Follow the Model: Miss J's Guide to Unleashing Presence, Poise, and Power - Rilegato

Alexander, J.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1439149909 ISBN 13: 9781439149904

Casa editrice: Gallery, 2009

Riassunto

How does a six-foot-four, Bronx-born black gay male become Queen of the Catwalk? In one word: attitude. Beloved by millions of fans for his outrageous wit, spot-on critiques, and irrepressible flair, J. Alexander, affectionately known as Miss J, has helped groom hundreds of wannabe models as a runway coach and judge on America's Next Top Model, as well as coaching such supermodels as Tyra Banks, Naomi Campbell, and Kimora Lee. But his empowering, no-nonsense advice applies far beyond the runway. And in this inspiring guide he shows women not just how to walk, but how to live the Miss J way -- fully and fabulously.

As witheringly funny in print as he is in person, Miss J recounts a remarkable life and career that began with creating couture knockoffs on his grandmother's sewing machine and took a brief detour while he considered becoming an accountant (yes, really). But it was a public casting call for a Jean Paul Gaultier runway show that led him to take his first impeccably clad step on the catwalk and confirmed his conviction that he belonged in the world of high fashion. In Follow the Model he reveals his secrets to succeeding at what you love most, shares life lessons and colorful (to say the least) anecdotes, provides a multitude of invaluable grooming and style tips, dishes on the celebrities he's worked with so intimately, and offers a glimpse into the world of ANTM.

Not everyone is born to be a supermodel, but every woman can acquire confidence, self-esteem, and the determination to realize her dreams. You've got to want it, work it, and walk it -- and Miss J is ready to show you how.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Born in the Bronx, J. Alexander (known also as Miss J) originally trained to become an accountant.  But a chance encounter at sixteen—while dressed in drag—with the impressed President of Elite Model Management got him signed to the agency and off to walk runway for designer Jean Paul Gaultier. There he met fresh model Tyra Banks and began to give her walking lessons. Banks coined his title Queen of the Catwalk. His accidental career as a backstage runway coach took off—coaching such future supermodels as Naomi Campbell and Kimora Lee (Simmons)—and led him around the world casting and coaching models for countless top-name designers. Now J. Alexander is a television personality, well known for his work as the runway coach and a judge on America’s Next Top Model. He currently lives in Paris.

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CHAPTER ONE

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

I was born April 12 at 10:10 am and I moved straight into our family home on Clinton Avenue in the Bronx. I was number seven of ten kids. In birth order there was: Barbara Ann, Ronald, Steven, Stanley, Beverly, Reginald, me, Phillip, Phyllis, and Valerie.

My family is one-eighth Jewish on my grandmother's side, so I won't blame something like Catholicism for my mother's house full of kids. I think it's more that my parents were deeply and madly in love with each other and liked to express that affection in, well, the most elemental way.

Sometimes, to my dismay, quite loudly.

Despite the amount of love in that house, from the beginning we were like the Kennedys of the South Bronx. There was always some sort of horrific tragedy besetting us. My mother, Mary Elizabeth Cohen Jenkins, buried six of her children before passing away herself. At age ten, Reginald fell and never recovered from a concussion. Barbara Ann died of breast cancer at age twentythree. Steven left us at age forty-four from an aneurysm. My baby sister Valerie died of AIDS at age twenty-nine. Stanley died of a heart attack at age forty-eight, and Ronald died too young, at age fifty-four, from throat cancer. Consider this my first bit of advice -- don't smoke.

My family is like some Greek tragedy come to life, with characters dying off left and right. I don't mean to sound callous or flip about it, but it's a fact of my life that I've experienced a lot of loss. I've had to learn to mourn and move on. I'm a firm believer that you must move on. I'll get more into this philosophical stuff later.

Growing up, my mother ruled our house like a five-foot-three-inch dictator. She could be very strict and, let's say, "physically communicative" if she felt she was being disrespected. But I don't mean that in a bad way. It never had to do with her being a mean or evil person. She was simply scared that if one of us kids disrespected her, then we would feel it would be okay to go out into the world and disrespect others. If you were breaking rules in the house, she was afraid it meant you would break laws out in the real world and end up in jail. She wanted to raise us better than that. If it took an occasional wallop upside the head to get that lesson through, well, that was just her way. And to be perfectly honest, it worked. Not that I'm advocating anything.

Dinner was at seven o'clock every night, no matter what. There were too many mouths to feed, so there had to be some order to the chaos. She would always set a place for every single child in the house. If you missed the seven o'clock sit-down, you missed dinner completely. The first chance was your only chance. If any of us missed more than one meal, we'd sneak into the kitchen for a bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Froot Loops after everyone had gone to bed.

Raising children can be like raising dogs. You have to lift up your voice to let them know who's in charge. When a dog is fighting in the street, it's fighting for power and control. It's the same thing when a child throws a tantrum. Kids will test the boundaries constantly. And my mother made sure we failed that test every single time, at least until we were old enough to make our own decisions and choices.

My father kept out of all of this though. Julius Montrolius Jenkins was a quiet man and mostly stayed to himself. He worked at the Humboldt Dye Works and would get up every day, Monday through Friday, at four thirty am to head out of the Bronx and into Brooklyn, in rain, sleet, sunshine, heat wave, or snowstorm. He'd bring his hard-earned paycheck back home to Mother, keeping just a little bit in his own pocket for hanging out with his best friend, Mr. Sol, who owned an auto repair shop in Hunts Point. On weekends, my father would help Mr. Sol fix cars and drink cocktails, and every Sunday, he would sleep in and watch sports all day.

