Teresa Lourenco has the choice of music. In the concrete wasteland of Studio 2 at NY's Pier 59, the CD player falls silent and the crew assembled for this shoot have been through vintage Madonna (Erotica), archival Grace Jones (The Island Sessions) and the inevitable electronic dance music excursion (Sascha: 003 San Francisco).

So what's it going to be? Air's Premier Symphonies? Blur's 13. Something so insider and ultra-hip, it'll put us all to shame? Because a gaggle of fashion people can be disgustingly competitive in the more-fabulous-than-thou stakes.

Teresa with her heavy credentials in the fabulousness stakes, whose annual income is so formidable, it does not make for polite conversation, chooses Bad Boy recording artists. 112 latest. "I think they're so cute", she gushes in that sweet fashion that you expect more of a typical teenaged fan rather than a baby superstar. An unaffected model is a wonderful thing.


The typical story of life for the new model is as follows: girl is discovered in say, a Wheaton, Ohio shopping mall. Girl is flown to a hip NY agency. The Director of New Faces sends her on a long round of go-sees to the cool photographers, the cool editors, and the cool stylists. If striking and memorable, the girl comes out of it with a cute "book" a portfolio of pictures that help to turn her from a pretty Mid-Western girl to the stark and chic creature called a model.
To aid in this process, this previously mentioned Director Of New Faces might cut the girl's hair, he might have it colored. He might coax her to lose weight, to dress better, to sit up straight. There are known cases where the girl has had her eyebrows shaved. And all this activity is in the process of "modelising" the girl.

Teresa Lourenco, the beauty glowering with such aloof magnificence on the cover never went through any of that. Yeah, maybe there were a few go-sees here and there. No doubt a trip or two to the hair salon helped her maintain that luscious mane of glistening chestnut hair. The point is this stunning eighteen-year-old, born in a little corner of the Caribbean called Trinidad and Tobago is that rare girl who stepped into the fashion world a fully formed star. She had a look and she was singular and stunning in this look and so there was never a struggle. The Industry, it basically threw the door upon for her.

 
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