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Giorgio Armani receives Légion d’Honneur

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is ready for a makeover a la Richard Gere in “American Gigolo.” Or so he joked to the costumer of that landmark film, Giorgio Armani, moments before he decorated the Italian designer as an Officer of the Legion of Honor at the Elysee Palace in Paris Thursday. The event, at the tail end of couture week, also saw Italian actress Claudia Cardinale elevated to the level of Commander. In a speech packed with one-liners that had the crowd roaring with laughter, Sarkozy played up his honorees’ origins. “As you know, I’m rather close to Italians,” he said, alluding to his new wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who did not attend the ceremony. “You are two individuals with great merit,” he continued, lauding Armani’s capability “of speaking to everyone” with his diverse designs and products that run the gamut from couture to pastries.

Actress Helen Mirren bowed before Armani in offering her congratulations. “The first time I had a posh dress, it was Armani,” she related earlier, also recalling how he did the costumes for her 1990 film “The Comfort of Strangers.” Mirren, who made a rare couture week appearance, recited the inscription she penned in the guest book at the Ritz: “I feel like Cinderella who got to stay in the palace without having to marry the boring prince.” Then she hastened to add: “I’m not referring to any British prince incidentally.” Carla Fendi, Silvia Venturini Fendi, Nathalie Rykiel, Lady Helen Taylor, Eugenia Silva and Tina Turner were among the notables who gathered in the sunlit Jardin d’Hiver for the ceremony. Turner accessorized her sparkling green jumpsuit with her own Legion of Honor medallion. “I’ve got my little shiny one,” she said with a laugh, patting the prize. But soon she’ll be rigged up with a microphone, with a concert tour kicking off in America this October and next January in Europe.

WWD

Lagerfeld The Life Saver

KARL LAGERFELD can make anything look chic - apparently, even a fluorescent yellow vest.

Such is his sartorial power, road safety chiefs in France have chosen the designer as the face of their latest campaign to encourage drivers to wear light-reflecting clothing when travelling at night.

Clad in his trademark dark glasses, suit and bowtie with a yellow vest, Lagerfeld cuts a dashing figure on a dark road in the poster, which carries the tagline: “It’s yellow, it’s ugly, it doesn’t go with anything, but it could save your life”.

Leisa Barnett

Mary-Louise Parker on High

On a recent Sunday evening a snaking single-file line of finely dressed, thirty-something men formed at the box office of the Playwrights Horizons Theater on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. Freshly coiffed and visibly anxious, the gentlemen resembled suitors waiting their turns to court a princess. In truth, they simply hoped to score tickets to a sold-out play that, frankly, wasn’t even all that good.

The first man in line approached the ticket agent unsurely. “I just wanted to check again to make sure my name hasn’t been called,” he said. “Where should I stand to wait?”

The next guy, his hair gelled and his suit pressed, asked, “Can you make sure I’m on the list?” A forlorn-looking man standing outside simply mumbled over and over, “I need a ticket, I need a ticket.” These men were not here because they wanted to see Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a slightly funny play about, as one might suspect, a woman who answers a dead man’s cell phone. No, these men were here for Mary-Louise Parker.

What explains the suddenly ascending sex appeal of the 43-year-old actress who, until recently, was best known for her role in the 1991 chick-flick Fried Green Tomatoes? How did the star of such other family-friendly fare as Boys on the Side and The West Wing transform into one of the nation’s more coveted sexpots, luring scores of men to see an otherwise unremarkable play? Why does Googling “Mary-Louise Parker” and “MILF” pull up 79,100 hits?

Parker calls it sheer dumb luck. She didn’t set out to become a much-beloved sex symbol, she says, it just happened. Her career-changing decision to take a role on Showtime’s Weeds as a housewife-turned-pot-dealer, who somehow always seems to end up splayed across a desk in a lacy bra and black panties, was not strategic. “I always took the best thing that was offered to me,” says Parker.

