Where Ralph Buys Blouses

By CATHY HORYN
Published: May 22, 2008

AT 7 most mornings, including a lot of Saturdays and Sundays, Pat Capolupo is in his garment factory, Pat & Rose Dresses, on West 37th Street. Rose is Rose Panebianco, his sister, and for the last 40 years they have made the drive together from Cliffside Park, N.J., where they live two blocks apart.

Randy Brooke/Wireimage, left; and Biasion Studio/Wireimage, right
SHOP TO RUNWAY Outfits by Marc Jacobs, left, and Ralph Lauren, right.
She usually prepares a lunch for them — the other day it was baked zucchini — and the only other comfort of note in his drab office is a Lavazza espresso machine. Maybe because is it the only bright object in the place, it says “I’m Italian”— more than the Italian soccer poster taped to the wall, more than the postcard-size picture of the village in Calabria where Mr. Capolupo was born in 1937.

Last Thursday, Mr. Capolupo was finishing a cup of a coffee as I stepped into his office. The bell signaling the end of the lunch hour had not yet rang, and his 45 employees — seamstresses, button-machine operators, pressers — were relaxing at their work tables. Some read foreign-language newspapers. Geovanny Carreno, a presser from Ecuador, had the Mets game on his headphones and continued to listen as he delicately applied short bursts of steam to a purple satin Ralph Lauren ball gown. If you buy beautiful American clothes, there is a good chance that some of them were made at Pat & Rose.

Despite the steady and dramatic decline of garment worker jobs in New York — from 335,000 in the 1950s to 25,000 today — and the impression that one factory is as good, or bad, as another, some of the best designers depend on Mr. Capolupo. He makes clothes for Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and Sophie Théallet, and in the past, Calvin Klein, David Cameron and Isaac Mizrahi. Mr. Capolupo is sort of the backbone of what remains of the Italian clothing makers who once dominated the Midtown garment district.

“Pat & Rose are really the only game in town that’s left,” said Buffy Birrittella, the executive vice president for women’s fashion and advertising at Ralph Lauren, which has made clothes with the factory since the mid-70s. There are other high-quality manufacturers in New York, like Ferrara, a suit maker, and Rocco Ciccarelli, a tailor, who is in Long Island City, but Mr. Capolupo’s specialty is blouses, shirts and trousers.

“Nobody can make a shirt like Pat’s — the way he sets the collar,” said Danuta Denuree, the production director at Marc Jacobs, which has relied on Pat & Rose since the designer’s Perry Ellis days. It is one of 10 factories in New York that produce his women’s collection line.

One advantage of having a factory close by is that a design house can see a sample from Mr. Capolupo the next day and make changes. But it also means that Mr. Capolupo is more connected to the design process than, say, an agent in Hong Kong. A factory like Pat & Rose may not look like much, with the old Singer machines and the blazing yellow lights, but it is pleasant to think that, in at least this one respect, there is no hocus-pocus about fashion.

“People talk, they make nice talk,” Mr. Capolupo said. “But in the end, in this business, you either know what you know or you don’t.”

He finished his coffee and went out on the factory floor. He is trim and stands quite erect, as if from long habit of measuring people in the reflection of mirrors. He has wispy hair and a liver-spotted complexion. Even though he has lived in this country for 45 years, he speaks in broken English. He said that when he opened his first factory, on Eighth Avenue, all of his workers were Italian. On weekends, he played cards with Italian friends, and at first he lived with his sister and her husband, speaking a Calabrese dialect.

Any time he went to see a pattern maker at Ralph Lauren, he spoke Italian. Mr. Lauren, who began in men’s wear, hired Italian tailors, like Elio Sicilia, who was called Pop, and his son Giovanni, who is in his 80s and still goes to work.

Like them, Mr. Capolupo has tailoring in his blood. He was 11 when his father, who grew grapes and chestnuts, apprenticed him to a local tailor. After that, he went to Florence. He never married.

