Daily Variety (registration required) reports that a new reality show being produced in Italy offers fashion students a chance to win an internship with newlywed British designer Stella McCartney.
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The show, entitled Fashion House and sponsored by the Finnish cell phone maker Nokia, features five-person student designer teams from the U.K., Italy, Sweden and France. Beginning Sept. 28, the teams will live and work in Rome for seven weeks while producing fashions to be judged by viewers. Naturally, text messaging is the preferred phone of voting, but voting will also be permitted from fixed phone lines and interactive TV sets. However, the ultimate winner will be chosen by a fashion panel after a "catwalk"-style fashion show featuring each team's creations.
Currently, Fashion House will air in the U.K. and Sweden in addition to Italy. Fact Based Communications, the Italian producers, are working to sell it in France and other European markets as well. We presume that the teams will generally speak their native language, and so each national version will have to feature the "home-town" team --- which is why the pan-European viewing audience can't select the winner. Nevertheless, we admire the idea of the show, as well as the fact that Stella McCartney is involved with it.
Speaking of the McCartneys, we note that, while Stella concentrates on dressing, her father Paul seems to be more interested in undressing -- in particular, undressing some of his Beatles recordings from the "Wall of Sound." After years of pleading from fans around the world, the Fab Four will finally release a version of its next-to-last project, originally called Get Back but finally released after the band's breakup as Let It Be, stripped of the orchestral and vocal glitz that was added by producer Phil Spector (who has been making some unsavory headlines related to his shooting of an actress in LA). The album will be titled Let It Be ... Naked and will be close in sound and format to the "second Glyn Johns version" of Get Back, which is largely unknown outside of Beatles fanatics. We hope that the final version, using digital mastering, was able to strip out Yoko Ono's hideous background warbling on the original master of John Lennon's "Across the Universe," which Spector covered up with a massed choir.
And speaking of stripping and the Beatles, we note that Yoko, John's 70-year-old widow, is returning to her artistic roots by holding another "strip for peace" in Paris, in which her artistic statement is to let the audience cut apart her clothes. She first did this "performance art" 40 years ago. We wonder if it's just because she can't find clothes that suit her. Maybe Stella McCartney could have the students from Fashion House design some scissors-resistant fashions for Yoko?