Australia's next top Miu Miu

miu miu FW1314 via wwd.com

Cassi van den Dungen missed out on winning Australia’s Next Top Model in 2009. But she has just achieved something that has so far proven beyond the grasp of any actual winners of the high rating Australian reality show: she just walked the Miu Miu show in Paris.

Japan accuses Russia of synchronising Miu Miu

getty via daylife

Russia's Natalia Ischenko and Svetlana Romashina are the reigning queens of synchronised swimming. Their high energy routines have earned them multiple world championships and after a mesmerising performance on Monday, they are now tipped to win the duet gold medal today. But one fashionista has given them a poor score for the originality of their costumes. 

Myf nabs Miu Miu - apparently alongside Katie Holmes

myf shepherd, miu miu SS09/style.com


Well she missed out on Lanvin. That was the big European campaign for which Australia’s new modelling supernova Myf Shepherd was recently on hold - and to which frockwriter recently alluded, although without mentioning the name. As reported by Supermodels.nl) via The Fashion Spot however – and as just confirmed by Shepherd’s Australian agent, Kathy Ward - Shepherd has just shot the Miu Miu campaign with photographic duo Mert & Marcus. That’s Prada’s high profile diffusion line. Just how prominent a role she plays in this multi-girl campaign remains to be seen. According to sources close to the Miu Miu shoot, months-long speculation that Katie Holmes was due to star in the campaign were on the money.

The complete Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2009 cast is reportedly:

Katie Holmes
Darya Kurovska
Elena Lomkova
Imogen Morris Clarke
Katie Fogarty
Myf Shepherd
Sophie Srej
Tilda Lindstam
Yulia Leontieva

According to Kathy Ward, Shepherd shot the Miu Miu campaign last week – and she has also just shot a Levi’s campaign, in addition to editorials for both Paris Vogue and German Vogue.

Not a bad get for a 17 year-old who has been modelling for less than 12 months – and who was famously overlooked by the producers of Australia’s Next Top Model for a role on the 2008 show.

Frockwriter has been tracking Shepherd’s career since she first popped up on our radar in April, in the leadup to Australian Fashion Week - to her first lowkey shows in New York, in July, for Resort 09. Not to mention, the 51 shows she walked in her very first international runway season, Spring/Summer 2009.

Shepherd's SS09 shows included some of the fashion industry’s biggest names, including Prada, Gucci, Fendi and Balenciaga.

And 17 year-old Shepherd did all that whilst reportedly also managing to score straight A's in her Year 12 exams in Brisbane.

A Miu Miu, a Miu Miu - they still all fall down

miu miu SS09/style.com

And there I was, having a SS09 debrief with Oz shoe guru Matt ‘Imelda’ Jordan earlier this afternoon, saying how fascinating it would have been to be a fly on the wall at Prada over the past two weeks. And if, keen to avoid yet more bad press over model stacks in killer heels, Prada might have done an eleventh-hour switch of shoes for the show of its diffusion label Miu Miu. Because dang, how terribly sensible the shoes of last night's Miu Miu show in fact appear to be, by comparison with some of the other footwear monstrosities that we have seen on the past month’s runways. Overlooking the nouveau pauvre-look burlap uppers of course. As it emerges however, what happened to the very last girl modelling the very last look of the very last show of SS09?

According to the testimony of The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman via her virtual Style.com alterego:

“As the last girl was going backstage she yes, fell down onto the catwalk, to many sympathetic gasps. You definitely knew that this was the season of the extreme shoe and I knew at that point that it was time to go home”.

And if that’s not funny enough – in a very macabre way of course – then have a look at Style.com’s just-posted portfolio of runway images from the Miu Miu show.


miu miu's relatively 'sensible' - but apparently still unwearable, SS09 shoes/style.com

If this sequence of images is as per the show, then the very last girl of the Miu Miu show was none other than Russian Yulia Kharlaponova (pictured at the top of this post).

That’s right, the very same girl who famously fell directly in front of the camera pit during last week’s Prada show in Milan – images of whom, AOT on Prada's fish mosaic of a runway floor, wound up splashed over newspapers across the globe.

A lucky escape then for Australia’s Myf Shepherd who was, according to the Style.com images, the fourth last girl in the Miu Miu show.


myf shepherd, miu miu SS09/style.it