Duran Duran ‘Girl Panic!’
For their splashy new “Girl Panic!” video, Duran Duran take a page from George Michael’s “Freedom ’90” handbook, casting supermodels as even more stylish versions of the band members. In keeping with the vintage glam spirit of Michael’s original model template, “Girl Panic!” features a dream lineup of original “supers”: Naomi Campbell as Simon Le Bon, Eva Herzigova as Nick Rhodes, Cindy Crawford as John Taylor, Helena Christensen as Roger Taylor, and, comically, Yasmin Le Bon, Simon’s own wife, as a random guitarist. Shot by Jonas Akerlund at London’s Savoy Hotel, the video celebrates the British pop group’s ongoing flirtation with high fashion – Dolce and Gabbana and Swarovski Elements styled the models. If you hire the best, you dress them to impress.
“Girl Panic!” is cleverly set as half mockumentary and half tribute to the excesses Duran Duran have enjoyed and embodied over the span of their 30 year career, winking all the while. Right on cue, the video opens with Campbell waking up in a bed full of debauched and leather-bound model groupies; Crawford, clad in snakeskin and fur, sips bubbly in a limo. Herzigova portrays Rhodes in a sequined jumpsuit and wanders along the Thames, while the real Rhodes appears as Helena Christiansen’s bellhop, maneuvering her blacked out body from one hotel suite to another, where she indulges in another spree of champagne and girl-on-girl-fueled hedonism. “Any addictions?” the “journalist” Roger Taylor later asks Christiansen in a mock interview. She sneers to the camera: “There were some episodes, but I’d rather not talk about them.”
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