My father was the goto man in our neighborhood whenever tax time came around. He did everyone's returns for them and got paid either a bottle of scotch, a very small amount of cash, or nothing at all. Despite his selflessness, for some reason he wasn't a physical man that any of us hugged. Yet he was a verbal man, and when he spoke, we listened. But our mother ran our lives. That's not to say that I didn't love him. I did, very much. But for the most part he left the parenting to my mother. He always deferred to her when it came to house rules or handling us when we broke the rules, of which she had many.

A good example is her feelings about house parties. We children were never allowed to go to a house party under any condition. I suppose because inside a house there are closets that you can disappear into for Seven Minutes of Heaven and empty bottles everywhere, just waiting to be spun. One night, when I was in the sixth grade, my parents went out with some friends, and I snuck out of the house. A girl down the street was having what we called a "pay party." In order to get inside, girls had to pay thirty-five cents, boys had to pay fifty cents, and couples had to pay seventy-five cents. I was positive that I would make it back home before my parents.

The party was everything you want a party to be at that age. It was packed with kids from my school, the music was fantastic, and all night long I was lost in the embrace of a slow dance with a beautiful girl. I don't remember her name but I remember the band that was playing was called Black Ivory. When what was about to happen happened, I was, shall we say, aroused. (Yes, I was attracted to a girl. It's actually perfectly normal. Don't judge me.)

I was young, I was happy, and I was in a state of sexual bliss when suddenly the needle on the record screeeetched across its surface and the room fell silent. Like a scene out of a bad teenage comedy, the room suddenly filled with harsh light from above and I froze like a cockroach revealed on a kitchen counter. All I heard was a little girl's frightened, trembling voice whisper, "H-hello, Miss Mary."

My mother stormed into the crowd of kids, grabbed my arm, literally gave me a kick on the butt and a smack on the head, and told me to "bring my black ass" out of there. She dragged me across the room and headed to the door, and as we passed the little girl whose house it was, she looked at her, nodded curtly, and said, "Say hello to your momma for me," and flicked the light switch back off for the rest of the partygoers.

I guess that's why they call it "tough love." She was tougher than the hide of an Hermès Birkin bag. It didn't matter if you were her son or her daughter; she treated all of us the same and didn't play favorites.

Many people I know in the fashion community have strong mothers, too, and in a way, I think many people who dress in drag are trying to emulate or honor that early defining presence they knew. Whether the relationship is good or bad, strong women tend to leave an undeniable impression on their children, one that shapes their attitude or dress. Or in my case, both. My mother was a major fashion inspiration. Though she often wore simple housecoats with penny loafers -- and usually had a Pall Mall Gold in one hand and a small glass of scotch in the other, with an empty Hellmann's mayonnaise jar full of ice water nearby to use as a chaser -- she could dress up fabulous when she wanted to. I remember looking at chic pictures of her from the fifties and sixties. In her wedding photographs she wore a perfectly tailored navy blue coat with an off-white lining that had big hand-painted navy blue flowers. One day I found her wedding dress in her closet, and when I pulled it out I discovered that the print was repeated on the dress itself. She had paired it all with navy pumps and a pillbox hat with an ivory veil. It was a classic look, yet still a bit daring since it wasn't a traditional wedding dress. My mother certainly knew how to make an impression when she wanted to, both in the way she dressed and the way she acted. I definitely inherited those strengths from her.

The first time she discovered me in her closet, rifling through her Sunday best (or as she called them, "my going-out clothes"), she had a fit and started screaming, "Stay out of my goddamn closet! Playing in my good clothes -- what, you want to be a girl?" I remember thinking, Hell no, I just want to wear nice, pretty things. She was the one who told me that pink was for girls and blue was for boys. I wanted to know which jerk made up that stupid rule. But for years when I was young I separated the two colors in my mind. In fact, when I first started playing dress-up with my sister Barbara's clothes, I was drawn to yellow, because I thought it was a color with no gender. I'd wear one of Barbara's old Easter dresses with a crown made of paper and make-believe that I was a fairy princess. I felt beautiful but my brothers would tease me mercilessly. It seemed so unfair. More than anything I wanted to be beautiful. It wasn't about being a woman; I just wanted to live inside the fantasy that women's clothes afforded. I still don't have any desire to be a woman. (But I suppose if I had to be one, I'd like to be a woman of the 1950s with a tight waist, large bosom, and a big skirt. Or maybe a 1920s flapper.)

Halloween became an incredibly important holiday for me as a kid, because it was the one time where I could wear a dress and not get teased. The first year I discovered this, I dressed up in Barbara's beautiful graduation dress. It was white lace, with a full skirt below the knee, long sleeves, and a jeweled neckline. I slipped on a pair of white wingtip Mary Janes with two-and-a-halfinch heels, filled up an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red with iced tea, and went trick-or-treating as a drunk bride.

I think back on my childhood as a generally happy time except for one thing -- we couldn't afford the things I really wanted. At the beginning of each school term my mother would sit back in her armchair, light up a cigarette, a...

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Gallery
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1439149909
• ISBN 13: 9781439149904
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 231
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile