The Hills

[lovepink87]

The next season will be like watching a train wreck.Painful but I have to see.I hope Lo gets yelled at.

And I hope Spencer gets shot.Wishful thinking lol.

I'm not much of a Lo fan either.

Does anyone know when the new season will start?

 

[KatjaR]

Can anybody ID this top?

http://tceb.typepad.com/tceb_torontos_celebrity_a/images/2008/03/29/080328_lauren_conrad_jw007.jpg

 

[impossibleprincess]

I'd recommend going to the star style section and then the Lauren Conrad thread, because I'm pretty sure someone asked the question in there...

 

[Zposen]

Dark Angel of The Hills

The viewers of MTV’s wildly popular kind-of reality show The Hills, which will begin airing its fourth season in August, first glimpsed fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone in season one, when series star Lauren Conrad was dispatched by her boss at Teen Vogue to procure 11th-hour tickets to a fashion show being produced by Ms. Cutrone’s company, People’s Revolution.
“They said, ‘Don’t make it hard, but don’t make it easy,’” recalled Ms. Cutrone, 42, on a recent evening, sipping cabernet and working her way through a three-tiered antipasti platter at the Soho Grand (where, as the hotel’s former publicist, she eats for free).
Ms. Conrad, who appears easily flummoxed and favors headbands, found Ms. Cutrone backstage at the fashion show, but couldn’t name the Vogue editors who would be using the extra tickets. “You’re going to need to move a lot quicker than this if you’re going to work in the fashion business,” Ms. Cutrone snapped on camera.
“Which I meant, because she was slow,” recalled the older woman, back at the Soho Grand munching prosciutto.
Ms. Cutrone was an immediate hit with the show’s producers and fans, and became a regular midway through the third season when Whitney Port, Ms. Conrad’s coworker at Teen Vogue, left the magazine to work for the L.A. office of People’s Revolution. In recent weeks, Ms. Port has been in New York filming the show’s fourth season, which will feature Ms. Cutrone even more prominently. Ms. Cutrone calls herself the series’ “antagonist.”
She also functions as a kind of antidote to the series’ dreamy plasticity, portraying fashion as an actual job where one works, rather than an excuse to rustle through racks of clothes while discussing your roommate issues. And, bitchy or not, as a powerful female whose authority is never questioned or mocked, she is a near-anomaly on television. She boasts a what-the-**** attitude that betrays punk-rockish roots. Any scene in with her in it is more interesting: it’s actual drama.
In person, Ms. Cutrone looked more polished and rested than she ever has on The Hills. She wore Prada heels and head-to-toe black. She has jet-black hair and wears no visible makeup atop her startlingly pale skin, which gives her the look of Wednesday Addams 30 years later. On The Hills, she is drawn and demanding, an East Coast Queen of the Night to Ms. Port and Ms. Conrad’s ditzy blond Californian Princesses.
So far, her increasing notoriety has not hurt her business. “Your clients, they don’t want you to be more famous than them,” she said. “But at the same time, they want to have a powerful publicist.” People’s Revolution currently reps 46 clients, including Longchamp, Yigal Azrouel, Vivienne Westwood and Sass & Bide.
Ms. Cutrone is brash both onscreen and off, but The Hills has edited her into a “power b*tch,” as she says, focusing on incidents like a public scolding of West Coast People’s Revolution publicist Jessica Trent, who was subsequently fired. (“If you think about Donald Trump on TV, like, ‘You’re fired,’ everybody’s like, ‘Yeah!’” said Ms. Cutrone, disagreeing that her behavior was at all unwarranted. “It’s like, do you understand what the job is?”) But ambivalence about her Hills portrayal is minimal. “I’ve been called [a power b*tch] so many times that it’s like an inner-slang situation,” she said. “People are gonna look at you and project onto you what it is they want. Power b*tch is a generational thing.
“I think that people hate women,” she added. “And I don’t think they like powerful women, and I think it really goes back to Salem, I really do. I think it really goes back to this concept of, you know, hysterical coming from uterus. …”
Ms. Cutrone leaned forward on the couch, where she was perched before her spread of proteins, rolling up thinly sliced bites of meat and popping them in her mouth between rapid-fire points. She seemed to be trying to outdo each statement with the next.
“I think that people really have to look back to Egypt, and this concept of women being in power is not a new thought. With the advent of religion, you saw the demise of the female in the godhead. In Christianity, Mary gets pregnant on her own, she doesn’t even get ****ed.”​

PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION EMPLOYS 24 people, most of whom, unsurprisingly, are women in their 20s. The company occupies three floors of a building on Grand Street in Soho, and Ms. Cutrone lives in a spacious loft in the same building with her 6-year-old daughter, Ava, and an Argentinian male model named Demian, whom she met while casting a fashion show in Mexico City and brought back to New York on a visitor’s visa to shoot an ad campaign for a client with the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Ava’s godmother. Ms. Cutrone later introduced Demian to photographer Bruce Weber’s booker, a friend, and he was soon posing for L’Uomo Vogue and V magazine spreads. (Mr. Weber, auteur of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is a noted discoverer of international-caliber pectorals.)
Since February, Ms. Cutrone has also housed and schooled a 7-year-old Native-American girl from a reservation in South Dakota, the granddaughter of John Trudell, a Native-American activist and former boyfriend who happened to be dating Angelina Jolie’s mother at the time of her death (Ms. Bertrand left him $100,000 in her will). Ms. Jolie produced a documentary on Mr. Trudell.
But though she lives with two schoolgirls and a male model, Ms. Cutrone has been dating music producer Jimmy Boyle, 40, who lives in Los Angeles, for several years, and she also remains close to her first husband, pop artist and Warhol affiliate Ronnie Cutrone, 60, to whom she was married briefly in her early 20s and who still crashes on her couch. (Ava’s father was an Italian she met in Paris and left three months into her pregnancy, shortly after leaving her second husband, an actor.) Another presence at le château Cutrone is Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s filmmaker and the former manager of the Velvet Underground, whom she met though Mr. Cutrone years ago, has reconnected with, and now considers an “uncle.” (It has been reported he is making a film about Demian.)​

If your head isn’t spinning yet, get this: Ms. Cutrone is trying to set up Demian with Whitney Port. “I was like, ‘Paul, if I get Whitney to marry Demian, will you come and direct an episode of The Hills?’ That would be the ultimate Warhol thing, right? To get ****ing Paul to do an episode of The Hills would be amaaaaazing!”

“I’ve been very impressed with how she’s doing,” allowed Mr. Morrissey the other day, reached at home in New York. “I’ve seen one episode of The Hills and she’s as natural as they come. That’s what she’s like in real life.” Said Ms. Cutrone: “Paul and I laugh, ’cause we were all kind of freaks in the Warhol family, and Demian’s, like, the next generation of these people who are kind of hooked into this thing.”
Ms. Cutrone likes to say she has lived her life backward: marriage, then kid, then all-white furniture in her apartment. But there is also an element of déjà vu to her present situation: She owned her first PR firm when she was in her 20s, after stints as PR doyenne Susan Blond’s assistant and, later, as Bob Guccione’s rep at Spin.
The story of how this happened is the stuff of New York myth. Just weeks after moving to New York at age 21 from Syracuse, where she was raised, she met writer and bon vivant Anthony Haden-Guest at a garden party. She moved into his apartment, she explained casually, after being evicted from her own, on Avenue C. He thought she needed a job, and introduced her to über-publicist Ms. Blond. (Ronnie Cutrone also takes credit for this introduction, saying he figured she’d be a great publicist because “she was always on the telephone, nonstop!”) She got hired.
“She was an accident waiting to happen,” recalled Mr. Cutrone. The couple first met at a club called Carmelita, in a former whorehouse. “She was wild, ambitious, volatile, sexual. Sex and the City looks like a ridiculous joke compared to what Kelly was! Plfffffft!” Early in their courtship, Mr. Cutrone found a gram of coke in a jacket Ms. Cutrone had borrowed. He himself was clean at the time, he said. “I’m like, what the hell! Kelly tracked me down at my building and woke up two gay guys, looking for the coke or me, and then eventually she did find us, but there it was—sex and drugs in one pretty picture.” (“I was out that night,” admitted Ms. Cutrone.) They soon moved in together, and got married. She was 22.
“We’d go to dinners with people, and we’d go home and I’d say, ‘That man was nice, who is he?’ And Ronnie would be like, ‘That’s Tim Leary,’” recalled Ms. Cutrone. “It was an amazing time in New York.”
After her stints with Ms. Blond and at Spin, she formed her own company, Cutrone & Weinberg, with a former Susan Blond intern named Jason Weinberg, now a prominent talent manager in L.A. They represented Eartha Kitt; Mark Ronson and his first band, Whole Earth Mamas, which also included Sean Lennon; and the Smithereens. But Ms. Cutrone was miserable.
“I owned a successful PR company—sound familiar?” she said. “And I just really felt like I was part of that ‘Don’t you know who I am,’ kind of club, and I bought into this world and I had this money and I had this kind of thing going on. I was using drugs to keep up with my life.”
Later in her 20s, she sold Mr. Weinberg her half of the company and became a tarot card reader on Venice Beach. Right on the beach. By the Hare Krishnas. She stayed for a year and a half. Her mother was concerned, but she was happy. “I was just doing full-on meditation all the time,” she said. “A lot of people that get out of PR do very bizarre things.”
But PR called her back. She began repping the Wasteland, a used-clothing store in L.A. The Sunset Marquis soon followed.
“She came to the hotel, I interviewed her,” recalled Rod Gruendyke, the hotel’s general manager. “She had her head shaved. I thought this was kind of interesting. A few weeks later, I had her come back, and this time she had blue dreadlocks. About three weeks went by and I called her again, and she showed up this time in an Armani suit, and I hired her on the spot.”
Ms. Cutrone moved her company back to New York in 1999, keeping a satellite office in L.A.
“I wouldn’t want 80 percent of [powerhouse fashion firm] KCD’s roster,” she insisted. “I would never rep Versace, I can’t stand her, I think she makes disgusting clothes. Calvin [Klein] is like, snore! Who wears Calvin Klein? I’m not dissing him. I think he’s built an amazing, respectable business, but I would never want to work for Calvin Klein, ever.” Her own stable of clients is heavy on up-and-comers and not the most high-end in the business, but she said it was consciously curated based on whom she thought deserved “a voice.”​

