Rejoice: as you may have heard, the new face of Giorgio Armani Cosmetics has been chosen, it’s 26 years old Dutch model Lara Stone.
Fashionistas will certainly remember her previously appearing in campaigns for Calvin Klein, Jean Paul Gaultier, MaxMara, Jil Sander and Givenchy, just to mention a few, and modelling for the Pirelli calendar.
Stone - chosen for being “seductive, sensual and modern” and for embodying in Armani’s words “the feminine ideal of our time” - was photographed for the campaign by David Sims, and styled by make-up artist Linda Cantello.
Well, honestly, who cares. Let’s put things straight, I don’t have anything against beautiful women and I don’t have anything against Armani make-up (in fact I even wear it and not because there’s written Armani on it, but for its quality), but I’m sort of tired of the usual make-up campaigns.
Yes, I know, the sales from make-up lines and fragrances allow designers to keep on making clothes and accessories, but I also feel that campaigns should actively involve real women. Ah, I can already hear many designers shouting at me, complaining that real women are too short/tall/skinny/fat/etc, so definitely not Pirelli calendar material.
I would even masochistically add that, apart from being too short/tall/skinny/fat/etc, most of us also have skin problems, no matter what we eat and how much exercise we take. Happy now?
When I talk about actively involve real women, I mean genuinely doing something for them, organising for instance interesting events
in connection with the launch of a make-up line, and not just trying to sell them a product.
Just on example? Why don’t you organise a mini-tour or even a series of workshops with a famous make-up artist in some selected hospital wards where there are cancer patients recovering? While a lipstick or eye shadow may not give you back your pre-operative body, some tips and suggestions given by a professional can help restoring a little bit of self-confidence that many patients lose and we all know that recovering, is, first and foremost, a psychological process.
Do you think that this is such an idealistic, bizarre, utopian idea? I guess you’re not really into fashion then. Fashion is indeed supposed to be about all these things, it’s about optimism and creativity, two things that, unfortunately too often, cancer patients forget about because of their health conditions.
While a fashion house is not a charity, many designers should actually sit down and wonder, who buys clothes and accessories (well, at least the more affordable ones), people or actresses?
We all know that the latter are often freely supplied with designer items so that they can be photographed wearing/carrying them and the next day their images can be bounced back and forth from one email box to another, can be published on millions of papers, magazines and blogs, and eventually convince us to buy that specific garment or that bag. Which leaves us, ordinary human beings, to support and sustain a fashion house and a designer’s luxuriously extravagant life, and I guess that most of us would be happy to see a designer actively involved in improving other people's life.
So, dearest fashion designers ready to launch a new make-up campaign, ponder a bit about you can do for women through engaging ad campaigns. Investing in the community may hurt your wallet a bit (though never as much as investing in a beautiful actress or model does...), but doing something to make society a better place - to paraphrase that Mastercard advert (sorry to use credit card ad semantics, but it’s often the only one many fashion designers understand…) - doesn’t have price.
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