In person, Parker resembles her TV, movie and theater characters, only more so. The sheen of her signature alabaster skin is brighter, the bulge of her breasts more prominent. On this afternoon, she’s decked out in a black Gucci jacket, black Prada boots, a gray knit dress by Mon Petit Oiseau and knee-high stockings that call out, ‘Hey, I dare you to try to avoid staring at my thighs.’ Her dapper assistant, Jeff, hovers inconspicuously one table away. Parker casually uses a large vocabulary, slipping in words such as “disquieting” when something much less expressive would suffice. She also crinkles her nose a lot, like a genie — sometimes it’s her way of emphasizing a point, sometimes it’s her way of saying, ‘This is a boring, awkward moment.’ And like her character on Weeds, she affects a big-eyed, girlishly surprised expression when something not so surprising transpires — for example, a reporter tells her he doesn’t read much fiction. It’s kind of adorable and makes you want to surprise her.

“I don’t have something mapped out,” Parker says. “A lot of people think, ‘I want to do this kind of movie and this kind of movie so I can achieve this.’ I don’t think in that sense. I take jobs. I gained more success as I got older.”

Indeed, the twin pillars of Parker’s suddenly booming fame — her commercial and critical success, as well as her place alongside the uni-name starlets in the tabloids — trace their roots back to a single, relatively recent and perhaps unlikely event: becoming a mother. Parker’s 2003 pregnancy may be famous for generating some of the more tawdry headlines in recent memory, but it is more notable for bringing the sexy back to motherhood.

This is not to say that Mary-Louise Parker’s career began the moment she got knocked up. In 1990, at the age of 24, Mary-Louise, as her friends do indeed call her, landed a lead role in the Off-Broadway premiere of Craig Lucas’s supernatural romance Prelude to a Kiss. Her star-turn landed her a Tony Award nomination, a number of movie roles and a romance with her co-star, Timothy Hutton.

Though Parker’s first and only love is the “journeyman, blue-collar” world of theater — “With movies it’s like, ‘What are the numbers? Did people come out to see it?’ Nothing about it is the same” — she spent most of the next decade in front of a camera. She played the abused wife in Fried Green Tomatoes, and the mobile-home momma Dianne Sway in the film adaptation of John Grisham’s The Client. You may have also seen her partnered with John Cusack in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Her most hardcore fans remember her bewigged appearance in Longtime Companion, an early, notable film about the AIDS epidemic. Her highest-profile theater gig in the 1990s was her Obie Award-winning turn in How I Learned to Drive.

Her career “snowballed,” she says, with back-to-back successes in 2001 — one on the stage, one on the small screen. First, Parker won a Tony for her starring Broadway role in Proof — the second time her acting contributed to Hollywood’s decision to adapt a play, then casting a better-known actress for her role. (Meg Ryan got the nod for Prelude to a Kiss, Gwyneth Paltrow for Proof.) Next, she won the heart of most every American male between the ages of about 20 and, say, dead, with her all-too-brief Emmy-nominated turn as the flirtatious feminist Amy Gardner on The West Wing.

Parker’s roles have had little in common, other than Parker herself. She plays a Southern-fried girl one day, the Chief of Staff to the First Lady the next. Each time, though, a bit of Parker shines through — the crinkling nose, the surprised looks, the undeniable smarts, the ineffable hotness. Parker was well on her way along the same approximate career track as maybe Joan Allen or Helen Mirren — a respectable track, to be sure, but one that would have been wholly devoid of the photo shoots and magazine covers and starring roles that have marked the last few years of Parker’s life. And then Parker got knocked up, and everything changed.

Motherhood complicated Parker’s career in ways traditional and ground breaking, predictable and novel — the changes began, however, not with her son’s birth in January 2004, but with the scandal that erupted two months earlier, which Parker famously (and understandably) refuses to discuss. Nearly every profile of Parker opens with a line about how much the obsessively private Parker hates to be interviewed. Reporters do this for two reasons: First, they hope to appear brave and to make clear why they were unable to elicit anything particularly interesting from their meeting with Parker. And then second, because it’s true.