 

[Zposen]

A FEW DAYS AFTER dinner at the Soho Grand, Us Weekly reported that Whitney Port was about to get her own Hills spinoff, in which she’d go bicoastal, work for People’s Revolution in New York (which sounds strangely like the official description of The Hills’ season four) and befriend New York socialites like Olivia Palermo (for whom Ms. Cutrone worked briefly last year when the young woman was suffering a spate of bad publicity). That afternoon, armed with a huge C.O. Bigelow bag, Ms. Cutrone rushed into her office, which is manned by two assistants who sit directly across from her at a massive white recycled table-desk. Behind her seat hung an enormous black-and-white portrait of Ava, shot by Ms. Mark.
“This thing just broke on Perez Hilton; my ****ing cell phone is ringing off the hook,” Ms. Cutrone said. “Obviously, I’m not too busy to buy face cream! I’m at the age when people try to be helpful, but they’re mean.”
Us Weekly sat open beside her Mac laptop, open to the relevant page.
She pulled up Perez Hilton on her computer and studied the screen. “I guess that thing ran and I’m everybody’s best friend now,” she mused. “Let’s get [Radar writer] Neel Shah on the phone.” One of her assistants sprung into action.​

“Is there anything you need?” she asked Mr. Shah with unconcealed glee before stressing that the news was “not confirmed, it’s leaked.” (“I’m signed to a very tight NDA with MTV,” she said later, adding: “I know for a fact [Olivia] has yet to sign a deal with them.”)

Ms. Cutrone is a micromanager and compulsive phone-caller who still dials press contacts herself to pitch her clients (almost unheard of in her business among top executives) and directs seating at her company’s fashion shows from the runways like an air traffic controller, often looking like she’s rolled out of bed only moments before. She works until 1 or 2 a.m. during fashion week, midnight many other months, and she doesn’t allow her two assistants to leave before she does.
“Why do people want to be part of a group, anyway?” she suddenly sighed, referring to the Council of Fashion Designers of America applications she had spent the morning organizing on behalf of three clients, going so far as to solicit a letter from Sofia Coppola on behalf of designer Araks and arranging for her to e-mail it directly to Steven Kolb, head of the CFDA.
Designer Norma Kamali was suddenly on the phone about a CFDA recommendation she wrote for Andrew Buckler, a client of Ms. Cutrone’s. “Norma, I sent it to your publicist two weeks ago,” Ms. Cutrone was saying. “No, I understand that, but it’s really … Well, you know they close at 5. No, I’m not saying that Norma. O.K., O.K. Could you just send it to Steven Kolb?”
Ms. Cutrone suddenly blared “Rapper’s Delight” from her laptop and lit a cigarette at her desk. “Sometimes I do nothing for a moment,” she said, adding that she uses brief, deafening musical interludes as “a management tool.”
“I’m not just doing it ’cause you’re here,” she added. Her preternaturally calm assistants nodded vociferously.
Then: “****, Norma Kamali’s e-mailing me again!”
Ms. Cutrone quieted things down and called Paper editor Kim Hastreiter, a longtime friend, to inform her that one of her assistants was Jordanian and could help arrange the paperwork for Paper’s September shoot in Dubai.
“You’re so pretty,” said Ms. Cutrone softly to a 19-year old intern who walked in with a phone message. “What’s your major?” Her name was Taryn, and she was at community college in L.A., where she had seen Nicky Hilton leaving People’s Revolution’s West Coast offices, which inspired her to apply for the internship.
“Why do you want to go to college for PR?” crowed Ms. Cutrone. “We have people with a bachelor’s degree who can’t take a frickin’ phone message! I would ask your family what they think of you not going to college for a few years and exploring a work opportunity.”
“Just be careful, because you’re pretty and look like a party girl,” she cautioned. “Are you a party girl?”
By that time, Ms. Cutrone’s star intern, Joe, had also popped in (she retains several interns at all times). “Who has been the nicest to you of all the senior people?” she said loudly.
“Kelly Cutrone!” said Joe.
Ms. Cutrone meditates every day and consults every Saturday at midnight with a yogi named Mikael Spector, an American who lives in India, whom she met after her tarot card days when she had a short-lived record deal at Atlantic based on a demo of her chanting over a friend’s band’s “groove.” “He doesn’t need me to do PR for him. I guess he’s like the perfect father, husband, brother,” she said of Mr. Spector, to whom she refers as “my teacher in India” and whom she has visited on the subcontinent. “He’s a very evolved being. I have all these amazing guys that all make up the one perfect man.”
It helps her to be mellow about the fact that, even though she is not necessarily experiencing the spiritual angst of her first go-round as a PR girl in Manhattan, she still needs to bring in $200,000 a month just to break even, all on fees which top off around $22,000 per client.
“I love a lot of the people I work with, but at the end of the day, if my business tanks, I’m the one who’s going to have to leave the country, because I’m oversigned and overleased and I have a gazillion things in my name,” she said. “If anything ever happened to People’s, I’d have to, like, bolt.”
“You’re never done in this job,” she said. “You’re never done. So you just have to figure out when can you stop.”​

