How do you get a bunch of pint-size models to halt and turn at the end of a fashion runway?
With a tiny stop sign, of course.
Polo Ralph Lauren planted a staff person with the helpful placard mounted on a stick at the end of its walk on Wednesday night at the Central Park Zoo for a children’s show featuring 11-year-old Levi Miller, the star of the upcoming film Pan.
He was joined by more than two dozen other child models, including some too young to read but clearly old enough to get the whole stop sign thing.
And there were plenty of tiny fashionistas on the front row as well. The fashion crowd was invited to bring along little ones, who feasted on bites of food served by guys in pirate hats before taking their seats. After, Miller fed the zoo’s sea lions as Polo turned their tank area into a Neverland-like playscape complete with flowering stilt walkers.
Polo hosted the show to promote children’s literacy but also to promote the October film, which is Peter Pan’s origin story. It takes J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters back to their beginnings in an original story, as Peter goes about the business of battling ruthless Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) with the help of Tiger Lily, played by Rooney Mara.
Miller said in a post-show interview that he did some of his own stunts as the mischievous Peter, who one magical night is whisked off to Neverland from the bleak London orphanage where he lived. The cherubic Miller, a blue-eyed Australian, said he read the Barrie book when he was 10 and “loved it.”
Of his movie’s Peter, he said: “He’s heroic and brave, but there are some things I don’t like about him. He’s selfish and quite ignorant, too.”
Out of the mouths of cherubs. Or, as the voice in a Pan promo put it as it mimicked Barrie’s book and blasted from loud speakers: “You can’t stay a kid forever. Even in Neverland.”
