Makeup Beat

“In the wake of the mysterious death of Wallis Franken, glamorous wife and muse of designer Claude Montana, the fashion world has swiftly closed ranks in a disturbing conspiracy of silence”.

By Marion Hurne for Node Magazine Australia August/September 1996

On an ordinary morning on an ordinary weekday in Paris this past June, a rumor started to ripple through the mirrored design studios, the gilded, glossy magazine offices and the cramped workrooms of the French fashion industry. “Have you heard?” whispered voices ominous with impending ill news.

“The police found a body on Rue de Bellechasse this morning.” “Have you heard?” they whispered, “about the death of Wallis Montana?”

“A tragedy,” people shivered. “Suicide,” they stated, although no note had been, or would be, found. What they did find out was that early that Wednesday morning, Wallis Franken Montana, model, muse and wife of Claude Montana, the fashion designer world-famous for star-ship-trooper angular clothes, whose business is worth about US$100 million, had fallen to her death from the third floor window of their city apartment. According to Parisian whispers, Claude, who has always been a night bird, was not at home, while a friend of his, referred to only as “Billy”, was there. “Suicide,” said the police of an open-and-closed case. “Suicide,” said fashion folk, at least “on-the-record”.

But “off the record”? The whispers among rail-thin women in angular suits, the whispers among muscular men with eyes like pin dots, grew deaf­ening. “Drugs,” they whispered. “Pushed”. “Jumped”. “Fell,” they mouthed. “A tragedy,” said Joan Juliet Buck, the editor of French Vogue, who would be drawn no further. Nor would Loulou de la Falaise, the muse to Yves Saint Laurent who had acted as a witness at Wallis and Claude’s wedding almost exactly three years before her funeral.

“A tragedy,” they all said as they dabbed underneath dark glasses to reach teary eyes as Wallis’ bird-thin body was laid to rest in a cemetery in Le Marais, one of the oldest arrondisements in Paris. But many secretly were perturbed by the manner in which this woman of style allegedly took her own life. It seemed unlikely, too bourgeois. Paris is a city that demands much grander gestures and Wallis was a woman with a sense for the spectacular.

And no-one could think of a probable reason for her self-defenestra­tion. Certainly it couldn’t have been jealousy, the discovery of a rival demanding some final demonstration of self-sacrifice. For Wallis knew all about Claude. Put it this way: a woman who weds a man whose dress-code is, unfailingly, stack-heeled cowboy boots and leather jodhpurs is unlikely to be wanting to make babies. A woman who has known her husband for 18 years before she marries him is unlikely to be shocked. Wallis Franken Mon­tana who married (for the second time) aged 43, was a woman of the world.

Today, people on fashion’s inside track can’t work out what caused Wallis to take her own life. Three summers ago, in happier times, they were chit-chatting about what could possibly possess her to link her life with Claude’s in holy matrimony; not that lavender liaisons are uncom­mon in the city of light. Sure, the pair were old friends, they holidayed together. But no-one expected it to be this pair who bucked a trend that makes fashion designer weddings rare indeed. The only brides most designers come close to are those decked out like ships in full sail at the end of their catwalk shows.

But on a warm July day, Wallis said “I do” in an organza pant suit and white cowboy boots. Claude’s cowboy boots were snakeskin and, instead of his customary leather, he wore a jean jacket and trouser ensemble in suede. It was rumored then that Wallis was doing it for business reasons, so that she could legally inherit the profitable company, with its world headquarters above the shady sex shops of Rue Saint Denis, should anything happen to her friend Claude. It was rumored that Claude wanted it that way, although it was Wallis who actually proposed. Why else would a confirmed bachelor agree to become a husband, a step­father and a step-grandfather when all along most had doubted that he was the marrying kind?

When Wallis married husband number two, she was a proud mother of two grown-up daughters, Rhea and Celia, and a grandmother. But she took to the task of being a good wife with some conviction. She and I met not long after the wedding. So what did she do? 1 asked her, expecting her to tell me of her life as Claude’s muse. “Oh, you know, cooking in the kitchen, fixing the dinner, lighting the candles…” she told me. Loyally, she announced that she wore only her husband’s designs, which, what with their huge, sculptural collars and wasp waists, plus the Montana-required footwear of 22-centimetre heeled thigh-high waders seemed somewhat cumbersome for her domestic environment. “Oh, I don’t wear them as they are worn in the show,” giggled Wallis. “I wear them in my own way, to do the things a woman does in the kitchen, in the house, making the bed maybe.” She gig­gled so alluringly, that for that minute it all seemed plausible.

