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.

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.

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.

Pimp of the Week: Leonardo DiCaprio

I know I talk about him a lot, but Leonardo DiCaprio is something special. His charms are part-boy, part-man, which lend him the appeal of being both prince and pimp. As the apple of Martin Scorsese's eye, Leo stars in the new epic thriller, Shutter Island. The film takes place at a hospital for the criminally insane in the 1950s. As my father says, "It seems pretty heavy duty." But even with the strangely feminized French dubbing of Leo's voice, I was riveted.

Leo is not only a ravishing screen specimen, but he is also into solar roof panels and boats made from recycled plastic bottles. He promotes clean energy, attracts lovely women, gives away millions to worthy causes, has his own production company, and is on the cover of Esquire magazine smoking a cigar and splashing a low ball of scotch. If he's not a Pimp of the Week, then there's no hope for the rest of us.

The Pedagogue

There is a stereotype about The French that they only like to travel so that they can complain about how inferior every country is to France. But I recently read that some French travelers are searching for a genuinely thrilling experience in their next vacation: they are paying a minimum of $1,200 to Ultime Réalité for someone to kidnap and imprison them for four hours.

If they are true high rollers, then they'll opt for a package that is more expensive and custom-designed to their mental histories (and most likely, mental illnesses, considering that they are paying to be tied up, gagged, and carted away). It makes me think of Michael Douglas in the classic psychological thriller of capitalist malaise, The Game. The only birthday gift his brother can think to get him is the most elaborate "abduction package" money can buy.

Film Review: Valentine's Day

The new romantic comedy, Valentine's Day, is a rompish series of vignettes chock full of amusing stereotypes and clichés. Within the first ten minutes you get a glimpse of the bare legs and asses of most of Hollywood's hot actresses, but my personal favorite was the young starlet and country singer, Taylor Swift, playing the ditzy blonde high schooler who just can't get enough of her hunky boyfriend and the giant white teddy bear he gives her for Valentine's Day.

There is an ultimate scene of romantic revenge, in which the sweet girl-next-door humiliates her cheating wanker boyfriend in front of his wife during their fancy Valentine's dinner. And perhaps the most cinematic incident of the film involves an 18-year-old boy in the nude, his guitar, and his girlfriend's mother, but I'll leave the rest to your wild imagination. I also enjoyed that they cast funny boy Ashton Kutcher as a florist.

The moral is: romance can be charming, but love is messy -- love is torturesome ... and you're lucky to find someone honest who is enjoyable to be around for more than seven seconds, so grab on tight (and pray that their mother doesn't walk in on you naked).

A Somnambulist

I recently attended an AIDS fashion couture gala in the Bois de Boulogne, a scenic area of Paris currently famous for its prostitutes and formerly famous for the opening scene of Gigi with Maurice Chevalier.

At this particular champagne-soaked evening there was a striptease spectacle involving men in hot pink Lycra and transvestites dressed as geishas. I have always had a penchant for beautiful drag queens, so I felt in my element, sporting a mink stole and gold leggings, which would be considered gauche in any other venue.

Surrounded by fashion designers, dapper gay men, and their fancy ladies in waiting, I decided that my favorite character of the night was a sixty-year-old man from the Great American South. He became a modern dancer and directed fashion shows in 1970s Paris. Now he leads a gospel choir and writes operas. When he returns from a nightclub or party, he makes a wistful comment about how 'things are not like they used to be, at Studio 54.'

Pimp of the Week: Owen Wilson

Owen Wilson dazzled me as a pot-smoking male model (mimbo to the max) in Zoolander. And then he stole my heart when he co-wrote and co-starred in the eternally iconic film, The Royal Tenenbaums. And now Owen Wilson is rumored to be starring in Woody Allen's next movie with French first lady and anti-monogamist, Carla Bruni.

