Backstage Glimpses

I've seen so many pictures of Freja in the past few weeks that I just can't remember what's new and what's old. I think these are new backstage images, but I'm posting them here instead of at tFS just in case they are reposts.

Chloe



Karl Lagerfeld


Valentino

My mind is an absolute jumble of images. It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the collections, but this season I decided it would also be fun to keep up with as many new girls as I possibly can in addition to keeping tabs on Freja. Hence, my addiction to the Runway Model Showlist thread at tFS. I like to see how many girls I can identify in a show, and I've definitely gotten better since the start of the season but I'm still no match for the pros over there. Some of the posters are simply amazing in their identifying abilities. Face covered up? No problem. They'll just use the ears as a reference point.

Interestingly enough, after a while you start to see similar features in girls that look nothing alike. And you start to see certain facial feature paragons present throughout all the girls' faces no matter where they're from. It's quite the lesson in geography and anthropology, albeit not a very productive one. Oh well. At the very least, I can spell Eastern European last names like no other. Do you think I can put that on my resume?

Image Credits: corbis.com

A Look Backstage

One of the best parts about fashion month, aside from all the collections, is all the backstage videos we get to see. I personally think the chaos backstage with all the models, dressers, hairdressers, makeup artists and photographers is so interesting. It's amazing to me that from all that insanity emerges a tight, calm, controlled presentation of clothes down the runway. Anyway, we haven't even hit Paris yet, but backstage videos are starting to emerge.

In this one from Derek Lam, you can see Freja from roughly 0:45 to 0:55 talking to Magdalena and Eniko, being quite expressive with her gestures. Nice to see the girls have remained on friendly terms after shooting this editorial together. It was rather intimate so I imagine they got to know each other quite well.

As the shows eventually come to a close next week, at least we'll have more backstage videos like this to look forward to.

A Picture to End the Week

The shows in Milan are going strong and we have a packed weekend schedule to look forward to. I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted from the week and so glad it's friday. So I thought this would be the perfect picture to illustrate the relaxed ease I'm in now that it's the weekend. That sly smile Freja has on her face is the same one I have on mine, knowing I don't have to work tomorrow. Now I can finally catch up on shows and check out all the new girls creating buzz. Definitely gotta go back to that Prada cast that still has me scratching my head...

Image Credits: sonnyphotos

Beautiful Pictures, Part II

I did this post a while ago about the beautiful pictures I found on Corbis taken by French photographer Delphine Achard. Well, it turns I made a small mistake. Delphine isn't a photographer for Corbis at all. In fact, she photographs for WWD and Vogue Paris! No wonder her pictures are so wonderful. If you work for illustrious publications like those, you have to be pretty good.

Anyway, Delphine was kind enough to send me a link to her new website where you can find more of her beautiful pictures: www.delphineachard.com Let me make this clear, she did not ask me to post the link here. I wanted to share it because I think you'll really enjoy her pictures. She has ones of all your favorite models: Anja, Anna J, Cat, Edita, Isabeli, Natasha, Snejana and more. There's only picture of Freja and it's one I've posted before, but here it is without the watermark.

There's a certain atmospheric quality about Delphine's backstage pictures that make them stand out for me. She really makes all the models look even more beautiful than they usually do. After you look at enough backstage pictures and candids, you can really begin to tell when a photographer understands and appreciates natural beauty because she lets it shine through in her work. If we're lucky, maybe Delphine will be shooting backstage again this fashion season. And if so, hopefully we'll get another batch of beautiful Freja pictures. Thanks Delphine!

Image Credits: delphineachard.com

Backstage at Narciso

I haven't had the time to do a New York recap, so until I do here are some backstage pictures and a rehearsal video from Narciso Rodriguez to keep you entertained. I'm still trying to sort through tons of images and catch up on some shows. Overall though, a pretty good New York showing for Freja. Of course I wish she would have done a few more shows, especially on the last day, but I'm just happy she's still walking after all these seasons.

Narciso Show Run-through from Andrei Dan on Vimeo.

Any shows you wish Freja would have done? Predictions for London? If I had my way, we'd see her at Luella, Jaeger, Pringle of Scotland, Jonathan Saunders, and Burberry. Fingers crossed!

London Showcard

Image Credits: imgmodelsblog.wordpress, models.com

Beauty

Corbis is a picture site that always has great backstage pictures, especially of Freja. Here are two more to send us off on the last day of New York Fashion Week.

London is up next and it looks like Freja will walk for the first time. So the excitement continues on without pause. But before we move on, hopefully we'll see Freja at a few shows today. We need a proper NY bon voyage afterall. Perhaps Isaac Mizrahi and Tommy Hilfiger?

