Heidi Klum is in search of new licensing deals after her jewelry line folded. Sure, she’s being turned into a Barbie and started hit fashion-reality-TV show Project Runway, which paved the way for Top Chef and its model host, Padma Lakshmi. She tells the Los Angeles Times:
Unfortunately, I did have a partner who … maybe wasn’t as knowledgeable in terms of setting up a business. I worked five years very hard on that. But we stopped because we had a lawsuit with Van Cleef & Arpels — they wanted to have the clover, even though our designs had never matched, I don’t know how may designs I had done in five years, maybe 800 different designs — but they just wanted to own the clover motif. So they went after everyone who does that — Louis Vuitton! — they said, “We own the clover.” And I was like, “Then who’s the person with the clover and the person with the heart?” I think when you’re a small company, which we are, we’re not a Van Cleef — they have a thousand lawyers. I’m a small fry next to that.
The appeal of designing a jewelry line is understandable, and it can’t be easy for Klum to see Padma prancing around naked in hers, but maybe she should stick to reality TV, which is what she does best. Take Models of the Runway, a spinoff about the Project Runway models, which looks amazing. “They do cry a lot!” Klum assures. So she can either create drama among models or caterpillar earrings. Hmmm.
Heidi Klum [LAT]