“A lot of the people who have interviewed me have said at the end of the interview, ‘Oh, I thought that was going to be so hard, I was so scared, I was so nervous,’” Parker says. “I just did this interview with The New York Times, and it’s valid, because I did say to him I didn’t want to do the interview, and now I wish I hadn’t, because he made it all about that, when we went on to talk for almost two hours, and we had a nice talk and we were laughing and I know all about his life.”

As much as it pains all of us — particularly Parker — the incident that brought Parker’s private life so much undesired attention (”Mary-Louise Parker” and “scandal”: 489,000 hits), one can hardly make sense of her distinctive career, or her pained relationship with the press, without it.

In late 2003, when Parker was seven months pregnant with the fetus that would soon become the uncommonly cute William Atticus Parker, Parker’s longtime partner, the heartthrob Billy Crudup, left her for a younger, blonder woman — My So-Called Life’s Claire Danes. Crudup instantly became one of Manhattan’s more reviled villains for his apparent lack of gallantry; Parker became a folk hero for her astonishing stores of resilience. Though neither Parker nor Crudup has ever publicly discussed the specific circumstances, one clue suggests that the separation may not have been as hostile as many believe: Parker still gave their son, William, his father’s name.

Ironically and Oedipally though not coincidentally, motherhood has transformed Parker into a pinup girl. Her naked rump can be found in the pages of Esquire, her bare torso in ads for Weeds. And thanks in part to a rap by Weeds guest-star Snoop Dogg, Parker is also now perhaps the world’s most famous MILF (if you have to look it up, you probably shouldn’t)

.

Parker began filming Weeds, which enters its fourth season in June, about a year after William’s birth. Parker plays Nancy Botwin, a suburban soccer mom who turns to selling — you guessed it weed — after her husband dies while out for a jog. The show is notable on many counts. It ranks as the first prime-time (cable) show to portray pot the way that millions of Americans perceive it — not that big of a deal. It has also further established the idea that smart television can in fact gain an audience and survive (if only on cable). And, in a nod to Freud, Weeds marks the return after an extended absence of Mother as sex symbol. In an era where many cover girls have yet to develop hips, Parker takes distinct feminist pride in having her sexy moment while standing at the precipice of middle age.

But Parker feels no need to clear up misconceptions, or voice her take on her life, as most clearly demonstrated by her total embargo on ‘The Breakup’. She disdains that so much of what already gets published is wrong. Contrary to published reports, she is not a Southerner, she says — spending the first six months of her life in South Carolina hardly qualifies her as a Dixie chick. (She’s more like a traditional military kid, with layovers everywhere from Thailand and Germany to Tennessee and Arizona.) She’s not engaged to a Weeds co-star, she says, contrary to what you might have read (”Mary-Louise Parker” and “engaged” and “Jeffrey Dean Morgan”: 37,600 hits.) Indeed, she says, she is quite single.

Parker hates that once the media fixes on a particular story, that’s the one story reporters will continue to tell, as if it’s a bad habit. She cites a Daniel Day-Lewis interview in which he claims that he could drink until the wee hours of the morning and bond with a reporter and still come out, as always: looking like an undertaker. Reporters have an attitude of, “‘this is what we already know, and let’s perpetuate it,’” she says. In her case, it’s the simple story of a Southern girl, wronged by a Hollywood Lothario, who moves on to find love with her co-star. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Therefore, already inclined to a privacy that borders on obsessive-compulsive, Parker never shares more than the little details on the edges — the candidate she favors (Obama), her current reading (a book of short stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides), her unrequited crushes (that “sexy prick” Campbell Scott). She wonders why reporters even ask. “Maybe you think I’m going to go, ‘Congratulations, you’re the one, I’m finally going to [really open up]. It’s just not going to happen — ever,” she says. “So I don’t know why people ask certain things. Because I’m never going to answer them.”

By Mark Fass for Papermag
Photographs by Marcelo Krasilcic
Styling by Christine De Lassus

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Carine Roitfeld is one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World

Carine Roitfeld
By Hedi Slimane

Carine Roitfeld was a freelance fashion editor at French Vogue and I was the newly appointed menswear designer at Yves Saint Laurent when we met in 1998. She was the first person to see my debut collection. As she did with many other designers of my generation, she was the first to support it in the press. Together with Saint Laurent and his business partner, Pierre Bergé, she helped launch my career. And as always, she did it genuinely, without any kind of speculation or personal agenda.

