Melancholybaby
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Ugh it looks amazing.Can't wait for October to come!
Can't wait for October to come!
Ugh it looks amazing.Can't wait for October to come!
I hate mules. I hate the noise when someone walks with mules. Clomp, clomp, clomp. I think it’s very not chic. I don’t even like a flip-flop. I don’t like this noise. I don’t think I’ve used mules one time in a story.
A Life in Pictures
A NEW BOOK HONORS CARINE ROITFELD’S SUBVERSIVE CAREER AND REMINDS STEPHEN GAN OF GOOD TIMES IN THE GLOSS
I imagine Carine Roitfeld was the little girl everyone loved to hate in school. She must have seemed so annoyingly perfect. Beautiful, clever, and sexy, she must have been so stylish, and probably told all the other kids how to dress. She must have been thought of as a snob.
Snob was my impression of her when we first met. It was 1993, and Mario Testino was in town and rang up to ask me to bring Cecilia Dean and all my friends because he and Carine needed some “cool downtown kids” to be extras in a fashion shoot for French Glamour. All I remember was her looking at how each of us was dressed, as we stood alongside the models. She didn’t say a word to us. Years later, she told me she had been quiet only because she felt shy.
In 1996, when asked which label she wanted to shoot with Mario for Visionaire’s FASHION SPECIAL, Carine chose one I didn’t think any “hipster” would: Yves Saint Laurent. Monsieur Saint Laurent was still around, and at the time it was a bit of an odd choice. But Mario and Carine shooting women’s Yves Saint Laurent clothes on Taber, a male model, made for an intriguing set of images. The results were epic—and to many insiders, even visionary—as they seemed to prophesy the coming of Hedi Slimane to design the house’s menswear two years later.
In 1997, Carine and I were working on another series of images with Mario for Visionaire’s CHIC issue. Having just been in a car accident, Carine put model Kim Iglinsky in her very own neck brace. Carine was, at that point, Tom Ford’s Gucci girl, and Kim was photographed in that season’s hottest Gucci heels, on a bicycle. At the launch of that issue, Carine walked into the Pavillon Ledoyen in Paris a half hour after everyone else had sat down to dinner. Resplendent in a white John Galliano gown that Mario had given her, she apologized out loud: “I’m sorry I’m late, I had to park the car.” I thought to myself, there’s nothing chicer than a woman who slips into an evening gown and drives herself to a dinner party, parks the car herself, and is proud enough to let everyone know that’s why she’s late!
These are the wonderful memories I have while looking through Carine’s dazzling collection of images—her honesty, her naïveté, her nonchalance, her sense of fantasy, and her ability to channel experiences and feelings onto clothes, just as a singer pours everything into a song.
If your average picture is worth a thousand words, then a Carine Roitfeld photo must convey ten times as much. What word would her body of work leave you with? “Irreverent,” for one—the apt title of her new book.
As I close it, I’m reminded of a line from Sunset Boulevard: “We gave the world new ways to dream.” That is what Carine has given the world, and what this book will give forever. Cherish it.