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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

New soul on French Idol

Jean Nouvel wins Pritzker Prize

Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize.

Mr. Nouvel, 62, is the second French citizen to take the prize, awarded annually to a living architect by a jury chosen by the Hyatt Foundation. His selection is to be announced Monday.

“For over 30 years Jean Nouvel has pushed architecture’s discourse and praxis to new limits,” the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.”

In extending that vocabulary Mr. Nouvel has defied easy categorization. His buildings have no immediately identifiable signature, like the curves of Frank Gehry or the light-filled atriums of Renzo Piano. But each is strikingly distinctive, be it the Agbar Tower in Barcelona (2005), a candy-colored office tower that suggests a geyser, or his KKL cultural and congress center in Lucerne, Switzerland (2000), with a slim copper roof cantilevered delicately over Lake Lucerne.

“Every time I try to find what I call the missing piece of the puzzle, the right building in the right place,” Mr. Nouvel said recently over tea at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo.

Yet he does not design buildings simply to echo their surroundings. “Generally, when you say context, people think you want to copy the buildings around, but often context is contrast,” he said.

“The wind, the color of the sky, the trees around — the building is not done only to be the most beautiful,” he said. “It’s done to give advantage to the surroundings. It’s a dialogue.”

The prize, which includes a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion, is to be presented to Mr. Nouvel on June 2 in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Among Mr. Nouvel’s New York buildings are 40 Mercer, a 15-story red-and-blue, glass, wood and steel luxury residential building completed last year in SoHo, and a soaring 75-story hotel-and-museum tower with crystalline peaks that is to be built next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown. Writing in The New York Times in November, Nicolai Ouroussoff said the Midtown tower “promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”

Born in Fumel in southwestern France in 1945, Mr. Nouvel originally wanted to be an artist. But his parents, both teachers, wanted a more stable life for him, he said, so they compromised on architecture.

“I realized it was possible to create visual compositions” that, he said, “you can put directly in the street, in the city, in public spaces.”

At 20 Mr. Nouvel won first prize in a national competition to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By the time he was 25 he had opened his own architecture firm with François Seigneur; a series of other partnerships followed.

Mr. Nouvel cemented his reputation in 1987 with completion of the Arab World Institute, one of the “grand projects” commissioned during the presidency of François Mitterrand. A showcase for art from Arab countries, it blends high technology with traditional Arab motifs. Its south-facing glass facade, for example, has automated lenses that control light to the interior while also evoking traditional Arab latticework. For his boxy, industrial Guthrie Theater, which has a cantilevered bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, Mr. Nouvel experimented widely with color. The theater is clad in midnight-blue metal; a small terrace is bright yellow; orange LED images rise along the complex’s two towers.

In its citation, the Pritzker jury said the Guthrie, completed in 2006, “both merges and contrasts with its surroundings.” It added, “It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of performance.”

The bulk of Mr. Nouvel’s commissions work has been in Europe however. Among the most prominent is his Quai Branly Museum in Paris (2006), an eccentric jumble of elements including a glass block atop two columns, some brightly colorful boxes, rust-colored louvers and a vertical carpet of plants. “Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love,” Mr. Ouroussoff wrote in The Times.

A year later he described Mr. Nouvel’s Paris Philharmonie concert hall, a series of large overlapping metal plates on the edge of La Villette Park in northeastern Paris, as “an unsettling if exhilarating trip into the unknown.”

Mr. Nouvel has his plate full at the moment. He is designing a satellite of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, giving it a shallow domed roof that creates the aura of a just-landed U.F.O. He recently announced plans for a high-rise condominium in Los Angeles called SunCal Tower, a narrow glass structure with rings of greenery on each floor. His concert hall for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is a tall rectangular box with transparent screen walls.

Before dreaming up a design, Mr. Nouvel said, he does copious research on the project and its surroundings. “The story, the climate, the desires of the client, the rules, the culture of the place,” he said. “The references of the buildings around, what the people in the city love.”

“I need analysis,” he said, noting that every person “is a product of a civilization, of a culture.” He added: Me, I was born in France after the Second World War. Probably the most important cultural movement was Structuralism. I cannot do a building if I can’t analyze.”

Although he becomes attached to his buildings, Mr. Nouvel said, he understands that like human beings, they grow and change over time and may even one day disappear. “Architecture is always a temporary modification of the space, of the city, of the landscape,” he said. “We think that it’s permanent. But we never know.”

By ROBIN POGREBIN

MICHAEL MUSTO as LINDSAY LOHAN as MARILYN MONROE

In an homage to New York’s recent nude Lindsay Lohan photo spread, the Village Voice columnist decided to stage his own version. He painstakingly re-created each pose, which Lindsay had, in turn, re-created from the original Marilyn Monroe series. (Bert Stern, who photographed both Lindsay and Marilyn, did not work with Musto.)

“I’ve long lived quite dangerously myself, and so, anxious to share my desperate man-tits with an audience beyond Chelsea, I gleefully agreed to star in an homage to an homage: Musto as Lohan as Marilyn. That’s three generations of loveliness, and I prepared for it by not shaving or waxing a thing, just letting it all hang in the wind as both a nod to history and a means of reclaiming control. Just like with Marilyn and Lindsay, people have always grabbed at me, wanting a piece of my piece and a slice of my soul, but usually with more pepperoni and less cheese.”

I love Berry

Berry has just released her first album, “Mademoiselle”

 

Marion Cotillard wins Oscar for best actress!!!

“Oh — thank you so much. Olivier, what you did to me, Maestro Olivier Dahan, you rocked my life. You truly rocked my life. Thank you so much to Picturehouse for your passion, members of the Academy, thank you so, so much. And — wow. Well, I’m speechless now. I — I — well, I — thank you life, thank you love, and it is true, there is some angels in this city. Thank you so, so much. “

Marion Cotillard won the Academy Award as best actress for her portrayal of legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose” to become the first French performer since 1960 to earn an Oscar in the category.

It was the first nomination for Cotillard, who was a favorite coming into Sunday’s award show in Hollywood.

The 32-year-old actress stunned audiences and critics at home and abroad with her physical transformation in the film that traces the life of Piaf, who achieved international fame after being raised by her grandmother in a brothel but saw her life cut short by drug and alcohol abuse.

The win comes just days after Paris-born Cotillard took home the French film industry’s coveted Cesar award for best actress for “La Mome,” as the Piaf biopic is called in her homeland. She also picked up both a British BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her role.

Simone Signoret won the best actress Oscar in 1960 for her leading role in “Room at the Top” and was the last French woman to do so, although several others, including Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Adjani, have been nominated.

In the best actress category, Cotillard competed with Julie Christie (“Away From Her”), newcomer Ellen Page (“Juno”), Laura Linney (“The Savages“) and Cate Blanchett (“Elizabeth: The Golden Age”).

Hilary Alexander for the Telegraph says: “Marion Cotillard, Best Actress – This scalloped, embroidered, haute couture ‘mermaid gown’ by Jean Paul Gaultier, was a winner from the moment she stepped out of her limo, accessorized with an unusual multi-strand diamond necklace by Chopard.”
Imogen Fox for the Guardian says: “Her full-length and literal take on fishtail by Jean-Paul Gaultier, complete with scales, was undoubtedly silly and a little creepy, but last month I couldn’t even spell her name and now she’s my out-and-out red carpet favourite.”