“I always thought about it,” he said as he stood next to a cutting table. “But then the years go by and you start to really work. I’m married to Pat and Rose the factory.”

Mr. Capolupo said he will make about 2,000 fall garments for Marc Jacobs, and perhaps twice that number for Ralph Lauren. The orders, known as tickets, are still coming in. Last Friday, Mr. Capolupo received an order from Ralph Lauren for 57 blouses — a glamorous long-sleeved style to be cut in pale silk and delivered at the end of June.

On the cutting table were tissue-thin stacks of silk pieces; these will be made into Marc Jacobs blouses with a soft tie. There were also oblong stacks of black velvet and gray flannel, for trousers by Mr. Jacobs. Although a ticket might call for 400 garments, some are for much smaller amounts. Mr. Capolupo flipped through a ticket for just five dresses, each in a different size. That means each dress must be cut separately.

“Does that matter to you?” I asked.

“It matters,” said Mr. Capolupo, pushing the ticket across the table. “But what are you going to do? What they give you, you make. You charge them a bit more.”
DEPENDING on the complexity of a style (last year Mr. Jacobs had a pants style with 15 zippers), Mr. Capolupo may charge around $50 for a pair of trousers that could sell at retail for $800. It will be much more for a sample or a small quantity.

HIGH-END EFFORTS At Pat & Rose Dresses, a seamstress at work near a row of Ralph Lauren blouses.

A Marc Jacobs tag is stitched inside a pair of pants at the factory.
He stopped at a table where six middle-aged women were stitching hems by hand. The women, whose backgrounds are a mix of Greek, Italian and Chinese, looked up at me with expressions of curiosity and annoyance. Mr. Capolupo said the average hourly wage in his factory, which is a union shop, is $15, although experienced workers who are fast can make more than $20 an hour.

Thirty years ago he paid $350 a month to rent a factory loft. Today, for somewhat more space, he pays $11,000. “For $11,000 a month, you have to ship a lot of pants,” he said.

The next time I went to see Mr. Capolupo, he introduced me to Gordon Hefner. “I moved to New York 10 years ago from Norfolk,” said Mr. Hefner, who is around 30. “I needed a job.” Now, in addition to running his own boutique downtown, he helps Mr. Capolupo manage the work.

“Everybody might make the same shirt but we might do the collar differently or our sewing is different,” Mr. Hefner. “I do know that compared to some factories we are a bit more time consuming. We do things the slow way. Sometimes the companies complain about that. They don’t want warehouses full of late beautiful clothes. So you have to work at a pace to keep the work in the factory.”

I wondered about the difference between the money Mr. Capolupo gets for a pair of pants and the price the stores charge.

“Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren do pay a lot to produce their garments,” Mr. Hefner said. “They use high-quality fabrics.”

He touched a pair of navy pants on his table, by Mr. Lauren. “This is cotton from Japan,” he said. “This part is silk. The thread is German. It’s expensive. If it costs a designer $75 in total to make a garment, they charge the stores $150. The stores sell it for $300.”

“But a pair of designer pants costs twice that,” I said.

“A lot of it is branding,” Mr. Hefner said. “Some customers want to buy expensive stuff. Also, it cost a lot to run a fashion company. The staff, the rents, the shows. Every time you open a magazine, you see a Ralph Lauren ad. That costs money. People pay for the marketing when they buy the magazine, plus when they buy the garment. But they live the life of wearing those clothes. It’s worth it to them.”

I asked Mr. Hefner if it made him cynical.

“No,” he said. “Fashion is fashion. You can either buy a $50 pair of pants or a $500 pair. They’d probably both be just as durable but there wouldn’t be fashion. There’d just be stuff.”

Ms. Denuree of Marc Jacobs said that while costs of living make it challenging to produce clothes in New York, “experience like Pat’s can’t be taught overnight.”

