modern and to the French sweetheart flower girl dresses , nothing short of revolutionary.Mimran says, adding that he chooses Joe Fresh’s runway models the same way.Energy, energy, energy!You ve got 12 minutes, which feels like forever, and if there s not great energy on the runway you miss a huge opportunity.The girls who really walk with energy just imbue the clothes with a little something extra.Bethann Hardison, one of the models who brought a little something extra back then, chuckles on-screen, recalling the French’s elaborate choreography and sets, with acts between designer vignettes that included Josephine Baker singing, Rudolf Nureyev dancing, Zizi Jeanmaire sashaying and Jane Birkin wearing no pants.The only thing they didn t do was shoot a man out of a cannon!The disjointed French presentation dragged on for two and a half hours.no props save their hips thrust forward with swagger.The clothes were just as simple: Bill Blass’s knits for evening, Burrows’ lettuce hems and airy flowing chiffons and Halston’s slinky disco-ready jersey.It may also have been, Burrows suggests, the first known instance of vogue-ing.The Royal Ontario Museum will announce future member and public screenings shortly; Versailles73movie.comVersailles ’73: The Juicy DetailsThe party plane10 Broadway dancers, hairstylists, dressers, assistants and photographers, and 36 models half of them African-American.ne de Rothschild, Jeri Hall, Antonio Lopez first communion dresses , Christina Onassis and the Guinnesses.And 650 other socialite, millionaire and celebrity guests.The talking headsTo find the many Rashomon-like points of view, Draper approached Stephen Burrows for advice; he opened doors and made introductions, as did Harold Koda, the curator in charge at the Met’s Costume Institute.Draper also spoke at length with Hubert de Givenchy, one of the original Versailles five.Filmed interview timing with designers Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan didn’t work out, unfortunately; Liza Minnelli simply declined.socialite and event patron Simone Levitt deadpans;if only there were no Parisians.Indeed, the French hosts were less than gracious, doing everything they could to sabotage the American production scheduling their rehearsal times in the wee hours, creating Joe Eula s set designs practically in miniature by measuring in centimeters instead of yards, providing no food or water at the unheated site and to top it off: no toilet paper in the ladies’ room.K party thrown at Maxim’s by Halston for Liza Minnelli on the eve of the show.One model’s memories paint a picture of the snow falling around Versailles on the night of the show and dozens of liveried footmen holding candelabra aloft to leads the toffs into the ball.cking crown on, laughs another attendee.The found footageKoda, Draper says, was adamant that there was no surviving footage the Met’s had used its impressive resources in 1993 for their exhibition about the event, to no avail.I thought there had to be something.Stephen Burrows he said he remembered this guy having a camera a gentleman that the Rothschilds had commissioned to make a documentary.That footage was never found but her research did unearth up a clip of Josephine Baker’s number, and old CBS newsreels of Walter Cronkite at Vanderbilt University with some model footage and B-roll.But it was a flashpoint for a lot of things.Even for the Chateau it was a flashpoint in fundraising, the first sponsorship they did of that magnitude and of its kind.It changed the way the Minister of Culture operated they had never done anything like that but today, you can book your wedding at Versailles!is still an issue and it will always be a question.How do you define beauty and why does it have to be defined by race, why not by beauty itself?In the doc, one model calls her moment in the Versailles spotlight ‘the energy of defiance.A few months after she returned from the show, editor Grace Mirabella put Beverly Johnson on the cover of American Vogue.The show altered the Parisian approach first communion dresses plus size , too.With Givenchy, his cabine for years was African-American afterwards because there was a way they wore the clothes, he said, that was so interesting for him.Then Issey Miyake did the 12 black girls a couple of years later.The fashion legacyThe crowd went wild for the Americans.Yves Saint Laurent went backstage to coo over Stephen Burrows.Countess Jacqueline de Ribes bought a green Oscar de la Renta dress right off one model’s back.Seventh Avenue, showing for the first time in France, outclassed their forebears, with no props, no space ships, just simple and casual daytime dressing for evening.It influenced the development of ready-to-wear in France.So when they go into Target and get this collaboration between a couture designer and a big box, that is where it began.The re-matchSince the documentary premiered last month other participants at the historic show have surfaced and Draper is in talks with the Council of Fashion Designers of America about the possibility of mounting a 40th anniversary re-match.This time, however, count on the battle taking place on American turf.As it celebrates fifty years of independence from British rule this week, Uganda is looking back on its complicated path to the present and looking ahead with hope to an uncertain future.For the better part of the past five decades, the East African nation was known as home to Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and the dictatorial regime of Idi Amin.It has endured political instability, civil wars and the scourge of AIDS.the discovery of oil in the northern part of the country offers new economic promise and investors are moving to the capital city of Kampala.After AIDS wiped out much of the population in the 1990s, the still-reigning government of Yoweri Museveni brought the infection rate down to around 6%.Life expectancy has risen dramatically since the 1960s, from around 43 years to 53, a nod to improved healthcare mostly due to the professionalization of traditional medicine.The country is shedding .