Carine, 53, has always been a charismatic Parisian, one of the most Parisian women I know, in every detail of her life. She has immaculate taste, and she is beyond unconventional in her thinking. With time I discovered that we shared a few principles: a preference for the “now” rather than the “new,” a preference for imperfection rather than so-called good taste and an attitude driven by intuition rather than reason. Most of all, she has an innate ability to mix street culture and society, always avoiding the caricatures that can define both worlds and always recognizing the mix of both worlds as the only catalyst of energy and creativity.

Now the editor in chief of French Vogue, she is influential almost without knowing it. By choosing influence over power, she has an effortless credibility. Her definition of fashion is clearly hedonistic, embracing fashion’s immediacy but with a broad cultural vision that puts everything in perspective. She has always been fully committed to fashion and also gracious to all. She plays by her own refreshing rules, not by the kindergarten politics that often governs the business.

No one would assume she does not know or talks without knowing. Every day, from 9 a.m., she simply acts and looks as if there is no misunderstanding about her job. She is progressive and perfectly behaved and an inspiration for fashion designers.

Slimane is the former designer for Christian Dior Homme

Sacre Bruni!

Gorgeous, Stylish, Occasionally Nude … Does Mrs. Sarkozy Matter? France’s 21st-Century Lady of State, Merger of Sex, Power, Art; ‘She Arouses Envy,’ Says Tony Judt, ‘Let ’em Eat Cheesecake!’

Until last Thursday, when a nude photograph of Carla Bruni, the 40-year-old model-turned-pop-star-turned-first lady of France, sold at Christie’s for $91,000, more than 20 times its expected price, Ms. Bruni hadn’t been the subject of much conversation among New Yorkers. But over the last week, her name popped out of pursed lips at cocktail lounges and long lunches across the city, as men and women started to catch on that a new icon of fashion, sex and sensibility—a 21st-century amalgam of Jackie O, Lady Di and J-Lo—was emerging across the Atlantic. News of the photo sale even made it onto Saturday Night Live’s weekend update.

Thanks to the Internet, the photograph—taken by Michael Comte in 1993, when Ms. Bruni was working as a model—made the rounds. Her face all wide planes, her small breasts pointing off in two directions, she stands with her hands forming a diamond over her nether regions, a sort of ironic Eve pose, but she doesn’t seem to be covering up for her own sake. Her expression—her lips are parted in a parody of innocence, her eyes are semi-frozen—says she had little need for shelter. Her skin is just the outfit she’s put on for the picture, as easy to model as a Dior suit or an Yves Saint Laurent gown. This woman has nothing to hide.

Indeed, in our own political season, when concealment, attack and counterattack are so rife, there was something Edenic about the photo of a first lady standing naked, unapologetic, challenging the viewer to choose between arousal and admiration. Because frankly, she looks great. The fact that the photo was taken 15 years ago is irrelevant, because Ms. Bruni has continued her full-frontal, forward surge of sex and power to this current day.

And while our own politicians seem to regard carnal passion as a dangerous third rail of politics—which, after all, it’s proved itself to be in the cases of men such as Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer—there is something invigorating about a first lady who told French magazine L’Express last year, “I’m monogamous occasionally, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.” Just look at any photo of her with her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy—looking at his dumbstruck, grinning, subservient mug, you can tell he can’t believe his luck. Just last October he divorced his second wife, Cécilia, after rumors of affairs on both sides, and immediately he finds himself cheek to cheek with Carla Bruni.

It’s taken the rest of us a bit longer to catch on. The widely circulated paparazzi shots last Christmas of the happy couple cavorting on an Egyptian beach were notable for the contrast of her physical perfection against his tubby, furry tummy. Their quiet February wedding made our papers without much fanfare. But even as Europe has been electrified—the British fell so deeply in love with Ms. Bruni during a recent state visit with her husband that The Daily Mail ran some 17 pictures of her, including close-ups of her hands and feet that, for some, were more erotic than the Comte photo—we’ve remained grounded, inoculated against her charms. Carla Bruni? Wasn’t she a model, a pop singer? Did she date Mick Jagger? Do a Guess campaign?

