Apparently Carine Roitfeld’s decision to resign as the editor in chief of French Vogue wasn’t purely Roitfeld’s way to express her whimsy and punk rock demeanor.
According to Cathy Horyn, the bosses (and Franca Sozzani) were quite unhappy, to say the least, with French Vogue December 2010 issue guest-edited by Tom Ford. Even advertisers were upset and complained to Condé Nast – and that was it for Roitfeld. She offered to resign as a symbolic gesture and the bosses at Condé Nast took her up on that offer.
Carine Roitfeld tells Horyn her side of the story, “Maybe, maybe. Everybody has an opinion. Before, it wasn’t a problem, and anyway the magazine was doing very well. It’s difficult to work with a big team. Maybe it’s good I go back to my roots. I was killed for that [Tom Ford issue]. You know, it’s difficult to try to do something new each month.”
The one thing we can learn from this? Don’t offer a symbolic gesture of resignation after you ran an editorial featuring 6-year-olds made-up, styled and sexualized as grown models. Not that I don’t see the hypocrisy – the age of those “grown models” deemed appropriate for the editorial would be, what, 14 and up?
