More details are emerging about the Naomi Watts advertisements for Thierry Mugler Angel, from the New York, rather than French, end of the business:

Naomi Watts was the inspired choice for Thierry Mugler, over and above her beauty and her star image. Displaying a modern touch, the actress projects a personality that blends sensuality, voluptuousness and evanescence to evoke the many facets of Angel. A blond fragility, a natural tenderness, an emotional seductiveness …
   Rather appropriately, it was in Los Angeles, city of the angels, and in the Hollywood Center studios, that the commercial was shot, following a scenario by Thierry Mugler and directed by director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls). A Hollywood fairy-tale surrounded by a profusion of Angel stars.
   To immortalize this mythical moment, Thierry Mugler called on photographer Ali Mahdavi to produce the advertising visuals of his Hollywood dream. A worldwide campaign, glamorous and magical, will begin in October 2008.

I finally came across the full text of the press release attacking Massey University over its story on its alum Rhonda Grant, Miss Universe New Zealand’s second runner-up.
   You can read the statement from the Association of University Staff’s president, Assoc Prof Maureen Montgomery, via Scoop. I think she was pretty persistent, sending it out to the NZPA as well as other news sources—she really disliked the story.
   It’s a shame Dr Montgomery has received anonymous hate mail over this today, when her release is filled with good targets for debate.
   I respect her right to hold an opinion and I think she was right to circulate it, but I wonder just how it might benefit the Association of University Staff, or any institution promoting tertiary issues.
   A lot of the arguments are addressed in our own release, which pageant director Val Lott asked me to write. I was more than happy to put the record straight, something that Dr Montgomery gave me a good opportunity to do.
   You can tell Dr Montgomery failed to do what I thought academics should do first and foremost: get sufficient evidence and maintain an open mind.
   The story on Rhonda Grant was no better and no worse in quality terms than the puff pieces about alumni on the Massey University website, so we know she has been singled out.
   Dr Montgomery writes, ‘Massey’s story reads like the formulaic sort of thing that aspiring beauty queens are expected to say when interviewed on the catwalk.’
   As I said in our release, the reality is the interviews are tough—and there are no expectations of formulaic answers at Miss New Zealand.
   I defend the pageant because I know how tough the judging got: Rhonda was allowed to talk about nutrition, and other contestants were quizzed about everything from the moral repugnancy of bank charges to genetics versus socialization, depending on their university specialization.
   ‘One might expect a university public relations office to do more than piggy-back off what comes across as a publicity statement produced by the Miss Universe organisation,’ she said.
   Publicity statements from the Miss Universe Organization seldom focus on second runners-up but, whether we like it or not, Massey has engaged in journalism. We might argue over the quality.
   I share some of her concerns over objectification but I believe that was sufficiently addressed when Rhonda’s bikini-clad photograph was removed from the Massey University website in favour of something more conservative.
   Once that was done, then the complaint really is a case of the lady protesting too much, unless all alum puff pieces are equally, to use Dr Montgomery’s word, ‘banal’.
   And as deep journalism, maybe that’s not unfair—but it should apply fairly to all puff pieces, not just Rhonda’s.
   If it were couched in such terms, I would gladly stand by her.
   Dr Montgomery’s complaint on Rhonda’s piece specifically might be better directed at government educational policy that has supposedly bred a generation of sex-obsessed high school graduates who might find Rhonda Grant’s figure the reason to join Massey University.
   Actually, on the sexualization of youth, I would also gladly stand by her.
   But for now, as a colleague here at Lucire said to me today, ‘You have to ask yourself: what does Maureen Montgomery get out of it? It’s none of her business. Why has she been allowed to be involved?’
   I suppose the answer comes, rightly or wrongly, from the anti-American stances of liberal universities around the world, and Dr Montgomery’s own informs them. It helps the profile of the University of Canterbury, where she works, and cements its liberal position.
   My own father equated Dr Montgomery’s release to Rosie O’Donnell’s outburst on The View against Miss Nevada 2006 and Donald Trump: ill-considered, narrow-minded, poorly investigated and founded on opinion.
   Where Dr Montgomery and I do share some basic views is how images can shape agenda. I know this. I publish fashion magazines. Let’s not kid ourselves. 
   She wrote, ‘Massey University has provided an excellent example of how the desperation to market universities as “attractive” places to gain knowledge and transferable skills intersects with the use of the sexualized female body as a site of desire.’
   There is an element of truth to such statements, but I question if university choices are made based on attractive alumni—even with my rant yesterday on sexualization.
   When I went to university, I had far more pressing concerns such as degree programmes and career prospects.
   Vitally, we are talking about a story that is hard to find on the Massey University site—a site that had proxy errors in the small hours of this morning that rendered it inaccessible. If it were not for her own strong and widely disseminated disapproval, it would have been seen probably by a few dozen people—perhaps one prospective student.
   I’d personally have saved the energy for when universities started putting out alumni swimsuit calendars.
   By all means, speak out—I do on even lesser issues. But consider the effect of the publicity: right now, it seems Rhonda Grant is going to be promoted to national stardom on Close-up and Campbell Live, and the pageant will get prime-time coverage on the same day Miss New Zealand Samantha Powell did her Good Morning interview on TV One. Earlier today, Paul Holmes promoted this as a major item on his radio show in Auckland.
   We couldn’t have dreamed of this profile.
   This has played into the hands of the pageant exceptionally well and, as a judge, I thank Dr Montgomery, even if I do so somewhat selfishly.

