If you’re at all uncomfortable being photographed, don’t stand next to Carine Roitfeld. The 57-year-old fashion stylist and former editor of French Vogue, who made the magazine de rigueur on chic coffee tables for 10 years, is as big a magnet for Fashion Week flashbulbs as the A-list actors there to flog their perfume deals. “Maybe they’re glad to see me now because I wasn’t here last season?” Roitfeld wondered, in her thick French accent, smiling for the paps in formfitting white lace Dolce & Gabbana (worn with sheer black hose) as they shouted, “Carine! Bravo! Encore une petite photo, s’il vous plait?”
Roitfeld had to sit out the ready-to-wear season six months ago “so people didn’t get confused” after her much-discussed departure from Vogue earlier in the year. Now she’s back in the front row with a raft of new projects, all feverishly chronicled in the blogosphere. There’s the 72-page celebration of Elizabeth Taylor, shot by Mario Testino, for September’s issue of V; Barneys New York’s fall-campaign multimedia tribute to Roitfeld, which has her starring in a short film that was shown in the windows in early September; and Barneys’ Women’s Designer book with Mario Sorrenti, which features 28 or so of her favorite models, family members, and friends wearing her picks. Then there’s her new book, Irreverent, a visual diary done in collaboration with Purple editor Olivier Zahm, due out this month from Rizzoli; another, on the Chanel black jacket, with Karl Lagerfeld, is also in progress. She styled the fall campaigns for Givenchy, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Chanel, injecting house codes with the cool-girl brand of quirkiness she is known for. And, of course, she covered the couture collections for W, styling herself in the portfolio you see here, and taking wmagazine.com viewers on a tour of the scene with an assist from filmmaker Loïc Prigent. “I’m my own boss now, and it’s a little scary,” Roitfeld said. “But it’s nicer. I’m like a butterfly, hopping from place to place.”
Roitfeld has been a stylist since the late Seventies, well before fashion became part of mass culture and the people behind the scenes started amassing groupies of their own. But the raw and intimate quality of her work, which the world at large first came to know when she was Tom Ford’s muse at Gucci in the Nineties, is a big reason why stylists started earning cachet on the level of photographers and designers. “She’s had a huge impact on fashion,” said Donatella Versace at Roitfeld’s Atelier Versace fitting at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. “She fights for glamour. Even when everyone was doing minimalism, she fought. She dares. You see her and you get inspired.” Without a Carine and her brash, easily identifiable taste and slightly kinky humor, there would likely not be a Rachel Zoe, who is as well known for her own look as for what she puts on her clients. (Decide for yourself whether or not this is a good thing.)
