| Username |
Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 09-May-01 12:11 AM
What follows is from the New York Times.
********************
May 8, 2001
A Casting Director's Job Is to Find Beauty
"Not too long ago, I saw this beautiful guy walking down the street and I walked up to him," Olga Liriano recalled a few mornings ago as she made her way through scrambled eggs, studiously avoiding the encroaching potatoes. "He was Australian. He was so beautiful. I tried to get his number but he just wouldn't give it to me, so I gave him mine."
Though her comportment in the presence of attractive strangers would suggest otherwise, Ms. Liriano is not the city's most egregious flouter of "The Rules." She belongs to the world of those who have license to approach the physically advantaged. She is a casting director, and one of a very particular sort.
In recent years, as fashion photography has become more narrative, images have required more bodies and faces with which to tell a story, and the industry has turned to Ms. Liriano and a handful of others to provide them. "Everyone needs a casting director all of a sudden," said Sam Shahid, president of Shahid & Company, an advertising agency that services fashion clients.
The need for Ms. Liriano and other casting agents — freelancers who comb bars, college campuses, bowling alleys, whatever — has also grown as a result of the premium fashion now puts on a look that veers away from the ethereal toward the real. Additionally, as Mr. Shahid put it, "everyone wants a new face, and no one has time to find that new face anymore." Modeling agencies "tell you how fabulous" all the models are, he added, "and most of the time they're dogs."
A voluptuous brunette with cheeks the color of a strawberry Starburst, Ms. Liriano started working as an independent casting director for fashion photographers about a year ago, after a decade of booking models at magazines and supplying them at agencies. This week she is in Puerto Rico helping to select 10 finalists for the Miss Universe pageant on Friday — a more fashion- oriented spectacle than usual, which will have as its hosts Naomi Campbell and Elle Macpherson.
"She's really the person you want to get to know," a male model just starting out said of Ms. Liriano.
Midway through her breakfast at a cafe in Greenwich Village, Ms. Liriano pointed to a picture of a young man in the fall 2000 Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, which she helped cast for the photographer Bruce Weber. "This one I found in a gas station," she said of the young man, dancing in a Santa Claus hat.
In the case of another picture she held — Gisele Bundchen leaving Grace Church, shot by Steven Klein for American Vogue — Ms. Liriano was hired to find extras who looked like people who might pass through the portals of a house of worship. "These two," Ms. Liriano said, referring to an older couple in the photo, "I approached in a restaurant." She befriended them, and they invited her to a New Year's Eve party. "I am not shy," Ms. Liriano said, stating the obvious.
Part of the appeal of working with Ms. Liriano, Mr. Weber said, is that she takes a Barbara Walters approach, asking questions beyond "What's your body-fat percentage?"
Ms. Liriano has also worked with Mr. Weber on shoots for the men's and women's editions of Italian Vogue and an ad campaign for Tse cashmere. "She can take a Polaroid of someone who isn't beautiful and show you what's beautiful about them," Mr. Weber said. "Once she found a guy, and I would have never known he was a dancer and planned to be sculptor. It changed the way I looked at him."
Of course, not all of Ms. Liriano's searches end in success, and not all of them focus on unearthing the person inside. In January, she went to Minneapolis to find new bodies for Abercrombie & Fitch. "It was hard to look at people, because they were all bundled up," she said. "Also, it's winter and everyone's drinking beer and has beer bellies." She found no one.
There have been other frustrations. Ms. Liriano was recently hired by Assouline, the publisher and design firm, to find a model for a direct-mail catalog it is producing for Ralph Lauren's Purple Label men's line. She thought to seek out writers and architects for the role, among others. "Ralph rejects everyone," Ms. Liriano said. Her directive has been to find a man who is a mix of Sam Shepard, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. "Well, yeah, I'm looking for that guy, too," Ms. Liriano said. "Isn't everybody?"
***************
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 09-May-01 01:42 AM
Electoral Beauty Myths: Part I
It's OK to judge a politician's looks. Just don't confuse them with character.
By Virginia Postrel
Shortly after the election, I left on a book tour of Australia and New Zealand. So when Katherine Harris became a famous face, I didn't see her on television. My husband told me about her on the phone.
