Elitist Parisian Spirit
Go Woke or Go Home
"We have to reflect the world that we live in. It is so important for designers not to run scared, and not to be too worried about what’s safe and what’s commercial." — Anna Wintour
After a century of telling us what we should and shouldn’t wear, the French edition of Vogue is in danger of “losing its soul”, or so insiders at the magazine have claimed; this is apparently as a result of Anna Wintour (b. 1949), pushing “American woke values” onto the publication in order to try and help its tumbling circulation figures. Not only that, but as part of a “streamlining” across editions, as a means of surviving in an increasingly digital world, next month’s edition will have its “Paris” title dropped from the cover for the first time in seventy years (incidentally Vogue Paris is the only edition of the magazine to carry a city name, with the other’s all carrying country names). In an editorial last week French newspaper Le Figaro said “Vogue has erased Paris from the map”, and accused Wintour, the global editorial director of the iconic fashion magazine, of “crushing the elitist Parisian spirit” and curbing the fierce independence of the French edition. It comes after Emmanuelle Alt (b. 1967), who had been at the helm for two decades before she became editor-in-chief in 2011, left the company in September, and in something of a coup de foudre the new top job, rebranded as “head of editorial content” went to Eugénie Trochu (b. 1988), who was formerly the fashion editor of the magazine’s website and key to building its digital presence. Vogue Paris has been setting trends for a century, from the post-war “New Look” of Christian Dior through the sexual liberation of the 1960s to the highly criticized “Heroin Chic” trend championed by the likes of Kate Moss (b. 1974) and Jaime King (b. 1979) in the 1990s and early 2000s. Only last month the fabled publication celebrated its 100th birthday at lavish event at the Palais Galliera, with a retrospective featuring more than 400 works from the magazine’s archives (an event at which Wintour was apparently outraged by the lack of non-white women in the photographs on display). Despite the endless glitz and glamour, the indisputable truth is that like much of the media industry, Vogue is struggling with tumbling sales (dropping steadily from 98,345 in 2017 to 81,962 to 2020) and ad revenue; clearly desperate times call for desperate measures and this latest saga is part of the endless push and pull between New York and Paris going back to the magazines early days. “The whole history of French Vogue is one of back-and-forth with Condé Nast in New York … growing more independent for a while, then being reined back in,” said Sylvie Lécallier, curator of the retrospective Vogue Paris 1920-2020, which opened earlier this month after a year’s delay due to the pandemic. “We had no idea it would end like this when we started work on the exhibition.”
The home of French architect Charles Zana, Paris, demonstrating the sort of unique style the city has become known for, image c/o Charles Zana
Schiaparelli's Spring/Summer 2021 Haute Couture collection, designed by Daniel Roseberry, image c/o Schiaparelli
No edition has ever quite reached the fabled heights of Vogue Italia under the auspices of its fearless and provocative editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani (1950-2016), which, in her words, was “extravagant, experimental, innovative” — but nevertheless, the Paris edition has always been a somewhat loftier, bohemian counterpoint to its hard-nosed, corporate New York sibling. At its peak in the 2000s, a leather-clad Carine Roitfeld (b. 1954) cleared the newsroom of foreign staff, specifically with the intention of bringing back something of a provocative Gallic identity — and in doing so, she became an inimitable fashion icon in her own right. This recent edict from Wintour comes only weeks after AD France was ordered to shut up shop, with its offices being moved out of the capital to Munich, with editor Marie Kalt parting ways, allegedly as a result of her unwillingness to give into demands that the magazine become more corporate, and in doing so, placing a greater emphasis on celebrity interiors, product placement and the demands of advertisers. It was announced early last year that Condé Nast intended to restructure its editorial leadership, a key tenet of which was to put key editors in charge of multiple titles; the ambition being to “transform how the creative teams create, share, translate, adapt and distribute content across platforms and formats”. Of course, the real risk of this cost-cutting homogenization is that such publications entirely lose any semblance of a soul — indeed without an editor-in-chief able to offer a viewpoint unique to the country of publication, will people really be interested, or, are we likely to see sales falling even further until only a single publication remains? It seems particularly strange at a time when, increasingly, people are becoming more interested in artistry, craft and manufacture, and in brands that have a unique vision and identity — for magazines like Architectural Digest and Vogue, that comes from an editor who is able to translate the spirit of a city, not only its overt beauty, but also its nuances and contradictions, into an individual publication.
