‘America’s Next Top Model’: Ciao, Lauren

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

It seemed like Lauren had been living on borrowed time. While the girl is tall and looked flawless at just about every shoot, her awkwardness and seeming ambivalence about being on ‘Top Model’ would probably doom her. Unless she learned how to walk and suddenly found a way to be a ‘punk’ (although, at least on the show, her punkiness didn’t seem to go much farther than a leather jacket and a crabby personality), she wouldn’t make it to the finals. It was a pity though that the editors of the episode made it so obvious early on that the night would be her final appearance. From the beginning, she talked about how she didn’t expect to make it so far in the competition, how she doesn’t fit in with the other girls, how she would suck at the challenge, and perhaps most damning, that she’s not a CoverGirl.

Lauren really should have made it farther than at least Dominique. Even if the latter has loads of perhaps misplaced confidence, so far she has been something of a nightmare in terms of media relations and, as one of the Italian designers pointed out, looks less than ‘fresh.’

However, in the end, after the dreaded foreign language CoverGirl commercial, Lauren was up against Whitney, not because Whitney was terrible with her lines or awkward on camera, but because the judges sensed a phoniness from her, as well as a streak that can rhyme with ‘witchy.’ It’s about time that the judges called her out on this: in front of them and the camera she has been all southern charm and excellent facial structure, but an episode cannot pass without her saying something negative about one of the other girls. Last night’s episode read almost like a Psychology 101 class. First we saw Whitney talking self-consciously about being a plus-size model. Then she put down Anya. Then she talked some more about being a plus-size model. Then she talked about Anya more.

Will Whitney be the first plus-size Top Model? That depends: the judges and designers seemed pretty much in love with Anya, and Katarzyna has not done too much wrong, other than the fact that Tyra seems to hate attempting to pronounce her name correctly, which probably means she’ll be eliminated next.

-- Claire Zulkey