Carine Roitfeld

Carine Roitfeld is a French fashion editor, stylist and publisher born in Paris on 19 September 1954. She began as a model and moved into styling and editorial work, developing a close creative partnership with photographer Mario Testino. During the 1990s she worked extensively with Tom Ford during his Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent years and helped define the polished, sexually charged image language associated with that period.

Roitfeld served as editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris from 2001 to 2011. Her tenure joined fashion editorial, portraiture, provocation and close designer relationships in a magazine with a highly recognisable visual identity. She launched CR Fashion Book in 2012 and continued working across campaigns, publishing, exhibitions and independent commercial projects.

Her relationship with Karl Lagerfeld moved from long-term editorial collaboration into a formal role at his eponymous company in 2019. Lagerfeld asked her to curate The Edit by Carine Roitfeld before his death, and the house subsequently appointed her Style Advisor for an initial three-season mandate beginning with Spring 2020. She also curated A Tribute to Karl: The White Shirt Project. The role centred on editing, styling and visual judgement, with Hun Kim retaining responsibility for the design of the collections.

Roitfeld’s styling is built around character, body and controlled provocation. Sharp tailoring, close-fitting silhouettes, black, leather, sheer fabric, high heels and direct posing recur through her work. Casting and attitude give those elements their force. She treats a fashion story as a sequence of personalities and tensions, with clothes selected to sharpen the role a model occupies in the frame.

Her strongest editorial work depends on close collaboration with photographers and designers. During the Gucci years she helped connect Tom Ford’s collections to an image of polished eroticism that could move through advertising and magazines with unusual consistency. At Vogue Paris she used the publication itself as an authored visual object, mixing established fashion codes with deliberately uncomfortable beauty, age, gender or social references when the story required them.

At Karl Lagerfeld her contribution centred on selection and continuity. The Edit reduced the house wardrobe to pieces she considered essential, and the White Shirt Project used one of Lagerfeld’s most persistent personal codes as a curatorial brief for multiple contributors. As Style Advisor she brought an editor’s eye to seasonal presentation. Hun Kim retained design authority, giving Roitfeld a distinct role built around curation, styling and image.