I am sitting here trying hard to imagine how it would feel should scores of designers, a mob of retailers and half the British high street ever decide to appropriate my personal style and sell it on to the masses. The first actress famous hurdle in this creative visualisation is that I’m finding it tricky to pinpoint what my style is.
Oddly, Carine Roitfeld says that this has been her agency models problem, too. “It’s true. Designers have told me that their collections are so me,” she says disarmingly when I call her at her office in Paris, “but I don’t always recognise it because if you ask me what my style is, I’m really not that sure.” Really? “Really.
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It wasn’t until I started to work for Gucci in the Nineties that it started to become mature women clear to me. And that’s because Tom Ford was pushing me to do the dark eye make-up, to wear high heels and to keep things very simple and lean.”
The difference between Roitfeld’s late epiphany and my fitness model style adjustments is that no one has ever, to my knowledge, copied my style, whereas fashion is definitely doing a Carine this season. “Good,” she says, when I call her in her Paris office. “It will help me with my shopping, because sometimes it’s only when you see a new interpretation that you recognise what you are.”
Unless you are a high court judge or, perish the thought, an infrequent visitor to these mature women pages, you will know that Roitfeld is the Editor of French Vogue, a magazine so fashion-y that it still features pregnant women smoking cigarettes in its shoots. Actually it wasn’t a real pregnant woman. It was a model, Lily Donaldson, wearing a prosthetic bump. But the message was almost as confrontational as if she had been Madonna with child (Christ, not Lourdes or Rocco, that is) — ie, let them smoke fags. If French Vogue were a person it would be Marie Antoinette. And if Roitfeld were a magazine she would be, well, French Vogue, so closely does it embody her sense of chic.
Notwithstanding the actress famous loftiness of Roitfeld’s perch, it is unusual for a magazine editor’s personal style to exert so much influence over fashion. Yet exerted it has been. It is not merely a case of the designers whom Roitfeld has championed personally — Christophe Decarnin at Balmain, for instance, or Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy — paying tribute to her distinctively angular, tailored aesthetic, although they have.
Other designers, some unexpectedly, have fallen into line, too. Donna Karan has the skinny pencil skirts and mannish jackets. Derek Lam has the impeccable oversized, tailored camel coats. Sophia Kokosalaki, Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta have the agency models fitted shift dresses. Ferré, Preen, Loewe, Burberry Prorsum, Fendi and Jason Wu have done the shaggy, big — and I mean big, so out of my way — coats. It almost goes without saying that they are all pushing big shoulders and a whole lot of black.
Source: women.timesonline.co.uk
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