The triumph of curves

There's no ignoring it — women everywhere are finally saying goodbye to the skinny-thinny and celebrating the fuller figure

(AP Photo/Evan Agostini)

Shane Watson

It’s taken roughly 15 years, but at long last, after a couple of false alarms, we are officially over skinny. And here is how you can tell: women have started to envy other women, not for their jutting hip bones and the amount of daylight visible between their thighs, but for their soft and shapely bodies. We’re not talking about recognising that hips, thighs and breasts are a normal part of the female package. (We’ve always known that, and it hasn’t stopped us from wanting to look like malnourished girls.) We’re talking about, once again, finding the shapely form desirable. We look at pictures of Daisy Lowe in her leotard and opaque tights and think — yes, that’s what youth should look like: blooming and rounded and bee-stung. We look at Joan in Mad Men, in those curve-packing dresses, and feel the strange sensation that, for the first time in more than a decade, we are seeing the womanly form as God intended it. Up to this point, there have been odd breakthrough moments when we’ve been reminded of the power of shape (Scarlett Johansson’s arrival on the scene, for example), but the novelty always wore off pretty quickly when we were faced with the prospect of fitting into this season’s fashion. For as long as anyone can remember, thin has been the aspirational body type — the one that went hand in hand with success and glamour and money and, above all, looking good in clothes.
Women don’t necessarily want to look as thin as Agyness Deyn (no offence, Agyness), and the fashion industry is waking up to the idea of a proper womanly shape. Look at the fabulous curve-enhancing clothes of Roland Mouret: the global success of the ubiquitous Galaxy dress was partly down to its ability to flatter a fuller figure. Even Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and notorious scourge of fat, seems to be coming round to the idea of curves. Recently, she featured the shapely British singer Adele in the magazine. Okay, she was photographed lying down, but at least Wintour didn’t ask her to lose weight for the shoot, as she famously did with Oprah Winfrey. The emaciated look has simply run its course for a whole host of reasons, and now we are ready for something completely different.
In the first place, thin has got boring. Not just boring, but grindingly predictable. Along with long blonde hair, skinny-as- nothing has become the default position of anyone who wants to get noticed (or photographed), with the result that anyone good-looking who breaks the mould now appears twice as striking and original. Beth Ditto is naked on the cover of Love not because her size makes the image shockingly avant-garde (that was last year). She’s there because she represents the end of fashion’s blind allegiance to the Identikit clothes model, and the beginning of a new love affair with the parts that make women different from indie boys.
The timing of this shift towards a new aesthetic is no accident. Whippet-thin is the standard body type of the high-maintenance woman with a husband in corporate finance, and those sharp shoulders jutting through cashmere have started to look decidedly last year. A reality check is happening across the board (in fashion, Karl Lagerfeld has christened it “the new modesty”). Now a real figure looks a lot more appealing and sexier than a starved one in the same way that driving a Hummer seems hilariously out of touch with the mood of the times. In Hollywood, it’s already noticeable: the likes of Jennifer Aniston have got a bit more flesh on their bones, and the disciples of Rachel Zoe (the Zoebots) are no longer setting the agenda.

Related Links

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Still, it would be naive to pretend we can just erase all these years of brainwashing overnight. Shape is making a comeback, but our perspective has adjusted and now the curvier figure has to obey certain rules. You need a small waist and a flat stomach to contrast with those fuller hips. A pair of nice arms, good ankles and a well-defined clavicle make all the difference. Above all, shape has to be dressed right for it to work, and that means finding the fashions that need filling out: the silhouette-hugging dresses, not the billowing harem pants. Every time Christina Hendricks (Joan in Mad Men) is interviewed and photographed in contemporary clothes, you are reminded that casual, undone and edgy do no favours for the hourglass figure. In that early 1960s look, with asset-packing sheath and immaculate up-do, any woman would die to look like her. But in a thigh-skimming asymmetric number with a frill down the front or, God forbid, jeans and T-shirt, she looks like the big girl who doesn’t quite have what it takes.
In the end, shape has been out of favour for too long because so many of the clothes in the forefront of fashion simply don’t work for women with curves. Now change is coming.

