Mind the g ap

Enlarge Image

The latest trend among the beautiful (including Vanessa Paradis) is an orthodontist’s nightmare.

NO longer relegated to Alfred E. New­man references, gap teeth are the latest beauty world obsession — nay, pop-culture phenomenon.

Both Chanel and British cosmetic giant Rimmel have just signed glaringly gap-toothed girls as the faces of their newest campaigns: Georgia Jagger, Mick's teenage daughter, replaces Kate Moss at Rimmel, and French actress Vanessa Paradis will be the "smile" behind Chanel's new line of lipstick, Rouge Coco de Chanel.

Young Ms. Jagger also flashes her adorable pearly goal posts in this month's British Vogue. Paradis' appeared recently on the cover of Vogue Paris.

The photos kind of make you wish your own parents hadn't worked all those extra shifts to pay for your orthodontia.

If you need further proof that the stars have aligned for the gap-toothed trend, consider the following headline-makers with space-invaded smiles: True Blood actress Anna Paquin and model Lara Stone -- named "most wanted face of the moment" in August's W magazine, and whose ID magazine cover with the tag line "Yes, I think I'm sexy" is already une reference absolue in current fashion magazine circles. There's also Amy Winehouse and Madonna (well, they're never not in the news, but still).

And then there's David Letterman, perhaps today's newsiest gap toother. His aw-shucks grin just might have helped him get out of the dog house.

On the pop-culture side, the moment we started paying attention to gap-toothed grins might be traced back to Twitter addict Demi Moore, who allegedly tweeted a picture of her smiling self at the dentist, where she was having a missing front tooth replaced.

On the beauty front, though, does the trend for gap teeth (medical term: diastema) define a new standard of beauty, or is it just fashion happenstance?

Definitely the former, says Adriana Ermter, beauty director at Fashion magazine. "I wouldn't run to the dentist to get a space put in between my two front teeth," she says, "But I think the gap-tooth beauty trend is another example of the evolution of beauty. What it is saying is, you no longer need to be a perfect blond with blue eyes to grab the cover of a fashion magazine."

Maybe it comes down to the fact that, these days, anyone can have rows of Chiclet teeth, thanks to caps and overly white veneers. The commonality of them makes a perfect smile seem so last week.

On the other hand, the trend could be just a Brigitte Bardot thing; the gap-toothed actress who practically patented the carefree sex kitten bit in the 1950s and early '60s, and who is the subject of a new exhibition in her native France (Brigitte Bardot: Les années 'insouciance' -- The carefree years) is clearly on designers' minds.

Bardot inspired Jean-Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton this fall, and Prada for next spring. And everyone, it seems, is wearing her signature over-the-knee boots (as well as her ballet flats) now.

Both Stone and Jagger look identical to the young Bardot in recent fashion shoots, with their dishevelled blond hair, parted pillow lips and, of course, gap teeth.

In a new ad campaign for the U.S. jeans line Hudson, Jagger's smouldering eyes, pubescent pout and slightly wrecked air is '50s Bardot redux; she looks as if she had, as the French actress so often did, spent the night partying with Serge Gainsbourg. The denim company, which says it chose Jagger for her "attitude, spirit and inherent sexiness," used Mario Sorrento for the campaign, the photographer who shot Kate Moss topless for a series of Calvin Klein jeans ads.

Another gap-toothed style icon who also possessed a free spirit is the 1970s model Lauren Hutton.

Hutton was one of the first models to take an imperfection and make it her signature -- like Cindy Crawford's mole, or Naomi Campbell's temper. Though she refused to fix her gap teeth, she went on to become one of the first models to score a lucrative cosmetics campaign.

-- Canwest News Service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 6, 2010 F1