D2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
Did you know that a woman can stroll top-
less in Manhattan without breaking the
law? Carine Roitfeld has made it her busi-
ness to know.
A maverick editor, an arbiter of Gallic
chic and, most recently, a brand, Ms. Roit-
feld has made the most of that city ruling.
For the cover story of CR Fashion Book, her
twice-a-year glossy magazine, which ar-
rived on newsstands last Thursday, she had
models parade along upper Fifth Avenue,
prim from the waist down in box-pleat
skirts and rigid boots, louche from the waist
up, breasts on display.
The photographs by Steven Klein were a
calculated affront to bourgeois sensibilities.
And that’s the way she likes it.
A natural-born provocateur, Ms. Roitfeld,
64, is perfectly happy to take a swipe at the
kind of crusty patrician style resurrected
for fall by Hedi Slimane at Celine, and rein-
terpreted with deadening literalism in the
September pages of Vogue and Harper’s
Bazaar, where models are garbed in a profu-
sion of so-called heritage looks: polo coats,
glen plaids and pearls.
To Ms. Roitfeld, those models stand in for
a type. “I know this woman very well — I
grew up around her,” said Ms. Roitfeld, who
was reared in an affluent suburb of Paris.
Wryly, she added: “This woman doesn’t
have enough money to shop at Hermès, soshe goes to Celine. She is not very nice to
her maid.”
Sending her up is the kind of brash move
that once sealed Ms. Roitfeld’s reputation.
But as superstar editors go, she is one of the
last in a vanishing breed. The 1980s and
early ’90s witnessed the advent of the celeb-
rity editor, Anna Wintour of Vogue and
Franca Sozzani of Italian Vogue among
them. Today they are all but extinct, much
of their authority ceded to cadres of chatter-
ing influencers.
“On Instagram, these people say what
they want, show what they want, without
any culture or judgment,” Ms. Roitfeld said.
They are far too busy airing platitudes that,
she said, “travel like fire on the web.”
“There will be no more Francas, no more
Annas,” she said with stony finality. “Fash-
ion has finished that chapter.”
Ms. Roitfeld is not looking back. “I try to
be like Karl,” she said, referring to Karl La-
gerfeld, with whom she often collaborated.
The designer, who died in February, “was a
bit like my dad,” she said. “They came from
a generation that never complains. I re-
spect that. I think it is chic.”
In the latest CR Fashion Book, Ms. Roit-feld celebrates her warm but somewhat for-
mal working relationship with Mr. La-
gerfeld — he addressed her unfailingly as
Madame Roitfeld — in a lavish portfolio
showcasing some 20 ensembles from the
’90s, pulled from the Chanel archives: ab-
breviated jackets worn with thigh-high
skirts, bras with men’s briefs, and layer
upon layer of black mousseline.
That those looks seem of the moment
does not surprise her. “Karl was never nos-
talgic,” she said. “He always looked for-
ward. I’m not nostalgic. One has to change.”
What has changed very little over the
years is Ms. Roitfeld’s lightly mannered in-
souciance. In town for New York Fashion
Week, she rambled through the cavernous
art-filled uptown apartment that belongs to
her son. She wore slouchy fatigues, a black
V-neck T-shirt and gold sandals. Slung like
an afterthought over a leather club chair
was the crowning element in her uniform,
an Azzedine Alaïa denim biker jacket.
Ms. Roitfeld leans in as she speaks,
laughs out loud more often than you might
expect, her warmth improbably mixed with
a stubborn audacity. During her decade-
long tenure as the editor of French Vogue —she left in 2011 — she upended convention
with a string of firsts: She was the first
mainstream fashion editor to dedicate an
entire issue to a black model, in 2002, and
the first to put a black transgender model on
the cover, in 2007, over the fretful objections
of her publishers.
“How do you put it?” she asked. “I had
balls.”
Mostly unchastened, she is still lobbing
spitballs in the face of convention. The cur-
rent CR Fashion Book is filled with images
of dead-pale models locking lips or sprawl-
ing, legs splayed, on a Central Park lawn.
Another feature explores the otherworldly
universe of the designer Rick Owens, high-
lighting models with alien-tall foreheads,
prosthetics for cheekbones, faces bleached
like chalky masks.
Fashion needs to push boundaries, Ms.
Roitfeld said, but that has become problem-
atic. “It’s a very delicate moment,” she said,
“People accept some things — you can
change your body, you can change your sex,
you can even show breasts on the cover of a
magazine. But they don’t accept others. You
never know when you’re making an error.”
It was her son, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld,
who encouraged her to reimagine herself as
a brand. Together they have developed a
fragrance line. In the future, they plan to in-
troduce cosmetics, accessories and ready-
to-wear.
The notion of branding is still foreign to
her. She has spent a fair part of her career
interpreting the visions of others, she said,
a reference to her varied contributions as a
stylist. (She is credited, most famously, with
injecting some steam into Tom Ford’s early
collections for Gucci.)
