Fashion Week Skin Prep: 
Detox Facials with Kate Walsh at Tribeca's Shibui Spa

With her waist-length dark hair, signature crimson red lips, and supernaturally fresh skin, downtown facialist Kate Walsh is the kind of girl who inspires the “I’ll-have-what-she’s-having” reaction.
    
This is a good thing—if what you are after is a similarly radiant, porcelain-fine complexion just in time for Fashion Week. Since arriving at Tribeca’s Shibui Spa just over a year ago, Walsh has quietly developed a steady following for her deeply soothing detox facials, which smooth pores—and eradicate stress—in a single shot.   
 
“I think sometimes the best thing you can do for your skin in this city is just to relax,” she says firmly. This is why, instead of reaching for whirring diamond-tip microdermabrasion devices and flashing laser lights, Walsh relies on the transformative power of touch—a skin-care concept that seems positively radical in contrast to the current more-is-more approach: “I try to talk people out of extractions. I never steam. It dries out the skin and it’s bad for rosacea. And a good massage isn’t fluff. It boosts circulation and brings oxygen to the skin. Not to mention that lymphatic  drainage can make you look ten years younger before you leave the room.”
 
Walsh, who tailors each of the property’s 60- or 90-minute facials to each client’s skin type, also relies heavily on an arsenal of skin plumping, super-hydrating oils by the British import Elemental Herbology and gentle peels from Natura Bissé. (“It’s important to keep the skin supple,” she says. “You can do more harm than good by overstripping.”)
  
Her real secret weapon, however, is the carbonated crystal detox mask (used to particularly spectacular effect in the spa’s purifying oxygen facial) that she smoothes over the face and neck. 
   
“Once you activate it, it brings a huge rush of blood to the surface of the skin, which pushes the dirt and toxins out. It’s basically like running a 5K in two seconds,” says Walsh. “Great before a big event.” Or, in the case of Fashion Week, 40 of them and counting.

Absolute Powers: Side Effects from Start to Finish

When asked if a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, director Jean-Luc Godard famously replied, “Yes, but not necessarily in that order.”

This line came to mind as I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects, an enjoyably slippery film that keeps morphing before your eyes. Rooney Mara plays Emily Taylor, whose husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), is just getting out of prison after being convicted for insider trading. Although Emily should be happy, she sinks into a deep funk. After deliberately driving into a concrete wall, she comes under the care of Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a successful psychiatrist who takes her into therapy and puts her on antidepressants. When the first medication produces nasty side effects, he puts her on a pill recommended by her previous shrink, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Yet far from getting better, Emily starts spinning out of control.

Because it relies on surprises, it’s hard to say much about Side Effects without wrecking it. It starts out looking like conventional drama about the risks of mood-altering drugs. Then, it suddenly becomes something deeper in the Zodiac vein, a look at guilt, responsibility, and the desire for certainty in the face of life’s baffling fluidity. And then, just when you think you’re on to something really good, it turns into a routine thriller whose twistiness can’t quite disguise the fact that the movie’s gone from being about something fascinating to being about very little beyond too-clever plotting. I kept wishing the movie’s ending had proved as resonant as its middle.

As it happens, much of what Side Effects has to say about beginnings, middles, and endings takes place off-screen. You see, each of its three key figures—Mara, Law, and Soderbergh—is at a different, and defining, stage of his or her career.

Although she’s been working since 2005, the 28-year-old Mara is clearly at the start of her career as a Hollywood leading woman. Where peers like Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence exude all-American likability—they are warm both on-screen and in person—she’s carving out a niche that feels more, well, Australian. I mean this as high praise: Judy Davis, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, and Toni Collette are today’s gold standard when it comes to playing smart, spiky, difficult, and sometimes even dangerous women.

