Pucci’s Camille Miceli Looks Back at Her Life in Parties
As the longtime fashion insider approaches her fifth anniversary at Pucci, she relives her nights out with Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, and more.
Since she was named artistic director of Pucci, in 2021, designer Camille Miceli has made it her mission to strike “a balance between the prints and the plain,” she says. But if anything, the Italian label’s life’s-a-party ethos has grown more emphatic under the direction of a vivacious fashion insider who’s enthralled the likes of Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, and Azzedine Alaïa, and who’s been spotted on the dance floors of some of the best clubs in the world. “If I’m at a party, I want to dance,” she says. “Otherwise, I go home. Music, for me, is essential—I don’t even like to speak to people, really. I used to throw parties in my apartment and prepared the caipirinhas during the day, so I was a bit drunk by nighttime, when my friends were DJ’ing. Everyone knew that I just wanted to dance.”
“My parents had a very social life, organizing dinners with artists, designers, and many different kinds of people, so I grew up in a very lively house in Paris,” says Miceli. Her Italian father, Stefano, was an art book publisher and collector, and her French mother, Dominique, was a stylist who worked with Guy Bourdin and was close with Azzedine Alaïa. “I was surrounded by beautiful things. Azzedine used to come for dinner when I was about 7 years old. I remember telling him to take vitamins so that he could someday design my wedding dress.” (He did.) After interning for Alaïa, and working in communications at Chanel and Louis Vuitton from the time she was 17, Miceli began designing jewelry in her 20s. She held prominent roles at Dior, with John Galliano, and Vuitton, with Marc Jacobs and Nicolas Ghesquière, until she took the star role at Pucci.
In her family’s art-filled apartment, Miceli was afforded great freedom as a child, even jumping rope indoors at age 6 or 7 in a Liberty London floral jacquard dress made for her by her grandmother Christiane de Sainte-Marie. “At that age, you’re allowed to do anything, no?” says Miceli. “For kids, grandmas are the best because you can tell them anything, and they’re always there to protect you. She was very elegant and a very curious person. At one point, she worked at the Centre Pompidou, taking care of the library.”
Miceli remains close with many of her childhood playmates, such as the French fashion consultant and creative director Charlotte Deffe (left), seen here around age 14 with Miceli and Emanuel Garboua (center). “She used to steal my Barbie clothes,” says Miceli. “And she had the first Sony Walkman. I was very jealous of that.”
For the birthday party of jewelry designer Victoire de Castellane, held at Les Bains Douches in 1991, Gilles Dufour, then Karl Lagerfeld’s right hand, dressed his nieces (from left) Mathilde and Pauline Favier, along with Miceli, in paillette scuba jackets fresh from the spring Chanel collection. “I always wanted to go to the Bains Douches, but the girl at the door was very harsh,” Miceli says. “One day she was loving you, the next day she was ignoring you, but there was always such a mix of models and celebrities. Karl and Gilles were there, of course, and I remember dancing with Kristen McMenamy and all the girls—Linda, Claudia, everyone.”
“Le Caca’s Club had the most decadent parties in Paris,” says Miceli, referring to the secret society led by the writer Frédéric Beigbeder (far right) and the media executive Guillaume Rappeneau (far left) beginning in 1984. Members usually convened at the club Castel, and the parties would end with socialites writhing on the floor while dancing the Bostella. “It was all this golden youth getting wasted, basically.” At the party pictured here, Miceli, with (from left) Charlotte Deffe, Cyril Karaoglan, and Pauline Favier, wore Alaïa leopard spots while dancing with Beigbeder. “We ended up on the cover of the magazine L’Echo des Savanes, illustrating an article called ‘La Boum des Riches,’ or ‘the Party of the Rich.’ I was furious!”
“Chanel was my entry into the professional world,” says Miceli, who worked for Lagerfeld for eight years. “I told them, ‘I can do whatever you want, even collecting pins on the floor.’”
Alaïa was her other great mentor, and he designed her wedding dress for her 2008 marriage to luxury brand executive Jerome Dernis, in Corsica. “As I was not 20, he said to me, ‘You’re not going to get married in white.’ He was also the one who told me never to wear panties with his tight dresses, but when I told him I wouldn’t wear them with this dress, he shouted at me: ‘No way! You don’t go to church without panties!’”
While at Louis Vuitton, Miceli collaborated with Pharrell Williams on a 2008 collection. “He has a new idea every 10 seconds,” Miceli says. “He was passionate about [Leonardo] da Vinci at the time, but also jewelry from the 1930s, a period that I adore.”
“I met Quincy Jones thanks to Naomi Campbell,” Miceli says. “She was staying at his house in Los Angeles, where he told us all of his stories with Michael Jackson. This was probably in 2007, and I remember he had a machine in his recording studio that looked like two towers, and when you walked between them it recorded the sound. We spent some nights kind of dancing there in a way that produced sound.”
Marc Jacobs’s New York holiday parties of the early 2000s were famed for their wild themes and elaborate costumes. (The designer, seen here with his longtime assistant, Maureen Procureur, left, and Miceli, came as a prizewinning pig in 2005.) “You can see in this picture who Marc is—the most sensible, sensitive, and funny person you can find,” Miceli says. When Jacobs joined Louis Vuitton, in 1997, he recruited Miceli to work in the press office, but when she asked to do something more creative, he named her his muse. “One day he came to me before a show and asked me for a pair of earrings, and that’s how everything started for me as a designer,” she says. “I made a pair of loops in gold, with some charms of the monogram and pearls, and it went into the show, then the ad, then to sales, and then we started a business.”
“My son, Romain Japy, is my biggest pride. He was born in 2000, and I think he came out as a wonderful person. He’s clever, he’s beautiful, and he’s super sympathique,” Miceli says, citing this image from a 2004 vacation to Lamu Island, in Kenya, as emblematic of their bond. “It was important for me to do a trip with him every Christmas, to show him the world.” Japy grew up to become a cofounder of a creative content company in Paris, called the New Face, that works with luxury brands.
“In 2025, I had the best time of my life in Brazil because of the energy, the beauty, the kindness, and the mix of people. Three weeks earlier, I had been by myself in my Milan apartment, depressed, when I got a call from my friend Alexia Niedzielski, asking me if I wanted to dress the Brazilian superstar Ludmilla (seen here with Miceli) for Carnaval. I said yes without knowing anything about her!”
Miceli and her friends, including the beauty editor Jeanne Deroo (in pink), headed to Salvador to outfit the singer. “C’est la beauté de la vie,” Miceli says. “I’m becoming Brazilian, darling.”
In April, Miceli presented her latest collection against a stunning backdrop, the Grotta dei Cordari rock formations in Sicily. The colors and prints referenced the lava flowing from Mount Etna, but the overall theme was l’alba, the Italian term for dawn. “I used to go out all night until dawn, so I think of that as a brilliant time,” she says. “Nowadays I like to wake up at dawn to do yoga. It’s a different feeling, but they relate in a way, the bohemian side mixed together with the healthier side of sports and fitness.”