Kurt Cobain remembered 15 years after death

Groups of funs sent flowers Wednesday to the park facing Lake Washington in memory of the U.S. Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain.

"I miss your beautiful face and voice," one dedication reads. "Thank you for inspiring me," says another.

Fifteen years ago, at a house adjacent to the park, Kurt Cobain's dead body was discovered by an electrician.

The Nirvana frontman, 27, had committed suicide, police later ruled, killing himself with a shotgun while high on heroin and pills.

Cobain's death ended a battle with hard drugs and added Cobain to a long list of legendary musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, whose careers were cut short by their addictions.

His ashes were reportedly scattered in a Washington state river and a New York Buddhist temple.

Nirvana band mates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl eventually formed other bands. Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, stayed in the limelight with an acting career and legal problems surrounding her own drug problems. Frances Bean, the couple's daughter, has largely lived outside the public eye.

"At point I thought, 15 years on, no one would really know who Kurt Cobain was outside of a group of diehard fans," said Jeff Burlingame, a Cobain biographer who grew up with the musician in Aberdeen, Washington, and knew him when he was a teenager who, without a place to sleep, crashed on mutual friends' couches.

But Nirvana's music endured, and Cobain even found fans in his hometown of Aberdeen, which he had derided as a small-minded town.

"The old-timers who were there when Kurt was around really took offense to some of the things he said about the area, so they had no real reason to honor him," said Burlingame, who co-founded the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee.

A famous son is a famous son, though. Now, visitors arriving in Aberdeen are greeted with a sign that reads "Come As You Are," after a famous Nirvana song.

A concert will be held Friday in Seattle to honor Cobain.

Daddy, buy me a laptop

The latest playground must-haves aren't skipping ropes and footballs – they're toy MP3 players and mobiles. Are we asking children to grow up too fast? By Paul McKenzie