www.observer.com

 

[colourmefashion]

thanks for posting !

 

[Party_Vixen]

Great article! Wow that woman has done sooo much!

 

[Princess2008]

Nice article!

 

[colourmefashion]

when does the new season start anyway ?

incase i want to watch it

 

[Princess2008]

^ August

 

[LUXXX]

Heidi's new song...

http://perezhilton.com/2008-06-23-new-music-from-heidi-montag

 

[Zposen]

So What Do You Do, Kelly Cutrone, Owner, People's Revolution?

This fashion PR professional talks about her life and her PR firm made famous by The Hills.

It's been over 20 years since Kelly Cutrone moved to Manhattan from her small hometown in upstate New York. Since then, she's been married twice, worked as an Atlantic Records recording artist, launched and then left her own boutique PR firm, only to return to the publicity world with her current firm, People's Revolution.

Now, Kelly is enjoying perhaps the biggest spotlight on her career, as part of MTV's hit reality show, The Hills. Whitney Port, one of the show's stars, currently serves as a People's Revolution intern. Yes, she actually does work. Kelly spoke to mediabistro.com about how that arrangement came about, why the Internet has changed the fashion industry, and how TV and media are, "sexualizing kids so quick." Name: Kelly Cutrone
Position: Owner, People's Revolution
Resume: Worked for PR maven Susan Blond; head of PR at Spin; started her own company
Birth date: November 13, 1965
Hometown: Camillus, N.Y.
Education: Syracuse University
Marital Status: Not married. Have been twice.
First section of the Sunday Times: Style
Favorite TV show: I don't watch TV.
Guilty pleasure: Target Last book you read: I'm reading a book right now called Conversations with God by Neil Donald Walsh.

Where did you work before founding People's Revolution?
My career started completely by accident. I moved to New York at the age of 21, I was just kind of, you know, a young girl who wanted to live in New York. I met Anthony Hayden Guest, the writer, who was the art critic at Vanity Fair at the time. One day he said to me, "Darling, you have to get a job!" And I said, "Well, I think I'll be an MTV VJ or something." This was like 1987. And he said, "You're much too smart for that, you should be a publicist." And I said, "Well, what is that?" And he said, "Oh, you know, you just talk all day and put people together."

