Tyra Banks: "Because he's fun, it's like a circus, but a tame circus. Not like a super spectacle. And it's entertainment, where you can just act the fool and be crazy and sexy. He loves us to be sexy, but not vulgar.
JB: "It's insane here. I've never seen so many camera crews. I can't believe it!"
Meghan Douglas: "I know. It feels like Chanel. Doesn't it? It's good though, and I really don't mind all the cameras in my face every five minutes. I'm getting used to it."
JB: "It's certainly a mob scene back here. Todd's shows are always a trip."
Shoshana: "Everybody loves Todd becuse it's something outside of the glamour, the clothes. There's just a realness about him. It permeates everything he does. He's a wonderful guy."
JB: "Todd how do you feel? It's two minutes before the show. The house is packed back there."
Todd Oldham: It's going very well. It's all very smooth. The last few rollers are coming out. It's going to be great."
JB: "What are you doing different this time around? Are there new twists, a new theme this season?"
TO: "Definitely. This is the biggest show I've done. We have a hundred looks and 28 models. It has a different flavour and I did all the shoes myself.
It's a cleaner look this season, it's not so much mix and match as it has been."
There's a lot more to putting on a rock and roll tour than zig-zagging across the country with a truckload of music equipment in tow. These days, the fans expect a full-blown extravaganza in exchange for exorbitant ticket prices. And 47-year old, London based Mark Fisher has staged some of the most magnificent shows around.
Mark Fisher: "I'm probably a vicarious musician. I think I would love to have been a musician, but I could never do it. So I can't perform, I just hide in the background and pray that the stage is a great performer. With the stage I did for Pink Floyd, you got something that was active all the time. A technological interface between the band and the audience. It's like a hole at the edge of the stadium, in which Floyd create a lot of dream worlds, with very bright movie projections on it. And another big screen inside with lots of lasers.
Fisher's currently touring stage is the mega Voodoo Lounge for the Rolling Stones. Early in the tour FT visited the lounge during its stopover at Toronto. The stage is 200ft long. There's 170 tons of steel and aluminum in it, enough to manufacture 180 cars and 275,000 beer cans and it takes four days to construct. It's so tall that the FAA insisted that warning lights be attached to the top. Mick Jagger's theorises that the trick is not to let the stage overwhelm the music.
MF: "You've got such a stage presence with Jagger, he's never been upstaged
by
a pile of stuff.
The thing about the Stones stage compared to Floyd's, is that the stage is
completely passive and it's the guys that
do the running around and put on the show. When the stage was being
designed, we decided to create a city of the future, but of course there
is no image of the future. I just started to do sketches and we went
through images of lips and things like that - many different shapes
and forms. These were coming out of remarks from Mick of wanting to have
something expressive, voluptuous, dynamic...
I would want to be sure that Prince Charles wouldn't like it. I would want
to be sure that Barbara Streisand couldn't sing on it. Then I'd know we
were 90% of the way there.
Isabella Rossallini: "They're sexy and glamorous, but they're funny as well. That's a difficult combination to to do."
Monica Belluci: "It was really difficult to walk in the high heels, but you know I prefer to make sacrifices and be beautiful."
Monica Belluci: "What I was wearing today I think was really feminine, very sensual and straight at the same time."
IR: "Inspiration is many women to me. My favourite outfit is, because I'm Italian, the big black bra, like a Sicilian widow's. It is the opposite of sexy and they made a sexy version of it. That I love."
The modeling game might seem glamorous to some, but it seems like a
meat market when you see an industry practice called casting.
Ten days before they show their collections to the world, the fashion houses
of Paris begin a selection process called casting in which hundreds of
model and model wannabes compete for a few empty spaces on the catwalk, a
chance for supermodel glory.
Some sessions last less than two minutes. They go something like this:
"How tall are you?"
"138."
"Thank you."
And that's all you get.
Dawn Wolf,Ford Agency : "Casting is a make or break situation. It's between the girl and the photographer and the client. It can make your career in two minutes if they get seduced by the notion of winning over the client.
Karen Mulder,Model : "I hate castings. There's nothing more embarassing than to walk into a place and you have your book which isn't very good 'cos you haven't done much yet and everybody's looking at you. And you say "Hi, I'm Karen," when all you really want to do is run out of there."
Bridget Hall: "When you first start you have a lot of castings to go to and it's very tiring. But you have to go to everyone of them."
Heather Stewart Whyte: "You have to go back every now and then. You can't be a snob. You can't sit back and think, 'they know me, they better book me!' "
Kristen McMenemy: "I don't walk around with my book anymore. I'm sorry. It's too heavy!"
Linda Evangelista: "I did many years of casting. I don't now."
While a handful of big name models can get away with avoiding the casting process. It's a necessity for relative unknowns, who can visit up to a dozen different fashion houses a day.
Chinky Scott: "There's so many ways to get a job. It's so tiring because you have to take the Metro, you have to walk, but you have to do it. You just have to do it."
DW: "There are certain people, obviously, that are not easy. Some people are a little more receptive to models. Certain people are absolutely out-and-out difficult. And then, depending on how the girl simulates and uses her smarts to get through to the person, it can make or break her."
Being rejected is part of a model's life. And those likely to succeed in the business are those that don't let it affect them personally.
LE: "Designers have their own favourite girls. Sometimes you're one and sometimes you're not. There are some shows I'd like to do and I don't happen to be one of the chosen ones. It's a fact. (Sob) "