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

David Sandison

Gadget girl: Esme McKenzie tries out the latest hi-tech toys

Life for my daughter Esme used to be simple. In between naps there were Dora the Explorer cartoons, Roald Dahl books and a smidgen of CBeebies, washed down with chocolate milk. Exercise consisted of walks in the local park and afternoon sessions at the playground. But that was when she was four. Now at the grand old age of six (she's seven soon, as she keeps reminding me) her world is a place filled with hi-tech toys that replicate real-life adult gadgets. These toys shrill, beep and even talk to her. Her world, in brand speak, is the "Youth Electronic Games" market.
It's a world that is bucking the global downturn. Sian Williams, the head buyer at the UK's leading children's retail store, the Early Learning Centre, says this market is now worth £90 million per year and has grown 10 per cent, year on year, over the last few years. It's a trend that she predicts will continue to grow because "children want to play with toys that emulate adult gadgets". Currently, one of the ELC's most popular item is its MP3 player.
The Youth Electronic Games (YEG) market is aimed at children aged ix to ten, and it is forcing traditional toymakers such as ELC to get with the technology age or be left behind. Although there is still a place for more traditional toys, Williams concedes that the ELC "would be mad not to sell gadgets like MP3s or Digi-Cams because the YEG is a healthy market".
Noting the upturn in the YEG market, major children's brands such as VTech and LeapFrog are now concentrating their efforts on coming up with the next hit, razzle-dazzle toy. But a word of warning, don't dare call it a "toy" within earshot of the manufacturers, who like to refer to their products as Electronic Learning Aids or – yet another acronym – ELA.
VTech's Kidizoom digital camera was the best-selling ELA in the run-up to Christmas 2008. Its head of marketing, Clive Richardson, is at pains to point out that this is more than just a toy version of a camera, offering "a balance between fun and learning". Learning through play is the mantra of all the main players in the YEG marketplace. David Lubliner at LeapFrog stresses that his company's products "teach phonics, encourage logical thinking and aid child development".
It was LeapFrog that introduced to the world the "Text & Learn BlackBerry", a product that came complete with a QWERTY keypad and a pretend web browser. "Society moves on," says David. "It's not the same as when we were young. Children are coming into contact with computers at an early age and they want to mimic their parents." And I suppose he's right. While I'm writing an email on the Apple iBook, Esme is on the VTech Knowledge Notebook (a dead ringer for a laptop), practising numbers in French. Technology-wise, Esme has a handle on most of the gadgets in our home. She is at one with the Sky+ remote, she knows how use an iPod, and she's been answering the phone for years. And she's not alone. In fact, being so tech-savvy doesn't mark her out from her friends – like them, she is a product of our times.
And the times keep moving. The next big gadget for the six-to-ten-year-old market is the mobile phone. Smelling new money, the major brands are making their move. Earlier this year Samsung released its Tobi handset, a phone that comes complete with a number of safety features, which is aimed at the pre-teen market. Mark Mitchinson, VP at Samsung Mobile, the driving force behind the handset, says the Tobi is not a cynical attempt to move in on the YEG market. He points out that 90 per cent of children now have mobile phones, mostly handed down to them by parents or siblings. "As more mobile phones fall into younger hands, mobile phone companies now need to produce responsible handsets with bespoke features," he argues.
The bespoke features include SOS presets and a block on unwanted text messages. It sounds just the ticket for responsible parents on the lookout for their child's first handset. But there's a nagging worry. I look at Esme switching between my iPhone and the Samsung Tobi with ease and I am troubled. Where is her childhood running to? I voice my anxieties to Nikki Kerr, a project manager at the children's charity, Kidscape, and she tells me about her two-year-old son who loves to play with the buttons of her mobile phone. "There is such a thing as too much technology too soon. Children are still growing emotionally at six and seven, they don't need the pressure at such a young age. If the parent wants to contact them when they are not with them, they should contact the adult who is looking after their child, not the child itself."
But not long into our conversation, she too gives way to these changing times. "Every household has a computer and teaching computer skills is on the national curriculum in primary schools – products will keep coming. And ultimately anything that is educational is a good thing." Nikki signs off by advising me that, "at the end of the day, it's down to the parents". And with that I press the off button on Esme's latest handset, grab our coats and take her to the park. The sun is shining and I want to hold her hand in the spring breeze. I want her to hold on to her childhood. Today, tomorrow's toys can wait.
Dinky devices: Put to the test
Samsung Tobi mobile phone: £69.99 on pre-pay and contract
Of all the gadgets that Esme tested, the Samsung Tobi was the one with the wow factor. "I want to take it to school to show my friends," she wails. An old hand on the home landline, she finds making a call on the Tobi child's play. She can't work out how to use the other features (this phone is aimed at 10-12 year olds), but she doesn't care, she just wants to phone her friends.www.samsungmobile.co.uk
VTech Knowledge notebook: £49.99
VTech toys rock. They push all of Esme's learning buttons and the Knowledge Notebook makes her feel like she has her very own computer. That said, she gets upset because she can't go online and play on the Cbeebies website like she would on my laptop. "It's not a real computer," I have to explain to her as the crocodile tears start to flow. www.vtechuk.com; 01235 546810
ELC MP3: £30
An easy-to-use gadget with all her favourite songs was always going to go down well in our musical household. We like the noise limiter switch, but we don't like the ear plug headphones (her ears are way too small for the large phones) and the fact that it's not Mac-compatible means hooking up songs in our household is always going to be a problem. www.elc.co.uk; 0871 231 3511
Leapster2: £49.99
Tapping into children's love of games consoles is key to the success of the Youth Electronic Games market. LeapFrog has designs on taking the Nintendo DS out of children's hands and replacing it with one of their own products. I like the fact that the games have a strong learning element and I have no problem with Esme playing with this toy – at the weekends only! www.leapfrog.co.uk

Big screen blasts from the past

The new 3D animation film Monsters vs Aliens takes its characters from Fifties sci-fi B-movies – and makes them cuddly. Expect more of these retro-cultural mash-ups in a cinema near you, says Kaleem Aftab

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Paramount Pictures

These monsters are cuddly and cute heroes rather than the terrors they were made out to be in the 1950s