Wilson calls himself a bad boy, and, like any proper pimp, he knows how to turn nothing into something. At age 16 he was expelled from his straight-laced Dallas prep school. But then he found a way to make a career out of dicking around with his best friend, Wes Anderson, and his brother, Luke. They turned 5 million dollars of Texan petty cash into the well-reviewed, poorly received film, Bottle Rocket.

By some ignorant film-goers, Owen Wilson is known for his distinctive nose, which was been broken many times, but I think it's just another sign of a life lived to the max.

Film Review: It's Complicated

The Nancy Meyers film, It's Complicated, is the story of a typical American family: a husband and wife have three beautiful children, they live happily ever after in the upper-class tranquility of Santa Barbara, and once the kids reach adolescence, the husband and wife are fed up of each other and go through a messy divorce ... then the husband remarries a high maintenance and physically fit thirty-year-old ... meanwhile, the middle-aged wife's baking career thrives (in the vein of the Ina Garten empire) and she spends her nights alone.

Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play the estranged couple still forced to see each other on graduation and wedding days. But they manage to take another stab at it, as they find themselves having a passionate affair, thereby turning the whole familial dysfunction in a whole new direction. Steve Martin is splashed in for the amusing romp, which includes an unfortunate incident between a Skype camera and Alec Baldwin's 'bald win,' so to speak.

No matter how Technicolor and Hollywood it gets, It's Complicated rings at the truth of divorce: for a while it seems tragic to all parties involved, but once people move on, the family can never go back to those fond memories of childhood vacations and cozy movie nights. The love is still there -- it's just different.

Pimp of the Week: Graydon Carter

Over the sea of Botoxed brows and candy-coiffed diners at a posh restaurant, I spotted the billowing plumage of none other than Graydon Carter. The Vanity Fair editor-in-chief exudes laid-back New England suavity, even though he is a political, literary, and cultural king of Manhattan. He also dabbles in restaurateurism and co-owns New York's cozy-clubby celebrity dining spot, the Waverly Inn, along with Midtown's old school Monkey Bar.

As Carter was exiting the restaurant, I dashed up to him like the desperate young pseudo-writer that I am and handed him my email address on a scrap of paper. All I could muster up to say was, "I'm a huge fan -- I'm a starving writer," but then I corrected myself, "Well, clearly I'm not quite starving, but you know..." I told him about the unpublished novel I wrote and let him go on his way. You never know when a humiliating experience will spin into gold. Perhaps Graydon Carter will be my Rumpelstiltskin.

"fortune hunter!"

Heidi Montag is the 23-year-old reality television celebrity who went from sweet and natural Colorado girl to botched and butchered Los Angeles pop star ... all in a matter of minutes. She recently underwent 10 different plastic surgery procedures in a day, saying that she wanted to become the "perfect" version of herself.

She's always indicated signs of derangement: she married a sociopathic mimbo-creeper, Spencer Pratt, and the two of them were baptized in the jungle by a born-again Christian minister (a.k.a. the youngest Baldwin brother) on public television. After they were absolved of their sinful hard-partying lifestyle, Spencer and Heidi (a.k.a. "Speidi") decided to make a series of music videos featuring Heidi's enlarged breasts on the beach. Well, now her lips (and cheeks, and eyebrow arches, and butt) will be bigger too. And her thighs (and ears, and nose, and chin, and neck) will be smaller.

She might be a talentless celebrity past the brink of sanity, but in a culture saturated by image obsession and body perfectionism, Heidi Montag might also be a dreadful alarm call for a future lived in plastic.

Pimp of the Week: François Pinault

In terms of billionaires in the world, François Pinault is apparently around number 39. He is the ultimate Frenchman of luxury, owning Gucci, Christie's auction house, the Vail Ski Resort, and that sort of modest NGO-based work. But the best thing about this capitalist pimp is that he bought a beautiful old customs building and a marble palace on Venice's Grand Canal, and then he turned them into museums for his extraordinary contemporary art collection: the Punta Della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi.

