April Tiplady takes flight

McQ resort 2014 via style.com

You know April Tiplady. The brand new Adelaide face whose grandmother bought her a Finesse Models deportment course for her 14th birthday and who, in November last year, two years later, was signed worldwide by IMG Models. Then in March - a month before making her Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia debut, walking in nine shows - she made an appearance at the Paris ready-to-wear shows and nabbed the cover of L'Officiel Singapore. Now 17, Tiplady has just popped up in the Resort 2014 lookbooks for the McQ diffusion label of British brand Alexander McQueen (above) and Italian designer Roberto Cavalli (below). And frockwriter hears she has some even bigger coups up her sleeve.

Paris is burning - Fall/Winter 2013/2014

april tiplady closes junya watanabe FW1314 via wwd.com

Frockwriter was out at dinner last night when we received a call from Brigette Mitchell, director of Adelaide's Finesse Models, direct from a "freezing" Paris. "April just did her very first fashion show" said Mitchell proudly. "She hasn't even walked in a fashion show in Adelaide, but she just closed Junya Watanabe". April Tiplady - that's the 16 year old whose grandmother paid for a grooming course at the same agency two years earlier in the hope of boosting the confidence of her gangly grand-daughter. Last November, literally just signed to Finesse and with no modelling experience, Tiplady was signed by IMG Models worldwide (i.e. all its international agencies). Now she is a card-carrying member of the Australian model delegation at the Fall/Winter 2013/2014 show season. 

New faces: April Tiplady

Two years ago, when she was 14, April Tiplady’s grandmother bought her a grooming course at Adelaide’s Finesse Models to help her confidence. Last week she was signed to IMG Models worldwide.

Ksubi paid its MBFWA models in cash - with a 'trade' bonus

nicole pollard backstage at ksubi SS1213

Couldn’t help noticing a tweet from top Australian model Melissa Johannsen this morning, thanking Ksubi for a AUD 500 gift voucher which had just arrived. “Oh yea! thanks @Ksubi...such an awesome show!” read the accompanying caption on Johannsen’s Instagram shot of the voucher (below). Knowing how endemic the practice of payment “in trade” has become in the modelling business - i.e. designers offering clothes and accessories instead of cash - we assumed the voucher might have been Johannsen’s fee for the Ksubi show at Mercedes-Benz Australian Fashion Week on April 30th. Not so, responded Johannsen, who told us that she never works for trade – at least not in Australia.

In Vogue: Emilia Skuza and Melissa Johannsen

nicole bentley for vogue australia via viviens' facebook

Two under-the-radar models, both repped by the same Adelaide mother agent (Finesse Models), but two separate Sydney agencies (Viviens and Chadwick), wind up shooting a 16-page editorial together in Vogue Australia. What are the odds? Voilà a taste of the “Twin Peaks” story from Vogue’s July edition, out tomorrow. Shot by Nicole Bentley in New Zealand, it stars Emilia Skuza (left, above) and Melissa “MJ” Johannsen, who appear to be channelling not so much David Lynch as Alfred Hitchcock, with cateye makeup and windswept '60s flips. Neither model had previously been featured anywhere in the magazine and although Johannsen was one of the stars of the Rosemount Australian Fashion Week runways earlier this month in Sydney, Skuza has never worked at the event – and was in fact booked sight unseen by Vogue according to Chadwick. But regular readers of this blog may recall both names. We first encountered MJ in November at the Adelaide Fashion Festival when the Alice Springs resident had been modelling for a matter of weeks. And Adelaide-bred Skuza popped up on our radar in January, after emerging at the Paris haute couture shows. Both girls went on to walk in a number of top Fall/Winter 2011/2012 shows in New York, London and Paris in February and March.