So easy to become obsessed with her

Fantastic interview in NY Magazine with Carine Roitfeld. I love how the writer spells out her accented words for us.

When Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue, styles a fashion shoot, she does not start with the clothes. She looks first at the model and comes up with a story: Perhaps this girl has married young and taken a lover. Perhaps she married young, has taken three lovers, and is about to go to Brazil. Perhaps she lives in London and is bored to death with mad cow disease and wants desperately to eat a great, juicy piece of steak. “I do a movie in my mind,” she says.

“Who is this girl?”One cold, bright December morning, her own story is this: She is a fiftyish woman having a double espresso in the lobby of the Carlyle on Madison Avenue. “For me, it is best to be the youngest in hotel,” she explains, “and I was not having this feeling at the Mercer.” She has come to New York for her son Vladimir’s 23rd birthday, which she celebrated the night before with dinner at Indochine. “It makes me happy because there is vewy gweat lighting,” she says about the restaurant. “Vewy flatter.” (Roitfeld has reached a compromise with the hard American r by converting them all to ws.)"

The stiletto-mania of the nineties owes as much to Carine Roitfeld as it does to Candace Bushnell. “I do not like comfortable,” Roitfeld says. She has outlawed sneakers and what she calls “Hugg boots” in her office because “they are hugly.” The line Roitfeld has always been best at navigating is the line between provocative and vulgar.

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