The candy colored houses of Curacao in the blinding equatorial sun: A new way of seeing!

I spent the weekend in Curacao, a Dutch commonwealth island in the Caribbean, just north of Venezuela. I flew down with no expectations, zen in the presumption that this was going to be another encounter with a mother agency looking to peddle its boys and girls to the" NY fashion people." But then something strange happened. Curacao which I assumed would be another postcard pretty tourist trap yielded quite a few surprises. The first surprise being a bounty of insider fashion gossip that was as over the top as the intense colors on the houses of Wilemstad. I found out for instance that the secret ingredient in Creme de la Mer is...whale placenta. Or it could be a scandalous myth but I love that idea in the same way I love the story I was regaled with concerning Maria Carla pulling out a thousand dollar jar of the stuff out of her handbag, backstage at a Givenchy show and moisturizing her face with it while giving the Kheil's bearing make-up artist the look of death.
I found out also who Hedi Slimane was dating and who Nicholas Ghesquiere was dating and which designer had used Beat Bollinger for their show and then switched to Joe Mckenna for the campaign. The ruthlessness! I founded out that Lily Donaldson has recently developed a major sense of humor and is the life of the backstage party. I heard that W and Vogue were looking to launch their own internet imprints as in vogue.com or wmag.com or some variation of the sort. I learnt which girl had destroyed her career by having her hair cut by the wrong photography team. I also found out that a certain girl who had chopped her locks off is finally US Vogue bound after years of being ignored by that booking bible. Funny enough, both girls have had their hair chopped by the same photography team, so go figure! The hiss (code worded "kiki" by one visciously entertaining little fashionista) was incredible and I learnt something about myself. I'm a shameless gossip but one with a fairly good sense of timing. Being a good gossip is a lot like being a good stand-up comedian. If you make people laugh they tell you EVERYTHING!

An all natural island ideal

It was all in good fun and as we sat by the pool of The Floris, my new favorite tropical retreat in all this world (plug plug), one of the cameramen decided to tape a conversation I was having with a certain young editor along with a certain power booker. The best male model in the model search we were there to judge had plucked his eyebrow into a severe arch not seen since the days of Donna Jordan when she consorted with the illustrator Antonio Lopez. The editor clocked it by saying "If you're a really good looking guy, don't pluck your eyebrow!" "Shall I write that down?" I joked. Then we found out that the kid was 15 and an all-island volleyball champion which made us realize that on second thought, the poor thing was being really directional. "Butch with an arch! Too modern" I contributed. Some LA manager type who was watching the "kiki" got really excited by all that cross-cutting and now wants to pitch the whole thing as a TV show. "As long as its not called Men On Film and as long as I don't have to wear a tiny little party hat tilted to the side" I said totally joking. That got him all the more stirred up and alas I might have inadvertently invoked the styling inspiration for the show. But does the real world care who Nicholas is dating or whether the Hedi Slimane line is finally about to get its backing. Will Middle America put its coffee cup down at the announcement that Jil Sander's non-compete is over? Is the love of fashion and design and contemporary art and music just too niche to speak to the people? Not with all this new frontier talk about hi-res video that loads on a computer screen instantaneously. Internet TV is on everybody's lips and the possibilities are endless.

A Baby Beverly Peele and we do mean baby!

In terms of the search, there was one truly amazing moment when this stick thin, 5'10" gamine stumbled into the room in what was obviously her first pair of high heels. Her skin was like glass and it was like staring at a chocolate toned Barbie doll come to life. This girl was simply one of the most beautiful young black models I have seen in years. There's a huge problem however. This child (and she's probably still playing with Barbies) is 11 years old. As such she cannot be signed, only tracked and developed. To do otherwise would not be moral. Also her body could change. Her face could change. She could grow to be too tall. She was only allowed into the search by her parents to give her experience and reinforcement to develop more confidence in herself, but ironically she blew every other girl away. Backstage she was ostracized by all those other girls and sat there completely isolated. And yet her innocence became a shield because she sat there oblivious to all the unkindness around her . She sat there with a kind of calm poise and sweet humility that just broke our hearts. It just goes to show, beauty and the magic of beauty can and will surface in the most unexpected of places. I loved Curacao , because it purged me of the jaded cynicism that sometimes cakes you over in this trade. I love that life sometimes forces you to see differently.