Her style: Sitting down for a chat, Aliana is polite, sweet and, for the first 20 minutes, guarded. She’s wearing a conservatively chic ensemble of light gray American Apparel pants, a black sleeveless American Apparel blouse buttoned all the way up to her neck and vintage black Chloe booties. (“I love the ’50s. That’s my style,” she says in the trademark Lohan rasp. “I just think it’s really beautiful how they didn’t show as much skin back then.”) Her long, dark brown hair is parted in the middle. She’s five foot eight, and her spiderlike limbs seem to go on for yards, making her look at least five inches taller.
Aliana's modeling career: “I signed with Ford when I was four years old, so I started pretty early,” she says. “At 14, I did a Teen Vogue shoot, and that was a big thing.” She also appeared on the cover of the trade mag Supermodels Unlimited in 2007 and posed for Lindsay’s clothing line, 6126, wearing a skimpy red lace dress. As a kid she appeared in a few of Lindsay’s movies (including The Parent Trap), released a Christmas album and (as chronicled on Living Lohan) worked on a pop record. But now, she says, it’s all about modeling. “Just recently I was like, I really want to focus on this, and just this. This is the only thing I wanna do.” A Marc Jacobs campaign, she says, would be “the ultimate thing.” Cindy Crawford, whom she admires for having “branded her name really well,” is her role model.
On Dina: “Yeah, she has gotten a bad rap,” Aliana says. “People don’t really know what has gone on. It upsets me sometimes when I see stuff that’s the complete opposite of the truth. I don’t listen to the negative stuff. I just try to take the positive. I don’t go on blogs.”
She doesn’t go on blogs, for real? Noooo, noooo, noooo, noooo,” she continues, shaking her head emphatically. “It’s so much less stressful if you’re not dealing with that stuff. I mean, obviously you [might] hear something from someone…but I just let it roll right off my shoulders. I don’t validate it. I’m just like, yeah, whatever. I know I’m fine. Everything’s great. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone who’s making up stupid stuff. I don’t get it. I would never do that, so I don’t know how someone could be that mean.”
Aliana was bullied: Aliana has had a few brushes with cruel cliques herself. “I had a little bit of a hard time,” she says of “the bullying thing” that happened in 2008, when two of her former classmates from Merrick Avenue Middle School on Long Island made a catty video about her and posted it on the Internet. “I would never think, like, they’re jealous of me—that doesn’t make any sense. Like, they’re my friends—why? I never think to see bad in people, so I would never assume that. But yeah, they did stupid things. It wasn’t, like, horrible going to school…There was something that happened, and I just thought it was better to home-school.”
She's going "graduate" this month: This month Aliana will not only turn 18 but will also graduate from high school early. “I get three or four months extra to be free,” says the Criminal Minds fan, who, if she goes to university, would choose Ithaca College, like her older brother Michael, 23, and study “how to profile serial killers or something cool like that. I am taking one step at a time,” she continues. “I will focus on [school] when I get to it.”
More on whether she had plastic surgery: “Oh my gosh, that’s so funny,” she says. But she doesn’t mean funny ha-ha. “I mean, I heard it from one of my friends, and I was kind of like, ‘Why are you my friend? Because I shouldn’t be hearing this. If you’re my friend you wouldn’t even talk about that stuff.’ ” She leans in close and gets almost too quiet to hear. Again, her eyes glance around the room cautiously before she continues. “When they did tell me, I was cracking up. Because, like, when would I do that? I’m 17 years old. That’s not legal! I would need my mother’s signature, and do you think my mom would ever sign off on that? No! It’s not the right thing to do. I mean, if you wanted to, that’s great, for anyone else. I know a girl who had a nose job in seventh grade, which is craaaazy. In seventh grade! I think that’s more of, like, the mom’s decision, not the kid’s. But I don’t know. It’s stupid. I don’t listen to it. It’s absolutely not true.”
On her slender frame: She says she’s “always had a fast metabolism” and is able to eat what she wants, from scrambled eggs with American cheese and hot sauce to Nutella. “I can just eat [it] out of the jar with a glass of milk,” she confesses.
Her parents: Aliana has no relationship with her father (“Um, no, no. Let’s keep it at that,” she says with a nervous chuckle). She calls Dina “everything,” her eyes lighting up. They talk on the phone at least once a day. “I’ve learned everything from my mom. Growing up, it was her raising us, so I remember her as my mother and my father figure. But she’s tough on me, especially when it comes to school.”
Her dreams: She’d like to get an apartment in the East Village, Soho or the Meatpacking District someday. She wants kids eventually (preferably two boys, because they’re “more low key” than girls). She’s not dating anyone, and she’s never been in love before, but if she did have a boyfriend it would probably be “a surfer type.”
On Lindsay: When she’s in L.A., Aliana stays with Lindsay. “We’re extremely close,” she says, lowering her voice again to a barely audible whisper. “It’s just, you can’t, like, trust anyone, so we talk to each other about everything. All of us do. It’s always been that way.” When they’re both in L.A., the sisters cook big Sunday night dinners. “She makes the best angel-hair pasta with vodka sauce and shrimp,” Aliana says. “I admire how strong she is,” Aliana says. “She’s an independent woman, which I respect so much. She doesn’t listen to any of [the rumors], either. Like, someone will tell her something, and she’ll be like, ‘Wait, what?’ You can’t listen to it because it’s like, you’ll want to have to fix everything, right? And it’s like, once you fix something, someone else is gonna say something bad. It’s never-ending.”
On not being a rebel: “No! Oh, god, no!” Aliana says when asked if she has a fake ID. “Noooo. I don’t go out at all. Honestly. Have I ever drank? No. You can ask any of my friends. I’ve never drank.” Smoked? “Noooo!” She looks horrified. “I just want people to know, that’s a no. I mean, my sister smokes cigarettes, but I don’t even like to be around [it]. The smell grosses me out. I like fresh air and nice candles. I don’t like smoke or anything.”
Facing her future: “I try to be aware of my surroundings,” she says, rushing to the sidewalk. “I’m very cautious. I like to be smart with things.” So is she a good girl? “Oh, for sure,” she says, holding up a lengthy limb to flag down a cab. “If there is any misperception about me, I do want people to know that I’m a normal girl like anyone else. I don’t walk in a place like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ “
I don't think she's cracked-out, but you can tell that she's been raised by cracked-out wolves, you know? The crack paranoia seeps in, the mistrust, the secrecy, the knee-jerk crackie denial, the sketchiness. Dina and Lindsay have really done a number on her.
And who really believes that Ali "studies" at any point? And now she's going to "graduate". This is what happens when your mother and your older sister prioritize famewhoring and actual whoring ahead of education.
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