Why We Can’t Read French But We Still Buy Vogue Paris

American Vogue may be fashion’s bible, but its Parisian counterpart is more like the literary fiction section at your favorite bookstore: Ever-changing, ever evolving, yet stocked with classics that inspire modern incarnations.

American Vogue revels in accessible glamour, while Vogue Paris wears exclusivity on its sleeve. (Editor Carine Roitfeld to U.K.’s Observer in 2007: “I think the rest of the country don’t like us, and we don’t know them.”) Its cover subjects are primarily models, not celebrities. Its editorials use clothing as props for the avant-garde and eccentric tangents of the photographers.  American Vogue more closely resembles a Spiegel catalog.

The Vogue brand was created to cover what’s new and what’s on trend, and to serve as a who’s who guide to the beauties and the creative brains in fashion. But Roitfeld and her staff go a step further, transforming each issue into fantastical art.  For November 2009, Lady Gaga is literally put on a pedestal, a model with the legs of a Doberman reclines across two pages and Michael Jackson graffiti serves as the backdrop for couture. It’s striking but silly. As a result, a reader is able to both peek inside the fashion world and feel a part of it.

Roitfeld has tested taste in the name of creativity without end since she adapted the title to her liking in 2001. In December 2007, feminists attacked after Karen Elson was featured in bondage in a Vogue calendar guest edited by John Galliano (the calendar was included with the issue). This year she’s drawn ire for featuring a sexed up, smoking model with a baby bump, an editorial depicting cannibalism, and, most recently, model-of-the-moment Lara Stone in blackface.

She’s incredibly smart for courting debate, because in the business of publishing and fashion, controversy is currency. She acts as an artist, not as a journalist or publisher­­–hinting at instincts that were developed during her time as a stylist (notably for Gucci before landing atop Vogue’s masthead). I almost wonder if she’s trying to please the reader or herself, and if it’s the latter, than I (the reader) am infinitely lucky.

And I’m not the only one thankful for Roitfeld’s second career. Since her arrival at Vogue Paris, circulation has increased 36%, from 102,000 in 1999 to 139,000 today. Of course that’s tiny compared to American Vogue’s stagnant count of 1.2 million, but at least it’s growing. And for that, the fashion world is lucky.

Lauren Streib is a Brooklyn-based writer and reporter at the The Daily Beast.

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