So I went and I had an interview with Susan Blond. My career started with Susan and I worked there for six to eight months, and then I left there and became the director of PR for Spin. From their I left and decided I would start my own company and contacted a former intern of mine who I had hired, a guy by the name of Jason Weinberg, who now owns Untitled, which is now probably the largest and most definitive management company in the country. He manages Hillary Swank, Naomi Watts, and Madonna.
So, we started this company called Cutrone and Weinberg, which was one of the first really young, boutique PR companies, and I did that up until the end of 1991 or 1992 and I just said, "I really cannot and do not want to do this anymore." It was the worst job.
I took some time off, and it's a big long story but I was actually signed to Atlantic Records. I got a record deal, and was living out in L.A., and I just really didn't like doing it. And, I left. I said, "Fashion is the new rock and roll," and started People's Revolution in 1996 or 1997; I'm not sure what year.
What do you think are some of the biggest changes in the fashion industry over the last several years?
With the Internet... I think it's like the Wild West now, and all of the templates of entertainment no longer are serving anyone. They're all breaking down, whether it's record labels or the old-school fashion systems.
Back in the day, the formula used to be, make really beautiful clothes, create an inspiring image, keep it very pure, don't ever let anyone who's not in the fashion world in to see it, stay super exclusive and then you'll have this master license five to 10 years down the road, that will be worth a lot for licensing. Or, some great head-hunter from Paris will come and find you on your island and bring you to Europe and have you head up a fashion house, and they'll also support your own independent line. What we've seen over the last five to seven years is that the French and Italian companies have done that, they've brought in different people, and then they bring these people in for three seasons and they go, "Oh well, you're really great and all these people write about you, but you don't know how to manage a team of 60-100 people, nor can you carry a $100 million company."
So, you know, thanks a lot, we've used you for your press and public persona and now we're going to throw you away. In my opinion, everything is upside down. You have people like Karl Lagerfeld doing deals with H&M, these people working with GAP, Go International with Target, Anna Wintour put Teen Vogue on The Hills. You have these incredible infusions and injections of what some people looking at it might call confusion. What I see is powerful pioneers seeking new distribution outlets and changing the laws and rules of how things work.
What about fashion PR? How has the new media landscape changed how you do business?
Well, I mean obviously, we're on The Hills. I think the important thing is that PR is not something that can be controlled, especially not now. Before you used to have like five press agents, so we talk to 20 people, and with the Internet and the increased attention on fashion and the fact that with fashion shows, lets say there's 400 or 500 people at a fashion show, maybe 25 to 125 of those people are valid and going to make a difference in the designer's work, and God only knows the other 300, who might be younger market editors, who might have a blog under another name, who take all of this as a fashion expert and they start blogging. So, this ability of controlling the image is completely changed.
So, what you have to do, I mean for me -- and the way we're working -- is we want our clients to command and control as many visual moments per season as they can. Whether those visual moments are their own retail stores, look books or fashion shows, you know, things they can control. Once you ship the clothes, they are the product of the stores and the store can put them in the window alongside whomever they want.
Once a celebrity wears a design, if they decide to go out and get drunk and drive home in your dress, it's not necessarily a great thing. So, we're into creating these visual moments and trying to help our clients create as many appendages as possible onto the body of their brands that can walk onto the pages of a particular magazine and make the proper statements for them.
What are some of the ways in which fashion PR differs from other industries?
I think when you're a specialist in PR it's like asking the question, "What's the difference between an orthopedic surgeon and a radiologist?" I mean, there's a lot of difference, you know. But, I think that branding is branding. The great thing about fashion is that it changes every six months, and you never get stuck for two years, or even eight months, like a movie campaign.
And of course, the clothes don't talk back. The clothes aren't going to call you and make you call their lawyer. They're not going to wake you up in the middle of the night because they were busted leaving a club with a drag queen. The clothes are the clothes, and usually the designers are manageable.
So much is made of getting a celebrity to appear on camera with your client's products. Is the celebrity endorsement overrated?
It depends on the celebrity... well no, it's not overrated if it's Uma Thurman who just won an Oscar in your dress and you didn't have to pay her to wear it. That's what I would call a good thing; it's a great placement.
Do I think any brand should depend solely on celebrity? No, because it's just going to look like an L.A. "celebu-tart" brand and it's not going to have the legitimacy and the read with the fashion guard, the true fashion guard coming from New York and Europe. So, I mean, like most things, you want your pie to be evenly distributed, which is, you want to have great design, a cool, interesting or charismatic designer, and if they're not that on their own, hopefully they'll have some type of connection, whether it's a rock star dad or a movie mogul boyfriend, or something that's going to make it easier to push them because the magazines want to feature people that are going to appeal to their readers. If you're a 65-year-old, 300-pound woman, they're probably not going to want to feature you in their magazine.
Also, you want to have good production, you want to have the ability to finance the brand through the terms that it's going to go and deliver them to retailers, and good press and good marketing. Those are all of the components that go into making a successful brand.
New York reported that Whitney Port "becomes bicoastal" while working for People's Revolution, for a new spinoff show. What do you think about Whitney having to carry a show?
Well, I don't know that she is carrying a show. We have no contracts or anything on that, so I cannot confirm that that is true. I can tell you that Whitney is bicoastal because we have a bicoastal agency and this is not her first time at the rodeo, coming to New York. Part of last season, she was in New York for a show we did, she was working here during Fashion Week and yes, she does come back and forth. If there is a pilot or a spinoff, we don't have contracts on that yet, so we can't confirm that.
How would you explain the popularity of The Hills?
I have a bizarre experience with The Hills. I'm a mom and I have a six-year-old, and when my daughter was a year and a half, my mom was trying to give her Disney princess stuff and I was really opposed to it, because I thought the messaging was very negative in the setup for little girls. It's always some poor village girl, and something happens to her, and then poof, this guy shows up and they move to the castle and everything is great.
I just really didn't want my daughter to get into that. I mean so much to the point that I was looking at a Waldorf or city and country type gender-free school because I just thought that it was negative imaging. By the time my daughter was two, she knew every Disney princess, every name, even though we didn't have it in our house and I just totally succumbed to the fact that Disney had gotten my kid and there was nothing I could do, so I mind as well join them and celebrate that aspect of imagination and femininity with her.
And now she's six and she's really into Miley Cyrus, who I think originally the core concept was developed for a tween market, but what's happening is TV and media are sexualizing kids so quick and everything's moving so fast that a five-year-old is now into what a 12-year-old used to be into because of the way things like Disney edits and paces their show.
People like Zach and Cody, That's So Raven, and then Miley, so it was like my daughter just turned six, she just finished kindergarten and she knows all about High School Musical, which is really a tween Grease, if you think about it.
Then what happens for these girls, their next installation is, guess what, The Hills. And they're just old enough to start watching MTV, they're hormonally in place, and they see these four young, beautiful girls who really in my mind are a continuation of a Disney princess, because they live in a world that most people will never live in. And, on top of that, you pick up the extra market of people who do live in that world who want to see themselves reflected back, like the fashion and entertainment people who kind of watch it like it's something like they can't really believe that they're watching, but they are watching and they're enthralled because they can't believe they're watching what they're watching but they're also narcissistic because they see their own world reflected back to them.
And then there's a sub-group of people that are drawn in by their wives. And I know this because when I go out of town or something, people come up to me, like a 40-year-old guy who's an engineer who is like, "Oh, are you on The Hills? I told my wife that was you, I knew that was you." And I say, "Well why do you watch The Hills?" And he says, "I don't know, I like to watch TV with my wife and she started having me watch it."
Being from upstate New York and not being born in New York on Park Avenue, I think I have an interesting perspective because I come from one world and I live in another, and I think for most young people who watch that world, it would be amazing if you're 21 and get invited to go the Crillion Ball in Paris. That's my take on The Hills and that's why I think it is so successful.
How did People's Revolution being in the show come about?
[MTV] asked if they could come shoot our Jennifer Nicholson show at the end of season one, and I said OK. Then they asked if they could come and cover some of our shows in L.A., and I said sure. And I was the same as I was now. They told [the cast] that there would be this woman who would be like Kelly Cutrone.
Lauren was there, and finally, I said something to her. I said to Lauren, "You're going to have to move a lot quicker if you want to work in the fashion business." Then, they started using that in all the bumps to the show. And then they continued with the show, and I saw them one other time in L.A. I saw [Teen Vogue west coast editor] Lisa Love in L.A., and she said MTV wanted to talk about the possibility of working with me. There is a reason why Anna Wintour decided to put Teen Vogue into that show without seeing or knowing what it is. If it's good enough for Anna Wintour, it's good enough for me. I talked to Lisa about the pros and cons of doing it. We took the temperature of some of our clients.
The big thing to check would be, can we do this without losing business? So far, the great thing is, we haven't lost any business from it. Clients that don't want to be involved have been secluded and not involved. The ones that have, have benefited. About being on the show and in public, I don't really care what people think about me. You know on the Web, that stuff like, "Kelly Cutrone's a b*tch, Devil Wears Prada," none of that affects me at all.