Talking one afternoon with Dario Colonna, a friend from Ralph Lauren, who dropped by with a sample, Mr. Capolupo said he doubted that the old ways would continue much longer.

Mr. Colonna suggested that manufacturing in Europe may hold less allure for Americans with the dollar so low against the euro. “They’re going to be coming back here to make clothes,” he said.

Mr. Capolupo frowned. “Yeah, but there will be no more Pat & Rose,” he said.

He could sell before that happened.

“But who would buy?” he said.

Mr. Capolupo shook his head and continued: “It’s my business. I built it in my way, from what I know. Really, there’s nothing to buy.”

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A Tiny Masterpiece, Unloved, Faces Threat

By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: May 25, 2008

NEW CANAAN, Conn.

Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Cristina Ross owns a Philip Johnson house in New Canaan, Conn., that she is thinking of demolishing.
FOR $3.1 million in New Canaan, you can get a middling, multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction but sufficient grandeur to assuage your distress at not living quite as well as your hedge-fund-managing neighbors who paid twice as much.

Or you could get a house by Philip Johnson, the most celebrated American architect of the last half-century. It’s not just any Philip Johnson house, either: it’s one that a preservationist called “a livable version of the Glass House,” Johnson’s New Canaan home, a temple of transparency that opened to the public last year and now draws worshipful hordes daily to bask within the glory of high modernism.

But who actually wants to buy, let alone live in, a Philip Johnson house, particularly one that, at 1,773 square feet, might make a nice walk-in closet for the chateau down the lane?

Nobody in New Canaan, so far, at least not at that price.

And so not three miles from the Glass House, on one of New Canaan’s most estate-studded thoroughfares, the austere glass-and-concrete confection that Johnson called his “little jewel box,” built in 1953 for Alice Ball, a single woman with apparent passions for pink stucco and ruthless spatial efficiency, faces the prospect of demolition.

The Alice Ball House’s owner, an architect and developer, Cristina Ross, decided a few years ago that the building would make a worthy pool house for a much more au courant dwelling to be built at the back of the property. But that move was blocked, first by the town, which has since been mollified, and now by the neighbors to the rear, who have not.

Ms. Ross says that if she is unable to add her vision (“an English country house in the style of Lutyens”) to Johnson’s, or if she cannot find a buyer for the existing structure, she might just knock down the Ball house and build a New Canaan-style paean to maximalism atop its minimalist ruins.

This would not be an unprecedented development in New Canaan, a suburb forever of two minds about its place as epicenter and laboratory of the International Style: about two dozen of the 90-odd modernist dwellings built in New Canaan by Johnson and a group of fellow modernists known as the Harvard Five have been torn down in favor of buildings that cast more shadow on the landscape. This would be the first Johnson house to fall.

“It’s basically an option,” said Ms. Ross, who has the demolition permit to prove it. “Investment in property is only worth what you can get out of it.”

Ms. Ross, who lives in a five-bedroom colonial elsewhere in New Canaan, had her office in the Ball house for a while and now rents it out while it sits on the market. By her count, there have been at least a dozen prospective buyers in the last year, and a Finnish fashion shoot and a 50th birthday party for an architect, but there have been no takers.

The fact that such an architectural trophy has gone unbought for a year speaks less about any ambivalence for modernism, or even a softness in local property values, than about the domestic expectations of the superprivileged. “No one builds with less than five bedrooms now,” said Prudy Parris, Ms. Ross’s real estate agent. “People with no kids or one kid want five bedrooms.”

Christopher Wigren, the deputy director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, made the same point in an interview with the online edition of Preservation magazine: “People in a position to pay $3 million for a house want more than a galley kitchen.”

A tour of the Alice Ball House does not take long. Other than the living room, which measures 26 by 23 feet and seems (barely) enclosed, within more glass than wall, the rooms are shockingly small. A king-size bed nearly fills one of the two bedrooms (there is a third bedroom in an adjoining guest house, added later). The kitchen, while nicely appointed, would not look out of place on a houseboat.

