These women made it look easy. They inspired us to try different things, mix time periods, high end, low end, genre, and to generally not be afraid to create interesting looks of our own. It has nothing really to do with her age, size, occupation or wealth, but with how she carries herself and the clothes. She wears the clothes- not the other way around. It’s the whole person, never a costume. These are our picks for 2009- and perhaps the last decade.
1. Kate Lanphear, Style Editor, Elle Magazine. She defined Tough Girl Chic.
2. Alexa Chung, TV Host. Mix master and high/low queen.
3. Helena Christiansen. Model, artist. Gotta love that she’s 40 and a mom. We always love her eccentric off camera style, but her crowning moment this year was the hot cougarlicious photo spread in Harper’s Bazaar with my fave GG man/boy Chuck Bass.
4. Catherine Baba, Stylist. Fearless, confident, brave, brilliant. Perhaps a touch crazy. Whatever the combination, it’s all effortlessly working for her.
5. Carine Roitfeld and Julia Roitfeld Restoin. Vogue Editor (Paris) and her daughter. This mom/daughter duo would never be caught wearing matching outfits, but they do always look impeccable together. I love that yes, you can tell who the mother is and who the daughter is here. No competing hemlines, no gratuitous skin. Truly a class act.
6. Clemence Poesy, Actress. Her personal style is a perfect modern mashup of updated classic, refined, timeless sculptural pieces and pops of vintage.
7. Mary Kate Olsen, actress, clothing designer. Say what you will about the Olsen twins, but Mary Kate is a true original and on everyone’s style radar. She sets the trends, reshapes the silhouettes, wears what she wants and continues to surprise us all.
8. Charlotte Gainsbourg. Simply- she’s French, she’s classic, she’s cool.
9. Marion Cotillard, Actress. In an industry that celebrates shorter skirts and not much else, Marion Cotillard is a breath of fresh air wrapped in Dior. Her choices and personal style, like the characters she plays are always cool, daring and interesting.
10. You. The Advent of Social Media will have its place in history books and this was the decade it happened. We’re in this special space in time where we all suddenly figured out how to talk to each other- how to connect, document and tell our own stories.
StreetPeeper, The Sartorialist, Facebook, Chictopia, Lookbook.nu and a zillion others have fostered the most important muse of this decade- she’s PaulinaBelle in Small Town, Connecticut, or maybe StrawberryKoi in Freedom, Indiana, but we also like Ines M. from Brussels. They’re everyone, they’re no one. They’re every photographer who has decided people on the street are more interesting than models in the studio. They’re every fashion-obssessed girl who has decided to take matters in her own hands by documenting and sharing her ’street style’ with the rest of the world- a world who clicks and clicks and clicks with seemingly endless fascination.
Is this the end of editorial? That’s a question for the next decade in fashion. Of the ten ‘muses’ listed here, it seems the one we are most fascinated with now is ourselves.
The Real World. A bunch of Nobodies on lookbook.nu
