Carine Roitfeld: The It Girl

My darling readers, I have a treat for you... an article titled "The 'It' Girl" in which Hamish Bowles interviews Carine Roitfeld for the November 1996 issue of Vogue... enjoy!

Carine Roitfeld creates potent fashion images, but Hamish Bowles finds it's her own style that's most influential

With a look that combines hippie chic with the provocative edge of a Helmut Newton photograph, French stylist Carine Roitfeld has always stood out from the fashion crowd. But now the crowd is catching up with her sleek take on '70s revivalism. The mix of edgy French style (trouser suits with heels), bad-girl sexiness and ethnic elements (Jane Birkin caftans and Indian shirts) that Roitfeld has been wearing for years is suddenly rampant on this season's runways. What's more, with her smoky sloe eyes and ironed shag of bitter-chocolate hair, she's become a muse for Gucci designer Tom Ford.

"She's one of the most inspirational women I know," says Ford. "I love the way she puts things together unexpectedly. She usually wears one thing that throws the whole thing off. She's my ideal European woman."

While she embodies the subversive sophistication of Ford's Gucci woman, Roitfeld also works with him to translate this image into the advertising campaign. "Tom is a brilliant designer," says Roitfeld. "He doesn't need someone to style his show, but to push, so that it's the same girl in the show and in the campaigns. That's what makes Gucci strong."

It is this synchronicity between what appears on a designer's runway and the image for the campaigns that Roitfeld effects. By pointing the Missonis back to the work they were producing in the early '70s, Roitfeld not only revitalized the house but helped launch an international trend. Look-alike skinny knits cropped up all over this season's hippest runways on girls who looked a lot like Roitfeld herself. "It's not very professional," Roitfeld says with a laugh, "but I do project myself into my pictures; it's what I'd like to wear myself."

Roitfeld's fashion sense is pure but eclectic. "I would never wear a 'total look'; it's not me," she says. She prefers to mix occasional ethnic elements like her signature Indian men's shirts with pieces from designers as diverse as Gucci, Jean Colonna, Eric Bergère, Helmut Lang, Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano. "I like sexy clothes, that's for sure. And because I don't have an 'obvious' face, I can push that, and it's never going to look tacky."

Roitfeld started her magazine career at 20 Ans and went on the French Elle, where she first met Mario Testino, the photographer with whom she now works almost exclusively (for French Vogue and the ad campaigns of Gucci, Missoni, and Rykiel). They went on to work together at the now defunct French Glamour, creating memorable fashion portfolios like one in which Christy Turlington was dressed as a punk ["Sacrée Christy"]. "I like to use fairly 'normal' clothes in my stories," says Roitfeld. "When we did Christy as a punk, I just used the chain of a Chanel bag around the neck like a dog leash but at the end of the day it's a Chanel bag!" Says Testino of her style, "It's like a mixture of chic with fashion. Carine is never fashion victim, and she is never bourgeois."

One influential 1994 story ["Néo-moderne"] cast Nadja Auermann as the embodiment of the new neo-bourgeois sleek chic — in the serenely contemporary setting of Roitfeld's own seventh-arrondissement apartment. Roitfeld and her husband, Sisley, the creator of the Equipment shirt line, worked with British architect David Chipperfield on the space, a lush belle époque apartment with views of the golden dome of the Invalides. The emphatically non-modernist shell was stripped to the bones, and uplighters were set in the parquet floors to highlight the original detailing. Spare units that appear to float in the apartment hide clothes and even photographs.

Roitfeld admits to having had very bohemian tastes before she met her husband, and the detritus of her early life — kilims from Morocco, furniture found in India — is now banished to her office, where the walls are smothered in her own photographs of her two children, Vladimir and Julia. "I changed a little bit, because Sisley was very Zen, strict and classic in his style. This apartment demands a different way of life, and I appreciate it," she adds. "I used to be very messy; you can't be messy in this apartment. And please, only white flowers!"

Carine Roitfeld photographs and editorials © 1993, 1994, 1996 Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved.

Update on vendredi 3 août 2012 by kellina

Très bizarre, I just found a second version of this article in my archives from the June 1996 issue of Vogue, a mere five months earlier... why would they do that?

Carine Roitfeld in Vogue "The It Girl" editorial © 2006 Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[bernie]

Obviously her models always looks like her with straight down hair and thick eyebrows plus the oozing sexuality that screams "IM CARINE INCOGNITO"

[kellina]

Obviously

;-)

[bernie]

I love the 90's Vogue where in models and minimalism used to dominate the world of fashion

[kellina]

Yes, Bernie, here is hoping for a return to minimalism...