Image Credits: corbis.com

Clothes aren't the only things that don't fit

Jeremy Kost took this backstage video for NY Mag during the Erin Wasson x RCVA show. What he saw was a jewelry fitting of sorts, with Erin accessorizing her models with all sorts of bracelets and rings. You can see Freja fail her fitting at :54. :)

Erin did eventually manage to get a few rings to stay on Freja's fingers. You can see them if you click through to the HQ pic below.

Backstage moments like this are priceless, entertaining and make NY fashion week so much fun. As much as I'm looking forward to the other cities, I know we won't get the same type of access that we've been getting in NY. Oh well...you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Image Credits: vogue.co.uk

Fans in High Places

It's no secret that Freja has a huge fan base scattered all over the world. However, what's becoming more apparent is that Freja has a huge fan base within the fashion industry as well. The latest to join the club are Rag & Bone designers Marcus Wainwright and David Neville, who have always been very model friendly.

There’s nothing like the backstage at Rag & Bone to immediately make you feel those high school insecurities all over again. With hot, hot design duo Marcus Wainwright and David Neville and their muse Freja Beha looking cool as hell, and male models and hipsters alike sipping on Peroni and smoking cigs, it’s no surprise this collection is a favorite of the cliques du jour. In fact, when I asked Marcus about the inspiration behind the spring collection he said, “It’s very Rag & Bone, it’s Freja.” Can’t argue with that! On a side note, I did see a striking blond model (not one of the Sashas!) crying by the bathroom backstage, with Gucci Westman’s makeup masterpiece dripping down her face, further proof that it’s not easy being beautiful.

Now, I've always thought Freja was more of an Alexander Wang type of girl. She does live in his T by Alexander Wang line of shirts and tanks, but I think it's wonderful that designers are taking inspiration from her uber-cool, laid back personality. She does personify an effortless, cool vibe that many people strive to emanate, yet with Freja it doesn't feel contrived in the slightest.

With fans like these in high places I guess it's only a matter of time before more and more collections become "very Freja" and we all start looking like mini-clones. :)

Image Credits: blog.shopbop.com

The Twitterization of Fashion

I've noticed something this fashion season. Twitter is completely changing the way we consume and digest the runway shows and the way we interact with fashion week. Thanks to the numerous tweets from people front row and backstage, we are now privy to instantaneous updates on which models walk, what the hair and makeup look like, and what a collection is about. All of this just mere minutes after (sometime even before) the shows end in real time, and hours before collection pictures go up on all the big websites.

Last season I could feel the initial stirrings of this (r)evolution. A few blogs were live tweeting shows and we got some blurry pictures here and there. But this season things feel drastically different and I think we can chalk it up to the perfect confluence of a few external factors:

-The ubiquity of iPhones containing cameras capable of taking quality pictures.
-The development and introduction of twitpic.
-The onslaught of the recession that caused fashion magazines, and indeed the industry as a whole, to suffer from decreased revenue.
-The consequent realization that other avenues (like the internet) needed to be tapped for their growth potential.

All these things have contributed to what I call the twitterization of fashion.

To be honest, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's probably too early to tell, and things are never black and white like that anyway. What I do know is that the influx of information from twitter this season has dramatically shortened my attention span and ability to retain any pertinent knowledge about the collections. Tweets come at a fast and furious pace, and they're short since Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet. Everything seems immediate and important, yet trivial and inconsequential at the same time. The moment you think you read about something important, another tweet comes along and erases the first one from memory.

This post comes from the realization that I haven't really looked at a lot of collections that have already shown this season. In the past, while sorting through the pictures to see if my favorite models walked, I'd get to really see the vision of a particular designer or come to appreciate a previously unknown talent. I didn't feel rushed and I also think that everyone else on tFS took the time to post good pictures and appreciate the clothes. This season is all about checking tweets and then moving on to see if tweets from the next show are up. The turnaround is just so fast paced that I think the fashion is being overlooked. I'll admit that even I'm guilty of glancing at the twitpic-ed showlist, scanning for my favorite models' names, and then only going to their thread at tFS for pictures.

Twitter isn't all bad though. Thanks to it's offshoot twitpic, we've gotten some great backstage photos of Freja, and we know when she's going to be walking a show before she actually does it. I'm sure this saves all the fans from nervous anticipation and "will she, won't she" conversations. But then again, isn't that all part of the fun?

Image Credits: twitpic.com/photos/vmagazine

Shake it Like a.....

I love the playful side that Freja has been showing us backstage this season. I know that you can't really tell much from pictures, but she seems to be relaxed and enjoying herself this time around. Perhaps the onset of maturity brings with it an acceptance and appreciation for one's circumstances. Or maybe she just reserves it for the polaroid camera. She's always doing something humorous in polaroids. I guess you have to be aware when someone is taking a picture of you with a polaroid, versus all the other backstage pictures that are taken of you without your knowledge.

