Bambi Northwood-Blyth covers V magazine with Lindsey Wixson

v magazine

Australia's Bambi Northwood-Blyth is on a roll. Behold the latest cover of US fashion magazine V starring Northwood-Blyth together with Lindsey Wixson - one of four covers of V's issue #74, shot by Terry Richardson and styled by ex Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld. Each cover pairs together two models, most of them high profile. Head to V's website to see the others, featuring Candice Swanepoel and Joan Smalls; Daphne Groeneveld and Saskia de Brauw and Sui He and Hanaa Ben Abdesslem. "These eight girls are unique" Roitfeld told WWD. "It's their diversity that makes each of them, to me, truly modern. They bring a new energy to fashion". This may be Northwood-Blyth's first major international cover, but it's her fifth OS cover this year, after French Revue des Modes (Spring/Summer 2011), Vogue Nippon (April 2011), Harpers Bazaar Espana (May 2011) and the current Fall/Winter 2011 cover of the Barcelona-based Metal magazine. And that's not the end of her V duties. She will be co-hosting V's Halloween party tomorrow night in New York with Richardson, Smalls, Swanepoel and He. Will her designer/DJ love interest "Dangerous Dan" Single play a set?

Julia Restoin-Roitfeld interviews Tom Ford for V Magazine

These shots were just slipped to frockwriter (and no doubt many other blogs, but at this stage we think it may be a first look). It's a preview of V Magazine's issue #69, a spread starring Julia Restoin-Roitfeld modelling Tom Ford's debut womenswear collection - described as "self portraits" so we have to assume she took the shots. And an excerpt from an interview conducted with Ford, by Restoin-Roitfeld, the face of Ford's Black Orchid fragrance campaign. This would have been in the pipeline for some time, but interesting that it falls hot on the heels of last Friday's abrupt resignation by Restoin-Roitfeld's mother, Carine Roitfeld, from Vogue Paris after a 10 year tenure. The official version is that Roitfeld wants to pursue "personal projects". In reality, however, noone leaves a position like that with several weeks notice. Few, if any, have voluntarily resigned from Vogue. There has been much speculation that Roitfeld was pushed by Condé Nast after problems vis-à-vis her ongoing consulting to fashion brands. Yes fashion editors (even in Australia) do paid work on outside ad campaigns and that's bad enough. It is verging on the ludicrous for an editor-in-chief to do so. There has also been speculation that the December issue of Vogue Paris, as edited by Ford, was poorly received by some Vogue advertisers and may have proven the final straw.

Rosemary Smith pieces together Jigsaw for Autumn/Winter 2011

Rosemary Smith has had a big year. After a slow burn in 2009, during which she shot for Harpers Bazaar Australia and Marie Claire Australia - and made it onto models.com's emerging models/creatives site, The Ones 2 Watch - this year she nabbed a Vogue Australia exclusive, which saw her featured in the August, October, November and December editions, swapped agencies (from Viviens to Chic Management) and will soon be featured in a new faces spread in V Magazine in the US. The latter was shot last month, while she attended castings for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Smith wasn't cast in the latter, however she has just bagged another local ad campaign. Adding to her recent Ksubi Eyewear and Ojay campaigns, here is a first look at Smith in the Autumn/Winter 2011 campaign for another Australian high street fashion chain, Jigsaw. It sees the Daria Werbowy lookalike reunited with photographer Nicole Bentley, who shot two of the Vogue editorials. The campaign was styled by Claudia Navone and photographed in a private mansion in Bellevue Hill. After her recent turn on the David Jones runway, where Smith caught the eye of Sydney expat casting director Kannon Rajah (who just added Versace to his client list, which already includes Fendi and the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show), let's hope we see her on the international runways in 2011. 

Hedi Christmas

A short film by Hedi Slimane, created for V Man and starring - who else but - a beautiful, half-naked, excruciatingly skinny 16 year-old boy. In this case, Oscar Nilsson from the Royal Danish Ballet Company. Apparently still an 'apprentice' with the company, perhaps Nilsson was scouted during one of Slimane's infamous "boy safaris".

V Magazine gets a little Norwegian wood

Overwhelmed by the staggeringly creative makeup in the 96-page Women/Supreme model supplement to V61? You are not alone. Various images of the covers have been floating around the fash blogosphere, but a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot reveals a striking series of ghoulish faces rendered in stark black and white by makeup artist Janeen Witherspoon, with styling by Nicholas Grasa and hair by Rita Marmor, Leonardo Manetti and Franco Gobbi. The series was shot by Paul Rowland, who tells V's blog that he was inspired by “Joel-Peter Witkin, paganism, mysticism, vampires, witches—all the things I love.” But did Rowland neglect to mention one key reference? Here is a series of screen grabs from the video.










And below is a series of images from True Norwegian Black Metal, a book by photographer Peter Beste that was released in May 2008 and is now on its third printing (and thanks to Kent for the tip).

Beste spent five years documenting the Norwegian black metal scene - which has been described, perhaps alarmingly, as Norway’s biggest cultural export.

Although apparently a little more civilised these days - Beste for one looks to have survived the experience - the roots of Norwegian black metal lie in Satanism and Norse pagan mythology and in the early 1990s, this underground metal genre became notorious in the wake of a string of violent crimes.

We’re talking murder, suicide, alleged cannibalism and as many as 50 cases of arson and attempted arson (churches, natch). GG Allin, eat your heart out.

Beyond the standard issue hardcore rocker accoutrements of black leather, spikes, studs and chains, Norwegian black metal-ites have a propensity for smearing their faces with ghoulish black and white “corpse paint” makeup, which would appear to have as much to do with 1970s rockers Alice Cooper and KISS as it does with early German expressionist cinema and the Oskerei, a legion of dead souls in Norse mythology.

Norwegian black metal is also the subject of the 2008 Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites documentary Until the light takes us, which had its world premier at the AFI FEST in Los Angeles on October 31st 2008.

While Paul Rowland's Supreme/Women photo series appears in a limited edition supplement to V61, Lady Gaga is on the actual cover of the edition.

In an interesting coda, it emerges that the director of Gaga's new Paparazzi video is Jonas Åkerlund, a former member of pioneering Swedish black metal outfit Bathory.









1. peter beste via news.figment.cc
2. peter beste via gawker
3. peter beste via michaelcarter.ca
4. peter beste via nemotography