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xxo HH

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pimp of the Week: J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger is the literary pimp who brought us such universally appealing expressions as "crummy," "phony," and "mean bastards." If he had not created Holden Caulfield, adolescents the world over would feel far less justified in escaping high school to wander the streets of Manhattan, to pay for prostitutes (strictly for talking purposes), and to seek alcohol-soaked wisdom from their English teachers.

But after Salinger became the star of literary irony, he receded into the anti-social depths of rural New Hampshire. But one can only remain in total isolation for so long. At age 53 Salinger ended up writing a series of letters to a Yale freshman girl, Joyce Maynard, because her article in The New York Times Magazine.

Maynard gave up the Ivy League to live with Salinger in New Hampshire. The affair ended when she wanted children and he wanted his peace and quiet. At least she got 10 months of boundless literary advice and a lifetime of unmatched dinner table conversation.

"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: 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.

Shecky’s Girls Night Out

This week a scandalous event took place at Drouot, the famous Parisian auction house: the police discovered that a commissaire-priseur (the coveted and pimp position of auctioneer/master of ceremonies) and a gaggle of sneaky auction-assistant-mignons orchestrated the theft of a massive amount of precious objects. A Gustave Courbet painting worth 1.3 million dollars was recovered, along with expensive watches, drawings, and other antiquated loot.

Drouot is a veritable high museum of art, but at the end of the day it is a business. And even if there's artistic prowess and Parisian propriety involved, when things turn sour, it's just another chaotic game of "dirty sexy money."

Getting Off Easy

In a dinner party of diplomats from Delhi, aristocrats from Paris, and me (a wayward semi-'student' lurking from Boston), a French expert in the global water system told me an apocalyptic statement: in 2043 there will be a melting of the glacier ice caps, and our world will be submerged in water.

I suddenly recalled the last time a Frenchman pretended to be sure of a disastrous event looming in the future: about two months before the economic crisis in The States began, a Parisian financial expert told me that the economy in America was about to collapse. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but now I am more wary when I hear ominous statements from the often-incompetent French.

Maybe we will all be swimming in 2043, and there will be a revolution in stilt-style architecture as a result. Or maybe we will all drown. Either way, I am going to try to drink more wine, meet more strangers, and take a few more crazy chances in 2010. Or perhaps later today.

Settle The Tab

In New York City there is a well-kept secret for young women in need of low-rent accommodations. At The Webster Apartments you can have a single room, two hot meals a day, and maid's service for a mere 250 dollars a week. The only catch: no males allowed.

There is a night watchwoman who patrols the corridors, making the social scene at The Webster reminiscent of a woman's ward in a mental institute circa 1960. But in all seriousness, I have applied and been accepted to The Webster on two separate occasions in my life. But my rent-free maid's quarters (storage space) on Park Avenue proved a better deal.

But The Webster is populated by more than 20-something unpaid interns and aspiring actresses. A recent article described a middle-aged resident who was living at The Webster after a messy divorce. She went from suburban splendor to urban nunnery. But hopefully she will revenge her wanker-husband and stow away a fetching young guy in her closet to conceal him from The Webster's boy-patrol.

Fancy Pants!

Apparently in France Halloween has been canceled. A principal at a grade school in Provence was put off by the concept of children sporting "fancy dress in the classroom," especially "when inspired by some ridiculous foreign novelty."

Luckily for me I spent Halloween at a soirée in Normandy in a picturesque town famous for its namesake cheese. In the courtly confines of a spooky Tudor mansion, I gallivanted with a group of Frenchies who were quite cozy with the prospect of getting decked out and disguised; there was a robed man in a Venetian mask dressed as a character from Eyes Wide Shut, Jack the Ripper, the inevitable sexpot sorcière, and a 'Mother Christmas' who drank a bit too much champagne and was less than merry the following morning.

No matter what the snobby traditional French school mistresses say, Halloween translates easily to foreign cultures: masks + cocktails + wigs = garden of earthly delights.