www.mediabistro.com

 

[Zposen]

Part II

www.mediabistro.com

What are you most looking forward to for this fall's Fashion Week?
I never really look forward to it. I'm a production maniac. And I like all of our clients' shows, we have some amazing things coming up. We're opening some conceptual collective space, which is going to be a home away from home from designers. We have another project with DJ Spooky [in L.A.]. Here in New York I've got my whole lineup of eight to 10 shows.
What are the key things to remember to have a successful show at Fashion Week?
Eat well. Tell the truth. Surround yourself with the best professionals that your clients can buy, from stylists to hair and makeup to music to casting agents. Make sure you secure the right exclusive in the right place. A lot of publicists tell too many people the same story and the client gets nothing.
You claimed that you wouldn't hire Lauren Conrad after working with her during the 2006 Los Angeles Fashion Week. Why not?
Well, I mean she didn't move fast enough for me. There was a year and a half between that first meeting and when we next met. And there was a huge change in her. I'm an authentic person; I wouldn't have someone in my office just because they're on a show. Whitney had [Lauren] come over, and I was surprised by her. I've talked to her, and she's done great. But she's also worked a year at Teen Vogue.
I just got a letter from a former assistant who I fired, who asked for letter of recommendation. I asked him to come in and talk with me first. I couldn't recommend him to a company without knowing more. When I saw him and there were a lot of changes, I was able to write that letter. Same with Lauren. The second time I had the opportunity to work with her, I chose to. We get a lot of kids here when they're young; of course they're going to go on to have successful careers.
Tell us your best "party-crashing" story?
My favorite one ever was someone called me and was asking for a ticket to an event. And they were trying to get me on the phone. They said, "I met you on the subway." I said, "That's impossible, because I don't take the subway." They could have said anything else.
You once said, "I'm really about communicating and about art. I couldn't care less about Calvin Klein or Donna Karan." What designers don't necessarily have a "name" but are master communicators or artists?
I love Jeremy Scott, Bernard Willhelm, Alexandre Herchovitch, Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto. I mean to me, a white shirt is a white shirt. They are incredibly conceptual and spend time and energy and not just into the season, but they're into the cuts and fabrication. Pieces aren't just made to show a woman's body part or to draw a mate. What accomplishment at People's Revolution are you most proud of?
That I've never bounced a payroll.

 

[brianna]

‘The Hills’ are alive with neighborhood chaos

“The Hills,” currently filming in a residential Hollywood neighborhood where lead character Lauren Conrad has bought a house, has local residents upset by the ensuing cacophonous parade of paparazzi and onlookers resulting from the production’s presence.

Neighborhood sources tell AccessHollywood.com that MTV has turned the residence into a commercial sound stage for the purpose of filming the show. The house is located in a single-family residential zone.

