Garance Doré turns personal style into necessary viewing for the industry elite and everyone else.
By Derek Blasberg
"Which do you want to hear?" asks Garance Doré. "What I would like fashion month to be like or what it’s actually like?" The illustrator and photographer's eponymous blog is a must-read for fashion's elite and fanatics alike, thus making this self-made style maven an authority on the four-plus-week biannual ritual that is the New-York-London-Milan-Paris collections circuit.
Doré, 35, starts with the best of intentions. "[The plan] is always the same: Get really prepared for
Fashion Week, do all my shopping, and do a really smart job packing," she says.
"Then, during the shows, I finish my work early in the evening and wake up every morning and go swimming, just like Anna Dello Russo." She's referring to the fanatically organized fashion editor, famed for her rigorous diet and workout schedule and her impeccable wardrobe.
But to Doré's dismay, what actually happens is a different story. Her next post, like those of most Fashion Week bloggers, depends on endless hours of camping out at the right time and spot. And so her packing tends to be rushed, her outfits thrown together, and her sleep hours abbreviated. "I always arrive exhausted. Since I will be out of the office for a month, I have to be all caught up." She sighs. "And then I don't have time to shop, prepare, and I end up throwing everything in a case and going to the airport."
In short, while she’s been heralded for her own quirky French style by fellow bloggers and editors, she doesn't see herself appearing as tucked and specific as some of the ladies she captures. We beg to differ. She prefers Céline for "its understated chic. It’s elegant to see a woman who feels good and comfortable and chic. I loved the Céline clogs because they were a little bit heavy, but you could run around in them." Being able to run around is of the utmost importance to her. "The recession made clothes wearable and buyable, which is true prêt-à- porter. There are now designs for a real woman who works. I am like that. I am a working woman, and I love that there is a fashion that understands me."
Yet for as many times as the camera is turned on her, Doré still views herself as an outsider. "It's my goal to look like those girls who are so put together, but I have to go home and update my blog," she says. Of course, she isn't an outsider, but she’s maintained an approach to fashion that's unjaded and honest and therefore eminently relatable. Pair that with a sixth sense for personal style—both her own and that of others—and her intimate pictures accompanied by musings on the appropriateness of short shorts or the beauty of a white shirt become absolutely essential.
Born and raised in Corsica, Doré grew up with dreams of illustrating for Disney. Her first job was as a film publicist, but she eventually ditched that to seek out small illustrative commissions from magazines. Still, even that proved too restrictive, and she craved communication with people looking at her work.
Et voilà, the perfect solution: a blog.
Garancedore.fr is now four years old, nearly ancient in Internet years. "I'm a first-generation blogger," she says. She initially posted her illustrations and welcomed reader comments. While her blogger status now seems enviably prescient, at the time she wasn’t particularly proud of it. "I didn't tell anybody. I thought having a blog was not cool," she says. “Four years ago, to have a blog meant you had no life.” Now it receives 70,000 hits per day, many of those by the very women she photographs, hoping they made the cut. Her entrée into the fashion world “happened very organically,” she explains. She had always been intrigued by what was happening on the streets. (“This is my office,” she says at one point, gesturing toward the New York street on which we’re standing.)
She developed her eye for street fashion in Paris and was duly impressed when she first saw the fashion-show crowds. That led to experimenting with photography, namely snaps of chic editors she took outside shows. "There is this fascination about the fashion industry, and you see all these beautiful things," she says. "And then you realize, 'Fashion Week is happening next door. You can go look!' "
So she huddled with a then-small group of other street-style photographers, like Jak & Jil’s Tommy Ton and the Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman. If Doré is first generation, Schuman is the style-blog godfather. In fact, Doré has been dating Schuman for two years and says he is “almost like my editor in chief.”
Even though the bloggers are all pointing their cameras in the relative same direction, the outcomes are different, she maintains. “We all shoot things in different ways,” she insists. “But if both Scott and I have a good picture of the same girl, we’ll both post it. We share some readers, and some readers aren’t the same.”
But all would agree that being a blogger is both liberating and not. “When you start, you realize how much freedom you have and how much of a pleasure it is to work on. It becomes addictive,” Doré says. “I am absolutely free with my blog and my life, but you have to be regimented, especially during Fashion Week.”
Every morning, the first thing she does is get on the computer. “I post early. As a reader, I go to the Internet in the morning.” After that, she can be seen at every important show or event on the schedule. She is invited to the many nightly Fashion Week parties but rarely attends. “That’s a decision I had to make early: If I want to keep my blog updated, I have to go home, edit my pictures, and then go to bed to wake up again,” she explains.
Some days, Fashion Week or not, she is pounding the pavement with her camera, and other days she’s in front of her computer for hours on end. (The day before we meet at the Mercer hotel for a glass of iced tea, she worked on her site from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m.)
While some people may think that a blog is a career jumping-off point—which Doré did intend when she started hers—the site has remained the source of her inspiration and worth nearly every waking hour of her day. But that’s not to say she hasn’t extended her reach beyond the Web. Personal style is fashion’s toptrading currency of the moment. Bloggers are being sought out by major labels, department stores, and designers. Being at the top of the street-style heap has brought Doré commissions like shooting Love Moschino’s Fall 2010 ad campaign and Club Monaco’s latest look book. Nevertheless, she remains a dedicated blogeuse at heart. “It is my focus, my vision, and a very important expression of myself,” she says. “My blog is the center of my life.”
