Original post Nov 18, 2010

I am speechless! At a total loss for words! Tom Ford has lensed Clarissa & Doug for Vogue Paris, December 2010-January 2011, in cahoots with the incomparable Carine Roitfeld who takes fashion risks like no other and is THE editor of the fashion universe.

F****** amazing!

Many will laugh and the jokes will fly fast and furiously, but other people will weep over these images and the wonderful reality that they represent. Who said that fashion is irrelevant, and that sexual desire is only for the young!

I KNOW this idea upsets younger people, because I wrote a piece once under another name for a big magazine. The responses about a 55 year-old woman having seriously sizzling sex were absolutely puerile. So what that same sophisticated New York audience would think of Clarissa & Doug is probably not suitable for publication.

I also love that if anything, Ford and Roitfeld accentuate age with lighting and coloring. And no Photoshop! Styling by Benjamin Bruno. 

Update 8/18/11: so much has happened since this infamous Vogue Paris editorial. Carine resigned as editor of Vogue Paris. Emmanuelle Alt has created bourgeois style milktoast with Vogue Paris. The suggestion of provocation or offense isn’t in her brain cells.

Alt reminds me of Erica Jong’s daughter Molly Jong-Fast, on whom I’ve declared women’s rights war. Tom and Carine’s editorial about sweet young things being treated as sexual creature at age 10 has erupted into a big story around Thyland Lena Rose Blondeau.

And for reasons I don’t understand (but will check) this article has zoomed into the #2 spot.

Look at the discussion around a single issue of Vogue Paris eight months later. Emmanuelle Alt will never have the guts or vision to generate this kind of controversy in the fashion world. There’s enough provocation in this single issue of Vogue Paris to keep me writing about serious topics for a year.

We love you Carine for making us think and argue in the fashion world, instead of being Emmanuelle Alt fashion automatons. Carine Roitfeld forever!  Anne

Carine Roitfeld is interviewed by Karl Lagerfeld in this month’s Interview magazine. I’ll be writing about it tomorrow.