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Volume 4-2011
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______________________________________________ Style, Fashion and their Disastrous Twins By RAR The model-clients of Elite Model Management (Los Angeles roster shown below - there are similar for New York, Miami and Toronto) provide an extraordinary peek into not only the world of fashion, but also of style. Fashion is a designer's statement, an expression of creativity from the production side. Style is all about selection, presentation and attitude. This group of photographs presented below offers a panoramic view of the archetypes available to women, ranging from the vulnerable (Alejandra, somewhat comically, to my eye) to the '50s housewife Amanda Viola, who appears to be completely absorbed in La Dolce Vita. The prominence of cigarette smoking in this collection is interesting and also an element of style. Things that kill you, used as props, bespeak a reckless lifestyle, so have a natural attraction to art directors. Some of these girls are flat-out beautiful, even among the range of probable subjective opinions. Most just have a factor, which varies with the individuality of each. They are "plug-in" imagery, specific cuts of humankind that represent certain broadly recognized types. Of these photographs below, for instance, Penelope Cordoba looks like a rich man's wife. Tess Wohrle looks like an actress. Veronica Pfeiferova looks like a successful actress. Ali Stephens looks like a photo shoot, as does Charlott Cordes, which is no doubt what they were up to in these shots, but Lauren Brown looks like an art film. Here lies the difference between personality, a style thing, and "fashion sense". One can be the womanly creature Lauren Brown portrays in this shot - maybe not for long, given the effects of cigarette smoking - but one can't really be what is being portrayed in the fashion shots of Michaela or Julie Ordon, not that you don't see it all the time. Katy Perry refers to this, speaking of her own stage presentation, as "full-out tranny". One sees young girls and old woman who seemingly present as such 24/7. One I know personally once revealed that she went from being a makeup-free flower child to a committed face painter after reading a report in which she was described as "a plain girl". Ouch! No one wants that! Or do they? Plain works pretty well for Anna Norheim and Nicole Lichtenberg. Plain, of course, is synonymous with "natural", and it is another style choice. Plain beauty is a big part of the requirement for getting a contract with the likes of Elite. All of these girls have the symmetry and dimensions required for the position. For girls 14 to 15 years old, that means they are between 5'7" to 6'0" tall, and for girls from 16 to 22 that means 5'9" to 6'0" tall. Those are the optimal altitudes from which to hang clothing. Linear-vertical types also tend to be thin, which works best on camera, lenses tending to "add" a few pounds to the captured image. The idea is to be thin and to photograph perfectly.
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