“I’ve always helped people tell their
stories,” she said. “Now I would like to tell
my own.”Above, Carine Roitfeld, a born provocateur. In Steven Klein photographs for her magazine, CR
Fashion Book, a classic look gets a lunar spin, below left, and heritage style is tweaked, below.ABOVE, HEATHER STEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN FOR CR FASHION BOOKA Maverick
Looking
Forward
By RUTH LA FERLACarine Roitfeld and celebrity
editors like her are vanishing.
Fashion ‘finished that chapter.’
The race to be the most sustainable fashion
brand is on.
When Gabriela Hearst presented her
spring 2020 collection at New York Fashion
Week, she described it as an “industry
first.” The designer celebrated for her cash-
mere knits was not referring to her latest
looks.
Instead, Ms. Hearst said she had
produced the first fully carbon-neutral run-
way show, at a time when scrutiny of the en-
vironmental footprint of fashion week has
reached fresh heights.
Forty-eight hours later, as the traveling
fashion caravan rolled into London, Gucci,
the luxury powerhouse, announced that it
too is taking greater responsibility for the
toll its business takes on the planet.
In a telephone interview, Marco Bizzarri,
the chief executive of Gucci, confirmed that
Gucci will stage a carbon-neutral runway
show during Milan Fashion Week this
month.
“We will offset everything, from the trav-
el emissions of 1,000 guests and 900 work-
ers, including models, production staff and
Gucci employees, to using recycled wood
for the set and Forest Stewardship Council-
certified paper invites,” Mr. Bizzarri said.
Gucci will be the first fashion label to earn
ISO 20121 certification for its show, he said,
referring to a standard of sustainable event
management from the International Orga-
nization for Standardization. Already, the
company, which has held its shows at its Mi-
lan headquarters for several seasons, has
been monitoring its water and electricity
consumption and waste, which have then
been offset by Kering, its French parent
group.
The more significant announcement, Mr.
Bizzarri said, is that Gucci will make its en-
tire supply chain fully carbon neutral before
the end of September. The company will off-
set all greenhouse gases produced by third-party raw-material suppliers and manufac-
turers that produce for the Gucci brand, as
well as its own direct operations.
Becoming carbon neutral does not mean
that a company stops producing harmful
emissions. Carbon offsetting means finan-
cially compensating for the emissions a
business produces by canceling out green-
house gas emissions somewhere else in the
world. The money paid to buy offsets sup-
ports programs designed to reduce emis-
sions. There is no fixed price on carbon,
meaning the cost of an offset varies.
Currently, more than 90 percent of all
Gucci emissions come from its supply chain
and raw materials sources, a company
statement said.
Its new initiative has been possible be-
cause of data collected from more than 1,000
suppliers across five continents for the
company’s annual Environmental Profit
and Loss statement, which aims to improve
analysis of the company’s environmental
footprint and study where it can become
more efficient.
From Mr. Bizzarri’s perspective, the com-
pany is heading in the right direction, even
as he tackles the question of how the appe-
tite for Gucci products and ever-increasing
levels of production to meet demand — thecompany reported 8 billion euros in sales in
2018 — can be reconciled with a greener
way of doing business.
“Look, the only way we can have zero
emissions is to shut our business,” he said.
“At the end of the day our company makes
things, and we employ thousands of people
with families and communities to do that.
We need to think up the best ways of sup-
porting our employees to do their jobs in the
most sustainable way possible.”
In 2015, the company started an initiative
to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by
50 percent by 2025. As of 2018, it had re-
duced those emissions by 16 percent, or 35
percent of Gucci’s current environmental
footprint. It will contribute money equally
across four REDD+ initiatives in countries
like Peru and Indonesia. (REDD+ is an ac-
ronym for Reducing Emissions from Defor-
estation and Degradation, a United Nations
program designed to protect forests.)
“We know it’s not perfect, but we cannot
afford to be complacent,” Mr. Bizzarri said.
“We cannot wait for technological innova-
tion alone to improve the climate crisis.”
Scrutiny of the fashion industry’s impact
on the global climate crisis has hit new
heights in recent months, driven by con-
sumer pressure to tackle its carbon foot-
print, and has prompted many brands to
publish updated sustainability commit-
ments.
Mr. Bizzarri, who was a signatory of the
Fashion Pact unveiled at the Group of 7
summit last month, said he believed Gucci
is the first luxury brand to try to offset all of
its emissions.Gucci Is Going for a Carbon-Neutral Style
By ELIZABETH PATONGlitter and fringe and ostrich feathers, Gucci- The luxury house seeks sustainability.
VALERIO MEZZANOTTI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAn article last Thursday about a rising genera-
tion of leaders in the fashion industry mis-
spelled, in some copies, the surname of the
creative director at Lanvin. He is Bruno Sialelli,
not Sailelli.CORRECTIONLONGCHAMP.COM | 212-223-1500645 FIFTH AVENUE – NEW YORK CITYKENDALLJENNERHere to steal
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