She told me back then that Claude made an effort for his wife too. Her daughter’s wedding was probably the only time he did­n’t wear a leather strides-and-boots combo: “He wore a traditional suit, so he didn’t look too butch,” she told me. We talked, as one does in interview situations, though rarely otherwise in life, about the past, the present and the future. Wallis preferred the present. “This is a very good time,” she told me.

As to her past: she was born in America, of a father who was in the fashion business and a mother who had been a fashion model. Her own modeling career began when, at 17, she was signed up by the mother of modeling, Eileen Ford, in New York. She first came to Paris after a working trip to Greece, and didn’t go home. She hung out with other angular and exagger­ated models of the day, such as Angelica Huston and Donna Mitchell. She worked with the best photographers of the 1970s, including Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. She was a hit, partly because she arrived in town just as milk-and-honey blondes were going out of fashion. In their place, she offered an angular face, stick-thin androgyny and a willingness to take a dare.

But she didn’t get sucked right in by the model industry back then. So she had the time to spot those perils which have claimed more than their fair share of beautiful young victims. As her wilder Paris friends danced and did drugs at Club Le Sept, she was a young mum by the age of 23, a vegetarian, a yoga-enthusiast who only drank herbal tea, “not that it lasted,” she chuckled, lighting up a Marlboro during our meeting some 20 years later.

Models can grow addicted to fame. When it starts to pass them by in favor of fresher flesh, then their beauty can turn them to madness. But that is certainly not what killed Wallis Franken Montana. Wallis, whose looks were off-beat to start with, never saw them fade or go out of fash­ion. She stayed striking and she stayed thin, (”Oh, I’ve never done the décolleté look; all you’d see is ribs,” she giggled); which is why, well past 40, she was still vamping for the cameras of Steven Meisel and Tyen. She even still did the occasional turn on the catwalk, not just for her husband but also for Chanel, where Karl Lagerfeld transformed her into a latter day Coco.

For a grandmother, she was pretty saucy, especially when she gyrated in a shiny leather outfit straight out of The Night Porter with Madonna in the video for ‘Justify My Love’. Add to that the acknowledgement in the fashion business that her designer-husband depended on her as a style guru, even if Montana is not as hot a fashion designer as he once was. No wonder that many thought the grim discovery on the pavement and the verdict of suicide might not add up.

But the strange thing was, once Wallis was laid to rest, those rumors “retreated”. The death of a well-known woman in the fashion world did not become a huge tabloid story, though it had all the elements of glam­our and scandal upon which such stories depend. By the time this piece appears, a lengthy, investigative obituary might well have been published in Vanity Fair, but in the weeks after the strange death, it was as if the fashion world had joined together in a col­laboration of silence. For some time after her demise, even people within the inner loop of the international fashion pack didn’t know about it; and were shocked when they did hear the sad news at last.

There is fear implicit in the strange death of Wallis Franken Montana, fear that it could become more than a tragedy. It could become the catalyst for the outside world to open up the world of fashion and reveal it to be a can of worms. You see, the fashion world, particularly in its world capital, Paris, is fuelled by means that those who control it do not really want the public to know about.
On the surface, fashion is about glamour and beauty and fabulous clothes. It is about marvelous parties, dazzling lives and the selling of dreams. But if we were to open up fashion’s dark underbelly we might find that all that glitters isn’t gold, but more likely gilt and guilt in a world where cocaine, heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, anorexia, bulimia and misery are com­mon. Therefore, those who control the fashion industry, who often live strange, sad, false lives themselves, prefer that the small matter of the death of a designer muse does not get exposed to too much scrutiny.

So a model and a muse may or may not have committed suicide and the fashion world just keeps moving.
Because it’s in everyone’s interests, even those fledging models and new photographers and junior design assis­tants who have not yet been completely sucked in, who gossip amongst each other but keep quiet when outsiders come round prowling. For these people want the fashion world to keep on turning. There’s money to be made, ambi­tions to be fulfilled, beautiful girls to gawp at or to be. Fashion is the frenzied feeding ground of the young, much more than the music industry which is even tolerant of its dinosaurs. So as tears are dried, the strange tale of the death of Wallis Franken Montana will be rewritten. “Hey”, people might say, “At least she died before she got old.”

I hope Wallis is laughing & smiling on the other side free of pain and concerns.
Photo by Steven Meisel. Thank you Linda Morand.
More photos of Wallis Franken here.