At the heart of the new 3D animated film Monsters vs Aliens is the idea of taking creatures from various 1950 B-movies and pitting them against each other in a battle to save Earth from Armageddon.
The 1953 film The House of Wax was the first film to trial 3D (three-dimensional) effects as a way of prising spectators away from their TV sets by creating an image and experience they couldn't get at home. So it seems fitting that, at a time when box-office analysis is showing that 3D movies are 30 per cent more successful than their D counterparts, a 3D film should pay homage to the 1950s. However, it's not the 3D effects that make Monsters vs Aliens stand out (the film is also on release for conventional screens), it's the decision to reprise the most delectable characters from the iconic 1950s sci-fi B-movies.
The cartoon starts with a faraway planet exploding and a robot pod being sent to Earth. When it crashes in America – which, the film amusingly explains, is "the only place that UFOs ever seem to land" – the fallout from the explosive landing in California sees Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), the wife of a selfish TV weatherman, transformed into a giant woman known as Ginormica. Yep! This was the very same plot of 1958's Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
Captured by the US army, Ginormica is taken to a military compound where monsters are kept hidden away from humans. Residing in the facility is a brainless one-eyed blue creature called B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) based on the jelly-shaped creature in the 1958 Steve McQueen starrer The Blob. Also there is a mad scientist, Dr Cockroach, PhD (Hugh Laurie), who has managed to morph into a half-human, half-pest creature during a failed experiment straight out of The Fly (1958).
Now, here is the cartoon's modern twist – it transpires that these monsters are cuddly and cute heroes rather than the terrors they were made out to be in the 1950s. They are misunderstood former humans who are struggling to deal with the changes in their physical state caused by external transformative factors.
In contrast, an evil cone-headed creature called Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) is the leader of the aliens. While this creature looks like something out of 1957's Invasion of the Saucer Men, the storyline is lifted from the much-derided Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
What's clever about the premise of Monsters vs Aliens is that it's a pastiche of an increasingly prevalent phenomenon of movies being made using the simple concept of taking characters from various film franchises and putting them together. It's a calculated attempt to get audiences to part with their cash for franchises that have long since passed their sell-by date.
So, when the Friday the 13th series started to suffer from the law of diminishing returns after nine sequels, it was decided that, rather than put killer Jason Voorhees into a celluloid coffin, he should be reincarnated with another slasher villain, Freddy Krueger of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. The result was the smash hit Freddy vs Jason. It's a marketing concept straight out of the school playground. Remember those juvenile debates about who would win a fight between Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan? Well, now they're being realised on the big screen.
The box-office returns made a mockery of the poor reviews for Freddy vs Jason. Whereas Jason X (aka Friday the 13th Part 10) took a paltry $13m at the US box office and Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Nightmare on Elm Street 7) a slim $18m, Freddy vs Jason took a till-busting $83m – more than any of the movies in either franchise managed. Such was its success that both the Freddy and Jason franchises have recently been revived.
It was a similar story with AVP: Alien vs Predator. On paper, this seemed a rather unfair match-up. Predator was a low-grade franchise that originated as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987 and had only one sequel, which didn't even feature him. Alien was an A-list franchise starring Sigourney Weaver that had lost some of its lustre. Even without Weaver, AVP was a huge hit. It even spawned its own sequel, AVPR: Alien vs Predator Requiem. Sequels can do better than the originals, but not this time; AVPR suggested that this match-up was a one-shot deal.
The next step in this evolution saw the arrival of a new breed of comic-book movie in which every film turns out to be a rather imaginative trailer for a big-budget ensemble bonanza. Comics have often seen characters teaming up to battle some super-foe, and Marvel Comics have been the leaders in this field. So when Marvel recently decided to take a more active interest in how their characters were being translated to the big screen, they came up with the plan to promote a forthcoming ensemble bonanza entitled The Avengers at every opportunity.
At the end of the recent Iron Man movie, an hitherto unseen Nick Fury, played by Samuel L Jackson, popped up to ask Iron Man to join The Avengers – and Jackson is scheduled to repeat the trick during Kenneth Branagh's forthcoming Thor. The number of cameos planned for Jackson explains how the actor was recently able to sign a nine-picture deal with Marvel Entertainment. At the end of last year's Incredible Hulk, Iron Man was seen enlisting the Hulk for The Avengers, a film that is scheduled to hit our screens in 2012, at the earliest.
However, it remains a shame that studio executives remain so short-sighted that they currently plan only to make these team-up and "versus" movies with characters that have superhuman powers. There is a whole plethora of delights that they could be making instead. I would be first in line were there ever to be a movie featuring a dance-off between the lead characters from Saturday Night Fever (John Travolta in the original), Dirty Dancing (Patrick Swayze), Footloose (Kevin Bacon) and High School Musical (Zac Efron).
The box-office success of mix-up and match-up movies means that we're going to see many more of them at our cinemas in the future. This would be a far more enticing prospect if only a bit more imagination was being put into the characters we see being teamed up.