Pageant judge and Lucire publisher Jack Yan has defended Miss Universe New Zealand second runner-up Rhonda Grant after criticisms about a Massey University story from the Association of University Staff.
   ‘It’s the usual story of pulling down someone because of her looks or her success,’ he says. ‘I believe she’s been singled out.
   ‘Journalistically, Miss Grant’s interview was no different in quality to others that have appeared on the Massey site.’
   Miss Grant gave an interview to her Alma Mater, Massey University. The Association’s national president Assoc Prof Maureen Montgomery called the article ‘one of the most banal news features emanating from a university this year’, and that it read ‘like the formulaic sort of thing that beauty queens are expected to say when interviewed on the catwalk’, according to a New Zealand Press Association article.
   Mr Yan says pageantry is far removed from Dr Montgomery’s suggestion.
   ‘I laugh when people assume that pageant contestants answer easy questions, showing that they are so very ignorant of the interview process.
   ‘Formulaic answers are rejected,’ he claims, ‘and they are certainly not expected.’
   Mr Yan recalls that questions in the 2008 pageant, held two weeks ago in Auckland, concerned everything from immigration policy and globalization to the debate on genetics versus socialization.
   ‘They are not bimbos and they are not judged by morons. We don’t prejudge these young women as harshly as the Association has. I expected that someone of Dr Montgomery’s qualifications would make a simple academic inquiry into the process before attacking it.’
   Mr Yan says that he has guest-lectured at various universities and contributed to academic journals in Great Britain, and that his fellow judges are well qualified in their areas of expertise.
   ‘We can’t afford to send someone to Miss Universe who cannot think on her feet or produces insubstantial answers.
   ‘For anyone to suggest that unintelligent women enter pageants is an affront to the contestants.’
   He admits that he has only read the criticisms as reported in the NZPA piece as run in The New Zealand Herald and that he does not have the full text.
   ‘Based on the Herald article, the message that the Association is sending is that young men and women who have good looks should not be fêted for their accomplishments, which they worked hard for.’
   He says he does not deny evidence that suggests looks can contribute to one’s career but points out that on the flip side, people like Miss Grant have to contend with being stereotyped as vacuous.
   ‘Miss Grant is an able, bilingual young woman with a science degree, running a nutrition business with a growing number of contracts,’ he says.
   Mr Yan believes that Massey University should be proud to have such talent and entrepreneurship among its alumni.
   He acknowledges that beauty pageant entrants run the risk of objectification but he did not think this was an example.
   A photo of Miss Grant in a bikini was removed by Massey University in favour of a more conservative shot.
   ‘I can understand complaints about the earlier photograph, but after it was changed, it still seems that the Association can’t let the matter go,’ says Mr Yan.
   ‘While I cannot speak for Massey University, I know earlier versions of web pages can go live, and I imagine what we see now is the final one.
   ‘To me, this was a non-issue sparked by a single image, and the Association is now grasping at whatever is left of the article to cement its self-importance and to belittle Miss Grant’s academic endeavours. That, to me, devalues the degree of any New Zealand university graduate.’

