Vogue Australia's Model Series is an IMG Models exclusive

The competition in Australia's modelling market was already heating up before IMG Models rolled into town last July. Sydney agency Chic Management was accused of "undercutting" the competition at last year's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia via the agency's "Chic Exclusive" shows featuring only Chic models. Frockwriter understands that the Chic Exclusives will continue at this year's event, which officially starts on Monday, but has kicked off already with a few off-schedule shows around town this week. Tomorrow morning's Carla Zampatti show in the Sydney CBD will feature only Chic girls. Meanwhile, IMG Models Australia has returned fire by stitching up its own big exclusive - with no less than Vogue Australia. And the other agencies are fuming. 

Frockwriter turns four. Where to from here?

4th july barbie/the couture touch

It’s the fourth of July, which makes it American Independence Day. And of course, frockwriter’s birthday. Now we are four. At this time, I usually take a moment to reflect on some of the highlights of the previous year. On this occasion, I’d like to take a more holistic view of the blog’s entire four year career, including some reflections on the experiment with the Press+ metered paywall, which was introduced in February. Correct me if I am wrong, but I do believe frockwriter is the world’s first fashion blog to introduce a paywall. As a guinea pig in this arena, I would like to provide some insights. It has been quite an interesting perspective on consumer behaviour.

A salute to Kirstie Clements

vogue.com.au

The Australian fashion industry had a reality check yesterday, with the announcement that Kirstie Clements had been unceremoniously dethroned as editor of Vogue Australia. Unceremoniously is putting it kindly. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Clements - up until yesterday the second longest-serving editor of the current Australian mainstream fashion magazine pack after Marie Claire's Jackie Frank - was escorted from the premises by security, with her phone confiscated [update 19/05: although Clements made no effort on Thursday or Friday on Twitter to correct this version of events - which we understand were witnessed by third parties - she has since denied to the SMH that her phone was confiscated or that she was escorted from the building]. The axing of two other senior NewsLifeMedia editorial executives at the same moment might have helped assuage the humiliation. This was business, after all, for News Limited, nothing personal. Given the accompanying press release, it was pretty clear that new News Limited ceo Kim Williams and his axe-woman, new NewsLifeMedia ceo Nicole Sheffield, had no idea just how personal a matter it would have been for Clements. They stated she had been Vogue's editor for 10 years, out of a total 13 years with the magazine. In fact, Clements was Vogue's editor for 13 years - but she originally joined the title in 1985 as a receptionist, before moving up through the ranks and briefly defecting to the newly-relaunched Harper's Bazaar in 1998. Some thank-you for almost 30 years of service to one of the world's greatest publishing brands.

Andrej Pejic: Shooting Jean Paul Gaultier's Spring/Summer 2011 campaign with Karolina Kurkova, rattling rednecks from Sydney to Serbia

karolina kurkova's facebook

Overnight Czech supermodel Karolina Kurkova published a shot of herself and a Jean Paul Gaultier Spring/Summer 2011 campaign co-star on Facebook and the cat is out of the bag and all over the net. Australia’s Andrej Pejic is also in the campaign. That’s the second big international SS11 campaign booked by Pejic to which frockwriter referred in our post on Tuesday. It is unclear at this stage if the JPG campaign features any other models beyond Kurkova and Pejic. But both do look to be wearing similar pleated trench coats – which were prominently featured in Gaultier’s SS11 womenswear show in Paris in October. The garment does not, however, appear anywhere in Gaultier’s mens SS11 collection, which was shown in Paris in June and which, as you may recall, Pejic in fact walked. What conclusion can we draw from this? That, unless Kurkova posted a staged teaser shot, Pejic may well be modelling womenswear in this campaign. Stop the press. 

At 14 this Polish teenager was banned from RAFW. Then she opened Calvin Klein

calvin klein FW0910/wwd

A shoutout to Monika Jagaciak. On Sunday we mentioned that although banned in Sydney last year, Jagaciak, now 15, had made a “breakthrough” in New York. Given that New York Fashion Week's Fall/Winter 09/10 season was only a couple of days old - and in spite of models.com hyperbole - it was an ambitious statement. Well, after scoring some of the week’s biggest shows, including Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan and Proenza Schouler, Jagaciak has just pulled off the ultimate model coup: opening and closing Calvin Klein. To be sure, there are many big shows in New York, however none as highly coveted from a modelling perspective as Calvin Klein. This journalist feels we owe Jagaciak a special thumbsup, given that we shoulder much responsibility for the fracas in which she became engulfed in the leadup to Rosemount Australian Fashion Week last year.

Click here to see the complete Calvin Klein collection on wwd.com.

To recap, in early 2008 IMG announced plans to fly out a contingent of its ‘Development’ board models to tread the runways at Australian Fashion Week, which is operated by IMG.

The idea served two purposes: to give IMG’s fledglings some off-main circuit runway experience and also, rev up the quality of AFW’s much-maligned group shows.

The Development girls had been promised minimum work in the group shows – with anything else up for grabs once they attended castings.

Jagaciak was promoted to local media above the other girls, as the VIP “face” of the event.

A promotional photograph of Jagaciak, lying on her back in a Vichy spa, wearing a wet, white swimsuit, was provided to The Sunday Telegraph, which published it on April 6, not thinking to ask her age.

Here is the image:


l'officiel singapore via TFS

But the names and most of the ages of the IMG Development girls had been documented in this April 5 blog post (on a blog called Fully Chic, which I was writing at the time for NEWS.com.au, News Limited's Australian online news portal).