Schiaparelli's Spring/Summer 2021 Haute Couture collection, designed by Daniel Roseberry, image c/o Schiaparelli
The former home of storied French decorator Jean-Michel Frank, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, as re-imagined by the supremely talented Pierre Yovanovitch
One might, understandably, ask what Le Figaro means by “elitist Parisian spirit” — as after all, “elitism” is a concept that for many has no place in modern life, and is entirely at odds with creating an inclusive, accepting society that doesn’t exclude on such characteristics as race, class and ethnicity. One can postulate, referring to the OED definition of “elitism”, that it context, it has nothing whatsoever to do with a “belief that a society or system should be led by an elite”, but rather, “the superior attitude or behaviour associated with an elite”. The latter, of course, has very different connotations, with “elite” being defined as “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society” — and can refer not only to a political or intellectual elite, but to anyone, essentially, at the top of their game, be it an athlete, performer or even a member of the armed forces. Ex hypothesi, elitism in this context refers to a belief simply that the French know fashion better than anyone else, which is, at least for many, a matter of fact, as Paris has, for decades, been regarded as the fashion capital of the world. Not only that, but arguably, for much of the twentieth century, it might also be thought of in terms of the “architecture” and “design” capital of the world, from the rise of Art Deco, through to the modernism of Le Corbusier (1887-1965), Jean Prouvé (1901-1984), René Herbst (1891-1982) and Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) et al, eventually becoming known colloquially as the “International Style”, which, with its rejection of ornamentation and emphasis on volume over mass, would entirely change the course of design, leading to what we now understand to be “modern” architecture. During the early to mid-twentieth century Paris was at the very epicentre of the European avant-garde, having an extraordinary impact not only in terms of visiting collectors, such as Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim (1889-1979) — who, after an entree into the city’s artistic and intellectual circles, became a self-professed “art addict”, buying “a painting a day” — but also in terms of its exports; perhaps most famously, Dominique (1908-1997) and John de Ménil (1904-1973), widely thought of as the “Medici of modern art”, who, with an intensely personal approach to collecting, would open the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas — an extraordinary private collection comprising more than 10,000 objects: Cycladic idols, Oceanic effigies and African totems, as well as modernist masterpieces from Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Magritte, Ernst, Calder, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Johns.
Paris is a city that plays to the beat of its own drum, whether it be in terms of art, interiors, architecture or fashion; indeed those in the industry speak often of the fact that they design, buy and create based not purely on market forces, but on their own unique, individual taste, and that they are confident that if they aim only for the best, there will always be a market, regardless of the fripperies of fads and fashions. For much of the twentieth century, Lécallier explains, “Paris was the place to hunt out talent and content and bring it to New York”, it was a city where, at least in terms of Fashion, style and womanhood came to be defined. This presumably attests for the myriad books on how to dress like a French woman, for e.g. How to be Parisian: Wherever You Are (2014) by “bohemian free-thinkers and iconoclasts”, Anne Berest (b. 1979), Caroline De Maigret (b. 1975), Audrey Diwan (b. 1980) and Sophie Mas, and Forever Chic: French Women’s Secrets for Aging with Style and Grace (2013) by Tish Jett. Seemingly in the frenzied midst of the digital age, with an unrelenting 24-hour news cycle, Wintour simply doesn’t feel such French je ne sais quoi is a bankable commodity, and would instead rather focus on the sort of pumped up, over-saturated mass-market celebrity style that apparently, at least in terms of marketability, has greater appeal to a wider audience. One wonders therefore whether it will impact the work of those French designers, at least stylistically speaking, who still hope to be featured in such publications as AD and Vogue, or whether, with the popularity of Instagram, and an increasing number of smaller, boutique publications, they will simply carry on as they always have done, confident in the knowledge that unique, artistically driven design will find its audience. “If you don’t have the means you have to be very niche,” explains haute French jewellery designer Marc Auclert, and so hopefully, we will continue to see, though perhaps not in the glossy, trend-driven pages of Condé Nast’s rapidly sinking armada, that particular brand of insouciance and originality that for centuries has been a prevalent and defining feature of the City of Light.