Sex advice website for primary kids angers parents Down Under

Melbourne, April 7 : Outraged parents are demanding withdrawal of a sex education website endorsing abortion and giving pre-teens information about sexual pleasure.
The controversial site, thehormonefactory.com, has been approved as a student resource for Queensland Year 7 classes.
Educators say that it is a valuable, fun tool that helps children entering their teens learn about their bodies, but parents are angry over the site’s description of abortion as ‘a relief’ and claims certain hormones make teens ‘feel sexy’.
The website, set up by La Trobe University, uses cartoons to tell 10 to 12-year-olds why certain hormones give them ‘sexy thoughts’ and start making them ‘interested in sex’. Students are also told that it can be a relief if a woman has a termination.
Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations president Margaret Black sought a meeting with Education Queensland’s head of curriculum.
‘We can understand that children will ask questions, however the answers on the website are far too detailed, not tasteful and are too advanced for primary students,’ the Courier Mail quoted Black, as saying.
Australian Family Association Queensland president Ken Francis warned that the website was potentially dangerous to the ‘physical and mental health of our children’ and was unsuitable for Year 7 students.
Cherish Life Queensland president Teresa Martin accused the site of not informing students properly about the psychological damage that abortions could cause, and said the topic should not be taught until at least Year 9.
However, Family Planning Queensland educational services director Cecelia Gore backed the website, insisting Year 7 was the ‘crucial time’ for sex education because research showed students dealt better with sexual encounters if they had been educated beforehand.
Website co-creator Associate Professor Anne Mitchell, of La Trobe University, said today’s kids were more sexualised by society and the site gave them straight facts.

Hugh Jackman jumped from cliffs to cool his temper!

Hugh Jackman had a unique way to curb his anger—cliff-jumping!
The ‘Australia’ star revealed that he found daredevil stunts as the only way to deal with his wild temper.
Jackman’s parents got separated when he was just eight years old, and the actor blames the subsequent divorce, his absent mother and the attention of schoolyard bullies for his violent rage.
And his uncontrollable anger had once left his brother in hospital after a chair attack.
‘I had some very dark periods as a child. I wanted Mum to come back. I desperately wanted to be normal. I got very mad and would take it out on the football field. High school was very tough - I was bullied and probably did some bullying myself,” Contactmusic quoted him as saying.
However, Jackman finally started using adrenaline-fuelled activities to cool down his temper.
He added: ‘I think there was a lot of pent-up anger and as a boy you have to let that out. I used to go to a place in Sydney and jump off an 80 foot cliff into the water.
“We’d also go roof-riding - a group of us would wind down the front windows, lie on top of the car and hold on. It was ridiculously dangerous, but I just thought it was normal fun.’

Leona Lewis’ ‘pony’ surprise birthday present!

Leona Lewis’ friends gave her a rather ‘galloping’ surprise present for her birthday— a sponsored horse.


The ‘Bleeding Love’ hit-maker’s parents, mates and boyfriend Lou Al-Chamaa travelled all the way to LA to give her a surprise on her big day.

They, then took the thrilled singer to a Thai restaurant, and gave her a sponsored horse as a gift.

‘Leona is besotted with horses. It’s a bit pricey to splash out one of her own so they did the next best thing and donated money to sponsor one for her in LA,” The Mirror quoted a pal as saying.

The friend added: “She was overwhelmed by everyone’s efforts.