>> THE MODELIZER —Ever wonder what Gemma Ward is up to these days, now that her face isn't plastered everywhere?  Apparently she turned up Annapurna Circuit in Nepal a couple of months ago, according to some fellow travelers, with a porter in tow carrying two fully stuffed body-sized bags containing a guitar, a chess set, and some books, among other things. [Uncornered Market: 1, 2, Bunny Bisous]

You're not too old to put these on your holiday wish list. Nor are you too young to invest in some nice hosiery. So, no excuses! We pulled some Falke hosiery for our The Sun Doesn't Care photo shoot and, compared to the drug store pairs we ripped up and experimented with, they were silky pieces of art. Too beautiful to touch. We decided we'd never wear another pair of 'black mist' Duane Reade pantyhose again. We called them knock-offs, we threw them out. After all, we rationalized, if you're wearing reputable undergarments, it will show through your clothes. That is you'll feel better and walk with confidence knowing that just underneath those superficial layers is very expensive, very thin pieces of lace and silk. Oh la la.

What makes Falke extra-special, over the other luxury hosiery options, is that their specialty is sportswear. Borne in Germany, Falke has over one hundred years experience creating innovative garments that are functional rather than superfluous. Unfortunately the hosiery shots didn't make our edit, for reasons completely unrelated to their performance, but we just couldn't leave out the post. If an epiphany in undergarments occurs, 'aint no pictures necessary.

>> Squabbling amongst modeling agencies is nothing new — everyone wants the primo girls, after all.  A couple of months ago, DNA Models's head booker Louie Chaban sent shockwaves around when he booked it over to Women Model Management, with rumors following after that he took Agyness Deyn with him (even though she's currently listed on DNA's board).

Now, DNA Models is having more booker trouble. 1 Model Management filed suit last week against the agency, alleging that DNA hired one of its former bookers, Vivien Wang, despite the fact that she signed an agreement to not work for any of 1MM's competitors for one year she left DNA in May.

And here's the rub: Vivien she took Denisa Dvorakova, an up-and-coming model who walked most of the big couture shows in July (Chanel, Christian Dior, Valentino, Christian Lacroix) with her to DNA. Losing a promising talent in the month before the fashion weeks hurts.
*image: source

This shoutout is long overdue--the Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer is one your editor's must-have beauty products. To be honest, we often leave the beauty posts to our beauty bloggers, for their knowledge is so impressive that our olive-oil and sunblock beauty routines seem a bit simple in comparison. We've realized, however, that we are not alone in loving this particular Clinique product. We buy mostly everything online but something, time and time again, we forget to purchase in advance is our moisturizer. It seems before we know it we're scraping the bottom of the glass jar and making some time in our day to run to Sephora for an instant replenishment. This happened for the fourth time in a row this week and for the fourth time in a row we dredged all the way over to Sephora only to realize that the moisturizer was sold out. Why we hadn't learned our lesson the first time is another matter completely. From this experience we learned two valuable lessons. One, our mousturizer of choice is acutally a lot of people's moisturizer of choice, and, shopping online takes the cake every time!

The Clinique Total Turnaround Visible Skin Renewer is super light and almost mealy to the touch. It leaves our skin actually glowing with out the sparkles that so many 'glow'-titled moisturizers secretly pack in their bottles. It always gives our skin just the right amount of moisture; never are we oily, never does our face feel dry. Quite frankly, it serves us better than any moisturizer we've ever tried and (our mom and grandmother always said, 'As far as skincare goes, only trust the French') it's from a company that's been with us since our teenage years (boy, did our skin glow back then). Below, the star mousturizer and a few other Clinique products we have scattered about our powder rooms.

A while back we posted on Deka Ray jewelry and spoke with designer Eugenie Huang about her work. Because we pulled Huang's newest designs for our The Sun Doesn't Care photo shoot, we've decided to pull part of that conversation out from the archives--in case you missed it the first time around. Huang, since last we spoke, has added larger-than-life pieces to her collection and had numerous publications shoutout her work. Deka Ray has landed everything from a huge Refinery 29 story to a feature in Elle magazine. Huang's architecture pursuits are still going strong but with orders streaming in from all over the world, she's being kept quite busy. Below, an excerpt from our post on Deka Ray,

...Being young, pretty, and ambitious usually means you've some sort of thriving business going on, and that's perfectly fine. The aspect that's often missing, in a city where anyone can do anything, are the designers who treat their work as a craft, and who've dedicated their time to learn about it on a deeper (daresay, classical) level...With a B.S. in Architecture from M.I.T. and a Masters from Columbia, Huang has been trained to meditate on the relationship of spaces and materials and to create based on those findings. As Huang says,

"I think of Deka Ray as being someone or something otherworldly landing in the woods of North Carolina [where I grew up] and gleaning ideas from this environment mixed with more futuristic notions about technology. Very much in line with the "future primitive" concept."

Sometimes all it takes is a closer look to realize that some girls aren't just makin' jewelry.