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The Edit by Net-A-Porter
August 14, 2014
French Revolution
Model Charlotte Gainsbourg
Photographer Driu Crilly + Tiago Martel
Styling Naomi Miller
August 14, 2014
French Revolution
Model Charlotte Gainsbourg
Photographer Driu Crilly + Tiago Martel
Styling Naomi Miller
net-a-porterThe progeny of music and fashion’s coolest union, CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG’s life was destined to be less than conventional. She tells HARRIET QUICK why her career and controversy go hand in hand.
It’s one of those summer days in Paris when the sun seems to battle rain clouds in an hourly cycle. Charlotte Gainsbourg has also been battling, albeit with a minor home emergency, and arrives at the Hotel Montalembert in Saint-Germain-des-Prés a little flustered. She drops her big black carryall and Céline raincoat onto a banquette and, after a stream of apologies, slips into thoughtful, conversational mode with an ease that seems particular to actresses.
Wearing a pair of boyish jeans, Stan Smith sneakers and a love-worn T-shirt, her dark hair splayed over her ultra-long, lithe arms, Gainsbourg cuts a cool figure. “I don’t really want to pay attention to clothes – I don’t see it as my job. I like it when it feels natural, but talking and analyzing... I find that weird,” the 43-year-old says somewhat languorously in a perfect English accent. “The most important thing for me is not to take myself too seriously. I like casual things, so I have to have a casual attitude.”
Around Paris in store fronts and magazines, the new Louis Vuitton FW14 campaign is about to hit. It features Gainsbourg in a portfolio of images – lying supine on a
grassy hillock, in an underground garage and in an artist’s studio –shot by three of fashion’s photographic heavyweights: Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber and Juergen Teller. Gainsbourg’s outfits (which include leather pants and a tweed jacket, a zipped bustier dress and a belted A-line skirt with a sports sweater) encapsulate the modern rigor of the debut collection from the maison’s new creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” says Gainsbourg of the designer. “I really followed him during his time at Balenciaga and the gap [between Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton] was painful. He was really missing – it seemed like he was gone for ages.”
During that hiatus, Gainsbourg made her own inroads into fashion design, collaborating on a capsule collection with LA-based denim label Current/Elliott, which is available at NET-A-PORTER later this month. “The proposition was perfect, as I have a real love of denim,” says the French-Anglo actress. “I went to LA to meet the owner, Serge [Azria], with bags of ideas. I wanted to do panties, socks and shoes and he had to narrow me down, so we started with a few jeans and jackets I really liked.”
Gainsbourg grants that she was “selfish” in the process: the jeans and cords are long-legged and slim-hipped (just like her), while the leather and lumber-style jackets have a tomboyish appeal (just like her). There’s a lot to like in the 40-piece line and, with the partnership in place for another three seasons, she can’t wait to get the spring/summer 2015 collection underway. “When you do a film, you talk about your work and I’m always happy to say I’m not satisfied,” she says. “It’s the same thing in fashion – you have to try to do better with each collection.”
Considering her polymath talents – actress, singer, nascent designer, mother of three – Gainsbourg is decidedly easygoing. “With my work, it’s almost as though I have no resistance. I like doing things spontaneously – it makes me confident in the idea of whatever will happen will happen, rather than to try and make things happen. Maybe I’m too relaxed concerning work; I prefer other people being in control. I like being able to be in the moment. I don’t want that aggressive attitude you need to have today. In every job, it seems you have to believe in yourself, give a message, be very positive. Maybe I am very positive deep down but I don’t like giving this message... I don’t know why,” she finishes with a quizzical smile.
Gainsbourg is the daughter of one of fashion and music’s most celebrated couples – French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg and British model and actress Jane Birkin – and she grew up in the public eye, her every move watched and critiqued. It is perhaps because of this scrutiny that she remains a disinclined star, and yet Gainsbourg regularly finds herself in attention-grabbing, demanding acting roles that push her to the emotional edge.
This year, she excelled in revealing the complex motivations of a character addicted to loveless sex in Nymphomaniac, directed by Danish auteur Lars von Trier. Having worked previously with von Trier in 2011, playing Kirsten Dunst’s controlling older sister in end-of-the-world drama Melancholia, and a grieving mother who self-mutilates in the 2009 horror Antichrist, Gainsbourg knew Nymphomaniac would be a challenge. “He’s very demanding,” she says of von Trier, “but he does not want you to suffer for the sake of the film; you shoot short but intense days. He’s a real genius.
What’s interesting is that he pushes you in one direction and then pushes you in another, so you are constantly searching and never quite sure of what you are doing. I felt unbalanced and quite troubled during [Nymphomaniac].”
With provocative images of Gainsbourg pasted larger-than-life on billboards and on the internet to promote the controversial film, her role surely raised a few tricky questions with her children. “We were able to talk, able to joke,” says Gainsbourg. “When I was small, it was [other] parents who maybe told their children how shocking my parents were, whereas now, via the internet, news travels directly. Maybe I’m being naive and in ten years my children will tell me how terrible their childhoods were because of me, but I don’t think that’s the worst thing I will have done as a mother. It’s film, it’s fiction and I would do it again.”
Gainsbourg has had first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a child at the center of controversy: aged 13, she famously sang a duet with her father called Lemon Incest, which reached the No.2 spot in France’s music charts in 1985. “Children were nasty but I did not care that much,” she says. “You create a distance, protect yourself and things don’t wound you.”
After the intensity of her acting roles, it’s little wonder Gainsbourg turns to her family for solace. She and her partner of 23 years, French-Israeli actor and director Yvan Attal, and their three children, Ben, 17, Alice, 12, and Joe, three, have until recently enjoyed a very private life in Paris. However, since December last year, when her half-sister, fashion photographer Kate Barry, fell to her death from her Paris apartment, living in the city has been difficult for Gainsbourg, who is considering relocating her family to New York.
Yet, rather like the title of her forthcoming film, Every Thing Will Be Fine, co-starring James Franco and Rachel McAdams, you somehow know that with Gainsbourg’s fearlessness and calm determination, everything will be fine. What would her younger self say to the woman she has become? “She would take the piss,” says Gainsbourg, smiling. “I think she would be quite mean, but I like being critical – that’s the way I like to function.
