Voxfrock’s grab-bag of stuff you never knew you might need to know. Or not. This week, it’s all about Melbourne. Except for the bits about Sydney.
Spring solved (insider info alert)
David Jones will host its usual VIP glamoursplash into spring next Wednesday July 31 in Sydney with model Montana Cox in the top catwalk spot vacated by Miranda Kerr. No surprises there. What’s different; it appears DJs has also solved a dilemma that’s plagued PR collaborators since belts were tightened in the brutal retailscape wake of the Global Financial Crisis.
On Wednesday, instead of planeloads of frock writers thundering into Sydney’s A-list catwalk sparkler and pulverising DJs spring budget (swank hotel accomodations and chauffered cars thrown in), in Melbourne a very sensible live “screening” of the show will be hosted over cocktails for local fashion reporters and bloggers in the salubrious surrounds of DJs’ city store.
The impossible task of ramping up the glamour while including and impressing as many fashion media as possible and keeping costs down to a shoe-string shareholder-happy minimum, in other words, appears all but solved. Only a modest sprinkling of interstaters, whose words and editorial pages have already been secured to fill up exclusively with DJs spring chic options, a spokeswoman said, will be flown in for the bash. The rest of us will wave flutes and cool heels at our own, quieter kneezup down here. Noice.
Montana Cox for Vogue Australia
Spring Solved Footnote: A Very Pretty and Popular Girl.
Although it will be her top-of-the-runway debut for David Jones next Wednesday night, Melbourne-born Montana Cox, 19, has walked and worked with Miss Kerr and model Samantha Harris in several of the store’s recent campaigns. Her career kicked off when she won Australia’s Next Top Model in 2011 (an apparently memorable night of Aussie telly Voxfrock missed on account of we count do not count a single devotee of the show among us. Au contraire; loathe is a fair measure of common sentiment for ANTM and similar mutations of fashion’s noble arts such as Project Runway.) and has fired on six cylinders ever since. She has modelled campaigns for Dion Lee, Gary Bigeni, Colette by Colette Dinnigan and Witchery, among others and walked at Milan, Paris and London Fashion weeks and Paris Haute Couture week for labels including Bottega Veneta, Chanel, Dior, Valentino and Lanvin.
Designing Diaz, and Jessica.
Cameron Diaz was appointed artistic director of the Pour La Victoire shoes and handbag brand and, while this news intrigued Voxfrock for precisely 1.34 split seconds, we were far more interested in what appeared to be first duties in her new job description. Miss Diaz attended – and apparently contributed creatively – to Pour La Victoire’s campaign shoot by popular sleaze photographer Terry Richardson with Australian model Jessica Hart. And it was filmed.
Jessica Hart photographed by Terry Richardson for Pour La Victoire.
Voxfrock adores Miss Hart. Voxfrock dislikes most of Mr. Richardson’s work. So it was with some trepidation we clicked through to a YouTubed jigsaw clip of the shoot, genuinely in fear Mr. Richardson might reduce our gorgeous gap-toothed beauty to a slithering ready-for-my-orgasm pornlet in a hot lesbian clinch. As he is wont to do. We need not have worried. Miss Hart’s quirk-of-tooth and sweetness of nature apparently leeched the icky lewdness right out of Mr. Richardson’s aesthetic speciality. Miss Hart is – yes indeed – steamingly sexy in every shot but her uniqueness also shines through with Monro-esque clarity.
Gorgeous. Have a look here.
Dress Code: Up
Extravagant fundraising for Aids charities hasn’t faltered since the pandemic’s height in the 1980s and there are several excellent reasons for that, but one in particular: Best. Parties. Ever. AIDS kneezups are simply the fanciest, most glamourous, often outragiously enjoyable of all significant public events and Melbourne’s FASHIONCONNECT is a marvellous annual example of the genre. Organiser Oscar Calvo, of OC Communications has announced a new location and lineup for Fashion Connect 2013, scheduled smack in the middle of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week (though, inexplicably, not included in its official schedule).
Actor Dan Ewing (Home and Away) will host the AIDS Trust of Australia fundraiser in the exotic Spice Market nightclub tucked into Beaney Lane behind the Grand Hyatt Melbourne. The night churns around a sophisticated mash of art, fashion and entertainment headlined by the heart-stopper acrobatics of “The Lady GaGa experience”, with all-male dance troupe PSA and “the burlesque bombshell” Miss Skopalova. Tickets sell quick. Best get a wiggle on.
FASHIONCONNECT, Wednesday, September 4, from 7pm., Spice Market, Beaney Lane, Melbourne. The first 200 extravagantly dressed guests also score a luxury $250+ gift bag. Tickets $40 to $60 for various single, group and package bookings, book here.
Sketchy chic
What is it about Westfield? The mallchain is firing on all marketing cylinders, pitching its experiential retail in gobsmacker ways that just make you want to pull on your uggs and go shopping in proper bricks-n’-mortar fashion. Its next exotic little project, August 7 to 11 (stick it in your diary),is called The Sketch House on Level One of Westfield’s swankish Doncaster digs. If this idea doesn’t lure legions of new punters Voxfrock will dance naked in its proverbial mallfountain for free. (Or not)
Westfield recruited Melbourne based fashion illustration sensation Megan Hess to inhabit The Sketch House on a couple of sparkly occasions. The rest of the time, it will be a working fashion illustration studio, its walls hung with Miss Hess’s international commissions including for Dior, Chanel, Cartier, Vogue, Saint Laurent, Michelle Obama and author Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City book series.
Meagan Hess illustration for Vogue
Miss Hess will host a signing of her own recently published book Fashion House (Hardie Grant) from noon to 2 pm.on August 7, but her principal task will be to judge the most fashionable and sketch-worthy photographs uploaded by shoppers to Westfield’s Facebook page before its competition closes Wednesday, July 31. A handful of winners will be sketched by fashion art students, and one outright winner will score a sitting with Miss Hess herself as well as a $500 gift card and copy of Fashion House. Good, huh? (Main picture, top, and above, Megan Hess’s elegant fashion illustrations are sought after by luxury clients across the globe.)
Your most glamourous photo should be uploaded here .
The awfully elegant Miss Hess.
Compiled by Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au with Terry Carruthers, info@voxfrock.com.au.