But while we were distracted by our own former first lady’s vigorous lunge for a return to the White House, Ms. Bruni stealthily installed herself as the most compelling, glamorous and refreshingly bold first lady in many a year. She’s let us know she looks great naked and looks great in clothes. She’s stayed young without chasing youth; she’s stayed sexy without shedding her dignity or her position of power. And that’s what many women, particularly New York women, want.

ON HER RECENT trip to England, much was made over Ms. Bruni’s choice of attire. Dressed head to toe in Dior by John Galliano, Ms. Bruni was described in The Guardian as “two parts Jackie O, one part Lycée girl.” Commenting on the importance of the French couple’s visit to Britain, Andrew Gimson wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “Many of us decided at once that if we were going to be seduced by anyone, we would rather be seduced by her.” Hungry for a woman who could brighten up dowdy, rainy, grannyish England, male and female members of the press swooned, comparing her also to Diana, the last woman to bring glamour to the U.K.

Former French Vogue editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck sees Ms. Bruni as little more than an extention of high-end, French consumer products that everyone wants. “Versailles was conceived as a magnificent showroom for French goods, because around 1678, Colbert said to Louis XIV: We have to prove the French do things better than anybody,’” said Ms. Buck. “In 2008, at last, a model is married to the president, which is great PR for the further global extension of French luxury brands.”

Of course, New York women posess their own kind of glamour (and plenty of Louis Vuitton handbags!). But Ms. Bruni, at 40, has more to offer us than the promise of good taste. She’s a popular sophisticate, and an intellectual exhibitionist.

As a powerful woman operating on the international stage as one half of the first family of France, Ms. Bruni begs to be compared to that other first lady, who is hoping to become our president, Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about looks; that contest would be unfair, given Ms. Bruni’s outrageous genetic gifts. The question is which of them stands as a more useful—even more modern—model of feminism, and femininity.

In America, we like our powerful women to be not too beautiful, not too brash, not too brilliant, even. They must be mothers—make that proud mothers—who wear gold jewelry, makeup done just so, and appropriate suits. (Something in red, or cobalt, is as daring a style choice as is made.) They also must admit their vulnerability as women, even if they are tough as nails. Ms. Clinton, who is whip-smart and confident in her debates with Barack Obama, has had some of her most affecting campaign moments when teary, or sentimental. These moments “humanized” her, said the press. But what is it about tears that make a woman a woman? And for some women, those tears seemed as false as so much political posturing that’s come from all sides of this presidential race. We’re constantly being manipulated.

Now, Ms. Bruni is a masterful manipulator, too. Even her ankles will seduce you! But what makes her different is her power to be both masculine and feminine in the perfect proportion, to be beautiful and bold, to lack shame completely—about her body (naturally), her intellect (she was educated at fine Swiss boarding schools), her sexuality. This woman decided she wanted to be a pop star, and became one. She’s a mom, but she’s other stuff, too. Then she decided to be the first lady of France—and she’s Italian!

Ms. Bruni proves that Americans haven’t cornered the marked on reinventing themselves. She’s done it again and again, from college girl intellectual to model to singer-songwriter to first lady. She’s powerful, and she knows it and likes it. It’s not just her sex that seduced the president (the story goes that she met him at an evening music dinner event, and spent the night singing sweet nothings into his ear) but also her brains and her lack of fear when it comes to showing off any part of herself. She makes it all look effortless; she wants everyone to know that being Carla Bruni is easy.

It’s a contrast to the current female role models we have at our disposal. There’s Senator Clinton, who reminds us at every turn what a treacherous road it’s been for her on the way to the 2008 primaries. There are the women of Lipstick Jungle—accomplished, gorgeous—who want you to know just how hard it is to be powerful women. (The jobs! The kids! The husband!) We wear our battle armor around the way Ms. Bruni wears her nakedness in the photo.