It’s not that we haven’t kept up with the row over the Miley Cyrus photographs taken by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair, which sexualize the teenage star, but I have to draw the line somewhere when it comes to news coverage.
   There are quarters in fashion publishing which would deem these photographs appropriate and artistic, just as Leibovitz claimed, and we ourselves have featured teens in and even on the cover of Lucire, looking probably older than they really are.
   But if a subject comes to me and tells me that she is embarrassed by a series of photographs, and for a cover decision she may well be in the know, then that’s good enough reason for me to have a meeting or a big office poll about it.
   And that’s just what Cyrus, star of the beloved Hannah Montana series, has said of her half-naked bedroom shot.
   In normal circumstances, this matter would be worked out privately between the Cyrus family and Vanity Fair’s publishers.
   Which makes this all rather odd: has the crisis surrounding these images been manufactured? One commenter on a Murdoch Press website seems to think so and, knowing how cover decisions are made, especially those that are potentially controversial, I am seriously tempted to agree.
   Reports suggest that Cyrus’s father, singer Billy Ray Cyrus, was present through most of the shoot.
   What I do know is that the modelling agencies we would work with are protective of their talent and we agree on many aspects of the shoot prior to starting when it involves a young girl—and that means overt sexualization is out.

For once many of the press have taken a moral high ground and that is, at least, pleasing to see, even if I have questions on their consistency. The Fairfax Press noted:

Every artist wants to subvert hypocrisy and artifice. And childhood, after all, is the ultimate artificial construction. It exists only because responsible adults deliberately set out to protect children from predators and situations their young brains are not yet wired to deal with.
   But in an era in which all taboos must be broken, the reigning philosophy is that every truth must be told, every emotion liberated, no matter how destructive, or unreasonable, because there is nothing worse than repression.
   Well—news flash—yes, there are worse things: child neglect, sexual abuse, childhoods cut short, depression, eating disorders, academic failure, violence against women, and all other manifestations of the premature sexualisation and objectification of girls in our culture.

   Interestingly, the op-ed in the Fairfax Press touches on similar subjects to a blog comment that I wrote in discussion with William Shepherd, a marketing expert based in California—one of those smart netizens who reminds me of the days in the 1990s when most people on the ’net were of a certain intellectual level.
   He wrote, on the topic of pornography in Brazil:

However, I find it hard to imagine that Brazil has an issue with porn. They should have a concern with AIDS, the cheap sex and underage labor that Brazil offers to Sex Industry. …
   [W]ill blocking wordpress sites stop white slavery, sexual abuse towards young children, men from going to Brazil to engage in power driven sex events that hurt the fiber of global culture, and humanity? …
   Sex is what it has always been. Yet, the online media has tried to make porn a staple of global culture and economics.

   When I think about these words today, it’s not just the online media, as Vanity Fair and others have shown us.
   I do, after all, see the irony of citing the Murdoch Press when it popularized the page-three girl and sensationalist stories founded in sex.
   At the risk of offending fans of certain TV shows, I responded:

The sex economy, the fixation on sex, are not good things for us to be so focused on, yet I don’t like it being constantly propagated even through prime-time shows such as the old Friends or Desperate Housewives.
   I do not regard myself a prude but you are right: there are more pressing things to be concerned about, and I’m far too busy to find double-entendres in every sitcom appealing.

