By the fabulous Jade Young! And here on the ABT website.

Went to my local bookstore last night and couldn’t find it, but apparently it’s now available for sale in online (European) bookstores at least.

In addition to original writing by Weber and Bolle, it includes text by D.H. Lawrence, and illustrations by Paul Cadmus! Hmmm…

(all photos by Weber and taken from teNeues)

Knowing how well I like ABT soloist Kristi Boone, photographer Jade Young sent me her new headshot. (He did Marcelo’s and Veronika’s as well). I think it’s gorgeous!

Over the weekend I went to see The September Issue, the documentary about Anna Wintour and Vogue, focusing on the mag’s — well, the fashion industry’s — most important issue of the year. I found it thoroughly entertaining, but not in the way I expected. I expected it to be a real-life Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn’t that at all. I remember from the book, Lauren  Weisberger’s main character constantly feeling like a horrid slob amongst all the fashionistas — or fashionista wannabes — who worked at the magazine, and I remember her even being ridiculed by everyone for wearing Ann Taylor, supposedly a cheap designer.

Of course Devil Wears Prada, the film, played up on all of that, having Meryl Streep lecture Anne Hathaway on her decidedly frumpy wardrobe and call her (a size 6) “fat.” But here, everyone who works at Vogue — particularly Wintour and other higher-ups like creative director Grace Coddington (who is really the emotional centerpiece of the film) are pretty mundanely dressed. They seem more like incredibly hard-working women who are far too busy to care much about how they look everyday at the office. No one wears much makeup, hair looks completely unstyled, Coddington munches on a rather bland-looking corner deli-bought salad while enthusing about the photo-shoots she’s designed and her romantic vision for the issue, talking about her past as a model and how she turned to the editorial side of things early on after a car accident ended her modeling career, and bemoaning the wasted money spent on photo spreads Wintour ended up not liking and axing entirely.

But my biggest surprise was how unattractive I found the models to be. And they weren’t — they were all really beautiful. But I think I’ve seen so much dance now that, as much as I used to admire models, I’m now almost horrified at their bad posture, their boney bodies, their completely uncoordinated frames, their sloppy-looking lines. During a shoot, this one model was playing around and she decided to do a kick — a battement — for the photographer and it was just about the worst kick I’ve ever seen. Her knee was bent awkwardly, her foot was doing nothing at all and gave her leg no line, and she almost fell over. The photographer seemed to think it was great though.

Made me think how much better dancers might be at making the clothes look good. I don’t know, maybe most dancers are too short or the fabric doesn’t drape as well over built musculature as it does over basically skin-covered bone.

This wasn’t the same model from the film — I can’t find a photo of her — but it’s taken from Italian Vogue. I mean the clothes look good — she’s pretty — but look at her lines underneath…

This in contrast to the New York City Ballet dancers, as photographed with this gorgeous flowing diaphanous fabric for NYCB’s Winter season calendar, which I just received in the mail today.

(There’s another ballerina, to the left, in that first photo, but I’m still pretty amateur at scanning and couldn’t get her in.) Doesn’t say who took the photos but I assume it’s company photographer Paul Kolnik.

Just looking at a couple of the photos New York City Ballet dancer turned photographer Kyle Froman has shot for Morphoses to publicize that company’s upcoming City Center season (tix go on sale for that today, by the way) and am realizing what an excellent photographer he is. I mean, he doesn’t just take pictures of dancers in action (which is an art in itself) but he has a real vision for dance with the way he poses his subjects against a setting and the overall images he creates and the feelings they evoke. He’s like Balanchine as a photographer. I don’t see a lot of dance photography like this.

Here are a few others that he took for the NYCB Dancers’ Choice event last year. The first I copied from Deep Glamour, the other two from Oberon’s Grove.

I enjoyed watching him dance with NYCB — particularly his hilarious turn as the pompous Russian danseur in Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth — but sometimes I think a dancer finds his or her true calling when he “retires.”

Here is his website. He also has a book out, In the Wings, consisting of photos he took behind the scenes at NYCB when he was still dancing there.

Okay, isn’t it apparent from this picture alone that David Hallberg is the best Apollo EVER?! And it’s only a rehearsal photo! Oooh, I really may have to go to Vail next year…

Photo taken from The Winger, where you should read Carla Korbes’s post on her experiences at Vail and performing the Balanchine classic with the great DH. She’s also got several more photos posted including some of D and Ashley Bouder.

For this gorgeous picture of Janie Taylor (one of my favorite ballerinas in the world right now) in one of my favorite ballets (Balanchine’s La Valse)! Sorry, I just logged on to the Times Dance Section and this picture just stole my breath; couldn’t resist borrowing it! Here is Sir Alastair’s review, by the way.

I didn’t go to opening night on Tuesday night (was at Stephen Petronio with a friend instead), but will most definitely be at NYCB this weekend. Thanks to Mr. Kolnik I really can’t wait now. Summer ballet season has officially begun — bliss bliss bliss!

I was in the bookstore the other day looking for literary magazines and somehow got caught up in the latest issue of Vogue Hommes International. I’ve been a fan of Keanu Reeves all the way back since River’s Edge (honestly) and I saw on the cover that there was an interview inside with Bret Easton Ellis (novelist, Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama, etc. etc.) Interview with BEE is pretty funny, actually, in a way it likely wasn’t intended to be. IE: interviewer: So, you were an icon in, like the 80’s. BEE: Yeah, it was hard being an icon. And confusing. Seriously. I’d get in a fight with my boyfriend and I’d be like, wait, you can’t criticize me; I’m an icon!” But my favorite BEE quote is here.

Anyway, I was flipping through and there are all these little mini interviews with and photos of writers (Stefan Merrill Block too!), architects, actors and filmmakers, of course designers and models.

(French actor / filmmaker Louis Garrel by Bruce Weber, images from here)

But not a single dancer anywhere. Why not? They’d make such good models

(photos of Sebastien Marcovici and Robert Fairchild by Paul Kolnik, from NYCB website)

(Jose Carreno and Roberto Bolle by Tommy Ng, from ExploreDance)

(David Hallberg and Herman Cornejo in Gene Schiavone pic, from here)

(Sergey Surkov, my photo; Slavik Kryklyvyy from here)

(Arunas Bizokas, my photo; Linas Koreiva, from here and here)

Vogue Hommes should so hire me to compile a dancer spread! Fabrizio Ferri can do the pictures. Maybe Bruce Weber, though he can get kind of cliched and corny… No, Fabrizio.

Then, yesterday, I saw Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was pretty good. The Dolce Vita-esque scenes were the best   And it reminded me of Fashion Week’s being moved from Bryant Square to Lincoln Center, and I thought how excellent (and fitting of course) it would be to have NYCB and ABT ballerinas as the models, an idea Kristin Sloan had proposed on the Winger a while back. Ballerinas generally have far better bodies than models. Come on!

(Stella Abrera, photo by Nancy Ellison, taken from here)

(Irina Dvorovenko, from ABT website)

(Janie Taylor, by Paul Kolnik, from ExploreDance)

How sweet would Janie look in this Valentino gown (middle, pink, image from here)

And Irina in this (image, here):