Tuesday, 01 September 2009

Not every New Yorker is born in San Francisco, squealing in a Brooklyn accent at birth.  By the tender age of 18, Raquel had fled the West Coast, starry-eyed and smug that Pace University was the bedazzled glove to her soft manicured Jewish fingers.  Spitting sunflower seeds and crawling in stilettos across Brighton Beach for the Q subway promptly gave her blisters, and a heavy price on her head due to scrolls of unpaid shoe repair tabs.

A nomad and international party girl, Raquel is not one to get schmaltzy over zip codes. These days she delights in Manhattan luxuries previously withheld. If you wake at the crack of dawn, you can find her leaving a Murray Hill apartment, strutting upside down on forearms to bikram yoga where she vacates her mind and body of toxins with the best of them. All that zen is then splurged on a 10 hour
grind in her calf-leather swivel chair at In Style Magazine. A hybrid of shiny big apple ambition dotted by a whiff of patchouli, she's easily the subject of Maroon 5's next big hit, and a force some are happy to reckon with.