August 27, 2006
The Talk
Babeth’s Feast
By
CATHY HORYN
The French fashion editor Elisabeth Djian, who goes by the more wholesome-sounding Babeth, can often be found sitting, arms crossed, in the front row. She has the intimidating look of a French madam, heightened by stiletto booties, a wink of a black bra and a laugh as free as salt. There’s a knowing quality about her without an eagerness to reveal herself. I once asked Djian what her life was like in the 1980’s when, as the fashion director of the influential little magazine Jill, she captured, and created, the ultrafeminine look of that era. Her answer sailed as cleanly as an arrow over my bow. “Lovers,” she said.
Today Djian is the editor in chief of Numéro, a magazine she started in 1998 as a secular alternative to Paris Vogue. There is no feeling that high art is being practiced in her pages; on the other hand, the list of photographers to whom she has given a creative home, like the camp colorists Mert and Marcus, is long. “You have freedom with Babeth,” said
Karl Lagerfeld, who shoots the couture for Numéro. Djian likes to say she is interested only in the fashion of today, and when we met over lunch, she cringed as I brought out several dog-eared copies of Jill. “Oh, I can’t look at them anymore,” she said.
Many other people can’t stop looking at Jill. Only 11 issues were produced between 1983 and October 1985, when it folded, but from its inception the magazine seemed to find people who spoke the same language.
Marc Jacobs has made reference to Jill in at least one Louis Vuitton show, and Hedi Slimane is a fan as well. This reverence for a magazine that died just as the decade was warming up is not surprising. In their Alaïas and Montanas, the women in Jill look as painted and dolled up as the next, but they’re not the Valkyries you typically associate with the era. They’re still real-looking, their innocence years from truculent self-awareness.
And let’s face it: being in Paris, the girls in Jill had other concerns. They had lovers. They had piles of Gitanes to inhale at Les Bains Douches. The October/November 1985 issue practically reads like a Sorbonne humanities survey and features, along with gloomy fashion spreads dedicated to Poe and Hardy, a series of Peter Lindbergh photographs based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. What is striking about all this Frenchness is that Jill actually had good reason to pay scant attention to the scene in Milan or London. With the rise of new stars like Azzedine Alaïa, Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, and the arrival of the Japanese avant-garde, Paris was again the creative center of fashion. Not only did Jill celebrate that idea, but it also openly preferred the new leadership. Hence, there is hardly any mention of Dior or Saint Laurent.
Lagerfeld, then in the process of reviving Chanel, said of Jill: “It had a spirit, more than a style, that was in fashion.” Romanticism had replaced punk; girls were again wearing hats and gloves, though now with an eye toward sex appeal. Club life set the trends, and the scarcity of boutiques — the explosion of designer shops was still a decade away — encouraged people to invent their own looks. As for the editors and photographers who worked on the magazines, they took it for granted that there was little money to pay for shoots, to say nothing of their fees. “I still wonder how we did all this stuff,” said the photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who contributed to Jill (and who is also a frequent contributor to T). “It’s not like today. There were no cellphones, no agents, and the modeling agencies were not developed the way they are now.” Models often collected in the cafes, and that’s where Mondino found the girls he needed. “We were almost picking them in the street,” he said.
Much of Jill’s spirit flowed from one source: Babeth Djian. It is probably a measure of her imaginative powers that Djian is nothing like the person she appears to be: “I might look like I’m a party girl, but I never went out,” said Djian, who lives with her husband and their teenage daughter in the Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine and likes to escape on weekends to their country house in Normandy. “I’m the most classic person, in a way.” The daughter of a lawyer, Djian spent her childhood in Morocco, and this exotic connection may explain, as Mondino suggested, the magazine’s embrace of fantasy. It was Djian who proposed the Egyptian shoot, asking designers like Gaultier to make special garments that fulfilled her romantic vision. “It’s all about feelings with Babeth,” Mondino said. The stylist George Cortina, who works occasionally on Numéro shoots, said: “If you call her with an idea, she’s very immediate. She’ll say: ‘J’adore. Do it.”’
To please her father, Djian studied law in Paris, but at 24 she decided she wanted to do something in fashion and went to school at Studio Berçot. After that she started work at French Elle, then the cutting-edge magazine among editors and stylists. A year later she became the fashion director at Jill, whose backer ran a local modeling agency. “His idea, of course, was to use all his models,” Djian said with a shrug. “But I didn’t do that, and he didn’t mind.” She doesn’t know how the name came about, and since the magazine had a minuscule budget, it helped that she was living in her grandmother’s apartment. “I don’t think Jill even had any advertisers,” Lagerfeld told me.
That’s not far from the truth, confirmed Djian in a tone that suggests nobody thought this was a big deal. “When people called me to put ads in the magazine, I didn’t even answer — that’s the way we did it,” she said, adding: “We were all young. We were doing pictures in the apartment of my grandmother. Very innocent. It was all done in a very innocent way.”
Jill published some of Ellen von Unwerth’s first fashion pictures (a display of legs, polka dots and sexual tension), and there were other photographers and illustrators whose names have slipped into obscurity. A year after Jill closed, The Face, in a special Paris issue, acknowledged Djian’s farsighted influence. Two years later, Carla Sozzani, eager to break the grip of big-name designers in Milan, offered a revamped Italian Elle that conspicuously favored new talent and softer, more romantic layouts. (Too conspicuously, powerful advertisers thought; Sozzani was fired after three issues.)
For better or worse, the fashion industry was emerging in its current guise. Djian, for her part, insisted that nothing has changed. She still feels at liberty to follow her instincts. Perhaps, but nothing beats creative freedom when it is the sole consolation for being young and idealistic. That is a little magazine’s scrappy legacy.
and I dont remember the Isabeli one but Wow she looks hot!!!
