MK & A = Inversion of Homeless Chinese Man

Ever since Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen stopped shooting kids' movies and Full House episodes, they have created a sensation in the fashion world due to their artful ability to layer sleep clothes with street clothes. This "homeless chic" look seems to result from their lifestyle of constant jet-setting, which forces them to wear some of the contents of their luggage directly on their bodies. MK & A dress like they are ready for anything: rain or shine, lunch with Martha Stewart or downtown rave with Jay-Z.

In China, instead of idolizing billionaires who dress like vagrants, style gurus are making a fashion icon out of an actual homeless man. Talk about gauche. He has been dubbed "Brother Sharp," for his striking good looks and his finesse for sporting multiple jackets at once. His followers say that he looks more like "a vagabond" than "a beggar," and fashion critics rave that he does an affordable version of Dolce & Gabbana menswear. If "Brother Sharp" is anything like the Olsen twins, I see a lucrative collaboration with Wal-Mart in this homeless man's future.

Pimp of the Week: Kathryn Bigelow Rocks It

I was delighted and dismayed to realize that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman in history to win the Oscar for best director. 2010 strikes me as a late date to start recognizing the creative artistry of women in cinema, but such is life.

Kathryn Bigelow strikes me as a person with her head on straight. She makes ballsy action films, even in Jordan, and she doesn't preach about being a "feminist filmmaker." Maybe that's why she was the first woman director to be recognized by The Academy.

Never mind that she was married to a famous Hollywood director and womanizer, because Bigelow is just a woman with a talent for making movies, and she doesn't focus on feminine issues or designer shoe brands. But why is it so illegitimate/un-Oscar-worthy to make movies about 'female trouble'? A war movie about men deactivating bombs is considered serious, but a film about a divorced woman raising her daughter is labeled "melodramatic." Maybe next year a female director will win for making a movie about a girl who is fired from her day job when her boss finds out she is pregnant, forcing her to sell cupcakes door-to-door in order to save enough money to find true love. Wait--that cliché just got horribly confused.

Film Review: Chloe, The BPD Escort Girl

The new sexy psychological thriller Chloe subverts a few conventions of mainstream romantic cinema. The waifish blonde escort girl is played by Mamma Mia's doll-faced Amanda Seyfried, but instead of following around a married older male benefactor, her character follows around an older married female benefactor (who also happens to be a gynecologist, which seems like a crude coincidence to me).

Julianne Moore plays the gynecologist whose wanker-husband is flirting with his students and generally skipping out on his marriage to embrace a mid-life crisis. So the wife hires the escort girl to seduce the husband, just so she can verify that he is a cheater. The film tries to be edgy and psychologically circuitous in the vein of a Hitchcock great, but it falls flat and devolves into a good old-fashioned lesbian sex scene. I suppose some of you will go running to the cinema now that I have said that, but I'll take a classic S&M-inspired dark comedy over a maudlin pseudo-lesbian flick any day.

Wanker of the Week: Misinformed Modelizer

While hovering on the Parisian sidewalk with my pro-health signs up against the crowds of fashion editors, photographers, and models, a man shouted out to me, "Size zero kills -- I have to disagree. Designers should be able to do whatever they want!" I argued with him, rambling on about the fact that top designers have a responsibility to consider the broader impact of their aesthetic decisions. To put it plainly, requiring models to fit such tiny measurements is sadistic and creepy. To put it elaborately, the prevalence of size-zero models spreads body dysmorphic disorder in consumers the world over.

As I battled it out with this modelizing fiend, his nonsensical rant quickly devolved into the wanker-worthy comment: "But thin girls just look beautiful in clothes! It looks better!" I quickly realized that he was not a reputable fashion editor or artistic director but merely a random straggler taking his Sunday stroll through the Tuileries Gardens. Perhaps he was lurking outside the Karl Lagerfeld tent hoping to find a wafer-thin waif to stand in front of him and "look beautiful in clothes."

Size Zero Kills: A Performance Art Piece Part 2

My experience on the fashion frontlines at the Karl Lagerfeld show in Paris was full of unexpected good fortune from strangers. After an hour of lying frozen in the same position on the ground of the Tuileries Gardens, wearing nothing but tights and a few trash bags, my limbs were trembling and I had lost all feeling in my hands and feet. I had my eyes closed to maintain the image of being dead, when all of a sudden I heard male voices circling around me.

One Louvre security guard crouched down close to me and started saying that I had to get up and clothe myself, because he was worried that I would become gravely sick. Since the Tuileries Gardens are the property of the Louvre Museum, it is the security guard's problem if some deranged performance artist freezes to death on the premises. They scooped me up off the ground and seized my "Size Zero Kills" signs, refusing to give them back and threatening to call the police. But the young, adorable security guard who helped me off the ground seemed to be genuinely worried about my health, and said, "It's a great cause!" He escorted me to the gates overlooking the Obélisque de Louxor in the Place de la Concorde and advised me to exhibit my signs at this strategic entryway.

As I stood with my shield-like signs in hand, my trash bags flapping in the wind, all the paparazzi, socialites, models, designers, and editors walked by to leave the fashion show, each with their own reaction of disdain, excitement, or merely a flash of their iPhone cameras. One statuesque fashionista smiled and shouted, "I'm not a size zero--I'm a size 4!"

