If Editor-in-Chief Carine Roitfeld is the Queen Bee of the French Vogue posse, then Fashion Director Emmanuelle Alt is her cool, and slightly edgier, BFF. With a personal style that encompasses elements of Goth, menswear, and straight-from-the-runway looks by favorite designers like Balenciaga and Balmain, Ms. Alt is the very definition of French chic. Her signature look is dark and slightly tough, with skinny trousers, shrunken jackets, loose scarves, and always vertigo-inducing heels. You will not see Ms. Alt in this spring's floaty florals or ballet flats. Her look is, to use a fashion cliché, fierce.
On the face of it, Alt's androgynous style appears deceptively simple, even attainable. But unless one has mile-long legs, Karl and Nicholas on speed dial, and a defiant indifference to what others think, her look is best not attempted by amateurs. I admit to a fleeting desire, against my better judgment, to purchase a pair of Balenciaga jodhpurs after seeing Alt photographed wearing them. (Unfortunately, I possess neither the boyish hips nor the fashion budget to pull it off.) Rarely seen in skirts or dresses, her wardrobe is almost exclusively black, yet she somehow manages to look both feminine and sexy, if not exactly approachable.
More so than their American counterparts, the women of Vogue Paris are intimidatingly chic. No fans of the demure, ladylike dressing that characterizes Anna Wintour's style, they are more Rick Owens than Oscar de la Renta. But even among this crowd, Emmanuelle Alt stands out. Slouchy and whippet-thin, with a makeup-free face and long side swept brown hair, she is the antithesis of the silicone-plumped, airbrushed look that is so prevalent in U.S. fashion mags. The epitome of cool, she rarely smiles in pictures and appears slightly bored with the whole game. And over the past several seasons, thanks to Alt's presence at the shows (where she is inevitably photographed), her personal style has infiltrated the New York social scene. This can be seen in the ubiquitous oversized scarf and skinny black jeans adopted by the fashion-savvy from Williamsburg to the Upper East Side. New Yorkers from Helen Lee Schifter to Olivia Chantecaille have long sported a similar look, but the subtle influence of Vogue Paris can even be seen, thanks in large part to Alt & Roitfeld's rock star status on The Sartorialist, on the socialites who populate the New York party pages. These ultra-polished glamour girls have lately been spotted sans lipstick, hair slightly mussed, wearing stacked heel booties and shrunken leather jackets.
Hired in 2001, along with Carine Roitfeld, to re-vamp Vogue Paris, Alt is that rare stylist capable of deviating from her personal taste in clothes to create amazing images that still bear her distinct touch. Her collaboration with Hedi Slimane, shooting in black & white, and model Sasha Pivovarova, for the April issue of the magazine is particularly striking. Wearing haute couture looks from Givenchy, Gaultier, and Lacroix, Sasha perfectly embodies the rocker-chick cool that Alt is known for, while modeling sparkly evening wear not often pictured in that context. Alt's fashion editorials rely less often than those of her colleagues on elaborate props, and in this piece Sasha is styled with little more than a cigarette, bed head, and supremely confident attitude.
As if to demonstrate her range, in the same issue Alt styled a shoot with photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin that features model Daria Werbowy in full saturated color, a bronzed goddess with gold jewelry, dressed in elaborately printed flowing gowns from McQueen, Cavalli, and Etro. Despite their diversity, Alt's editorials have the common element of women presented in strong poses, without the tendency to infantilize that's so prevalent in fashion now (you know the look: models posing pigeon-toed with eyes downcast, or lying on the ground looking scared and vulnerable). Alt most often uses a single model in clothing that exudes power and confidence.
Vogue Paris, with a circulation that's miniscule compared to its American counterpart, can afford to take risks without worrying about how it will play in Topeka. As Carine Roitfeld's recent interview with New York Magazine made clear, she and her staff are willing, if not eager, to alienate the "average woman." With edgy editorials and a healthy dose of nudity, the magazine is uninterested in appealing to the mainstream. Despite her influential position and status as style icon in the fashion blogosphere, Emmanuelle Alt remains mostly unknown to those outside the business, and one gets the impression that she couldn't care less.