Too bad the cameras and film have been discontinued. There is a campaign to save them though, so hopefully we'll still have great polaroids for many seasons to come.

Image Credits: wireimage

Dressing

Only marginally related to Freja, but I thought this was so interesting that I wanted to post about it. A blogger over at Vogue wrote about her experience backstage at Derek Lam, a show that Freja walked.

Sunday morning I get to the tents in Bryant Park at 10:00 a.m. sharp to go backstage at Derek Lam. When I get through the crush in hair and makeup, I reach the dressing area, where I encounter an army of dressers in black. They all work for Barbara Berman a professional dresser who’s doing 55 shows this season (she doesn’t say no to anyone unless there’s a scheduling conflict)—from Oscar de la Renta to Jason Wu to Joseph Altuzarra (she loves helping out the young ones). People travel from all over the world to work for Berman. Today there are fashion students, image consultants, stylists, and others, all looking for experience in the industry, and, says Barbara, “some New York cachet to bring back to their clients.”

Berman, who’s done fourteen New York fashion seasons, takes her job very seriously. All of her dressers have to sign confidentiality agreements: “No Twitters. No Facebook” (in this age of technology, someone with a camera could post photos of the clothes before they even get out on the runway). Plus, none of them are allowed to talk to the press—which I learned firsthand when I tried to ask them questions for this story. Some of Berman’s pros know different languages, and if she knows a model speaks, say, Portuguese, she’ll give her a dresser who does, too.

So it’s no surprise that all goes smoothly on the dressing end. “It’s my job to help the designer have a cool, calm backstage environment,” says Berman. Just as the lights are dimming in the tent, I dash out to watch the show and see Derek’s (and, in a way, Barbara’s) latest work.

Most of the time we're so preoccupied with models and designers that we forget about (or simply don't know about) all the other vital people who toil away behind the scenes. A person like Barbara is so integral to fashion week because without her the shows literally cannot go on. How do you think a model manages to change into 2 or 3 outfits within the span of 12 minutes when I know that it takes me at least 30 minutes to put on one outfit in the morning?

In all seriousness, I hope the spotlight is projected more often onto people like Barbara. I bet she's just full of interesting stories and privy to more gossip than anyone sitting front row. I have so much admiration for people like her who do their job year after year with little to no recognition. That type of dedication and passion deserves as much, if not more, respect than that which we bestow upon fashion's visible personalities.

Here are some old pictures of Freja dressing/being dressed for your time:

Image Credits: fashion_shows, hintmag, celebritycity

Look Into Her Eyes

Are you tired of looking at runway pictures yet? Maybe these polaroids will help break up the monotony. Anyway, happy Monday. Marc Jacobs tonight! Good chance Freja will be there. She hasn't missed a Marc show...ever.

Image Credits: wireimage

New Trend?

If you're tired of styling your hair in different ways, try this new styling look for your eyebrows! :) But seriously, I wonder if this trend will translate onto the streets? The Alexander Wang show is pretty influential in terms of style, but doing eyebrows this way might be taking it too far. I don't know....maybe in four months I'll be eating my words. I can see "Wangster" girls like Lissy Trulle and Alice Dellal sporting this look. And a year ago if you told me partially shaved heads were going to be in, I never would have believed you. But now they totally are and the only person who I think pulls it off is the wonderful Kate Lanphear.

Image Credits: scan by tFS member OhJane, wireimage

Backstage Fun

Fashion week can get hectic. Running around from show to show, making sure you're on time, going to fittings, trying to catch up with all the people you haven't seen since February. Freja seems to be taking this all in stride like the pro that she is. She can do her job, very well might I add, and still goof off and have fun backstage with her friends.

(Hmmm, where's your hand Heidi?)

And she's making new friends as well. Here she is with Karmen Pedaru.

That's my favorite shot so far. Two of my favorites together...just add Karolin and I'm done. Thanks for finding that picture slow_hands. The Heidi ones above are for you. :)

Image Credits: dazeddigital.com, wireimage

Flashback

Are we sure we're in SS10 and not SS07? Because it appears that not much has changed since back then.

Freja and Iselin


Freja and Irina


Freja and Lily

In an industry that changes faster than you can catch your breath, it's nice to see that some things remain constant and consistent. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Image Credits: altamira, celebritycity, style.com, flickr/christopherpeterson

Blink and you'll miss it

I was browsing Stella McCartney's site in my search for some new workout clothes. I think I just wanted to torture myself by looking at her collection for Adidas, knowing full well that I'd never spend that much on clothes I sweat in no matter how cute they are. Anyway, I started poking around the rest of her site and came across this backstage video from FW0910.

