Not ones to pass up the opportunity to put a semi-naked teenager on their pages, today’s papers are full of stories about teenage supermodel sensation Lily Cole becoming the new face of Marks & Spencer.
Cole is currently the posh totty of broadsheet choice because, having had the benefit of an expensive private education, she currently has a deferred place to study politics at Kings College, Cambridge in 2008. Proving rather nicely that wealth and success in this country tends to provide er, more wealth and success!
Marks & Spencer, meanwhile, are in PR overdrive. Not only have they got a prime slice of bankable teenage flesh to sell their undies with but we learn that “[Lily’s] commitment to environmental issues makes for a great partnership with M&S”.
Indeed, this beauty with the brain, we’re breathlessly informed by gushing M&S PR cretins, has a “social conscience” and recently wrote the foreword for Tamsin Blanchard’s ethical fashion book – no doubt named by the razor sharp wits of Hodder & Stoughton’s marketing department – Green Is The New Black.
Pity then, that where Cole’s concerned, green is in fact the new load of old bollocks for marketing an image to a target demographic. Because the nineteen year old, signed to the Storm model agency, has already amassed a mere £11m fortune largely by flying from “catwalks and photoshoots in Paris to New York or Rome“.
It’s nice to see the young new members of the British establishment are every bit as hypocritical as the old ones isn’t it?
Is she not promoting consumption by her work? That’s not too green is it!