When Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue, styles a fashion shoot, she does not start with the clothes. She looks first at the model and comes up with a story: Perhaps this girl has married young and taken a lover. Perhaps she married young, has taken three lovers, and is about to go to Brazil. Perhaps she lives in London and is bored to death with mad cow disease and wants desperately to eat a great, juicy piece of steak. “I do a movie in my mind,” she says. “Who is this girl?”
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In the story she comes up with for herself, it is her ambition to look like the subject of a Helmut Newton photograph, and she does, in a way: She sort of exists in black-and-white, and her clothes often bear straps and buckles, a very light fashion bondage. She also looks, as has often been pointed out, quite a lot like Iggy Pop.
But she does not think much about her influences. “Some editors, they have that, they know all the designer from the beginning of the nineteenth century. They know this is triple cashmere, this is simple cashmere. Maybe they went to fashion school. Me, I don’t. I just get a feeling about what is exciting. It is all just from feeling. So I don’t know”—she pulls her lips into a pout and gives one of those poufy little French exhales—“I think maybe I have a talent.”
Roitfeld has been the editor-in-chief of French Vogue for the past seven years, ever since she took over from the cerebral Joan Juliet Buck. Roitfeld remade French Vogue in her own image, which is to say svelte, tough, luxurious, and wholeheartedly in love with dangling-cigarette, bare-chested fashion. French Vogue is now internationally major, to use an industry expression, with an influence that transcends its tiny (133,000) circulation.
So much of the fashion world is about negotiating insecurity—exploiting it enough to make you want to buy things, but still nurturing, to keep you close. But Carine Roitfeld is like the industry’s X factor: Fashion does not, could not, make her insecure. Fashion is the place in the world where Roitfeld is most comfortable and at home.
Because of this, Roitfeld’s French Vogue is the polar opposite of most American fashion magazines. It is unconcerned with making fashion wearable or accessible to its readers. It is not inclusive: There is no advice on how to dress if you’re shaped like a pear or about to turn 50.
In Roitfeld’s world, models are never too skinny, diamonds are never too expensive. Covers are not devoted to whichever film star has a blockbuster to promote, but primarily to models—when Roitfeld and Bruce Weber happened upon (former “Look Book” subject) André J., a black transvestite with an Afro, incredible legs, and an Amish-style chinstrap beard, they put him in a minidress and on the cover.
French Vogue assumes membership in a club that treats fashion unapologetically. Guest editorships are given to cool girls of the moment (Kate Moss, Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Gainsbourg), who post endless photos of themselves and their skinny friends and the details of their lives—lives in which such mundanities as medicine cabinets and grocery lists are shown to be far more glamorous than your own. The scrappy documentary photography of these features only underlines how naturally cool such people are: Their glamour is presented as something that doesn’t need the aid of stylists and special lighting. It is innate.
Credits: New York Magazine, Time Magazine
Carine Roitfeld was born in Paris, France on 19 September 1954. At 18, she began modeling, having been scouted on the street in Paris by a British photographer's assistant. She became a writer and then a stylist for French ELLE. While she was working as a freelance stylist, her daughter, Julia, was in a children's fashion shoot for Italian Vogue Bambini in 1990, photographed by Mario Testino. Roitfeld and Testino soon after began working as a team, doing advertising work as well as shoots for American and French Vogue. Roitfeld went on to work as a consultant and muse for Tom Ford at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent for six years. She was approached by Conde Nast International Chairman Jonathan Newhouse to edit French Vogue in 2001.
In my opinion, Carine Riotfeld is successful because she has changed the face of fashion, from being uniform and uninteresting to something entirely different. Fashion isn't about buying and wearing cool clothes, following trends, etcetera. Fashion just is... fashion.
"So much of the fashion world is about negotiating insecurity—exploiting it enough to make you want to buy things, but still nurturing, to keep you close.
But Carine Roitfeld is like the industry’s X factor: Fashion does not, could not, make her insecure. Fashion is the place in the world where Roitfeld is most comfortable and at home.
Because of this, Roitfeld’s French Vogue is the polar opposite of most American fashion magazines. It is unconcerned with making fashion wearable or accessible to its readers. It is not inclusive: There is no advice on how to dress if you’re shaped like a pear or about to turn 50."
What sets her apart is the impact that her decisions make. Instead of doing things the usual way, she chose the alternative route, changing others' perception of fashion. Choosing to be different. Injecting her own style, her own flair. Impacting people, yet doing it so subtly. That's what truly inspires me.
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