The Republicans, he said, had gotten a lucky break. The Florida secretary of state was attractive, too good-looking to be demonized like Linda Tripp.
Oops.
Harris did of course get vilified, for her appearance as well as her politics. Instead of focusing on bad features or unattractive clothes - Tripp's faults - critics condemned her for wearing too much makeup. Wags compared her to a drag queen, Vampira, and Cruella de Vil. They drew on a centuries-old tradition that equates cosmetics with deception, decadence, and even witchcraft. A woman who wears a lot of makeup, they suggested, is not to be trusted. Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan famously pulled out all the metaphorical stops, writing that Harris' skin "had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat." The secretary was clearly wearing false eyelashes, Givhan declared, so that "caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid."
The response to such blistering commentary was outrage and condemnation. Conservatives blasted feminists for double standards that attack conservative women while protecting liberals. Feminists decried double standards that zap women while exempting men. The Post's own ombudsman wrote that "mocking someone's appearance is not something that newspapers should do."
Righteously upholding the idea that looks don't matter, these watchdogs all studiously ignored the embarrassing truth: Not only do human beings make judgments about how other people look, we enjoy doing so. We're not going to stop just because ombudsmen of various sorts tell us it's bad manners. And in an age where we see more and more good-looking people, either directly or through the media, we're getting more and more judgmental. When it comes to looks, double standards - of whatever variety - are disappearing.
Even as they bemoaned the emphasis on appearance, in fact, commentators gleefully used the opportunity to air their own pent-up judgments. "Warren Christopher wears handsome suits but otherwise looks like a deflated mix of Shar-Pei and beagle," wrote Andrea Billups of The Washington Times. Maryln Schwartz of the Dallas Morning News compared Christopher to a prune and Joe Lieberman to an elf; she mocked Strom Thurmond's orange hair plugs and told Dennis Hastert to go to Weight Watchers. Having released these attacks, Schwartz declared such slurs "too nasty, too vicious, too totally uncalled for." She claimed that people only say such mean things about women.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 09-May-01 01:43 AM
CONTINUATION FROM ABOVE:
Al Gore might beg to differ. In his first debate with George W. Bush, Gore appeared in orange makeup applied thickly to cover a sunburn. He looked awful. Commentators compared him to Lurch from The Addams Family, "Herman Munster doing a bad Ronald Reagan impression," and "a big, orange, waxy, wickless candle." One columnist wrote that "it looked like he melted down orange circus peanuts and then asked Tammy Faye for a 'light' dusting." San Francisco Examiner television critic Tim Goodman landed one of the most quoted blows: "If you'd stuck him in a push-up bra and a sequin dress and had him sing show tunes, he'd have carried San Francisco in a landslide."
The vice president became The Man Who Wears Too Much Makeup. The label has endured as a trope of late-night comedians - "If Al Gore took off half his makeup and gave it to Warren Christopher, they'd both look a lot better," said Jay Leno recently - and as color for political journalists. This isn't just fun at the vice president's expense. Commentators treat Gore's pancake problem as if it has deeper significance. It makes him seem bumbling, unmanly, and, most of all, phony. "While Gore yammered about [the voters'] 'will,' it was clear to my houseplants that the man who looks like he raids Katherine Harris' pancake makeup supply was really gloating about the Florida Supreme Court decision in his favor," opined a disillusioned Gore voter in late November.
Harris' critics similarly seized on flaws in her appearance to indicate flaws in her character. The Post's Givhan interpreted Harris' fashionable blue eyeshadow as evidence that "she failed to think for herself" and declared that "one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship." By focusing on makeup as metaphor, Givhan could make political judgments without supporting them.
This is the trouble we get into when we declare mere appearance off-limits to serious commentary. Instead of admitting that how people look is interesting in and of itself - that writers and readers enjoy making aesthetic judgments about people - we strain for broader significance. We treat beauty as a sign of virtue and ugliness as a sign of vice. If Al Gore and Katherine Harris wear the wrong makeup, they cannot be trusted. If Paula Jones has a crooked nose and Monica Lewinsky is fat, they cannot be telling the truth. Conversely, if Hillary Clinton has a bad health care plan, she cannot have a lovely face.