“This is a space that has to be experienced directly,” said Gregory Farmer, a preservationist at the Connecticut trust, which lists the Ball house as one of the state’s most threatened treasures, “a space that’s experienced at a very personal level rather than something that’s very impressive to someone passing by on the street. Driving by, it looks like nothing.”
This is particularly the case on the road called Oenoke Ridge, one of New Canaan’s best addresses. Directly across the street from the Ball house, an 18,000-square-foot Tudor palace known as Wexford Hall is on the market for $13.9 million. All along the ridge top, monuments to architectural excess, not to say the killings made on Wall Street in recent years, echo across rolling lawns. The Ball house, now finished in beige rather than pink, sits close to the road and presents as a tan-and-glass shoebox.

Rob Bennett for The New York Times
Preservationists want to save the 1,773-square-foot house.
Ms. Ross’s plan to build a second house on the 2.2-acre property for resale ran afoul of the town environmental commission, which denied her permission to pave about 3,000 square feet of wetlands for a driveway and parking area. She scaled back the plan and won the town’s approval. But meanwhile, her neighbors to the rear, a retired investment banker and his wife, had signed on as secondary defendants in a suit Ms. Ross filed against the environmental commission, and they will not let the matter drop.

“We think it’s a capitulation on the wetlands issue,” said Linda Powell, the retired banker’s wife, adding that for what it’s worth, “building a columned colonial Italianate home in the back is not what we would consider preserving the Philip Johnson house.”

Some fans of New Canaan’s modernist heritage have taken it upon themselves to find a buyer. Jack Trifero, head of the New Canaan Village Association, the town’s chamber of commerce, buttonholes strangers and acquaintances in front of his Gramophone video store on Main Street and presses into their hands a flyer bearing a picture of the Johnson building and the plea “Save This House.”

“I’ll see somebody I know in the arts and say, ‘Mr. Smith, I can see you in this house,’ ” Mr. Trifero said. Some people express interest, he said, while others “just don’t understand why a house like that would be valuable.”

Even some modernist partisans say the price seems high. Ms. Ross bought the house for $1.5 million only three years ago, and says she has overhauled “all major systems: roofs, walls, woodwork, plaster, stonework.” But Helen Higgins, the executive director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, said, “There haven’t been enough improvements to suggest that the value is doubled.”

Ms. Ross’s hopes, though, have been buoyed by two recent sales. A quarter-mile up Oenoke Ridge, a crazy-looking 1958 pyramid-topped house by Edward Durell Stone, architect of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, just sold for $4.1 million, though it is more than twice the size of the Ball House. And on May 14, the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Calif., designed by Richard Neutra, sold at auction for $16.8 million.

The math on the Alice Ball house works out to $1,750 a square foot, ignoring for the moment the value of land, which is of course considerable. That’s about triple the average price per square foot of houses that sold in New Canaan in the last few weeks, on lots that average the same size, according to statistics from a local brokerage, Barbara Cleary’s Realty Guild.

Ms. Ross said she would sooner knock the house down than lower her price.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that if there’s a buyer out there, great. If there isn’t, then I’ve done my due diligence.”

If Ms. Ross does decide to take down the Ball house, she has plans for demolition day.

“I don’t want to be here,” she said.

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Paris Hilton crime against fashion

By ELIZABETH SPIRIDAKIS

Very is a regular free-association column by Elizabeth Spiridakis, in which she calls it like she sees it.

One day in the distant future, the children of our children’s children will look back upon the ‘aughts’ for retro inspiration and stumble upon the sartorial black hole that is Paris Hilton. Her egregious crimes against fashion are too numerous to list here, but in this photo of Her Tragedy, accompanied by her boyfriend Benji Madden, the offending look is:

Very next-level vanity: Really, a T-shirt with your name on it? Is it so you remember or we never forget? Maybe it should be spelled backwards because we suspect that every time she looks in the mirror there’s a split second when she wonders, “Wait, who’s Sirap?”
Very wannabe It couple: If you took a snapshot of Kate Moss and Pete Doherty from two years ago, photocopied it 27 times, covered it in Velveeta, ran it through a Hot Topic sample sale and then sold it as a cheap knock-off on Canal Street, it would look like this picture.

