Two commercials starring Tina when she was known as Tina Lutz:
http://youtubech.com/test/read.cgi/qB98Rg_4YX8/tag/ティナ・ラッツ/l50
The first video for Look Chocolate (I think), and the Shiseido Beauty Cake one.
The New York Times (nytimes.com)
September 12, 2004
POSSESSED
East Meets West in a Blurred Embrace
By DAVID COLMAN
T'S a testament to the disfavor in which ambiguity is held in Western culture that the word blur is nearly always a slur. Really, isn't it all a blur?
"Western thinking is much more about black and white," said the fashion designer Derek Lam, himself a fuzzy cross of cultures — the product of a defiantly Westernized Chinese father and a devoutly traditional Chinese mother. "Asian culture emphasizes the gray areas."
Ergo, what even enlightened Westerners still see as the mysterious East is no mystery at all but merely a different style, one that forgoes the poles of black and white to revel in all the gradations in between. And Mr. Lam's prized talisman, while it might puzzle the Western eye with its duality, is to him a perfect expression of the Asian passion for balance.
Equal parts necklace and bud vase, the object was the creation of Tina Chow, one of his early role models. It is a heavy, three-inch pendant, a hollow eggplant of highly polished black nephrite, which hangs from a delicate hand-knotted silk cord. The pendant's shape is reminiscent of "pebble form" snuff bottles of 18th-century China, before more ornamental styles became popular. It also recalls the ornate necklace-mounted solid-perfume compacts that enjoyed vogues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Without a lid, it is essentially without purpose, as if form got sick of following function and went its own way.
Ms. Chow also forged her own path, doing turns as a model, a socialite in the art and fashion worlds, the wife of the restaurateur Michael Chow, a collector of vintage couture and, finally, a talented jewelry designer before dying of AIDS in 1992. Mr. Lam recalls being intrigued by Ms. Chow 20 years ago, when he was newly graduated from high school in San Francisco and spotted her in Vogue. At first, he did not like her.
"She was wearing this geisha makeup, and I thought, `God, here we go again,' " he said. But then, as he saw photographs of her in a variety of guises, he grew to like her irreverent spirit. As a boy, he was often unhappy to see Asians stereotyped as serious and nerdy. "It was interesting to finally see someone who was Asian and who was living life out of the box," he said. "She was such a noncliché."
Mr. Lam's spring fashion show, which takes place today, is a valentine to another exotic, Josette Fabien. In 1930's Singapore, she was the older lover of a 19-year-old gigolo named Helmut Newton, whom she encouraged to practice photography. Mr. Lam's collection celebrates Fabien's pre-air-conditioned glamour. Blond and fair, she wore sheer, form-fitting dresses that married Western hedonism with Asian handiwork, a flair recalled in a thin lace dress Mr. Lam will show with a sheer underslip painstakingly finished by his Chinese seamstresses. It is a balance that the muscly and very unnerdy Mr. Lam himself likes to strike, both on and off the job.
As for the pendant — only a handful of examples were made — it spends most of its life hanging next to Mr. Lam's bedside table, sometimes holding a single orchid bloom. The placement is appropriate, since it was given to him by a former lover. There, he can contemplate its essentially blurry nature — lovely to hold, but hard to grasp.