It would be better for our public discussions, and our mental health, if we simply admitted that we care about how other people look - if we acknowledged that beauty has its own significance and does not need to be saddled with symbolism. Commentators could then opine on distracting makeup, crooked noses, and broad hips without forcing their aesthetic judgments to take on inappropriate moral weight. They could be honestly catty without pretending to be deep. If they wanted to add substance, they could stick to relevant considerations, such as how Harris' heavy, '80s-style makeup typifies women of her age, region, and social class. But respectable commentators could not get away with pretending that analyzing how people look can substitute for analyzing how they think or act.
Treating beauty as though it has moral significance is an anachronism. The idea of beauty as a value in and of itself - looks as just looks, as compelling surface without deeper meaning - is what the historian Arthur Marwick calls the "modern" idea of beauty. Traditional cultures assumed that good looks indicated good character. Think of the ugly step-sisters compared to beautiful, virtuous Cinderella.
Nowadays we see a fuller range of human looks - and of the human character that accompanies them - than people who lived before modern trade, travel, and communications media. We can thus judge both looks and character more stringently and more carefully, and we can separate the two. "Only when people have the opportunity to make choices and comparisions can they make a genuine evaluation of personal appearance," writes Marwick in his 1988 book, Beauty in History.
The emancipation of women, he argues, contributes to this process. More women become visible to a broad public, giving everyone a broader basis of comparison. And attractive women can make a living from their looks - whether directly as models or indirectly as saleswomen or newscasters - without trading sexual favors. "Women active in society offer enhanced opportunities for comparison and choice," Marwick concludes, "while at the same time women themselves begin to judge men as men had, prevailing orthodoxies notwithstanding, tended to judge women - by appearance."
Talking honestly about how public figures look certainly has its negative side. We already have high standards, pushed ever higher by the beautiful faces we see in the media. It's surely no accident that both presidential candidates, and the incumbent president, are unusually good looking. "Presidentially, the United States is now in a place called Hunksville," wrote Hank Stuever of The Washington Post's style section in a long disquisition on the politics of cuteness. Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician.
But denial won't work. Pretending we don't care how people look doesn't make us stop caring. It simply encourages us to equate good looks with other qualifications. Instead of treating beauty as one value among many, we come to treat it as the greatest value of all. It may not seem fair to treat looks as important. But it's far more fair than treating appearance as something more.
(Virginia Postrel (vpostrel@reason.com) is editor-at-large of Reason magazine, and the author of The Future and Its Enemies. She is writing a book on the changing economic and social role of aesthetics. Her Web site is at www.dynamist.com.)
|
| Namita |
Posted
on 09-May-01 09:32 AM
Ashu, I had enjoyed it tremendously when I first read that in NY Times, especially the piece on Gore and Harris. Thanks for sharing with everybody. We are definitely in a post-postmoderna era, and here i am aruguing against 'beauty pagents.' Really where have I been? Have I traveled a time machine and reached the Antiquity without my knowledge? Could it be? I am confused.
yup, a little sermon from the Pope, John paul. "dear father, forgive me for my sins....."
|
| Hari |
Posted
on 09-May-01 07:12 PM
Dear Namita,
No need to be confused. After all, these are only "eras" and they keep-a-changing. What is trendy today might be abhorred tomorrow.
What is important is that you hold on to your convictions and your passions. If you believe that beauty pageants are inherently wrong, then go fight for it, whether it's trendy right now to support beauty pageants or not. Sure, you might want to use arguments that a postmodernist-beauty-pageant-o-phile might just LOVE.
Hope you are not dissuaded by stuff printed in the New York Times or elsewhere to continue fighting for your quest.
Dui Paise Musings,
Hari
|
| namita kiran-thuene |
Posted
on 10-May-01 09:30 AM
Dear Hari,
Thanks for the advice, but I was kind of joking :) as it is so irresistible! thanks for the good wishes though. another thing: i just caught a mistake in my title!! the "need" was missing. It should have been read "Sleeping beauty does not NEED to be kissed..." See, that is why I am taking a sabbatical from writing on this site for i don't know how long. i need to practice on being silence and meditate, and write poetry but, of course(!) Om....
namita
|
