Miss Boo

"Perhaps inevitably as the public face of the company, Miss Boo quickly became the chief cause of concern. For the past few months she had been sporting a red ponytail and looked like a high school cheerleader, which wasn’t nearly good enough for the cool, urban image we had been trying to create. She seemed barely old enough to order milkshakes in the local diner let alone hang out in down- town bars. So the design team tried to make her more sophisticated by giving her different hair. But none of the styles they experimented with, from white dreads to black Afro, was quite right. The trouble was that she almost seemed to be trying too hard. As Kajsa put it, ‘She’s so cool, she’s really uncool.’ It was difficult to know what could be done. ‘Maybe she should change her hair all the time,’ Kajsa said, ‘like every three months. She’s such a fashion victim that she’s always on top of what’s going on.’ One way or another, it was clear that we needed some expert advice. So we booked the world’s top hair-stylist, Eugene Soulemain, whose clients included top Holly- wood actresses and fashion houses like Prada, Louis Vuitton and Hussein Chalayan. For a few weeks, while she waited for Eugene to fit her into his busy schedule, Miss Boo sat bald but beautiful in a quiet corner of Niclas’s Macintosh. But it wasn’t enough that she should just look cool. She had to talk cool too. A journalist called Lucy Ryder-Richardson wrote some lines for her, but the style-was thought to be too European when the point of Miss Boo was that she was the kind of girl who felt at home all over the world. So at the beginning of October we brought the New York style commentator Glenn O’Brien over to London for a couple of days to make her hip but transatlantic. Glenn had begun his career working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine and went on to be variously a comedian, poet, author and copywriter. Michael Skidmore had known him at Barneys, where Glenn had been creative director for advertising."

"magazine. “With zippy five-day deliveries, 3D/360-degree product- viewing, styling advice from Miss Boo the virtual sales assistant/ model, plus boo.magazine due to be launched online later in the year, we think we’ve seen the future of fashion.’"