"I am a target. I don’t know why I am, but I am, and I accept that."
Lindsay Lohan, budding fashion designer extraordinaire, is featured on the cover of the Style section of the UK newspaper The Sunday Times … in her coverstory interview, Lindsay opens up about the recent Ungaro fashion show that she “oversaw” and was described by pretty much all accounts as a disaster. Lindsay, aware of the way she seems to be targeted by critics, brushes off the negative reviews and seems happy with her place in the world of Fashion. Here is Lindsay’s Sunday Times: Style coverphoto and some excerpts from the coverstory interview/article:
You look like a good girl, but we all know you are bad,” goads the photographer Ellen von Unwerth, as she snaps Lindsay Lohan vamping it up on the floor of her room at Hôtel Plaza Athenée in Paris. Lohan revels in this reference to her notoriety, and pouts harder, throwing back her waist-length, newly blonde hair (the result, she reveals, of two 12-hour days in the salon). The room looks like the aftermath of one of those home-alone teen parties advertised on Facebook that then gets horribly out of hand. Chaos rules. Designer clothes are strewn everywhere; most of them from a sweep of the Emanuel Ungaro boutique that Lohan made upon her arrival in Paris, walking away with an estimated £90,000 worth of free clothes. Shoes, make-up, jewellery, even a stray lampshade obscure the hotel carpet. Her passport is in here somewhere. She’s been looking for it for days. Frankly, I’m surprised Lohan’s got the energy even to raise a smile. It’s been a trying week. She’s in town for her new gig as artistic advisor to the once-revered house of Emanuel Ungaro. How much work that actually involved was revealed when her catwalk show was roundly drubbed by the fashion community the following day; as her new fashion sugar daddy, the CEO of Emanuel Ungaro, Mounir Moufarrige, put it: “They knifed us.” With no formal design experience, it was hardly a surprise, but there is a logic behind fashion’s new Faustian pact. Lohan brings notoriety, press (good and bad) and a worldwide audience to a house that has been on the skids for years. If that can be translated into sales, the brand’s future could be secure. Moufarrige won’t reveal her pay package, saying only that it is “quite enough. It’s expensive”. Given her unpredictability, it is also a risk. Her fragility, says Moufarrige, “has been factored in”. It needs to be … The big question for anyone interviewing her is: will she actually turn up? Lohan had already cancelled several interviews during her stay in Paris. The day before our shoot, I’m told Lohan has been rushed to hospital with food poisoning. (The night before, she’d been to a Mario Testino party and was hanging out with Daphne Guinness.) Despite her fragile state, confirmation of our meet and shoot finally comes through just before midnight.
Around noon, Lohan makes it out of her room and into the hotel lobby; late, bizarrely, because she wanted to tidy up her suite before we arrived (yes, our pictures are the “after” shots). She’s obviously tired, and her wet hair suggests she’s just woken up, but she is here.
Wearing a ruched black Emanuel Ungaro minidress, thigh boots, a sequined black beret and a large Chanel scarf (she’d treated her 15-year-old sister, Ali, to a shopping spree there earlier in the week), the first thing you notice is how tiny she is, then what a large bosom she has. Her pale skin has been sprayed the colour of a ginger-snap biscuit and the lines etched into her freckled forehead make her look at least 10 years older than she is. She orders an iced water in a voice honed by too many cigarettes and a lifetime of late nights. When she sniffs, which is often, she refers to “my allergies”.
Despite all these signs of fatigue, she talks at breakneck speed, racing though sentences and peppering them with California-isms. “I’ve always been really interested in, you know, the fashion industry, and I really have a great appreciation for designers, and all the work that goes into one piece of clothing, and how expressive it can be,” she announces. Of her role at Emanuel Ungaro, she says: “This is more personal to me. It is more about who I am and what I want to say as a person through clothing.”
And what exactly does she want to say? Her efforts, pulled together in three short weeks with her design partner, Estrella Archs, resulted in a parade of teeny ruched party dresses, scattered with heart motifs and rhinestones (left). It was fun, young, but not ground-breaking. Lohan appeared dazed and emotional as she took her catwalk bow, her big, wide eyes filled with the kind of grateful tears that suggested Disney had made all her fashion dreams come true. “It was such a surreal experience and I think I was emotional probably for the entire week, but when we walked out, it was a good feeling,” she says.
In the scrum backstage (one journalist crawled on her belly, between the legs of the photographers, merely to get a quote from the starlet), she said that the whole experience had been “like a fairy tale”. Then after this soaring high came a crashing low. The reviews began to flood in and the dream became a nightmare — a familiar pattern for Lohan. The industry bible, WWD, called her efforts “an embarrassment”; others were not so kind.
After the jump, check out some a few photos from this Sunday Times article, find out how Lindsay dealt with the harsh reviews of her Ungaro fashion show and find out what she’s got planned for the future …
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