Another woman approached me and commented, "But you're not a size zero." I replied, "No, I'm a size 4. I was a size zero and I almost died of anorexia." Her response was: "You look great. You're not too big, you're not too small, you're perfect!" She was so submerged in the fashion industry that even her compliment remained constricted by the 'thinness institution.' Nonetheless, it felt like a Chanel ballet flat in the right direction.

SIZE ZERO KILLS: A PERFORMANCE ART PIECE

Today I am doing a performance art piece in the Jardin des Tuileries Espace Ephémères, outside of the Karl Lagerfeld show for Paris Fashion Week. I will be lying on the ground feigning death, my body partially covered in black trash-bags crisscrossed with white ribbons and mesh covering my eyes. My face will be painted white with blue lips to accentuate the death imagery, my legs will be covered in black tights, and my feet will be in Chanel ballet flats. The white signs propped next to me on the ground will read: SIZE ZERO KILLS.

I spent my early adolescence poring over fashion magazines and skinny models, and by the time I was 20, I was hospitalized for anorexia. I finally realized that viewing thin models and absurd retouching contributed to the serious distortion of my own body image. When I was in the hospital, I was horrified to meet 13-year-old girls on feeding tubes, barely alive, still worshipping Chanel and Vogue as though the fashion industry was their savior.

Karl Lagerfeld has promoted the illegitimate claim that size-zero models are better at selling products than models at healthier weights. He famously lost 90 pounds in a year and uses the anti-obesity card as a way of deflecting from the anorexia issue. Our culture is struggling with a problem of extremes, and if the media's beauty ideals return to a more balanced vision of naturalness and health, then perhaps it will encourage the same in the general population.

We are bombarded with images of impossible perfections that feed on our insecurities, driving people to dangerous dieting, plastic surgeries, and in the extreme case, anorexia ending in death. Too-thin, too-young models perpetuate a culture that is afraid of embracing beauty as a thing of depth and variety that spans across all ages, races, and shapes. The new female beauty ideal starts with changing the sample size from zero. The concept of beauty has always been tied to the saturation of images in a given time, and if those images are created by society, then they can be changed by society too.

Pimp of the Week: Luca Bassani Antivari

In the Marilyn Monroe classic, Some Like It Hot, there were a few of my favorite things: train travel, cross-dressing, and big boats. But these days, not even a classic yacht off the coast of Florida satisfies the appetite of a high roller. And that's why the international yacht man du jour, Luca Bassani Antivari, has teamed up with Hermès fashion house to create a boat that is so big it's actually an island.

Luca Bassani Antivari is the president of the famous Monaco-based yacht company, Wally, and he unveiled his futuristic creation at the Abu Dhabi yacht show. Antivari says, "Everybody's dream is to live on an island, in complete freedom, without constraint." It sounds like the attitude of a pimp who likes to live outside the law and maybe even abduct some willing captives.

"shabby people"

While skiing in the French Alpine resort town of Val-d'Isère, I encountered many a Slim Aarons situation. From the lounge chairs at the foot of the slopes, to the Frenchies drinking mid-afternoon red wine in those lounge chairs, it was a surreally elegant ski experience.

From my early years, I recall awkward moments at ski school involving a combination ski suit with suspenders and a desperate need to go pee while riding on the chair lift. I always wanted to become that girl in the snow bunny outfit like some Bavarian ice princess at her chalet in Gstaad sipping slope-side champagne and wearing furry boots that look like animals.

This time around, my sartorial choices were more 1970s-pimp than 1980s snow princess. But no matter what sort of Italian magenta jumpsuit or rabbit fur chapka hat you wear, the awkward mountaintop experiences of youth still abound. Ski boots inevitably make you walk like you have a load in your pants, and falling on your ass is practically a requirement.

The Bay of Bengal

Jet setting is the best, especially if it is on the arm of a dashing man or woman who has piles of money to spend on plane tickets and lavish hotel suites. In theory. In the movies, that is.

A flight attendant friend of mine makes a lifestyle out of meeting men in the first class cabin. She's seen most of the globe and has more stories of luxury travel at the top than Hugh Hefner, or Condoleezza Rice.

She was recently invited for a romantic last-minute trip from Barcelona to New York. Unfortunately, when she arrived to the Manhattan hotel room of her gentleman friend, she picked up his cell phone and found that he had sent the same text message invitation to a multitude of women. It was an international chain text message booty call, and she was the unlucky one who responded. This time the Wanker of the Week met a literal Princess in Flight.

A Street Urchin

Since I live in Paris' red light district, everyday I walk by a slew of sex shops and strip clubs with names like "Pussy," "Glamour," "Two Asses" (as in the animal), and (my personal favorite) "Sexodrome." But since I was in the mood for a glitzy highbrow version of all that synthetic lingerie, I went straight to the home of burlesque, the Moulin Rouge.

It was an internationally appealing and well-choreographed spectacular. There was even a sultry blonde woman who dove into a glass tank while wielding multiple snakes. The costumes were minimalist, and tended to involve pink feathers and reflective beads. I came out of the theatre in a daze, having seen more firm female bare butts than in all my life. And unless I plan on taking up a job in hip-hop video production or the porn industry, I don't think I ever will again. Conclusion: the real Moulin Rouge is much better than the Nicole Kidman version.