Charlotte Gainsbourg

[Luella]

There's an interview about fashion in the newspaper WELT am Sonntag, July 16/2006

Link:
http://www.wams.de/data/2006/07/16/958477.html

rough translation:

Welt am Sonntag: What does fashion mean to you?
Charlotte Gainsbourg: To be honest I'm no fashion icon.
I don't care for the latest trends. I almost never go to
fashion shows. Most of the time I wear casual stuff like
jeans and sneakers because I feel comfortable in them.

But still you modeled for Gérard Darel.
When I got the offer three years ago I needed money -
otherwise I would have had to sell my father's house.
And I was flattered that Darel wanted me to be the
follower of beautiful women like Stephanie Seymour or
Nastassja Kinski.

And how did it feel to be a model?
Surprisingly it felt natural. I didn't have to play a part,
the campaign was made for me. I wore a trenchcoat or
shirts - these outfits were 100% Charlotte. And I enjoyed
working with great photographers like Peter Lindbergh and
Mario Testino.

Did you let them shoot you in a dress?
No, I'm too androgynous for that, I have no cleavage
and my hips are too small. I only once let me talk into
wearing a dress by my favourite designer Nicolas Ghesquière
for a public appearance. His silhouette flatters my body
because Nicolas designs elegant clothes for women that have
a boyish figure.

Do you think that women who don't have curves have
no sex-appeal?
No, just look at Kate Moss! For me she embodies the sex symbol
of the 21th Century: she's petite but strong at the same time.
Kate's unique, she has a special vibe in every picture.

Would you want to be like Kate Moss?
Nobody can imitate this woman. I wish I had her confidence.
Even as a teenager she knew exactly what she wanted. That
can't be said about me. When I was 15 or 16 years old I would
copy other people's style most of the time. I wore my mom's
jeans and t-shirts or I would search for 40's style skirts, like the
ones that I wore in the movie "The Little Thief".

Did you experiment a lot back then?
You could say that. Even today I often think: It's boring to
always look the same, I should try something new. But then
I go back to my comfortable, unpretentious style because I
hate changes.

Your simplicity is due to whom?
My mother. I often heard her say "oh my God, my make up in the
60's was so over the top!" In the 70's and 80's she wore only
casual clothes because she felt more comfortable in them. Today
she isn't that casual anymore, she's very careful with what she
wears.

The Birkin Bag and her made fashion history.
That Hermès bag and my mother have been inseperable to me
for 20 years. Maybe that's why I never wanted to have one. I
think it would be wrong if I was walking around with one, it just
belongs to my mother.

And what to you associate with your father?
He is the reason why I don't find these blonde surfer types attractive.
I prefer guys that are a bit careless and have a beard, they remind me
of my father.

Then your partner Yvan Attal corresponds with your beauty
ideal quite well.
He refuses to let me give him any fashion advice. I wish he would just
get rid of his horrible old jeans and t-shirts (laughs).

You've been a couple for 15 years. Why did you never get married?
I don't believe in marriage. We're happy and we have two children.
I think getting married would ruin that. Before my parents met they had
horrible marriages. That's why they never tied the knot. I suppose this
had an influence on me.

Do you consider your parents role models?
I always compare myself to them and have to remind myself that I'm
an independent person. I can't be living in the shadows of Serge Gainsbourg
and Jane Birkin.

How important is family to you?
Very important. I don't like to go out. Most of the time I'm home with
my children Ben and Alice. Or I meet with my mother and my half-sisters
Kate and Lou.

Kate Berry is a photographer, Lou is a model. Do you and your sisters
talk about fashion?
Of course. I discovered Helmut Lang, Marni and Dries van Noten because
of Kate. And Lou is an excentric, who isn't afraid to wear whatever she wants to.

Your English grandmother was very elegant.
She lived in Chelsea and was just as glamorous as a Hollywood star. I wish
I had inherited her wardrobe but after she died I didn't dare to search through her closet.

Your paternal grandmother lived in Russia.
When I met her she was already very old. She was a Russian mommy,
melancholic and kind-hearted. Most of the time she wore a necklace my
father had given to her with a Star of David pendant.

Did your father give you jewelry too?
He and I would always go to Cartier together and he told me to pick
anything I wanted which I always refused. He never understood why
I didn't share his passion for jewelry. Eventually he had a necklace with
a Star of David pendant custom-made for me. I loved it very much.

Do you still have it?
No, I gave it to my father when he was buried and took his bracelet
with a Star of David pendant instead. I wore it quite often until I stopped
wearing jewelry completely.

And today you don't wear jewelry at all?
No. Yvan gave me a watch recently. I love it, for me it's a part of my
body. And I have necklace with a simple diamond that director Claude
Berry gave to me before we started to shoot a movie.

Why do you often wear your own clothes on the set?
Well, when we shot "My Wife Is An Actress" it made sense because I
played myself. And when I prepared for my new movie "Science of Sleep"
I saw this sweater that I liked and I thought that it would be great for
my character. I play Stéphanie a woman that's not vain at all. That's why
I could easily identify with her character.