But wouldn’t it be nice to be free of that, to depoliticize things just for a moment, to be free to wing it?

Carla Bruni’s got a career, a kid, a husband, and now duties as France’s first lady—and it’s a snap. It’s a fantasy, too. But couldn’t we all use a little dreaming, instead of constantly having to confront better-looking versions of ourselves, or searching for common ground with celebrities? Wouldn’t it be nice to fall in love?

ABOUT THAT FANTASY … If ever there has been a charmed life, it may be Ms. Bruni’s. She was born rich, an heiress to an Italian tire company. She moved to Paris from Turin when she was 5 (her family reportedly left Italy to escape kidnapping by the Red Brigades) and was educated in Switzerland. She began to model at 19, at the suggestion of a friend, and worked for high-end designers like Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Lacroix, Versace and Yves Saint Laurent. In the mid-’90s, Ms. Bruni was making more than $7 million a year.

But for Carla Bruni, modeling was just the simplest runway onto to the world’s stage. Her work introduced her to Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, with whom she was linked romantically; later, she lived with the French writer Jean-Paul Enthoven but fell in love with his son Raphael—who was not only 10 years her junior, but also married to Justine Lévy, daughter of rakish philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy. (Yes, she broke up the marriage—the affair produced her son, Aurelien, who is 7.) Later, she was linked to the French prime minister.

As an adult, all of Ms. Bruni’s privileges served her well; her Italian beauty led to her modeling career; her French wiles led to an exciting and high-profile series of romances; and her European education led to suitability as France’s first lady. And then there’s the music. Music runs in Ms. Bruni’s family. Her mother is a classical pianist and her stepfather is a composer. This explains the pop star.

Don’t roll your eyes. Ms. Bruni’s songs are … très bien. Her 2003 debut, Quelqu’un m’a dit, was a collection of simple ballads and plucky tunes all sung in a husky half-whisper, the words spilling out on the infectious title track as fast as she can form them. (And yes, Ms. Bruni wrote her own songs—lost love, end of the affair, etc.—and plays the guitar charmingly.) She’s sold more than two million copies.

For her 2007 follow-up, No Promises, Ms. Bruni chose her favorite American and English poems and set them to music: Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden. … It’s a schoolgirl’s assignment—you have to listen to this poem! I’ll sing it to my guitar. Rossetti’s “Promises Like Pie-Crust,” however, could be the soundtrack to Ms. Bruni’s life: “Promise me no promises/ So will I not promise you;/ Keep we both our liberties/ Never false and never true. … You, so warm, may once have been/ Warmer toward another one;/ I, so cold, may once have seen/ Sunlight, once have felt the sun.”

And this is another thing about Carla Bruni: Has there ever been a spouse in a political couple so honest, so frank, about her desires? Ms. Bruni says that because she is “Italian by culture,” she would not like to divorce and that she will be Mr. Sarkozy’s “wife until death.” For his part, Mr. Sarkozy seems like a puppy in love. Yet something about this arrangement works. She gets to be first lady; he gets to have one of the most beautiful women in the world.

“This characteristically Sarkozist lack of restraint makes Carla Bruni a neat encapsulation of his presidency: eye-catching, over-compensatory and more than a little lacking in taste,” wrote Tony Judt, Erich Maria Remarque professor of European Studies at N.Y.U., in an email. “Closer, in other words, to Lady Di than to Jackie Kennedy—but Diana was far too canny to take her clothes off.

“The short-run plus for Sarkozy is that the disappointment and disdain he was beginning to arouse in the French public will (for a while) be replaced with a sort of prurient envy (by both sexes): to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, ‘Let them eat cheesecake…,’” wrote Mr. Judt.

This is a power union, but not in the sense that we think about it in America, where our high-profile marriages seem more like mergers than matches. These two may be reaching their individual goals, but they’re also having sex at night. And probably during the day.

Will America ever have a first lady who says “sex” instead of “cheese” when she’s having a photo taken? It doesn’t seem likely.

But we can dream, yes? Please Carla, come visit!

by Hillary Frey for the New York Observer