In the catalogue for The Model As Muse, an exhibition opening tomorrow in New York , there's a little story that summarizes the way modelling used to be.
It's a slight but chilling tale from 1920 that recalls the
Paris couturier Paul Poiret at one of his presentations saying to a journalist, "Do not speak to the girls, they are not there."
That changed in a dazzling manner in 1983 when
designer Karl Lagerfeld hired
Inès de la Fressange to personify the image of Chanel. Proving to be the spokesperson who roared, de la Fressange possessed more than Audrey Hepburn brows, nut-brown eyes, a boyish figure and legs. Her perfectly gamine loveliness came with a mouth.
In her biography on evene.fr, France's leading cultural website, her iconic status is neatly encapsulated as "the model who talks."
Last week, de la Fressange, 51, brought her gift of the gab to Toronto as an ambassador for the Roger Vivier label, named after the great
French shoe
designer.
The brand was launched five years ago, and de la Fressange, who has been on board since the beginning, sets the tone of the enterprise. A director whose image-building responsibilities have ranged from store design to publicity, she is fond of saying that she thinks of herself as "court jester."
That was the way she did things at Chanel. On the runway, her performances were a mix of hammy antics and moments of sublimely understated glamour.
In conversation, she bubbled droll opinions and basked in irreverence and candour. Backstage in 1987, de la Fressange, singing the praises of a
Chanel makeup foundation, told me, "It's not a liquid, it's not a compact, it's like chewing gum."
That spacey, offhand humour remains intact. "What important things have happened since then?" I ask at our interview one morning last week at Holt Renfrew where, later in the day, she will be guest of honour at a cocktail party. "Nothing," she answers, "And you?"
But the voice is deeper, the kookiness darker, the willowy beauty seasoned by times not always sunny. The collaboration with Chanel's Lagerfeld began well enough – with him introducing her to The New York Times as "a most elegant French girl, amusing, very chic" – but ended in a public squabble.
In 1989, de la Fressange accepted the honour to sit for the image of Marianne, an emblem of the French republic that appears on postage stamps and busts in public buildings.
Lagerfeld let loose his notorious tongue. He said it was all too provincial, that he couldn't dress a monument and told the press, "There will be no more Inès."
De la Fressange quit.
The next year for her wedding in the south of France to Luigi d'Ursi, an Italian businessman, art historian and inductee into the Best-Dressed Hall of Fame, the bride packed Yves Saint Laurent, Lanvin and Lacroix and, a year after that, had her own label of clothes and home furnishings.
Predicated on her taste – which runs to jackets, shirts, oversized sweaters, pants and flat shoes – her
Paris fashion shop, stocked with both clothes and home furnishings, was an instant must-visit, melting even the rancour of Lagerfeld who sent her a congratulatory note.
Then in 1999, she was fired from her own company by shareholders who held on to the rights to her name.
"I fought for 10 years, but I got fed up. I forgot it," she explains with calm acceptance nurtured by a favourite book, The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.
So far, the biggest challenge to forgetting and faith that de la Fressange has faced has been the loss of her husband – father to her two daughters – who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2006.
She resolved not to burden her children with any stricken widow routine, and supports their dreams. Nine (pronounced "Neen") is 15 and a promising actor; Violette, 9, is a fashion maniac.
Mother doesn't mind.
"Good," she says, "Frivolity, talent, beauty. You can't live without them."
But she could happily live without the idea of superiority of
French style, though she is thought to be the very embodiment of it.
Last summer, France admitted de la Fressange's to the Legion of Honour. In the January issue of Interview magazine, she said that it was her mission at Vivier to show that you could be "French without being conventional and grim."
As for "chic," she told Wallpaper magazine, "Nothing comes from chic-ness, no
fashion, no art. Chic is when you don't have anything left." ]
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