Do you prefer women who aren't vain to those who are always
perfectly styled?
Not at all. I admire Audrey Hepburn. She embodies the perfect
elegance in my opinion: she's gracile like a dancer and very stylish,
a delicate woman with a great personality.

 

[1karina1]

Thanks Luella for that interview. I love how upfront she is about why she said yes to the Darel campaign.

 

[jetsetandtrash]

shes so amazing, just completely unpretencious and unaware about her fashion taste and status as an icon,

 

[sosneha]

#321 thanks luella for posting article

 

[GBArt]

... she's gracile like a dancer and very stylish, a delicate woman with a great personality.

Sounds like a perfect self-description to me.

GB

 

[MARLOWE TIGER]

Luella,Thank you for translating this interview.
Charlotte sounds so charming and humble.

 

[cheiby11]

she's divine!

 

[wheneveriwakeup]

she truly has a joie de vivre. I adore her face and everything she stands for. So chic and understated. American actresses should take notes on these lovely french ladies.

I can't wait for The Science of Sleep either. She, Gael and Michel

 

[GBArt]

she truly has a joie de vivre. I adore her face and everything she stands for. So chic and understated.

Yes, she is amazing.

 

[spinster]

I also thank Luella for translating that article. I love Charlotte but have not been able to read many articles on her. They're always either in French or Japanese!

I didn't know she and Yvan never married. I know she actually says this in the interview, but is it really true?

 

[1karina1]

Looks like Charlotte's in this week's French Elle!

Can't wait to see more!

 

[boubou]

Elle.fr

 

[boubou]

From charlotteweb :

 

[MARLOWE TIGER]

With the help of close friend Nicolas Guesquière (designer of Balenciaga),Charlotte's decided to change her style : She's gone for a pair (shes actually bought a couple of the same style !) of wax faded black Notify (its a french brand,Linda Evangelista is crazy about them.Theres even a style that was named after her),and a jacket designed by Nicolas (he used to be Jean-Paul Gaultier assistant) for Balenciaga.
This is the same jacket she wore on the cover of ELLE,only this one is jet black.She said it seemed to have been made fo her.
Enjoy !

P.S : Let me know what you think of her new look...
source:starface

 

[MARLOWE TIGER]

1karina1 and Boubou ,thx for posting this new pic of Charlotte.
I guess shes started to promote her new LP (5.55),since its coming out at the end of august...which means we might see her a lot in the mags !.. I cant wait !

 

[1karina1]

She can pull off any look. Thanks for the pics marlowe tiger

 

[GBArt]

P.S : Let me know what you think of her new look...

It's awesome. Especially the boots.B)

GB

 

[Estella*]

here's what's inside french elle, the photographer is mondino...

scans by me

 

[1karina1]

Here's a beuatiful editorial from Double magazine. Don't think these have been posted before.

www.bird-production.com








Incredible!

 

[1karina1]

Here's an interview of Charlotte's from today's Sunday Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk)


Ducking and diving through the traffic towards the appointed meeting place, the taxi passes Rue de Verneuil. This is the Paris street where Charlotte Gainsbourg’s father, Serge, lived, and in which, in 1986, he devised his daughter’s debut album, Charlotte For Ever. She was already two years into her film career by then, with three roles and a César award to her name. She was just 15.
Twenty years later, she is — with efficiency and good grace, but little enthusiasm — promoting her return to the recording studio. It has resulted in her superbly dark and murky new album, 5:55, which is as intriguingly offbeat as her films. Ensconced in the boutique Rue du Bac hotel she uses as a base for what she clearly regards as an ordeal, Gainsbourg sits across the table with a cup of tea and an expression that suggests someone poised at the crease, waiting for a tricky delivery. You can see at once the watchfulness and deceptive passiveness she has brought to many of her film roles. (Her performance this year in Dominik Moll’s psychodrama Lemming was a strong example.) “I did interviews for my first films when I was 14,” she says, “and it was awful. I hated having to answer questions. People wanted to get too intimate, so I put up a barrier from the beginning.”

She talks like this a lot, in sentences abounding with the precise vowel sounds of her mother, Jane Birkin, yet with the higgledy-piggledy grammar that betrays the fact she has lived in France all her life. It seems refreshingly like unedited candour at first; later, you begin to appreciate the subtlety and firmness of her approach, how fleet of foot she is. In fairness, she’s probably being both artful and artless. Ask her if she’s having to learn to consider herself as a singer too, now, and she says: “No, but it took me a very long time even being able to accept saying that I feel like I am an actress, because I always felt like an imposter. So in the same way, no, I don’t feel like a singer.” This doesn’t, she says, concern her in the least.

Gainsbourg isn’t entirely insouciant. She flew to America when she was seven months pregnant with her second child to audition for the movie 21 Grams; filming began only weeks after her daughter was born. And she admits to incubating the idea of a return to music-making some time before the French electro-pop duo Air contacted her with the same idea. Nonetheless, it sounds like a fraught experience, with the producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Paul McCartney) having to cajole performances out of her.