Lapis Lazuli

The famous film director Roman Polanski was recently arrested in Zurich for a rape case that he has been fleeing since 1977, when he lured a 13-year-old girl into Jack Nicholson's house under the guise of a photo shoot, serving her champagne and Quaaludes.

The topics of pedophilia, celebrity, film, and sexual assault, stir up a great deal of fervor and consternation in the United States and in France; while the French tend to support Polanski's release, "America's puritanical morals want him to be lynched," in the words of my Parisian friend.

The story of Polanski's life is a nightmarish epic: internment in a concentration camp where he witnessed the death of his mother, the brutal murder of his pregnant wife by the Manson Family, and the eruption of his own senseless cruelty and resulting fugitive lifestyle. Polanski is equipped with the ultimate survival skills and continues to create, in spite of the horrors of his own reality.

Dote On Me

Last week a Russian woman was so frustrated with the French government for refusing to grant her citizenship that she stormed into the Louvre Museum and hurled a coffee mug straight at the Mona Lisa. Talk about gauche. But decent performance art on her part, I must admit.

I am similarly on the verge of throwing a piece of crockery at the oversized head of one of the officials working at the French consulate. Their general ... how shall I say this nicely? "Frenchness" ... is getting on my last nerve. I have been attempting to procure a long-stay visa and struggling with the bureaucracy of their convoluted website. The receptionist became so familiar with the sound of my voice that he deemed it appropriate to hang up the phone on me.

I have been instructed to obtain "proof of repatriation insurance" so that in case I die, the flight for my corpse to be sent home will be covered. Finding an excuse to drink red wine and eat baguette everyday for a year is more overwhelming than I had hoped.

An All-White Suit

Marina Abramovic, the performance artist famous for testing the limits of the body through a variety of media (Russian knives, catatonia pills, bullets, etc.), just announced that she will be installing herself in the MoMA for 586 hours next year. Abramovic will stand on a shelf suspended 50 feet high against the wall of the museum's atrium. The shelf will be no larger than the top of a desk, and the ladders descending from it will consist of upturned knives.

For seven hours a day and five days a week, the artist will stand like a lighting fixture, staring down at the visitors who will lounge back on chaises and peer up at her through telescopes. Abramovic does not have a precise notion of what this awkward-and-dangerous high-up prolonged experiment will feel like. But she has no interest in doing a "run-through" either. Performance art is not about rehearsals. It's mostly about successful failures. Let's just hope Abramovic does not end up as a Princess in Flight.

"Take Us To Martinique"

In Connecticut a man just turned himself into the police for the brutal murder of a 21-year-old philosophy student at Wesleyan University. He and the girl weren't strangers but met two years ago when they both enrolled in a summer course at NYU on "Sexual Diversity in Society." He became obsessed by her and proceeded to send her 38 threatening emails.

The shooting took place on the day of the college's annual "Spring Fling," a time for students to start drinking at noon and engage in the customary undergraduate green lawn revelries. And the campus became like a deranged ghost town: “Everyone was trying to compute the whole thing while slightly intoxicated."

All the news articles display a very sexy, wet-lipped picture of the girl, Johanna Justin-Jinich, part of a trend in the media's glamorization of young female victims of violence. One commenter wrote about the culprit: "he looks like a creeper too. wish we could just lock all creepy dudes up for good. solve all our problems." Creeper seems like a good word to add to the list of wayward male personalities: wankers, pimps, and creepers...OH MY.

Tchotchkes

I want to believe that prince-like things still exist in this age of doomed chivalry and philandering father figures—that terrifying Austrian man who kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years being an extreme example.

It is hard to find the right type of romance, that makes your heart beat faster—but not so fast that you have a coronary. In the French movie Priceless, the pretty Parisian poupée, Audrey Tautou, plays the emotionally bankrupt girl who wants nothing more than to marry a pimpish elderly creepazoid. But the penniless young bartender/bellman manages to steal her heart, and they ride barefoot across the sunny Côte d'Azur on his scooter.

My friend's boyfriend had to move to the UK just as they started dating. Two weeks into their relationship, he flew back and surprised her for a visit. She is a poet, and he is an impoverished graduate student, but princes find ways to cross oceans, even when they're paupers.