After an April 7 phone call to Jagaciak's Polish mother agency, it emerged that Jagaciak had only recently turned 15 - and had been 13 at the time the shot was taken. Taken by Singaporean photographic duo Chuando & Frey, the image had been published in the February 2008 edition of L’Officiel Singapore.

A subsequent April 8 blog post entitled, “This Polish teenager was 13 when this photo was taken, do you have a problem with it?”, promoted on page one of NEWS.com.au, sparked considerable reader debate.

On April 9, Vogue Australia cancelled a planned cover shoot with Jagaciak, claiming Jagaciak was too young (in spite of the fact that Vogue had previously featured a 15 year-old New Zealander on the cover).

On April 11 The Daily Telegraph (same publisher as The Sunday Telegraph) jumped onto the story, asking “Should Monika Jagaciak be at Australian Fashion Week?” - soliciting comment from, among others, the Australian Family Association.

Later that day IMG FASHION Asia Pacific made the decision to ban all under-16s from the event.

Several weeks later News Limited dispatched a news crew to Poland.

According to IMG FASHION Asia Pacific managing director Simon Lock, the crew staked out Jagaciak's home and school, upsetting her. The incident prompted heated debate between the various IMG offices (the latter witnessed by independent sources).

The Daily Telegraph published paparazzi-style long-distance shots of Jagaciak en route to school with a classmate in this May 1 2008 story.

The story included quotes from Jagaciak's mother and local model agent and does make make reference to a gag order from IMG.

According to Lock, The Telegraph crew was dispatched to Poland after initial interview requests with the Jagaciak family were denied by IMG.

I was unable to blog about this at the time due to the fact that I was working for News Ltd.

I found out about it at AFW, when Lock bailed me up one day to say (words to the effect), “Do you know how much trouble you caused that young girl?”.

For the record - and one more time - I would just like to state that I do not personally have an issue with underage models.

But that is on the very strict proviso that underage models are fully chaperoned by responsible adults. And that the work they do is age-appropriate.

By age-appropriate, I mean that underage models should not be permitted to pose for sexually provocative imagery.

No Australian media outlets asked if Gemma Ward was too young for AFW, even though Ward was 15 when she debuted on its runways in May 2003, one of many 15 year-olds who have participated in the event.

Nor were any questions asked when Tallulah Morton opened the Josh Goot show in May 2005. Morton's agent told media outlets that she was 14. It later emerged that she was in fact 13 at the time.

Banning underage models from major fashion events does not protect them from exploitation. Notwithstanding unscrupulous parties who try to take nude backstage shots of models changing, underage girls are in fact likely to be safer at major fashion events than anywhere else, by virtue of the fact that these events are crawling with media outlets.

Banning Jagaciak from AFW did not prevent the subsequent production and publication of yet more provocative photographs - including several shots in which her breasts are clearly visible.

Evidently neither IMG nor Jagaciak’s parents have had a problem with that.

That’s great if Jagaciak has finally cracked the big time. Well done. She would undoubtedly have arrived there with or without a few turns down the relatively low profile Sydney runway.

And look, if any company has a history of embracing sexually provocative imagery of teenagers, it’s Calvin Klein.

The Sunday Telegraph checks up on "this frockwriter blog"

the sunday telegraph

Frockwriter applauds the practise of thorough checking. There can never be enough of it. That said, we could not help have a chuckle at a communication that has wafted our way via the Texas-based language analyst Global Language Monitor, the source of frockwriter’s Fashion Buzzwords story on Tuesday. The organisation was contacted by Elle Halliwell – who sources indicate is The Sunday Telegraph’s “new Melissa Hoyer/Kate Waterhouse” (ie the paper's main fashion writer) and whose first column, we understand, is to be published on Sunday. Halliwell wanted to verify the bona fides of frockwriter’s info, because the paper is interested in the story for this Sunday’s edition. It’s the wording which tickled our funny bone: “I was wondering if you could confirm that this Frockwriter blog is correct” (followed by an excerpt from Tuesday's post).

Look thanks for the interest in the story, to which you will note frockwriter beat The Sunday Telegraph by five days. We will take a bet that frockwriter will not be getting a mention.

At the bottom of Tuesday's post, Global Language Monitor was provided as the source of the information. And frockwriter understands that this blog, along with Reuters, were the first two global news outlets to have the report prior to a wider release. We beat Reuters as well apparently.

Memo to Halliwell: that's fair enough that you might not a/be familiar with the blog, because let's face it, plenty are not. And or b/be willing to take our word for something. Because frankly, why should you?

Frockwriter welcomes the arrival of any general newsroom-trained journalist to the fashion round, because we feel the round should be accorded more gravitas. Notably, in Australia.

We particularly enjoyed Halliwell's (above-linked) January 25 expose “Dogs becoming dumb and dumber” and feel that its brilliant observations could quite possibly be transferred across to an analysis of the profession of journalism period.

From the story:

“EVER wondered why Fido and Muffy prefer the toilet bowl to the water dish? Well, the truth could be that they're just airheads.

“A Swedish research scientist has discovered that the current generation of pedigree dogs, normally social and curious creatures by nature, are disinterested, shy and less responsive to commands than their ancestors.

“The study found show-quality and "handbag'' pooches were the most likely to lack the instincts of previous generations, which were bred for their strength, hunting and working abilities, rather than their looks”.