His son, François-Henri Pinault, is married to Hollywood hot actress Salma Hayek. In fact, they got married twice -- first in Paris and then in Venice. Just for good measure. There are some things money can't buy (like marital bliss), but there are other things (like a Venetian-masquerade wedding reception, or a Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation), where a lot of money can't hurt.

Pimp of the Week: Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton is a total pimp. He was a seminal fashion photographer in the 1970s. I visited the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and was spellbound by Newton's pictures -- always erotically charged, slightly deranged, subversive, and sinister in a way that exposed the fallacy of the luxe lifestyle.

His handwritten letters to various fashion editors are particularly amusing. He once wrote to Anna Wintour, "I love high riders like Gary Cooper used to wear." And he tended to sign his letters with: "From the old naughty boy!"

Newton once said about his preference of models, "Please make sure you get a gal with some muscle and meat on her -- none of those starved females!! Horrible matchstick women." He knew that the whole heroin/anorexic-chic look was useless in artistic photography, and useless in general.

Film Review: He's Just Not That Into You

The recent romantic comedy, He's Just Not That Into You, was an unexpected burst of truth on contemporary dating in an age of Facebook, email writing, and text message disasters. Gigi (played by the adorable Ginnifer Goodwin) waits at the phone every night for her crush to call her. She fails to see the difference between a. men who are flirting with her at a bar because they are drunk, b. men who want to date her, and c. men who never want to see her again.

The manager at Gigi's local bar lets her in on some heterosexual man insight: "If a guy is into a girl, then he will make it happen, so if he hasn't called her or asked her on another date, he's just not that into her." Women often give bad advice to other women: for example, if a girl is desperately in love with a guy for a period of many years, then her female friend might say to her, "He's definitely gay, and that's why he's dating that incredibly masculine girl." Alternatively, she might say, "Men are like pears -- they have to ripen in a brown paper bag before they are ready to commit to the one they really love. He just needs another 2-12 years to really ripen!"

Gigi ends up converting the wanker-commitment-phobic-barman to a prince who is ready for a real relationship. Moral of the story: miracles can happen in fictitious versions of Baltimore that are populated by incredibly attractive people.

The Showcases

I had a true Bavarian Christmas with my endlessly entertaining German cousins. They are my third cousins, so technically they are considered "kissing cousins," which is an expression that either denotes "distant cousins familiar enough to kiss" or "cousins that are distant enough in relation that it is not the end of the world to kiss them." Either way, the expression is gauche, and probably not the best holiday dinner-table conversation.

After we celebrated Christmas with a roast goose at an old-school Bavarian golf, polo, and hot-air-ballooning club, my cousins and I continued to the bar where many of the German guests had brought their dogs with them during after-dinner drinks. One older man and his wife, who seemed Russian in temperament, had two Chihauhaus in tow (very 'Paris Hilton' and un-German of them). When the couple exited the lounge, my cousin asked, "What kind of dog is that?" and the portly man responded, "A very expensive kind." When we commented on the tiny dog's pink diamond-encrusted collar, the owner responded, "Yes, the collar was more expensive than the dog."

I guess on Christmas some people have kissing cousins to keep them company, and some people have their blonde wives and very small dogs.

Pimp of the Week: Hugh Grant

Hugh Grant is apparently quite the "Renaissance man," as he is proficient at both golf and tennis, buys paintings, is reasonably literate, and even dabbled with novel writing. Since Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a new romantic comedy premiered last week, USA Today did a little interview about the wonders that make up Hugh Grant. His "rakish" persona has charmed me ever since I saw him acting like a complete wanker in Bridget Jones's Diary. He cozies into, and perhaps even invented, the 'emotionally unavailable men' roles.

In the USA Today interview, Grant, admitted to the dangers of vanity: "I stopped Googling myself. Life improves exponentially. I think the same thing applies to reviews." He also confessed to his penchant for showering girls with expensive accessories and shopping at Chanel. But I think it is mostly because he loves the way the salesgirls make him feel about himself.