Lindsay Lohan wants you to know that she's all right. Reminiscing about the series of scandals that have sullied her name and nearly deep-sixed her career, she is all contrition. "When I look back on this last year, it's like what was I thinking?" she confided in this month's issue of Harper's Bazaar. "I've learned so much, though, like learning to live my life a different way."
No need to take her word for it. Images speak persuasively, and in the case of Lohan, who appears this month inside Bazaar and on its cover, they do what they can to counter the perception that she is a train wreck, yesterday's news.
The cover, shot by Peter Lindbergh soon after Lohan's third round in rehab for alcohol abuse, makes her look as if she had spent the last 12 months thriving on yoga and a diet of sprouts.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
It is the most sophisticated of a trifecta of magazine covers this month to feature the troubled star - including a near-nude shot by Bert Stern for New York magazine's spring fashion issue and a provocative pose for Paper, the alternative style monthly. Together the covers represent a full-court press by Lohan and her handlers to reposition her as fresh-faced and comeback-ready.
She is the latest Hollywood celebrity to seek to overcome scandal through the redemptive power of glossy fashion imagery. Last June, six months after her arrest for drunken driving, Nicole Richie modeled on the cover of Bazaar with Paris Hilton. In September, not long after Britney Spears' first go at rehab and her divorce from Kevin Federline, she vamped for Allure, the beauty magazine. Drew Barrymore, Vogue's current cover girl, first graced the magazine's front in 2005 when many readers still recalled her years of drug abuse.
"A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab," said Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. "Some people go to Utah," she said, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox program, where Lohan was treated. "Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot."
PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVIC
The audience for such makeovers is not just the ticket-buying public. The glamorous covers are also aimed at movie directors and executives - a very high-end head shot. "A person in a position to greenlight a movie project might say, 'Oh, I guess she's turning her life around,'" Rosenberg said.
That is Lohan's hope, her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, acknowledged last week. "Her appearance on Bazaar is part of a strategic repositioning," she said. It is an attempt to recast the actress as the pulled-together antithesis of the bad girl who was scolded in 2006 by a producer for failing to show up on the set of Georgia Rule.
"Right now I just want to find a great script, a great role," Lohan said in this month's issue of Paper. She is shooting Dare to Love Me, a movie about a tango star, but has not completed a movie since starring last summer in the horror film I Know Who Killed Me, which flopped.
"Fashion can put a calm, fresh and vital face on a recovering soul," said Sally Singer, the fashion features director for Vogue. "Some people can appear on a cover and suddenly seem relevant again."
Lohan, 21, looks mature and confident on the cover of Bazaar. Such a laboriously constructed image, thanks to makeup artists and digital retouchers, is meant to serve as a corrective to the awkward, sometimes ugly celebrity candids in tabloid weeklies. "As a publicist, I would be high-fiving myself for getting Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Harper's Bazaar," said Chris Miller, Barrymore's manager and publicist. "It tends to smooth out that edge and negate when she's on the cover of Life & Style."
He added that it can eventually translate not just to film roles but to advertising contracts. Barrymore, who wrote directly to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, to campaign for a cover in 2005, according to Miller, is the current face of Gucci fine jewelry and the latest face of CoverGirl cosmetics. "That first cover was a power tool in putting her out there," Miller said.
More than a talk show appearance or a stroll along the red carpet, a magazine photo shoot, with its army of enablers to select the right clothing and makeup, casts a performer in the best light. "It's a safe atmosphere where the star has some control of her image, her words and the fashion that she is putting out there," Sloane Zelnik said.
Winona Ryder must have thought so. Last August, five years after a humiliating trial and conviction for shoplifting, she was persuaded by Vogue's editors to pose for the cover. It was Singer's job to reassure her. "Before the shoot I told her, 'You can show your face to the world in the context of clothes in which you look beautiful,'" she recalled. If an actress is hoping to dust herself off after a fall, she added, "this is a good way to do it."
Of course it also pays returns for the magazines, as scandal-craving readers snap up the issues, which often promise a star's first on-the-record account of her troubles. And if the interview is anodyne - or even nonexistent - there are always the pictures. Lohan's Marilyn Monroe-inspired striptease for New York was the magazine's biggest selling issue of the past four years, a company spokeswoman said.
Nothing like the spectacular, dramatic unraveling of a political party in Taiwan has unfolded before as has hit the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) over recent weeks. The meltdown of the New Power Party (NPP) and the self-implosion of the New Party (NP) were nothing compared to the drama playing out now involving the TPP. This ongoing saga is so interesting, this is the fifth straight column on the subject. To catch up on this train wreck of a story up to Aug. 20, search for “Donovan’s Deep Dives Ko Wen-je” in a search engine. ANN KAO SENTENCED TO PRISON YET AGAIN,
Despite her well-paying tech job, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked for help running a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed up and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure. The 30-year-old woman from Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, hopes one day to start an online business importing furniture from her home country. “I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want independence.” Li is among a new wave of Chinese migrants who are leaving their country in search of opportunities, more freedom or better financial prospects at a
When the Dutch began interacting with the indigenous people of Taiwan, they found that their hunters classified deer hide quality for trade using the Portuguese terms for “head,” “belly,” and “foot.” The Portuguese must have stopped here more than once to trade, but those visits have all been lost to history. They already had a colony on Macao, and did not need Taiwan to gain access to southern China or to the trade corridor that connected Japan with Manila. They were, however, the last to look at Taiwan that way. The geostrategic relationship between Taiwan and the Philippines was established
Sept. 9 to Sept. 15 The upgrading of sugarcane processing equipment at Ciaozaitou Sugar Factory (橋仔頭) in 1904 had an unintended but long-lasting impact on Taiwan’s transportation and rural development. The newly imported press machine more than doubled production, leading to an expansion of the factory’s fields beyond what its original handcarts and oxcarts could handle. In 1905, factory manager Tejiro Yamamoto headed to Hawaii to observe how sugarcane transportation was handled there. They had trouble finding something suitable for Taiwan until they discovered a 762mm-gauge “miniature” railroad at a small refinery in the island of Maui. On
RSS