Very space tramp.
Very vomitrocious. The ‘L.A. Look’ needs to go away forever, please. If they banned fedoras, tacky sunglasses, blazers over T-shirts, leggings and Kitson, Los Angeles would become a nudist colony.
Very last stop in the fashion cycle: All good trends (leggings, metallics, rock star boyfriends) go to Paris to die. Clean out your closets accordingly.

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Fashion’s Harlem Address

By ERIC WILSON
Published: May 22, 2008
Enlarge This Image

Gasuza Lwanga of Gasuza Media
STILL GOLDEN A 1960s dress from Seasoned to Perfection.
IN the self-aggrandizing nature of fashion speak, the term “emerging designer market” is often employed to mask what to the average mind would be called a “crafts fair,” where the only key to entry is a hot glue gun and a sack of beads.

But if you happened to be among the 500 or so people checking out a temporary market last weekend at the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem, you might have concluded, correctly, that the neighborhood has arrived as a fashion destination.

In the last year, Dane Huggins moved his popular shoe store, Head Over Heels, from Fort Greene in Brooklyn to 270 St. Nicholas Avenue at West 124th Street. Aissatou Ndao-Fiteni, a designer, opened a boutique called Aysa (aysaboutique.com), at 2310 Seventh Avenue at West 136th Street; it sells a mix of modern and traditional African fashions and witty handbags.

And Michelle Gittens and Enyinne Owunwanne, after leaving jobs in the financial industry, have started a Harlem-based collection called Seasoned to Perfection (s2pvintage.com), which repurposes vintage clothing into new styles. All were represented at the weekend market.

“There’s a lot of great Harlem businesses that people don’t know about,” said Ms. Gittens, who had worked for Lehman Brothers in real estate finance for five years before enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Ms. Gittens, in a belted vintage gray dress, and Ms. Owunwanne, wearing jeans she had altered with an orange tie at the back, organized the market to draw attention to what is happening in Harlem, as well as to spotlight designers from Brooklyn and New Jersey. They are planning another market in July. (For updates, visit uptownedm.com.)

Nearly all of the 40 companies selling designs on Saturday, and the 20 that had anything left to sell by Sunday, had an original concept. There was, for instance, Chalay (chalay.com), a T-shirt line with styles suited to the city’s cultural pride parades, with messages like “Puerto Rican for the Weekend.” And Brooklyn’s Cut It Out! Apparel (cutitoutapparel.com), offered T-shirt dresses, cut up at the neckline and hem, printed with messages meant to empower women. One was a succinct call to arms: “My name is not Shorty!”

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Backstage All-Access Passwear

By MIKE ALBO
Published: May 8, 2008

LAST Friday I walked down to the Bowery to visit the new John Varvatos store. As you probably know, Mr. Varvatos took over the legendary and recently defunct music site CBGB and turned it into a stylish space to sell his superior and expensive clothing.

I had a hard time finding it because suddenly the Bowery has all these obnoxiously fabulous luxury condos, hotels, drink spots and throngs of Heidi and Spencer types I swear weren’t there four months ago. The street is starting to look like Epcot with a drinking problem, and the John Varvatos store, beautifully styled and reverently decorated, is its high-end Hard Rock Cafe. It’s a beautiful museum of the area’s grittier, more artsy past — a time when New Yorkers lived within their means, wore incongruous garments they plucked from trash bins in SoHo, and came to this space to play loud, visceral music.

