10 Things You Didn’t Know About Carine Roitfeld

Impossibly stylish Carine Roitfeld is the epitome of Parisian chic. Envelope-pushing (arguably, on occasion, to a fault), the 60-year-old editor never fails to look appropriate even in the sexiest of outfits — fittingly she’s often cited as a muse to Tom Ford with whom she worked extensively at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. While she’s best known as the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris and the current editor-in-chief of CR Fashion Book, Roitfeld has a long history of styling shoots for major brands like Chanel, Givenchy and Max Mara. Her unique style has also landed her a Barneys New York campaign. Here’s a look at 10 other things you may not know about one of the world’s chicest editors.

  1. Roitfeld, whose signature look is a dark charcoal eye, teamed up with MAC for a limited-edition collection of colors and tools. The goal? To help women look “tired sexy.”
  2. The editor is a grandmother to granddaughter Romy Nicole, the birth of whom inspired Roitfeld’s daughter, Julia, to start her own site called Romy & the Bunnies.
  3. She is a former model and, in her pre-editor years, appeared on the cover of a British teen magazine, Look Now; she also did some work for Kenzo.
  4. She’s unlikely to approve of the growing trend of wearing yoga pants, telling The New York Times, “When I see a woman in the street, sometimes I think, Oh, it’s a bit too comfortable the way she is dressing, you know? And not in a nice way.”
  5. Family is very important to Roitfeld, who once told Town & Country that when her children were still in school, she had time to take care of them — “traveling together, doing a lot together, football, horse-riding, the dentist, good and bad things, seeing their teachers, the difficult stuff as well — it keeps my feet on the reality. Okay, I can fly away with my pictures, have fun with Mario Testino, doing porno-chic, but then I have to go home and cook.”
  6. She doesn’t believe in trends, calling them nothing more than a game.
  7. Roitfeld considers her eyebrows and legs her best features.
  8. The editor, who once said she didn’t know how to use a computer, joined Instagram late last year.
  9. Kim Kardashian has been styled by Roitfeld and the editor also compared the reality star to a modern day Marilyn Monroe.
  10. Unlike what we saw inThe September Issue, where pricey shoots can take place without any of the resulting images being used, CR Fashion Book doesn’t have the budget for superfluous shoots. Well a magazine like CR, we don’t have a lot of money,” said Roitfeld. “Nobody believes me, but we don’t. So I would say 90% of what we’re shooting, we’re using.”

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