Mara is clearly in their company. Possessed of an angular beauty that’s hard to read and a manner that’s at once chilly and hot, she’s ideal for a day when, after a long hiatus, Hollywood no longer insists that every single heroine be “likable.” (Even as the appealing Erica Albright inThe Social Network, she was best known for calling Mark Zuckerberg “an asshole.”) She makes an excellent Girl with a Dragon Tattoo—seldom has Asperger’s seemed so efficient or sexy—and, though Side Effects lacks the same mythic wallop, she’s even better as Emily Taylor, a walking hall of mirrors who could be anything from an innocent victim to a sociopath. Only two starring roles into her career, Mara flaunts an edge that I hope the industry won’t try to dull.

Of course, it often takes a while to find your proper spot in the movie business. I had Law pegged for big things from the moment I saw him in Gattaca, where he stole the movie from its official star, Ethan Hawke. Hollywood obviously saw the same thing, a young man who wasn’t simply a good actor but almost ridiculously handsome. If you’d put the young Law and the young Brad Pitt side by side in a beauty contest, the judges’ heads would’ve popped like flashbulbs.

If the attempt to make Law a superstar felt short (aside from the seemingly de rigueur scandals in his personal life), he could be, when properly cast, the jolt of energy that brought a movie to life—the enviably murderable Dickie in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the robot gigolo inA.I. Artifical Intelligence, the creepy photographer/assassin in Road to Perdition. In fact, rather like Pitt, he has always seemed most comfortable in character roles, especially scruffy ones. Now, in the middle of his career, that’s what he’s doing and he’s become one of the movies most reliably entertaining actors. He’s fun as Dr. Watson to Robert Downey’s Holmes, disconcerting as the shifty blogger in Contagion, and so touching as the straight-arrow husband in Anna Karenina that we care more about him than her. You won’t be surprised to hear that he’s first-rate in Side Effects, too, where, like Mara, he uses his ambiguous features to keep us guessing. Is Banks a serious medical man or just another hustling shrink? 

Such ambiguity is mother’s milk for Soderbergh, a cussed fellow who, having just hit his fiftieth birthday a few weeks ago, has announced that Side Effects is his final feature film, 24 years after his debut, sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. If it’s true that this film is his last—and I wouldn’t trust everything he’s been saying in interviews—it marks the end of perhaps the most fascinating directorial career of the last quarter century.

If you look back over Soderbergh’s filmography, it’s hard not to be impressed by the talent and range revealed in his best work. In addition to launching the indie-film boom with sex, lies, and videotape, he made the great populist crowd-pleaser Erin Brockovich (and won Julia Roberts her Oscar), the perfect crime picture Out of Sight, the color-coded drug film Traffic,the amusingly plush star vehicle Oceans Eleven (although Twelve was pretty darn bad), the sly comedy about capitalist schizophrenia The Informant!, and Contagion, a movie about an epidemic, that was actually a defense of rationality and science. Could anyone else in Hollywood have done that? 

Now, along the way, he made several films I respected more than enjoyed—for instance, his four-hour, two-part Che—and a few I liked far less than that. He could be a cold fish. That said, it was the great contradiction of Soderbergh’s career that he was nearly always most artful in impersonal projects like Out of Sight, surely his best film, while his greatest failures (The Good German, yikes!) came when, aspiring to work that was somehow more serious or personal, he experimented with form and technique.

Although I would’ve liked him to go out with something better than Side Effects, it’s fitting that Soderbergh would end with a film that’s superbly shot, directed, and acted, and yet, at some fundamental level, profoundly half-hearted. I can think of no other filmmaker so gifted at turning out Hollywood movies who wound up being so bored by, even contemptuous of making them. Which may say as much about today’s film industry as it does about the man himself.

RNA Inc. THE ALTERNATIVE SYNDROME

Vogue Stories

Vogue Stories: Sarah Jessica Parker, Isabella Rossellini, and Others Recall Their Big 

Breaks in the Magazine

For Sarah Jessica Parker, saying “yes” to wearing a string bikini may have played a part in her six appearances on the cover of Vogue. For Joseph Altuzarra, it all hinged on an e-mail sent late at night. For Garren, it was daring to suggest to the owner of the most stylish hair in the world that it might be time to change her look. For Isabella Rossellini, agreeing to do a favor for a friend launched a 20-year career. And for Vera Wang, it meant following up on a chance meeting at Yves Saint Laurent. But when they made it in Vogue, they knew they’d really made it. In honor of the magazine’s 120th anniversary (1892–2012), we asked some of our favorite designers, subjects, and contributors to share their stories.

