Jean Paul Gaultier (French: [ʒɑ̃ pɔl ɡotje]; born 24 April 1952 in Arcueil, Val-de-Marne, France) is a French haute couture fashion designer. Gaultier was the creative director of Hermès from 2003 to 2010. In the past, he has hosted the television series Eurotrash.
Gaultier never received formal training as a designer. Instead, he started sending sketches to famous couture stylists at an early age. Pierre Cardin was impressed by his talent and hired him as an assistant in 1970. Afterwards he worked with Jacques Esterel in 1971 and Jean Patou later that year, then returning to manage the Pierre Cardin boutique in Manila for a year in 1974.
His first individual collection was released in 1976 and his characteristic irreverent style dates from 1981, and he has long been known as the enfant terrible of French fashion. Many of Gaultier's following collections have been based on street wear, focusing on popular culture, whereas others, particularly his Haute Couture collections, are very formal yet at the same time unusual and playful.
Jean Paul (21 March 1763 – 14 November 1825), born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.
Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtelgebirge mountains (Bavaria). His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof, and in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, Jean Paul went in 1781 to the University of Leipzig. His original intention was to enter his father's profession, but theology did not interest him, and he soon devoted himself wholly to the study of literature. Unable to maintain himself at Leipzig he returned in 1784 to Hof, where he lived with his mother. From 1787 to 1789 he served as a tutor at Töpen, a village near Hof; and from 1790 to 1794 he taught the children of several families in a school he had founded in nearby Schwarzenbach.
Jean Paul began his career as a man of letters with Grönländische Prozesse ("Greenland Lawsuits", published anonymously in Berlin) and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren ("Selections from the Devil's Papers", signed J. P. F. Hasus), the former of which was issued in 1783-84, the latter in 1789. These works were not received with much favour, and in later life Richter himself had little sympathy for their satirical tone. A spiritual crisis he suffered on 15 November 1790, in which he had a vision of his own death, altered his outlook profoundly. His next book, Die unsichtbare Loge ("The Invisible Lodge"), a romance published in 1793 under the pen-name Jean Paul (in honour of Jean Jacques Rousseau), had all the qualities that were soon to make him famous, and its power was immediately recognized by some of the best critics of the day.
Suzy Menkes, OBE (born 24 December 1943) has been head fashion reporter and Editor for the International Herald Tribune since 1988. In that time she has written over 1.7 million words in the paper.[citation needed]
Menkes was born in Britain. She was educated at Brighton and Hove High School. In the 1960s, she went as a teenager to Paris to study dressmaking. Viewing her first couture show at Nina Ricci sparked her interest in high fashion.
On her return from Paris, she read history and English literature at Cambridge University. After Cambridge, she worked for The Times reporting on fashion. In addition to her journalism, she has written several books, particularly on British Royal style.
Among Menkes's trademarks is her signature pompadour. She lives in Paris, is widowed and has three sons and three granddaughters. She holds the Legion d'Honneur in France and a British OBE.
In November 2009, she appeared as one of the judges on the finale of Lifetime TV series Project Runway. In 1996 she appeared in the second 'Last Shout' special in British comedy Absolutely Fabulous, playing herself.
Coco Rocha (born Mikhaila Rocha on September 10, 1988) is a Canadian fashion model.
Rocha was born in Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in Richmond, British Columbia where she attended McRoberts Secondary School. Her family is in the airline industry. Her mother, Juanita, is a flight attendant and her father, Trevor Haines, is a ticket manager. She has one step sister named Lynsey. She is of Irish, Russian, and Welsh descent.
Rocha is one of the few models who has spoken out against the prevalence of eating disorders in the modelling industry. In an open letter to the New York Times, Coco spoke out on her blog about the pressure the fashion industry puts on young models "How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion’s aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it." [1] In an email to the Associated Press, she gives an insight into the fashion world, saying: "I'll never forget the piece of advice I got from people in the industry when they saw my new body ... They said, 'You need to lose more weight. The look this year is anorexia. We don't want you to be anorexic but that's what we want you to look like.
Karlie Elizabeth Kloss (born August 3, 1992) is an American model and ballet dancer.
Kloss is ranked 3rd on the Top 50 Models Women List by models.com. Vogue Paris declared her one of the top 30 models of the 2000s.
Kloss was born in Chicago, Illinois, and her family moved to suburban St. Louis, Missouri in 1995. Kloss has called her classical ballet training "a beautiful thing" that taught her how to move in the modeling world and was a great training ground for her runway walk.
When Kloss was 13, she was discovered at a charity fashion show in St. Louis. She was encouraged and inspired to model by one of her teachers in Webster Groves High School. In 2007, she signed with Elite Model Management.
One of her first modelling stints was for Abercrombie when she posed for the brand's photography shot by Bruce Weber. In January 2008 she left Elite and signed with NEXT Model Management. She ended up walking 31 runways in New York Fashion Week notably, closing for Marc Jacobs, opening Carolina Herrera, and occupying both spots at Doo.Ri. After New York she went on to walk 20 shows in Milan, and 13 in Paris for the fall 2008 collections, with a total of 64 shows in a single season. Kloss found herself in the middle of a legal dispute when her former agency Elite was suing NEXT for allegedly stealing away its young star by offering her "improper compensation" to sign. Elite felt they were responsible for launching her career and booking much work for her. The case was eventually settled out of court.