The sources also say residents feel that the ancillary activities from the production present a serious threat to public safety, create a public nuisance, cause disturbing problems and interfere with their rights as homeowners.

An MTV spokesperson tells AccessHollywood.com that, “MTV is in accordance with all required production permits, and is working with the city of Los Angeles to assist it with neighborhood concerns that have been raised.”

According to public records on the Multiple Listing Service, Lauren Conrad Living Trust purchased the house for $2.36 million on February 1. The production has been filming in the location for most of the ensuing months. The seven-room (three-bedroom, one-bathroom permitted) two-story house was built in 1922 — its prior price in 1999 was only $710,000.

“The Hills” is one of the most popular shows on the cable channel. The show’s mid-third season premiere in March 2008 attracted 4.8 million viewers, the series biggest audience for a single episode. The show follows the lives of five young women: Lauren Conrad, Lo Bosworth, Audrina Patridge, Whitney Port and Heidi Montag, as they negotiate the early stages of their careers and social lives in Los Angeles. Lauren and Lo live in the main house on the property in question, and Audrina lives in the back guesthouse. The girls moved into the house towards the end of the show’s third season, which finished airing in May 2008. Season four is set to premiere this August, according to MTV.com.

A rep for Conrad tells AccessHollywood.com that Lauren is as upset as her neighbors are over the situation taking place on her block. The rep says that MTV has followed all protocol and that Lauren herself has hired private security for outside of her home.

An undated letter sent from the executive producers of “The Hills” to the neighborhood residents just a few days before shooting began (but more than two months after Conrad purchased the house), and provided to AccessHollywood.com by a resident who requested anonymity, states, “As a documentary crew, we do not have any equipment trucks, and require no special parking. Our crew is not allowed to park on the streets, and is shuttled to the house in minivans. Our equipment all fits in one van, which we will also not leave on the street. Once we are shooting, our presence will be minimal — we strive to be as invisible as possible.”

AccessHollywood.com’s sources claim that, contrary to this letter, equipment trucks, crews and other vehicles associated with the production are left on the street on a regular basis, making parking for the other residents difficult and creating congestion.

Is there really anyone at home?
The sources say residents have complained that Conrad, Patridge and Bosworth are only at the house when the cameras are rolling or when there is a paparazzi outside to document them coming and going. They claim the young women do not live permanently at the residence. However, they claim the lights are left on in the home around the clock.

AccessHollywood.com sent reporters to the house at approximately 6:30 p.m. on June 19, where from the street, what appeared to be bright production lights could be seen permanently affixed on the ceiling inside the home. They also appeared lit on June 20, at around 9 p.m. and June 21 at around 3:30 p.m.

Also attracted to the neighborhood? According to AccessHollywood.com’s sources, an unruly group of paparazzi.

As the paparazzi have become increasingly more aggressive, according to our sources, they are vandalizing personal property and threatening residents. The paparazzi are allegedly fighting with each other over “territory” and who has the right to be there.

AccessHollywood.com’s sources claim that dozens of complaints have been made to MTV, the executive producers of “The Hills,” City Councilmember Tom LaBonge’s office, the city attorneys office, Film L.A. Inc., and the LAPD Hollywood division, resulting in limited changes to the amount of activity taking place on the block.

Actions that LaBonge’s office says they have taken include:

* Speaking with MTV and asking them to hire a full-time security guard, which LaBonge’s office says MTV has done.

* Increasing police patrols by a senior lead officer, who is familiar with issues relating to the paparazzi.

* Increasing parking enforcement on their street — particularly with regards to the paparazzi.

* Asking Starline Tours to stop using their microphone when they’re on the street, and to discontinue stopping in front of the street. Starline Tours has told LaBonge’s office that they are complying with this request, and LaBonge’s office says that they have not received complaints since their request of Starline.

LaBonge’s office says that they have recommended to the neighborhood residents that they put together a preferential parking district on their street, which they are currently considering. The office has received a formal legal document complaining about the neighborhood disruption, submitted by a single resident, which was sent on to the city attorney’s office.

msnbc.com

 

[sassyposh]

i love the hills! but i think it not reality show anymore, i think it is kinda scripted

 

[KatjaR]

News from Spencer, revealed by Mary-Kate Olsen...haha

http://perezhilton.com/2008-06-27-mary-kate-olsen-vs-spencer-pratt

 

[colourmefashion]

i watched that last night ..

 

[stateofbliss]

Mary-Kate Olsen & Spencer Pratt Feud Started in High School

It's starting to heat up into another classic Hollywood feud: Mary-Kate Olsen vs. self-promoting bad boy Spencer Pratt.

But well before Olsen publicly dissed the villain from The Hills for being a bad-tempered high-school spoilsport on the Late Show with David Lettermen Friday, the seeds of their mutual antipathy were planted well before.

In a 2007 Details article about Brody Jenner, best friend Pratt brags to a reporter about how he once made $50,000 by selling a photograph of Olsen drinking at a party back when the two attended the same high school.

