The All-NSFW Carine Roitfeld Retrospective

From the Cut:

Before she came to French Vogue in 2001, Carine Roitfeld made her name as a fantastically gifted stylist for the British magazine The Face and Tom Ford. She directed far more of Vogue's shoots than is usual for an editor-in-chief, and remade the magazine 'in her own image, which is to say svelte, tough, luxurious, and wholeheartedly in love with dangling-cigarette, bare-chested fashion,' as Amy Larocca put it in her profile of Roitfeld for New York.

Legendary photographers like Steven Klein, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Mario Testino snapped the pictures, along with the corps of multi-tasking designer/photographers (Karl Lagerfeld, Hedi Slimane and of course, Tom Ford), but what showed up in the magazine was all Roitfeld: women and men wearing stilletos and thigh-highs, legs akimbo, involved in something S&M-ish. The nudity — and there's a lot — is mesmerizing, powerful and matter-of-fact in a characteristically French way. Sometimes there was controversy (her decision to paint blackface on the model Lara Stone caused a firestorm in 2009), and recently Roitfeld seemed a little weary of it all. Three months ago, she told the New York Times' Eric Wilson, 'We have to fight to keep this un-politically correct attitude of French Vogue. But it's more and more difficult...You cannot smoke, you cannot show arms, you cannot show little girls, because everyone now is very anxious not to have problems with the law. Everything we do now is like walking in high heels on the ice, but we keep trying to do it.'

Here are some highlights from Roitfeld's more provocative work at French Vogue. For complete layouts going back years, as well as some of her ad campaigns, Models.com has a well-organized link list.

Carine Roitfeld is the most appealing woman in fashion today--or at least was. I read a few profiles of her--including NYMag's--around the same time I heard her highly praised in the NYT in their account of Fashion Week a few years back. She's frank and funny and so French in exactly the proper sense. Even her decision to leave French Vogue, though disappointing, does her credit. Several months ago, there had been rumors of her being offered American Vogue and turning it down--another move, if true, that did her credit. Her quote at the time was perfect: "I'd never take the job." She realized, as any person of sense would, that the magazine would change her far more than she would ever change it.

The most recent thing I read about her--before the announcement of her departure from Vogue, or this retrospective--was an interview done by the NYT.  Check it out here.