On Feb 27 La Liz became a 77 year old Pisces beauty. How could I have missed this!
Dame Taylor is also on my wish list of women I’d like to work with. Just one of the greatest beauties of our time at any age from childhood until today. If I lived in West Hollywood and went to The Abbey maybe we would meet and fall in love. Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky Ray has a nice sound to it. No? (last photo by Avedon)

The supremely divine Diana Ross wearing Afro wig
and Bob Mackie costume for G.I.T. on B’way.
I love my Mo-Town home girl…Reach out!
Diana is on my wish list of people I’d like to work with some day.
source

OK, now it’s for real – supermodel Gisele Bundchen
and NFL star Tom Brady have tied the knot. It’s been written that Gisele was the picture of tradition at her hush-hush Catholic wedding to football phenom Tom Brady. Wearing a flowing fairy-tale veil over a long, ivory lace dress by designers Dolce & Gabbana. I can’t wait to see the wedding photos.
Congratulations to the sexy couple!

Hair guru Harry King, Pop artist Andy Warhol, and makeup master Way Bandy in a rare Polaroid taken in the late 70s. All the hairstyles below are by Harry King.

Pattie Hansen in one of my all time fav Vogue stories. Harry tells me he had a small braid on the right shoulder to add a more youthful look. But Richard Avedon retouched it out of the final shot.

Rosie Vela on Vogue and Paulina for Cosmopolitan magazine.

Rene Russo and Pattie Hansen were both on the cover of Vogue many times.

It was on this photo shoot of Janice Dickinson and Pattie Hansen that I met Harry King. Janice had her little sister Debbie there, and after I did her makeup Harry complimented me on my work. Which meant a lot to me at that time, because he worked all the time with Way Bandy my makeup hero.
Photograph by David (Harry) King.

Francois Nars the orginator of NARS cosmetics used two shades of eyeshadow to create the lip color for the Marc Jacobs show during Fashion Week. Recalling the frozen frosted lips of the early club girls lined up outside clubs like Area or the Mudd Club. Find out how @ The New York Times. My personal fav is a lavender by Shu Uemura that has been discontinued, but some other choices are:

Laura Mercier Lip Colour Shimmer lipstick, topped with Lip Glace, both in Violet.

MAC Cremesheen Lipstick in Lavender Whip.

Everyones talking about how “refreshed” Madge looked at the Oscar after parties.
Here’s what some experts had to say:

Was it a super duper facial?
“It looks like she had a sapphire abrasion or a vibra facial. These are procedures in which the skin is exfoliated and a serum is applied,” said Dr. Suzan Obagi, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cosmetic Surgery and Skin Health Center.

Was it lasers?
Dr. Bruce Katz, director of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine’s Juva Skin and Laser Clinic, argued that lasers had a hand in Madonna’s fresh face.
“It’s very likely she’s had a new laser treatment called fractional resurfacing. It tightens the skin, takes away wrinkles, and tightens pores,” he said. “Her skin looks great — no sunspots, it’s supple, not tight, so it doesn’t have that pulled look, which is indicative of a facial treatment as opposed to surgery.”

Botulinum toxin?
Both Katz and Obagi agreed that whatever procedure gave Madonna her glow, she can thank Botox for her bright eyes and arched eyebrows.
“She’s had Botox, which gives her that nice, flared eyebrow,” Katz said. “In her older photos, her eyebrows are almost horizontal. In the new one, they’re arching up. That’s a tell-tale sign.”
“You can tell she’s had Botox by the arching of the brows and the smoothness between the brows,” Obagi added. “She has also had Botox of the ‘bunny lines’ — the lines that are created on the side of the nose. You can see in the more recent photos that these lines are not present even in full smile.”

Source: Queerty.com

Victoria Beckham’s lingerie ad for Giorgio Armani which were shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott where she shows off in a polka-dot bra and high-cut thong.

Togetherness is when you both get contracts to pose for Armani underwear.

THE BLONDS are the design duo of David and Phillipe Blond. Together they create the one-of-a-kind special order fashions that you may have noticed on celebs like:

Britney Spears

Rihanna while sashaying on stage.

Or on Fergie for M.A.C. Viva Glam.

A great part of the inspiration for what The Blonds do comes from the life they lead. David and Phillipe can be found at all the chicest events and parties in New York and usually Phillipe is wearing one of their fabulous creations set off by a pair of Loubouton heels and fantastic hair & makeup.

Phillipe’s dedication to all things glamorous and beautiful is portrayed by his own image. Not trying to actually be a woman (he wears no padded breasts etc.) but just living out his fantasy of the super diva. Which gives them both a better understanding of the fashion needs of the woman they design for, while seeing how the clothes move in real life. And having a lot of fun at the same time!

Here are photos of some of the designs they have created.

Barbie’s 50th Anniversary Runway Show

The Blonds Spring 2009

The Blonds Fall 2008

Phillipe closing the Spring 09 show.

The Blonds are represented by MAO.

This is such a sexy photo of Cindy back in the day.
A’ la Josephine Baker with the pearls and all.