel iconography into a seeming endless array of sartorial options. Particularly love the camellia skirt on model #2 and the unexpectedly toughness of model #3. I have an ace Miss Sixty jumper with that kind of tooled puffa sleeve...I shall have to dig it out. I also enjoy every commentator's complaint that the models had trouble posing without their high heels. I quite enjoy a bit of ingénue gawkiness myself - makes the whole thing less rarefied.However, I'm genuinely quaking at the thought that demi-opaque tights are going to be big news again. Stupid trend rumours delivering on their promises...bah.

I'm surprised though that no blogger has commented on the state of the models faces. I was browsing merrily through style.com's detail shot archive and I was shocked to see how exhausted and cracked-out some of our top models look in close-up. I sincerely hope it was the lighting but some of it has to be a sheer lack of a good eight hours shuteye:

Seriously -- click and enlarge and check the bags. I honestly think Vlada Roslyakova (centre) is trolling the front row for brains. Even lovely Iekeliene Stange looks ready to either nut someone or fall forward snoring and drooling on her bouclé. I know models are worked like whippets in couture week but jeepers Karl - let 'em sleep.

That's enough out of you, Kaiser. You're just acting out. No more ipods for you.

Love,
Becky.

Tit-Tock it's Pirelli o'Clock

Hello friends,

It's getting towards the end of the year and like many responsible young people, my thoughts are turning to how I'm going to mark my time. Buying a New Years' calender is a tricky business for the aesthetically inclined. It's got to be glossy, embody in its pictures a little of my true nature and have good sized squares for me to write my important business doings and whatnots.

That said, I'll settle for boobies.

I was reminded of how much I love an arty or art-ish nude whilst browsing in Borders and happening upon The New Complete Pirelli Calendars a glossy tome that is wrist splintering in weight and filled with all the Pirelli Calendar images from 1964 to the present day. Apart from a chance to look at pretty much every supermodel that's ever been revelling in purest sun-drenched nudity, it also provides a fascinating glimpse into 50 years of mainstream erotica and how our scientific notions of phwrogh! have changed over the half century. It's also pretty cool to see models (which, face it, women and gay men pretty much own, visually and emotionally speaking) shot with an unabashed eye to the mainstream heterosexual male audience. Let us not forget, the calender is a tool to promote car tyres and I like to imagine Karen Elson's pale artistic buttocks hanging on the walls of the greasiest of garages. High fashion crossover is good, huh?

March 2001. Model: Karen Elson. Photographer: Mario Testino

Now, the book is an eye-watering £50 in the shops but like all good nerds, I swallowed my despair and went online. You can see the vast majority of Pirelli pictures at the Pirelli website

albeit in lo-res andd slightly cropped form. You should buy the book for the full experience. And some nice tyres. And Pirelli should not sue me. Yes. That part is important.

Doctor E-rotica analyses some Pirelli images from across the decades
When you're digging around the archives, the Pirelli image is fascinating. It's so strange to see how the brand has moved so much from the artish titties and beer approach to a more out-and-out high fashion stance. Now, Pirelli has always employed a lot of fashion photographers to do their shoots - pretty much everyone big in the business but a surprising number of them do soft core a great service and a an equally surprising number don't seem to be satisfied until all the world's hetero winkies have shrivelled and inverted like sea anemones.

See here:

August 1969. Photographer: Harri Pecchinotti,

This shoot, only the fifth in Pirelli's history, is one of my favourites. No 'name' models but a really amazing scuzzy San Antonio vibe. Sassy urban girls in bikinis....who don't know they're being watched - check those low angles and photographer's print sheet motif and marvel at the seedy voyeurism that's being implied. 'Don't Walk' and 'Don't Touch', friend because this is the sexually violent urban world that created "Last Exit to Brooklyn".These natural untouched photos are genuinely sexy but they're critiquing our lewdness even as we look. It's a really amazing juggling act.

November 1970, Model: Alexandra Bastedo. Photographer: Francis Giacobetti

Crude, sure. But I love an image that cuts to the chase. The Pirelli calender was always meant to be photographs ofglorious women with their tits out, shot by master photographers. The ultra zoom on the nipple is erotic, sure but also turns the breast into this strange abstraction. I love we can see the texture of the cotton (is there anything more innocent and prim then a grey cotton bra? I love love love that juxtaposition) and the moisture on the skin. A lovely breast is one thing but a visceral lovely breast is quite another.

November 1972. Photographer: Sarah Moon

This is the first Pirelli shoot photographed by a woman and it shows. It's a very female type of sexuality on show here, with an emphasis on texture and implication. It also doesn't acknowledge maleness or the male gaze - the whole year it's the same: gauzey, lacey Pretty Baby style pseudo lesbianism. It may not do it for the fellas but I think it's pretty ace. The fact that the lovely frizzy grainy 1970s style resembles the decadent Ossie Clark print ads is so much the better:

Then....the 1980s happened and it was all big lips and bitches. Pirelli from this era is ACE.

November 1985. Model: Iman. Photographer: Norman Parkinson

I'm obsessed with Iman at the moment. If you're not already, I heartily endorse Project Runway: Canada as worthy of your reality TV time. Iman is a frickin' QUEEN and the Canadians provides a surprising amount of pure fashiony goodness. I salute them, their mounties and their tendency to produce excellent improvisational comics.

February 1999. Model: Sophie Dahl. Photographer: Herb Ritts

Ah, the 90s and their back to basic minimalism. The majority of the photos from this era have stark backgrounds and acres of tasteful bosom. Sidenote: don't you miss fat Sophie Dahl? I sure do - she was something magic back then.

And then Pirelli caught art. Sucks for us when Annie Leibowitz gets all Lucien Freud on our asses:

March 2000, Model: June Omura. Photographer: Annie Leibowitz

And lo! we cry as one: I can't wank to that! It's especially unfair when you consider that Leibowitz was getting some hot Susan Sontag action of her own.

Way sexier than ol' corpse flesh above. She probably wouldn't have done a Pirelli though.
What with the whole "Images anaesthetise" thing.

This brings us up to 2008 and the latest calender. Without doubt, this is the WORST Pirelli calender I've ever seen. Get this: no nudity. Not even a buttock outline. It's just a bunch of models in 'Oriental' clothing, mostly Dior.

Go to the site, you'll see Lily Donaldson, Agyness Deyn and Du Juan.....fully clothed and in a shoot more boring than American Elle (the apex of fashion zzzzzz). Talk about images anaesthetising us, Susan. Neither I nor you, nor anyone else can become aroused by Caroline Trentini with a cabbage on her head.

Wow. Bodes well, huh? 2008: Chinese Year of the Meh. Let's pray for 2009 and the full reign of the ample buttock.

Love,
B.

Yasmin le Bon is regressing.

Hello friends,

Today I am ill, so no lengthy discourse. Instead please enjoy this informative 1989 MTV video of the super-dupe models backstage at Armani. Cindy Crawford hosts.