If you skip to around 1:30 you'll see a quick exchange of looks between Freja and Magdalena. I just think this is cute because it gives us a small glimpse of the camaraderie between models backstage. I think many people are still under the assumption that models are bitchy, snobby, cut-throat people. Linda Evangelista didn't do much to dispel that stereotype with her infamous quote about not getting out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. But these days, with "model" holding a lower cache than it did back in the 90s, most girls genuinely seem down to earth and like they get along in their little model cabals.

They form bonds due to their shared experiences and it shows in the few backstage videos and photos that we get to see. In fact, I think we'd probably be surprised at all the different models friendships going on, simply because what we get to see backstage is only a tiny fraction of it all. If you're like me and you religiously read Tatiana the Anonymous Model's column at Jezebel, you'd know that some of her posts reflect and reaffirm that sense of camaraderie.

Anyway, sorry that there isn't any sound and that the video quality is so crappy. Normally, I wouldn't post something like this because it's kind of insignificant....literally blink and you will miss it. But it's a slow news day and regardless of what it does or doesn't mean in the grand scheme of intra-model interactions and friendships, I just think it's a sweet, funny moment. Maybe the Fragdalena pairing isn't such a far-fetched idea after all. Too bad it didn't get any votes. :(

And speaking of, the next round of voting will go up sometime later this week. Thanks to all who indulged my attempt at having some fun. :)

Horsing Around Backstage

Thanks to an anonymous poster on this blog (whoever you are, you're wonderful and I really am grateful!), I bring you this clip from the FW0910 Isaac Mizrahi show. Skip to around 1:20.



I literally laughed out loud because what I saw was so unexpected and just so funny. I absolutely adore fashion shows for the spontaneous backstage moments like this. Freja has such a sense of humor and playfulness to her manner! And I love the relationship she seems to have with Heidi. The two of them just seem like they have such fun together backstage. Maybe that rebel persona is just a front? I'm onto you Freja Beha Erichsen. Those tattoos aren't going to fool me any longer.

If you're a model-fanatic (like I am), it's pretty difficult to satisfy your curiosities about models off duty. Even though they're beautiful and glamorous, in the larger media food chain models aren't important enough to warrant tons of interviews and hours of video footage. (Instead, we get rundowns of the daily minutiae of "celebrities" like Miley Cyrus and Lauren Conrad. Is there no justice in this world?) Most models merely remain the pretty faces that we see walking the catwalks and posing backstage for pictures. We rarely get to see anything that gives them the opportunity to express their personalities or their age. Don't you always forget that most of these girls aren't even old enough to drink in the US? I know I do.

Luckily things are beginning to change. Sites have emerged like Modelinia, which focus on models off the catwalk. Most of the major agencies run blogs that highlight the adventures of their top girls. And every season we see more and more backstage video clips from fashion blogs and sites that capture off the cuff moments like the one above. Maybe the contingent of model-maniacs is growing? Or maybe we're just starting to realize that there are enough of us out there to warrant more behind the scenes stuff. Either way, you can bet I'm totally looking forward to what next season's backstage might bring!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Three day weekends are wonderful, aren't they? I hope you take this time to....

Catch up on your sleep.


Hang out with your friends.


Go out dancing.


Get plenty to drink (I'm sure most of you will be going for stronger stuff.)


Peace out!

Image Credits: celebritycity, firstview, jdvision, myspace, sonnyphotos, style

Marni Moments

I really love this set of backstage pictures so I had to post them. Marni also happens to be one of my favorite brands.

Isn't it kind of strange to see Freja with the newer girls, instead of her usual model crew? I kind of miss the Lily, Irina, Agyness days.

It's even more strange (to me at least) that Freja is six (!) years older than Jac, yet they look the same age. Maybe Jac even look a little bit older to me because her cheekbones are so sharp.

We always get a ton of backstage pictures after shows end, but I'm willing to bet they don't even begin to convey the craziness and chaos that constitutes the actual backstage. Thus is the nature of photography that the end result is merely a small moment, captured and frozen, separated from the greater whole. Anyway, the following two pictures remind me of this.

Just check out the sheer number of girls and looks that have to come together. All the meticulous design work during the months before the show culminates in a quick flurry of activity and 15 minutes on a catwalk. Craziness indeed.

ALSO! Don't forget about the Dansk Fashion Awards tomorrow (or today, depending on when you read this). On May 20th we find out if Freja can take home the award for Danish Female Model of the Year for the second consecutive year, or if she concedes the title to Agnete or Charlotte. Regardless of what happens, I hope Freja shows up and we get some candids!

Image Credits: fashionmag.com