Bridget Here Is The Article
bridget said:
Bridget- The part about Cintia, modeling & a few other girls is in bold.
Guy Trebay
Copyright New York Times Company Mar 2, 2005
And so, as the saying goes, the dogs barked and the
fashion caravan moved on, this time to Paris. Having folded their tents in New York,
London and Milan, the barkers, the talent, the showpieces, the claques all followed in semiannual migration, their movement propelled on a river of talk.
''Gucci is starting to come up -- it was struggling, really struggling big-time for a couple of years,'' said Frank Castagna, the chief executive of Castagna Realty, owner of the Americana
shopping center in Manhasset, N.Y., which is to most luxury malls as St. Peter's Basilica is to a little church in a dell.
Forget the
stock reports, the
focus groups, the self-appointed market prophets, always willing to skew their analysis to fit a reporter's thesis of the moment. Mr. Castagna is the man who virtually invented the luxury
shopping strip by taking an assortment of fading carriage trade boutiques on the North Shore of Long Island and adding to them the slick aura of destination.
With the
help of the architect Peter Marino and the gifted landscape designers Oehme, van Sweden Associates, who lined pedestrian Route 25A with swathes of glaucous cultivated grasses, Mr. Castagna laid the groundwork for a temple to the cult of luxury. Where once there was a Miracle Mile consisting of genteel dinosaurs like Best & Co. (where this reporter was introduced to the Eton-collared jacket at age 5), a handful of local carriage trade merchants and a vast depressing Waldbaums, the Americana now stands as luminous and humming with promise as the Crystal Cathedral on a desert Sunday morning.
When Mr. Castagna talks, merchants listen. Well, maybe they don't always listen, but they should. How many truth-tellers are there in an industry in which hype is mother's milk? ''YSL is still struggling, and Cartier is still a little slow for us,'' he said. ''Prada was flat for three years now, but now it's coming up.''
The
money is still out there, but it's in different hands than in the days when Hicksville was still a suburban dream of the future and Billy Joel had yet to be born. And the customer for luxury goods has changed tremendously, said Mr. Castagna, whose
shopping center is a short driving
distance from 12 of the top scorers in a Worth magazine survey of America's richest towns. ''The average age of the shopper 20 years ago was 60,'' he said. Now it is closer to 40. ''And those people are not empty-nesters. They have children living at home.''
Do you want to know who is buying those $300 Marc Jacobs flats and the $2,970 bag from Dior? It is likely to be a 17-year-old with her own platinum card. ''They have a lot of available income now,'' Mr. Castagna said. ''These people take care of their kids.''
The fact that Cintia Dicker has a big head really tends to get in her way, say casting agents, cold-hearted types who give proof to the saw about modeling being the ugly business of pretty women. Ms. Dicker is a gamine, with large eyes, red hair, a short upper lip and a certain amount of baby fat clinging to her girlish Brazilian body. A year ago, when she came on the scene, there were big predictions for a success that failed to happen, although she made the round of castings for every designer worthy of note.
This season, suddenly, Cintia Dicker was a phenomenon, the girl that everyone had to have. She was booked for dozens of runway shows, and even got paid for many of them, an outcome that is by no means guaranteed.
But will Ms. Dicker last in a business where there are trends for certain types of humans just as surely as there are for ombre dye treatments, plastic disc jewelry, platform wedges, Rastafarian tams and gathered hems?
''You never know because this is a really strange business,'' explained Diana Dondoe, another of this season's runway darlings. (French Vogue, in its March issue, which is devoted to mannequins as the new stars, calls the gorgeously moody Ms. Dondoe ''le plus intello des tops,'' a typically goofball formulation that basically translates as ''smart for a model.'')
Ms. Dondoe is smart and, like an increasing number of young women in her profession, surprisingly well grounded. ''You have to realize that nothing in this business is personal,'' she said backstage at Sophia Kokosalaki's show here on Tuesday. ''It's not personal when they like you, and it's not personal when they dislike you. It can all change in a day, and although it hasn't happened to me yet, I hope I'm ready when it does.''
Ms. Kokosalaki is one of those designers whose name carries a mysterious hip factor, which works strongly in her favor in a variety of ways. Anna Wintour came on time to her show and sat with impressive calm through an hourlong delay. Modeling agents gladly sent Ms. Kokosalaki their best girls, the familiar names in order to keep the resumes fresh, the novices in the hope that they will be spotted by Ms. Wintour or, more likely, by Melanie Ward or Brana Wolf. Getting the nod from an influential stylist can make the difference between raking in a half-million dollars for a season on the catwalks or going back to flipping burgers in the McDonald's in an Estonian mall.
''It's funny how it all happens,'' said Raquel Zimmerman, a Hitchcock blonde from Rio Grande do Sul, the Brazilian province with a large population of German immigrants and a correspondingly large population of gorgeous Aryan types with exceptionally long limbs. ''Two years ago when I started, I was working all right, but it was nothing great, and I wanted to stop and go to Parsons,'' Ms. Zimmerman said. ''And then, suddenly, boom!''
The Zimmerman boom happened to coincide with a change in the way clothes were being proportioned. ''Maybe it's not the greatest face,'' said one stylist, a person who should probably research corrective lenses. ''But the body was perfect for the classic looks Alber Elbaz was doing at Lanvin.''
Her success, Ms. Zimmerman understands, is a fluke and really not due to anything she can control. ''It's so much a matter of taste,'' she said backstage at Dior, one of the 35 shows she has worked so far in a season with five days left to go, for an average runway fee of $10,000 a show. ''Who knows when it will end?'' she said as she pulled a cigarette from her purse. ''It could be tomorrow. And when it does, it's actually just the beginning of something else. I'm only 21 years old.''