   While sex is as woven in to Desperate Housewives as it was into Benny Hill, and those watching it at its late hour (past the watershed?) know what to expect, it gets an awful lot of publicity in TV promos with their share of suggestive imagery at other times. OK, it wasn’t the best example of a TV show (which I watched at one point), but the old Friends certainly was. I think it’s difficult to disagree that we have become too obsessed with sex in our society and those early seasons of Friends depended less on characterization and more on innuendo, not often that subtle.
   At the idealistic level there is nothing wrong with this when it comes to showing behaviour between consenting adults—it’s less objectionable than seeing the extreme violence that has now made it on to prime-time television—but we now face the danger of it going further and further into promoting promiscuity among the young. Expand sex’s reach, and you arouse greater curiosity in our youngest citizens at an earlier age. It’s like lowering the drinking age to 18, as had happened in New Zealand: now it’s not 17-year-olds sneaking in three years before they are legal, but 14-year-olds with fake IDs.
   That curiosity around sex has always been there with those who are 11 or 12, as any of you reading this will know, but the signals are telling us that as adults we need to give more guidance, and we need to take a stand against marketing that encourages sex at a time when mentally, young people are not prepared for the consequences.
   And it was interesting to read that I am not alone in my assessment; in fact mine seems ill-educated alongside that of an author who has devoted a book to the subject. Fairfax again:

[Melbourne child psychologist, Michael Carr-Gregg] said internet porn, with hardcore sites available to children at a mouseclick, “has completely changed the sexual behaviour of young women, [particularly] the obsession with oral sex.” Young girls, he said, have been encouraged to behave “almost as predators, as if [a boy] is some sort of game animal they want to bag”.
   Again, he blamed parents for creating “a culture of entitlement and indulgence [in which they] are hesitant to set limits around sleep or internet use. Democracy doesn’t work in families. You have to have a benign dictatorship.”
   In a new book, Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau writes that “an incremental but aggressive sexualising of [our] culture … [has created] a status quo in which almost everything seems focused on what’s going on ‘below the waist’.”

   As long as we sit back, tut-tut when the items make the news but fall back on not caring at other times, then we have lost yet another value. Add that to a huge list in the west—and the east—since the end of World War II.
   If certain institutions are being so aggressive as Liebau writes, then adults need to be as aggressive. ‘Benign dictatorship’, in the words of Carr-Gregg, probably describes the families many of us had—and we turned out all right.
   It was a sort-of democracy in my household because my parents involved me in every family-affecting major decision and I earned their trust so I never had a curfew. But that was earned—and I was probably lucky I had a good conscience or spirit guide, or something directing me.
   Not everyone is so fortunate, and in this day and age, it’s not a bad idea to be strongly involved in our children’s lives because that moral compass no longer comes from those cohesive, homogeneous communities of old, nor does it come from the media, at least not regularly or consistently. We, the regular people, are the last and possibly only resort in our respective families.

‘Oh, duck! I canardly believe it! The new Mini Cooper S Clubman!’
   One of the shots we won’t publish (in print) from my 35 mm roll.

There are only 8,000 each for him and for her of the Diesel Fuel for Life Special Edition bottles, launched December 2007—and if you search, you may still be able to find some at ‘exclusive sales outlets’. We had to mention it since we think this is the coolest looking bottle for the first part of ’08.

   Meanwhile, photographer Matthew Plummer went along to the Little Brother show in Wellington, New Zealand and took some catwalk shots—we really loved these since they aren’t your ordinary “photographers’ pit” stuff. Some of Matthew’s work will be in the next print edition of Lucire.
   Speaking of the next print edition, Elyse Glickman has an interview with very hip, celeb-favourite LA label Hale Bob—and it was interesting to note that there has been African inspiration there. It’s evident in one of the collection photographs: embellished, raw and stylish. This pic probably won’t run due to space reasons, so here’s a chance to enjoy it now.

    Finally, in terms of happenings for our team, hop over to the beauty pages: our Mari Johnson has been to the Qua Bottle Lounge in downtown Austin, Texas—read about her experiences here.

Online today: a preview of the H&M summer 2008 range (left), which the company says is inspired by hot, exotic locations such as India and Africa.
   This is clearly in the Zeitgeist: the same week we receive Peter Alexander’s latest catalogue (below), which has an African-inspired collection. There’s something about Africa this summer, so let’s hope that translates into awareness of the continent’s issues that we, as a planet, can help with.
  Speaking of exoticism, we do have our special on Katherine Mansfield, the famous New Zealand author—and possibly its ‘first fashionista’, online, for those who missed it earlier this month. The exhibition of her property—including her clothing, perfume bottles and jewellery—is still on in Wellington, and we highly recommend a visit to understand the New Zealand fashion character.