And Pratt's glee at his own plots doesn't end there. The other schemes he talks about include having Jenner start datingNicole Richie and then try to get her to eat, and trying to date every girl on The Hills.

Perhaps most ironic: He spends 20 minutes talking about how he wants to make a sex video with girlfriend Heidi Montag and then post it online. It's the height of hypocrisy, if you believe Lauren Conrad's claim that Pratt started the feud between her and Montag by spreading rumors of a sex tape starring Conrad.

people.com
So gross! He and Heidi are the biggest losers.

 

[colourmefashion]

how he would manage to get Nicole Richie to even talk to him is hilarious..

 

[brianna]

Heidi Montag is over 'The Hills' and the drama

The Hills are alive with the sounds of Montag.
Depending on whom you ask, Heidi Montag is the villainess on the hit MTV reality show The Hills. But ask Montag, and she'll sing a different tune: She's merely the outcast friend who is portrayed as the troublemaker by star Lauren Conrad.

Regardless, Montag, 21, has used the drama to her advantage. She is unveiling the fall collection of her fashion line, Heidiwood, which is sold at Kitson and Anchor Blue. And with the help of her manager/boyfriend, Spencer Pratt, she is releasing her first official single, appropriately titled Fashion, after previous song Higher leaked online.

The Hills ended Season 3 (available on DVD July 29) in May with Pratt, 24, flying to Vegas to reclaim Montag after a broken engagement. (There was some ugliness involving a tacky pink ring he had given her.) Montag and company have been shooting Season 4 for more than four months in Los Angeles; the first of 19 episodes premieres Aug. 18. Montag reveals that viewers will meet her older sister, Holly, 24, an aspiring filmmaker who once lived with Montag and Conrad.

"Holly and Lauren were inseparable for a while," Montag says. "But they stopped being friends when Lauren and I stopped being friends."

Montag credits Pratt with saving The Hills from cancellation when he joined the series in Season 2 as the resident troublemaker. The two had met a year earlier off-camera. "I fell in love with him the second I saw him," she says. "He's the most amazing person to exist. Everything you could ever want in a best friend, soul mate and boyfriend."

Nonetheless, they broke up repeatedly, and Montag changed her number several times so he couldn't contact her. Asked whether they are engaged, Montag looks at Pratt and her naked ring finger and asks, "Where's my ring?"

He says he's saving up for a multimillion-dollar bauble to show how much he adores her.

Even though The Hills chronicles Conrad's life (it's the most watched TV show among women 18-24), it's her feud with Montag that's grabbing most of the attention. The falling-out began when Conrad expressed her dislike for Pratt. Montag blames Conrad for telling co-star Audrina Patridge to drop her as a friend, even though Montag introduced them. All hell broke loose this past season when Pratt and Montag revealed that Conrad had supposedly shot a sex tape with ex-beau Jason Wahler.

"I don't even want to talk about that," Montag says. "There were rumors about a sex tape, but I had nothing to do with that. God knows the truth in all of this, and at the end of the day, that is the only thing that matters. Jesus was persecuted, and I'm going to get persecuted, ya know? But it doesn't matter to me."

Little coverage in celebrity magazines, which seem to chronicle every movement of this reality troupe, is given to Montag's and Pratt's Christianity. Montag identifies herself as "kind of non-denominational Baptist" and hopes to release a Christian album one day. Both she and Pratt read the Bible conscientiously. Montag even planned on devoting her life to God as a missionary in Africa.

"I have been the most religious person since I was 2 years old. I always felt this crazy connection to God," says Montag, who grew up in Colorado with Holly, brother Sky, 15, and her since-divorced parents, Bill, a rancher, and Darlene, who runs a restaurant with Montag's stepfather.

This August, she and Pratt are headed to Africa to "feed children and help build things." Cameras will capture their trek, but not for The Hills. Pratt says it's possible they could adopt a baby while over there, but Montag laughs that idea off.

"Not right now," she insists. "I think we'd be married before we do that."

Montag likes to think she and the Jonas Brothers are part of a new wave of positive role models. "As a parent, I would not want my daughter looking up to someone throwing money away, on drugs or coming out of rehab," she says.

But while Jesus preached forgiveness, Montag says Hills fans should not hold their breaths for a big reunion for her and Conrad. "I don't think people are ever going to get that," she says emphatically. Even so, if Conrad offered an olive branch, Montag would accept. "She'll always have a place in my heart."

A more likely scenario: Montag and Pratt will wrap up their time on The Hills after this season and launch their own MTV reality series along the lines of Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica — Montag's all-time favorite show.

Any concern such constant camera presence could lead her and Pratt down the same doomed path as the since-divorced Lachey and Simpson?

"I don't really feel that way," she says. "You're either going to make it as a couple or you're not. I love cameras, but the cameras aren't with us when we're falling asleep at night.

"The show's going to be about our lives, and it's such a blessing to be doing this."

usatoday.com