“I was so shy,” she says. “It was difficult to see how I would get there, because my voice was shaky and I didn’t have any breath. We tried all sorts of things to make me a little freer. Drinking: that didn’t work. Hiding behind a sheet: that worked. Anything to make me a bit more comfortable.” Part of you wants to say “Oh, get on with it” when you hear this. Her remark several years ago — “I have no imagination: for the piano (she is an accomplished musician), I can’t improvise; for acting, I need a director and a text; all I do is follow other people’s ideas” — can elicit a similar response. Yet Gainsbourg’s shyness is not of the attention-seeking, “come-and-get-me” variety you often encounter in actors and singers. Rather, it seems to spring — small wonder — from a childhood spent in the shadow of at least one, and possibly two, extremely needy parents (Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus was only the start of it), and under a spotlight whose glare arguably deprived her of anything approaching a normal growth trajectory.

It’s a tribute to her, then, that she is so entirely unfinished, unpolished, even. There are few niceties. She answers unwelcome inquiries with a rebarbative “Why?”, a wary, drawn-out “Right” or sometimes simply “No, no, no”. She has an infectious, conspiratorial laugh, though it is as often a portent of evasive tactics as it is a sign of amusement.

Gainsbourg has often referred, without any apparent self-pity, to a lack of friends in her life. “But it’s the way I am,” she says. “People have friends since their childhood. Well, I changed school every year.” She pauses. “In order, maybe, not to ever have friends. I don’t know.” She comes back to this later, almost as if she’s annoyed that some threads of ambiguity have been left trailing. “From the very beginning,” she recalls, “when I was quite small, I protected myself. I don’t feel I had a tough childhood, although I remember people saying awful things about my parents.

It was a bit shocking, what they did, how they appeared and all that. So, of course, I shut myself off, and people didn’t, they couldn’t...” She leaves another thread hanging. Didn’t try to be her friend, or couldn’t because she stopped them? She looks as if she’s swallowing a hot potato. “Yeah,” she stonewalls, with finality.

Growing up in France, Gainsbourg witnessed the scandal that her father’s alcohol-fuelled activities attracted (not least his duet with his then 13-year-old daughter on the song Lemon Incest, with an accompanying video that showed them cavorting, semi-clothed, on a bed). But this was balanced by a respect for his genius for les chansons français that bordered on adulation, and certainly skimmed over some of his excesses. British attitudes were far more hostile — shaped, in part, by a feeling that this bug-eyed French toad had somehow corrupted the utterly English, and apparently irreproachable, Birkin, but also by a sense that Gainsbourg was all shock tactics and no depth.

Somewhere in the middle was probably right. But what the Brits consequently missed was Serge’s own innate shyness behind the mask of mayhem. Accordingly, we’ve found it harder to comprehend the same trait in his daughter. When I raise this, a sudden froideur descends upon the room. “I try not to refer to him too much,” she whispers. “For my own sake.” She has spent years attempting to secure funding to turn her father’s house into a museum, a campaign that is, at last, showing signs of bearing fruit. But she and her boyfriend of 15 years, the actor and director Yvan Attal, have recently talked about a move abroad. “It’s a wish I really have,” she says with unusual force. “Just to move.”

Discussing how French, or how English, she feels, she answers, revealingly: “The English was really my mother, it was never me. Because, being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French. I can see what my mother gave me, what she made me listen to or see — very English things, like Morecambe and Wise. But with the English, I’m not really comfortable.”

On 5:55, the lyrics — most of them in English, and chiefly written by the former Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker — provide plenty of scope for forensic biographical sifting. Gainsbourg attempted to write some herself, but settled for discussing the subject matter with Cocker. The song Little Monsters addresses playground taunts; Beauty Mark includes the line “Your leading lady needs direction”. And the key track, Everything I Cannot See, finds Gainsbourg eschewing the breathy mooching of much of the rest of the album in favour of a vocal stridency that, tellingly, features her most clipped, Birkinesque delivery. Forced to battle against an anarchically discordant piano part, she sounds, at last, like a singer rather than a hoarse whisperer. “I’m very proud of it,” she says with rare gusto. “It’s stupid to say this, but it’s like violent scenes in films, where you just forget, you have to dive in. That was the same. I just had to dive in, and it would be all right. Or not.”

Musically, the album — which also contains contributions from the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and Beck’s father, the string arranger David Campbell — is awash with noirish sound devices, giving off a strong air of illicitness and assumed identity of which Gainsbourg’s father would surely have approved. More a short-let tenancy than total artistic immersion, Gainsbourg’s occupancy of 5:55 is captivating but tantalising. Briefly, she’s presented as a recording artist. Next month, her role in Michel Gondry’s new film, The Science of Sleep, will position her once more as an actor. As so often with her, what she seems to be holding back is as thought-provoking as what she delivers, if not more so. You wonder how proud she is of the album, how much other people’s reactions will colour her own estimation of what she has created. “That doesn’t bother me,” she says firmly. As a self-protective mantra, it’s a strong statement. Yet, even now, she sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself that it’s true.