The Varvatos company took pains to preserve and cultivate the energy of this hallowed birthplace of American punk rock. It “zhuzhed” it up with dramatic lighting, velvet-curtained dressing rooms and four antique stained glass windows behind the cash register to give the room a sense of reverence. Most of the original scrawled and stickered walls remain intact. Near the entrance a gorgeous tattered palimpsest of fliers and decals is encased behind glass, as if it were stonework from the great temple to Jupiter in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.


Also near the entrance, classic mint-condition albums in clear plastic sleeves are for sale from artists like the Del Fuegos and Joan Jett. Adorning the walls are colorful gig posters for D Generation and Built to Spill, a framed copy of Blondie’s “Eat to the Beat” album. Nearby, vintage stereo equipment is also for sale, like a gleaming Pioneer SX-1250 ($895) or a black scuffed-up McIntosh MC2100 amplifier ($895).

The clerks are mostly male and all model-beautiful. Many have ornate tattoos that peek out of the cuffs and collars of their lovely Varvatos shirts. An adorably gangly salesman with stalky black hair and a cough (“I’m giving up smoking, and it’s all coming up”) set up a dressing room for me, and I tried on a black tux shirt with a subtly embroidered bib ($185), a soft ivory-colored jersey ($135) and an olive-green button-front shirt ($165).

A pair of suit pants in a black and white plaid had a faint sheen ($425), and a brownish-gray linen sweater with big wooden toggle buttons fit perfectly ($298). In fact, it all fit perfectly, and I wished I could afford the garments or was punk rock enough to shoplift.

The Varvatos shoes, in particular, are always desirable, free of the gaudy overdesign and tacky stitching that seem to plague men’s footwear. I picked up a strikingly simple black boot with a side zipper ($498) as a statuesque female clerk walked up and explained that it was called the Mercer. “John’s been making it ever since he started the company,” she said. The shoes are displayed on a small stage in the middle of the space, where acts like the slithery Perry Farrell performed at the opening night gala last month.

It’s often said that Mr. Varvatos has a rocker aesthetic (the band Cheap Trick appears in the label’s ad campaign), but a lot of the styles here evoke the mellow ’70s singer-songwriter rather than the sweaty drug-fueled rock star. A caramel-colored blazer in lamb’s leather with gold studs along the lapel ($995) is something Kris Kristofferson might have worn while he canoodled with Carly; and an airy long-sleeved henley in a bluish off-white ($198) was something Cat Stevens might have worn while he canoodled with Carly.

REGARDLESS of their reference, the clothes here are unanimously amazing, even when they cost more than Joey Ramone spent on hair care in his entire life. Unfortunately, along with Mr. Varvatos’s fresh offerings, selections from “What Comes Around Goes Around,” the vintage apparel company in New York, appear in the store for prices that are downright offensive. A rack of WCAGA’s worn-in tops included a yellow Doobie Brothers shirt for $200, a beat-up Wrangler denim button-front with a frayed cut-off collar for $100, and a plain crew-neck T-shirt yellowed with age for, no joke, $75. Anarchy!

Back in the day, guys came here to be a part of a dynamic scene — they moshed, smoked, maybe got konked on the head with a beer can. But now we live in a city of aspirations and replicated cool. N.Y.U. students come in and imagine how great they will look when they get their six-figure jobs, and six-figure-salary guys come in to buy clothes so they can look as if they moshed.

Baffled by the hallucinatory expense of New New York, I gazed at the old, intact walls of CBGB, slashed and scrawled with layers of noise and history. If Mr. Varvatos and his team are smart, they will reproduce it and sell it as wallpaper for $5,000 a yard.

And why not — looks like there’s a market for it. Everyone who came through the doors seemed to be starved for authenticity, including me. I walked around transferring my rock nostalgia directly onto the deliciously displayed clothes. I would have bought something, too, but at the time my bank balance was so low I couldn’t even spring for a $69 white short-sleeved henley from Mr. Varvatos’s collaborative line with Converse, the cheapest thing I could find in the store.