Click through the pages below to read their Vogue stories.

Landmark Decision

Landmark Decision: Natalie Massenet Named First Female Chair of the British Fashion Council

by Sarah Mower

At the headquarters of Net-a-Porter in West London.
Photographed by Jonathan Becker, Vogue, June 2010

London Fashion Week is about to have the equivalent of what Diane von Furstenberg is to New York: a glamorous, successful, internationally respected businesswoman to helm the future of its designer industry. This afternoon, Natalie Massenet, M.B.E., founder and executive chairwoman of Net-a-Porter, was ratified by the executive board of the British Fashion Council as the incoming chair, to the widespread surprise and delight of London’s designer community. “I have always been passionate about the British fashion industry and to be taking on this role is a great honor and responsibility,” said Massenet upon news of her appointment. “We have the best young talent here as well as some incredible global brands, and I am thrilled to be joining the BFC at this exciting time to help showcase the industry globally—in person and, of course, online.” She will be stepping into the role in January 2013, taking over from Harold Tillman, C.B.E., who has been chairman since 2008. 

The reaction amongst London’s designers—many of whom were given their first international sales boost by Net-a-Porter, was uneqivocal. “It will be great to have someone who is such a visionary working on behalf of British fashion,” said Erdem Moralioglu on hearing the news. Jonathan Saunders pointed out that Massenet’s clout on the world stage has never caused her to be a remote boardroom figure. “What’s so encouraging is that we’ll have someone who will be of such practical use to individuals—she’s always been interesting to talk to, always looking for new approaches, never afraid to take risks, and in the forefront of innovation.” Christopher Kane echoed Saunders’s sentiments: “Natalie has been such a huge support over the years. She’s a warm and generous person with so much business experience, not just in the U.K., but the world.”              

On the eve of London Fashion Week, which starts on September 14, Massenet’s appointment tops off a good-news year for Britain’s creative use of its resources and dynamic talent. Coming on the heels of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the success of the Olympics and Paralympics, there could hardly be a better morale booster for the country, which only ten years ago was the fashion underdog of Europe. Massenet will continue with her day job at Net-a-Porter’s twenty-first-century headquarters above the Westfield shopping center in Shepherd’s Bush, West London. The BFC chairmanship is an unpaid post.

Landmark Decision: Natalie Massenet Named…

FNO Highlight of the Day: Show Your Support for Runway to Win at DVF in SoHo

Photo: Courtesy of Runway to Win

If you want to pull double duty on Fashion’s Night Out, you can not only shop for something good, but also show your support for President Barack Obama by hitting Diane von Furstenberg in Soho, which will be debuting the third iteration of the Runway To Win Pop-up Shop. The highly successful collection—which was first unveiled by Scarlett Johansson last fall at Theory and then, more recently, Chanel Iman in Chicago—boasts politically minded pieces (think tees, buttons, and totes) from designers like Eddie Borgo, Tory Burch, andDiane Von Furstenberg herself, the proceeds of which go directly to the Obama Victory Fund. Everyone from Victor Cruz to Anna Wintour is expected to make an appearance, and if you can’t attend on the big night, don’t fret. The collection will be on sale at the DVF store until the end of New York Fashion Week. 

Diane von Furstenberg, 135 Wooster Street, NYC, 212.542.5754 

For more information, visit fashionsnightout.com

FNO Highlight a Day: Opening Ceremony

The Fashion Week A–Z: 
26 Things We Are Looking Forward To, From New York to Paris

As we brace ourselves for a month of back-to-back fashion shows and get ready to embark on a schedule that involves traversing the globe, it’s clear we’ve got a whole lot in our calendars (and on our minds) besides just taking in the best looks and squeezing in a few after-parties. In anticipation, we’ve distilled and organized it all alphabetically in a guide that, both on and off the runway, delivers equal parts survival tips and seasonal inspiration.