Mind the Gap

Gap-toothed models are having a moment—in this issue, you needn’t look too closely to see the similarity between the smiles in “True Blood”, “Color Me Beautiful”, and “Georgia On Our Mind” —but the trend has a history. It began in the Fifties with Brigitte Bardot, who turned an imperfection into one of the defining features of her sex appeal. The following decade Lauren Hutton arrived with a space between her front teeth: “I’m unlike anyone else,” it seemed to say. Hutton and Jane Birkin, she of the elegantly slim gap, begot the next generation of beautiful space cases, namely the young Kate Moss and her running mate in photographer Corinne Day’s grungy London posse, Georgina Cooper. The Nineties also welcomed actress, chanteuse, and Chanel model Vanessa Paradis, owner of the gap-toothed grin featured in the current advertising campaign for the Rouge Coco lipstick line. And today, of course, the latest muses with artful apertures are Lara Stone and Georgia May Jagger, the ravishing women seen in “Color Me Beautiful” and “Georgia On Our Mind,” respectively. It’s enough to put a scare into orthodontists everywhere.