Françoise Sagan

Carine Roitfeld's favorite book is Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), the first novel by French author Françoise Sagan who was dubbed "the Bardot of literature." Bonjour Tristesse was published in French in 1954 and tells the coming-of-age story of a sophisticated seventeen-year-old girl, Cecile, her hedonistic widowed father, and the women in his life. This powerful novel, at once sympathetic and unsparing, was an instant scandal upon publication as well as an international bestseller that was made into a movie. Not bad for a seventeen-year-old author that wrote the entire manuscript in 32 days! Read an interview with Sagan conducted by The Paris Review in the autumn of 1956, her views on everything are quite amusing, particularly her success.

Françoise Sagan photographs © 1955 Life Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
Françoise Sagan photograph © 1956 Jeanloup Sieff. All Rights Reserved.

St. Tropez

When asked to describe her favorite holiday, Carine Roitfeld chose "St. Tropez, 1973. I arrived outside a café not knowing a soul; in five minutes I'd made lots of friends." This photo was actually taken in St. Tropez four years earlier in 1969 when Carine was fifteen years old. She is totally boho chic, wearing a purple tshirt as a dress with a wide brown belt slung around her hips, a purple silk scarf on her head, a silver pendant from Morocco for good luck, and bare feet. Carine reminisces, "I'd just come back from London, bought the tshirt, and seen Hair. It was that very purple time. I remember David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' that summer. And that was sort of my Jane Birkin look." It's easy to see why Carine had no trouble making friends in a strange new world.
Carine Roitfeld in St. Tropez photograph © 2007 by Carine Roitfeld. All Rights Reserved.