May, 2007:

If you are a fashionista, then it’s certain that fashion magazines will never be absent in your baggage. Whether you are in Milan, Paris, London, New York, or Tokyo, a fashion mag gets you updated to the latest fashion trends around the world. It is the survival guide for fashion aficionados and gurus alike.

A fashion mag carries valuable pieces of fashion info–from the current couture, WHO’s IN in the designers’ department, what are the hottest brands in the market, and what’s the IN style for the season. But that’s not all. It includes tips and how to’s as well, in make-ups, get-ups and anything under the fashion sun. Most importantly, it contains fashion blunders, no-nos, and taboos every fashionista should know about.

Models get their exposure not just in the catwalks but in front covers of these glossy fashion magazines. They help make way for fashion stars such as Elle Macpherson, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Heidi Klum, Giselle Bundchen, and many others. Likewise, these magazines are podiums for many designers’ works, from the big names like Gucci and Prada, to Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, to independent and uprising fashion artists. They parade not just models and designers’ creations, but styles of famous celebrities and who dresses them. Celebrities’ outfits in normal daily bustles are included in scrutiny, and above all famous stars’ attires in huge movie and television awards become the limelight in fashion mags.

Fashion magazines also have their share in creating fashion icons out of recognized people, like Jackie Onassis Kennedy for instance. They have the eye for who can be considered an image of style, whether that person is in politics, sports or business. And rest assured that in every notable event all over the place, there would definitely be fashion photographers for these magazines in the front line.

Grabbing your favorite celebrity magazine, you see the cover photo of the most talked-about couple in Hollywood basking in a private island in their private vacation. Inside, you stare at your best-liked stars on the red carpet, striking their unrehearsed poses. Even more, you get to see their pictures without makeup or without fancy clothes gracing the next pages. And there’s a lot more.

The photos: courtesy of paparazzi.

Paparazzi is an Italian term for photographers who shoot candid pictures of celebrities, often by deliberately chasing them in their public and personal activities. Paparazzi can be both a friend and a foe to celebrities–friend by continually putting them in pages of glitzy show business magazines thus adding to their visibility, foe by incessantly haunting them to the point of losing their personal privacies. Oftentimes as well, paparazzi carry a negative connotation, especially to those celebrities that are constantly badgered by such photographers. One known incident about this paparazzi conduct was the death of Princess Diana in 1997 in a high-speed car accident in Paris, France.

I read in a trivia that paparazzi became popular from the movie ‘La Dolce Vita’ where a news photographer in the film was surnamed Paparazzo (singular for paparazzi). It also stated that paparazzo is actually an Italian dialect word for a certain noisy mosquito. Ah, so there’s the association.

How then does being paparazzi become a lucrative job? These photographers, the paparazzi, sell their photos to a lot of magazines and newspapers. These magazines and newspapers then publish such photographs, where we all know that the most in demand celebrities are the greatest buzz makers, and the publications that feature the most in demand celebrities would certainly sell like hot potatoes. There’s how the paparazzi earn their big money, from the precious photos they take. Take Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s Shiloh Nouviel for example, where magazines paid millions for a single picture of the most famous celebrity baby.

To simply put, stars aren’t alive without the paparazzi. Magazines wouldn’t sell without the paparazzi. Boon or bane, it’s part of celebrity business.