Am I punky, or just poor?

JOHN VARVATOS

315 Bowery (between First and Second Streets); (212) 358-0315.

Post-Punk The old CBGB space has become a high-end clothing store full of desirable garments, vintage jackets and worn-in concert tees, all at ear-splitting prices.

FASHION HUNKS Friendly, perfectly styled and drop-dead gorgeous, the staff is about as D.I.Y. as a photo spread in Men’s Vogue.

WHO’D A’ THUNK Old show posters carefully framed, sections of the site’s original walls preserved behind glass, no photographs allowed — the downtown New York music scene has an official museum.

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The world’s highest-paid supermodels

By Kiri Blakeley

updated 8:29 p.m. ET April 30, 2008

In the words of supermodel and Project Runway host Heidi Klum: In fashion, one day you're in and the next you're out. One could say the same about Forbes.com's 2008 list of the World's Top-Earning Models. Some beauties moved up, some down, some off, a few on.

Then there's Gisele Bundchen, still entrenched firmly in the No. 1 spot with an estimated $35 million in earnings, more than double the $14 million banked by Heidi Klum, who came in second. The 15 models on our list were ranked primarily by estimated earnings over the past 12 months. Where necessary, prestige and relevancy of campaigns, editorials, fashion magazine covers and the opinion of those in the industry were taken into account.

Rounding out the top five are usual suspects Heidi Klum ($14 million), Kate Moss ($7.5 million), Adriana Lima ($7 million) and surprise addition Doutzen Kroes ($6 million). The 23-year-old honey from Holland made a long-legged leap up the charts from her second-to-last position last year. In 2008, the Calvin Klein and L'Oréal face expanded her deals and also hit the modeling mother lode: a Victoria's Secret contract.
"I wish we had snapped her up a long time ago," says Edward Razek, who has been selecting the company's models for a decade. Her agent, David Bonnouvrier, compares Kroes to Christy Turlington, another Calvin Klein muse. "It's that type of beauty," he says.

Bundchen may have ended her Victoria's Secret run, but her $5 million a year record-setting contract didn't expire until the end of December 2007, allowing much of it to be included in this year's tally. Even without the lingerie giant, the Brazilian bombshell continues to bag multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts, most notably as the new face of Pantene and a cosmetics powerhouse that can't be named until July.

German übermodel Heidi Klum is smiling at No. 2 by virtue of not only her television success as host and executive producer of Bravo's (soon to be Lifetime's) "Project Runway," and as the host of Germany's version of "America's Next Top Model," but with a slew of campaigns and partnerships including ones with Diet Coke, Jordache and Mouawad jewelry. In her home country, there's new deals with McDonald's, Volkswagen and hair care giant Schwarzkopf.

Waif icon Kate Moss tripped up a bit last year by ending contracts with Burberry, Stella McCartney, Dior and Versace. But her eponymous clothing line with British retailer Topshop is a hit in 29 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Russia. With a yearly guarantee fee and royalties, Moss' fashion cents banks her in an extra estimated $2 million a year.

Victoria's Secret made millionaires of two newcomers: Miranda Kerr and Selita Ebanks, striking poses at Nos. 10 and 12, respectively. "Selita has a stunning smile and is a great on-camera spokeswoman," enthuses Razek. "Miranda's got the cheeks of a chipmunk, the smile of an angel and the body of a devil."

Fresh to the list is Revlon model Isabeli Fontana, who, at 24, has come out of semi-retirement after having two children. Fontana also poses for H&M, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana. Rounding up the newbies is Russian Valentina Zelyaeva, the exclusive model for Ralph Lauren and the face of two L'Oréal fragrances.

A noticeable drop-off is last year's No. 5, Victoria's Secret angel Alessandra Ambrosio, who took a break from bikinis due to her baby bulge. Liya Kebede was edged out of Estée Lauder, pushing her five places down to last place.

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