As promised, some better photos from last Saturday’s cruise with the Miss Universe New Zealand 2008 contestants from my Voigtländer Bessamatic, which shows that a 49-year-old camera can get some darned good results.

Samantha Powell (who would go on to win Miss New Zealand 2008, but Miss Horowhenua at this stage), Rebecca Connor (Miss Wellington, sponsored by the Establishment Bar), Rhonda Grant (sponsored by TR Designs, Palmerston North) and Kylie Anderson (sponsored by C. R. Johnson Ltd., and second runner-up to Miss New Zealand 2006).

A 35 mm film version of the photograph from the cellphone, but with a slightly narrower field. Rebecca Connor (Miss Wellington), Hannah Matthews (runner-up, Miss Universe New Zealand 2008, sponsored by Masport), Samantha Powell (Miss Universe New Zealand 2008), Kylie Warfield (chaperone, and Miss New Zealand Asia–Pacific 2005), and Sylvia Laurenson (sponsored by Bettjemans for 2008, and 2007’s runner-up).

My scanner has gone kaput and I’m now three weeks in the process of getting it fixed. You know—ordering a part, having it arrive, finding it’s totally wrong (as in: the part does not even exist inside this model of scanner), and now, having a really annoying moiré effect on photographs that do not have a dot screen!
   I’m less than impressed as I have some lovely photographs from my judging of Miss Universe New Zealand 2008 that I wouldn’t mind posting. Girls: don’t worry—the embarrassing ones won’t wind up anywhere on the ’net, though I may email them to you directly.
   These are off one of those newfangled cellphones. The good 35 mm ones will have to wait.

Miss Wellington, Rebecca Connor, sponsored by the Establishment Bar, on the launch to Waiheke. Rebecca was in the top five and, from what I can tell, a crowd favourite.

Samantha Powell, Miss Horowhenua, who later won the title of Miss Universe New Zealand 2008. She seems to have a natural beauty. I don’t think I’d be revealing too much about the judging if I were to say she gave a fine interview on the first night (Thursday).

Some of the top-placed contestants are here in a very leggy shot: Rebecca Connor, Hannah Matthews (runner-up, sponsored by Masport), Samantha Powell are present from left to right. From right to left are Lauren Kyle (Miss Auckland), and Sylvia Laurenson (sponsored by Bettjemans), runner-up in 2007, re-entering (Sylvia came in the top five this year). That leaves Kylie Warfield third from right—not a contestant, but one of the chaperones and assistants, who could have easily come in a top position herself in this competition. (She was Miss New Zealand Asia-Pacific 2005.)

The wake from the launch out to Waiheke.

The girls do not starve themselves, as you can see—yep, that’s cream on the top of that glass being delivered to Miss Wanganui, Michelle Kleinsmith. And it’s one of two such glasses heading to this table.

It’s been three years since Summer Rayne Oakes first appeared in Lucire, as a feature interviewee rather than a member of the team. Since then, the association between the magazine and Ms Oakes has strengthened, with her taking the acting editor’s role in 2006 and as editor-at-large from 2007. Here are some shots from that April 2005 story, which to our knowledge have not appeared online, in a quick trip down memory lane today. As the United Nations Environment Programme’s first fashion industry partner, Lucire was destined to be in the same world as Summer Rayne. It’s been a great association, and we hope it’ll continue to grow.

From top: Summer Rayne Oakes in Linda Loudermilk V-neck top in sustainable silk, found lace and vintage thread beads embellishment, Linda Loundermilk vintage lace jacket, and her own necklaces. Hand-made embroidered jackets made of recycled materials from Project Alabama, Carasan Designs woollen tweed corset with hand-beaded Swarovski crystals, and beaded choker. Photographed by Sarah McColgan, make-up and hair by Deshawn Hatcher, styled by André Adkins. Summer Rayne Oakes was represented on this shoot by Boss Models.