Carine Roitfeld and Tom Ford: The Woman Who Turned Fashion Into Desire

Carine Roitfeld and Tom Ford: The Woman Who Turned Fashion Into Desire

Carine Roitfeld never looked like someone who needed fashion to tell her who she was. She looked like someone who understood that fashion was a language, and that the most interesting people knew how to bend it. Born in Paris in 1954 and raised in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, Roitfeld grew up between French bourgeois elegance and her Russian family's more dramatic sensibility. Her father, Jacques Roitfeld, was a Russian émigré and film producer whom she later described as her idol. Her early career took her from modeling to French Elle, then into the orbit of Mario Testino and, eventually, Tom Ford. Together, Ford, Roitfeld and Testino helped create one of the most recognizable visual languages of 1990s and early 2000s fashion: glossy, sexual, expensive, slightly dangerous and deliberately impossible to ignore. Roitfeld understood something many fashion insiders still struggle to articulate. Clothes alone do not create desire. The image around them does.

Early Life: Paris, Russia and the Education of Taste

Carine Roitfeld was born in Paris on September 19, 1954. Her father, Jacques Roitfeld, had emigrated from Russia and eventually established himself in Paris as a film producer. Roitfeld has spoken repeatedly about his importance in her life, describing him as her "idol." Her memories of him were connected not simply to family but to glamour, cinema and an adult world that seemed slightly more exciting than ordinary domestic life.

Her childhood took place in Paris's 16th arrondissement, an affluent district associated with the city's old bourgeois establishment. Roitfeld herself has described the atmosphere as extremely comfortable and bourgeois. It was hardly the kind of childhood that suggests rebellion was inevitable.

But there was another influence running through the family. Her Russian grandmother taught her Russian and filled her childhood with Russian fairy tales, writers and memories of an older culture. Roitfeld later said that she felt comfortable in Russia and connected strongly with Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky and Gogol.