Now Curating | Supe du Jour Lara Stone
By
Ana Finel Honigman
In selecting the Dutch supermodel Lara Stone to succeed the American transexual club goddess Amanda Lepore as its guest curator, the site
notjustalabel pits nature against science. Every month, the leading online showroom for emerging designers invites a key tastemaker to comb through the hordes of designers who display their wares on the site and select a lucky few to be showcased for its Shop section. (Previous guest curators have included Diane Pernet, the French fashion maven, and Robin Schulié, the buyer for Maria Luisa.)
For her part, Stone has cherry-picked a stunning selection, which includes Aoi Kotsuhiroi’s rough cut quartz rings and a Gareth Pugh-like futuristic jacket by the London designer Samantha Cole. But my first response on hearing that a great beauty would follow in the footsteps of such a surgicalized creature was to wonder who has the better advice? Should we listen more attentively to someone born beautiful or to someone who has painstakingly sculptured beauty onto themselves?
On one side of this divide is Lepore, a global icon modeled after Marilyn Monroe, whose tireless surgical quest has made her “the world´s No. 1 transexual” by her own description. On the other side is Stone, whose pouty blond beauty recalls Brigitte Bardot’s natural earthiness in “And God Created Woman.” Comparisons to Bardot swirl around a lot of sexy blondes, but few of them approach Stone’s uncanny reincarnation of the original sex kitten. Even her aspirations for life after modeling are reminiscent of Bardot. “I want to retire and get a dog,” she told me when we discussed her selection for NJL.
Stone’s sultry looks, however, have a feral bite that Bardot was rarely allowed to express in pictures and that make her a captivating force in images and on the catwalk. In contrast to Lepore, who poses very carefully in surreal fantasy constructions by David LaChapelle and other high-concept artists, Stone’s allure springs from her disarming lack of polish. In ads for
Lanvin, Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, Emanuel Ungaro (?????) and H&M, she projects an intimidating nonchalance and captivating aura of chaos. Her friend Stefan Siegel, the man behind the initiative, admires her effortless style and chose her because, he said, “I believe her style, attitude and character fit much better to NJAL and its emerging designer than to a boring D-Squared or Calvin Klein. She embodies the black sheep!”
Stone’s designer selections are appropriately gritty and unconventional, with a strong emphasis on rough stones, leather and other natural materials. Her mostly black and orange picks are an homage to her native Holland. But all her choices share comfort, despite the garments´ often unexpected aesthetics and tailoring.
Whereas Lepore told me, “my dresses are very tight and mostly all made for me — couture baby,” Stone “wants comfortable clothes to wear between jobs, mostly black and lots of hoodies.” However, she does share one thing with her predecessor: a fascination with the other side of fashion. “I love men’s wear,” she declares.
In the final analysis, few of us may possess either Lepore’s determination to make herself beautiful or Stone’s natural charms. Rather, we should probably heed Stone’s assertion that anyone aspiring to style need always remember that “individuality is a necessity.” At this point, a cliché. But all too true.
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themoment.blogs.nytimes.com
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