Charlotte Free is doing really well. Despite only being discovered last year by IMG, she's already appeared on the cover of Wonderland magazine, fronted campaigns for Uniqlo and walked for Vivienne Westwood and Roksanda Ilincic and it doesn't end there. This weekForever 21 announced that they have booked the model as new face. So far she's appeared in their look book images and shot a short video for the American high-street retailer but I'm sure there's a lot more to come.
As we confirmed on Twitter yesterday, Kelly Osbourne has replacedTaylor Momsen as the face of the Madonna and Lourdes' Material Girl line. Although neither party has confirmed the reason for the split, it was hardly a surprise after Momsen was dropped from IMG late last year.
The news of Osbourne's appointment was announced on the Material Girl twitter yesterday and then on their blog. “We’ve had a long time crush on Kelly and featured her as one of our “cool peeps” over the summer,” the blog reads, “We are so thrilled.” And Kelly is as pleased about the deal saying, “to be thought of as an inspiration in that way is brilliant… I hope little girls look up to Lourdes because she doesn’t dress too grown up and she always looks so stylish."
It was only a matter of time before Daktoa Fanning signed with a big modelling agency and now she has. Yesterday IMG announced that they've taken the actress on and this morning she appeared on their model board alongside Liv Tyler and Lauren Hutton. But as Daktoa joins the agency Taylor Momsen has reportedly left the agency. As yet there's been no news about Momsen will go next.
Despite sticking with the same management since the beginning of career and following them from Ford to Supreme, Chanel Iman has decided to join IMG in a bid to take her career to the next level. Case in point: last November she signed a three year deal with Victoria's Secret with more big things allegedly planned for the near future. “I feel like, with the move to Lincoln Center and Fashion’s Night Out going global, this season is all about change and evolving," she said. "I have wanted that in my career as well, which is why I’m so excited to be with IMG now and working with such a great team. It’s the celebration of a new me."
It seems that it's all change for New York Fashion Week this season, and we're not just talking about the change in venue. Lincoln Centre's new fashion director Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has certainly made her mark - at the beginning of this year she announced that fashion week gate-crashers would be a thing of the past, and she's stuck to her word.
According to IMG, roughly 80 per cent of the designers showing this season are jumping on board with Winston Wolkoff's plan to send out bar-coded invitations, meaning guests will be able to check themselves in and find their seats using kiosks at the venue. The implications of the coded system have been put in force to ensure a smoother, more efficient admittance for guests, however it will also wipe out any gate-crashers, as well as allowing publicists to detect no-shows, enabling them to fill any empty seats.
Alongside her plans for technologically advanced admittance, Winston Wolkoff has revealed that she aims to make Lincoln Centre's devotion to fashion a year round thought, rather than just season to season. "I want to see fashion on par with all of the other cultural activities here - the ballet, the opera," she told the Wall Street Journal. "I really do think that it's going to be very important that fashion at Lincoln Centre becomes a year-round initiative."
She might have been signed six years ago by IMG and landed a number of high end jobs since then, but this Summer really is the season ofFreja Beha Erichsen, the 22 year old Danish model known for her signature walk, bad girl look and androgynous figure.
This year has seen the slight model grace the coveted Spring/Summer covers of i-D and Numéro Homme, the August covers of French and British Vogue as well as appearing in a multitude of high end campaigns - Max Mara, Valentino, Chanel and Tom Ford Eyewear to name a few. Featuring in Balenciaga's upcoming campaign, Freja is now ranked no.2 on Models.com coming just behind the goddess of curves, Lara Stone. It seems there's no stopping fashion's favourite bad girl!
Yesterday it was announced that Vogue publisher Tom Florio is leaving Condé Nast after 25 years. According to sources, the relationship between the Florio and the publishing house has been rocky for some time with reports that he nearly left late last year.
The move didn't come as a surprise. Last year Florio told the Journal that, "I want to be CEO of my own company" so it was only a matter of time before he jumped ship. Since being spotted in meetings with IMG, many are already speculating that he's switching to the world of entertainment but Florio is keeping tight lipped on his next move. “I’m just in a position to do something else,” he told WWD, coyly adding, “It could be in TV; it could be on many platforms. It also could be that I will be working closely with Condé Nast. We’ll see,” he told The Cut.
IMG's books are bursting at the rim, now more than ever. Not only have they signed up the beautiful Ariel Meredith who you will most likely recognise from the recent Louis Vuittion show, but old client Tyra Bankshas resigned with the premier model agency too. Ariel used to be with Ford, who represents the likes of Janice Dickinson and Twiggy, and has graced the pages of magazines like Marie Claire, Glamour and Sports Illustrated. The return for modelling for Banks after her focus on America's Next Top Model is hopefully going to see her catapulted back onto the modelling scene.
Fern Mallis, senior VP of IMG - the group at the front of New York Fashion Week - is leaving the company to start her own consultancy firm, Fern Mallis LLC. Yesterday was her last day with IMG, marking the close of an era for both New York fashion and Mallis herself. The former executive director of the CFDA, Mallis has planned New York Fashion Week since the birth of the event 18 years ago.
For Mallis, this isn't an out-of-the-blue change. "When we were planning the move to Lincoln Center, it felt like closure, like the end of the cycle," she explained to WWD. And though IMG Fashion will be Mallis' first new client, we expect big changes for fashion week come September. With a new venue for the shows, and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff taking the new position of Fashion Week director, it's hard telling what we'll see at the next collections.
Ever since Dutch supermodel, Lara Stone, was signed by IMG in 2006, she has become one of fashion's most in-demand models with a distinct and edgy tomboy style; a style we can now get a piece of for ourselves.
Stone has personally picked out 50 of her most loved pieces for the September curate section at Not Just A Label, an uber-cool online shop specialising in selling young designers’ pieces. The site will provide all Stone-style admirers with a unique insight into her taste in clothes. “She loves leather, very tomboyish stuff,” says NJAL co-founder Stefan Siegel. “She basically wanted to choose all black, but when we asked her to choose some colour she fell in love with an orange felted shift dress - and it was by a recent graduate from Ravensbourne College.” Stone’s top four items, all modeled by herself of course, have been renamed as the Lara Stone micro-collection.