FASHION : An American in Paris Restyles an Icon : It’s been reverse culture shock since Joan Juliet Buck took over French Vogue. It’s a whole new look that’s turning heads from the Champs-Elysees to the streets of L.A.
When Los Angeles-born Joan Juliet Buck arrived here in June to take over French Vogue, there was bound to be some French resistance. The worst of it came from, of all places, her hair salon.
Being the editor in chief of France’s most prestigious fashion publication means maintaining a certain discipline in one’s everyday life, Buck ruefully acknowledges: “It’s all hair and makeup and high heels. And no more Minnie Mouse shoes.”
Minnie Mouse shoes?
“Chunky, high heel, flamenco-type shoes,” she explains. “I thought it would be safe one Saturday morning to wear them to the hairdresser. Well, they fell down laughing. . . . Anywhere else on Earth you can wear The Wrong Shoes and get away with it. Here, they snub you.”
But this was not Buck’s only shoe incident, she confesses. Fueled with cigarettes and coffee after lunch at the Cafe Flore, she launches into a story about the time she and her French boyfriend were touring a museum. Halfway through the visit, he noticed.
“I was wearing a pair of very dirty sneakers,” Buck says. “He distanced himself for the rest of the visit, and then made me go home and change shoes before lunch. The French man keeps French women up to standard.”
But we digress.
Buck was sent here with a mission. French Vogue has been in a slump for several years--reportedly losing money since 1991 with sagging advertising revenues, a stodgy and rather pretentious editorial attitude, and a dwindling circulation of 80,000. (American Vogue, in contrast, has a circulation of 1.2 million.)
French Vogue’s Los Angeles audience consists of hard-core fashion types who think nothing of forking over $10 for one issue--even though they might not be able to decipher the text.
“I get it for the fashions you can’t get in American magazines, and for creative ideas,” says stylist Pat Naderhoff, who designs wardrobes for music videos and commercials. “The French seem to stay a little more in tune. They seem to find the new designers first.”
L.A. hair and makeup artist Collier Strong also looks to the French for inspiration and ideas. “They are so far ahead of American magazines.”
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Buck, who most recently worked as the New York-based movie critic for American Vogue, was recruited by parent company Conde Nast to make the magazine viable.
“French Vogue has always meant snobbery, high society, a completely worn-out image. My mission is to make this magazine a necessary entertainment,” she says.
Petty hairdressers aside, it is the American who is inflicting culture shock on the French. Buck didn’t waste any time on her magazine’s make-over.
She banned the proverbial shot of The Girl in the Hotel Bedroom because, “What the hell is she doing there?”
S & M and girls kissing were also out.
And au revoir to “beaten children waify things with (breasts) hanging, the sad Lolita thing.”
And artsy out-of-focus pictures. “Vogue was out of focus for about eight years.”
She cannot resist adding, with a steely smile, “I’m iffy on garter belts.”
Her first issue in September was billed as an “homage to the French woman.”
“September newsstand sales were up 20% from last year, October was up 29%,” reports Jonathan Newhouse, president of Conde Nast in Europe. “I’d say it’s an extremely good performance.”
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What is the Buck imprint? “I really believe everything should be fun,” she says. “Jung said if you aren’t connected to a sense of play, it just ain’t gonna happen.”
She poses the next question herself: “Am I making it more American? Certain things about American journalism are unbeatable. Like a sense of clarity in writing and photography.”
On the other hand, Buck never forgets the French half of French Vogue--the part, for example, that treats fashion “as a natural thing, a given, rather than the how-to language of American fashion magazines,” she says.
Born in Los Angeles 45 years ago, Buck moved to Europe at age 3 and speaks, writes and even thinks in fluent French, thanks to a peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a movie producer who shuttled among Paris, London and Hollywood. Summer vacations were spent at the Ireland home of her godfather, director John Huston.
Her first job after dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College in 1968 was as a fashion photography stylist. She has since worked as a writer or editor for British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveler and Women’s Wear Daily, among other publications. Along the way, she has also written two novels and five screenplays.
Reading fashion magazines as a teen-ager inspired dreams of “drama, mystery, elegance and that extra unattainable thing.” A great magazine, she reasons, “should be a place you can’t quite reach, a place you want to be in.”
Do French women want that in a magazine too?
“All they want is a little black sweater,” she deadpans. “But it has to be the right sweater,” she says. (This season, it has to be a Prada.)
“French women are marvelous because French women tend to dress to attract men. An American woman will wear a rather too long skirt and flat shoes because it’s comfortable, and because she thinks it has something to do with Newport (R.I.).”
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This leads to another digression on whether the French woman carries a gene for chic.
“American rigor is about clean hair. French rigor is about the right skirt,” Buck offers. And while American fashion editors might talk about a line of clothes as having “a good weekend feeling,” for example, a French fashion editor will say, “Look where the jacket stops. It’s form over function.”
Of course, Buck adds unhelpfully, “It might be in the little chocolate bar inside the pain au chocolat. “
Los Angeles women have a particular style all their own. “I haven’t been to California since the 5.6 (earthquake),” Buck says, “but I always think of Los Angeles as the Long Beige Linen Skirt.”
Buck may think in terms of clothes, but she holds her magazine to a higher standard. “If it’s just clothes, fashion is a catalogue,” she says. “It has to have a dream factor. A fashion show that is really exciting presents costumes for a more interesting life.”
