As it’s Bastille Day, when could be better to discuss the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, who at 5ft10 is considered a role model for many tall women. But really, is this woman a role model for any girl?
Bruni was born into a wealthy, Italian family who moved to France when she was 7. After an education in Switzerland, she returned to France for Art School but quickly left to pursue a modelling career and several other women’s husbands.
She is unashamedly honest about her dislike for monogamy and her actions seem to prove she is far from ‘all talk’ : she is said to be the reason Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger finally split up; and she once fell in love with a french philosopher, only to get bored shortly afterwards and decide his married son was far more to her liking (she subsequently had a child with him too). What’s slightly more terrifying is that she was once quoted (pre-Sarkozy) that she “wanted a man with nuclear power”. Are you getting the idea that whatever Miss Bruni-Sarkozy wants, she gets? Yes, me too. Thank God she keeps herself to mainland Europe.
Apologies for getting slightly diverted by Bruni’s ruthless determination for a moment, but it’s an alien concept for someone to be quite so calculating and in control at all times. Having said this, her State visit to England last year saw Bruni make some incredibly ‘well thought out’ choices, mostly through the choice of Dior (happy French fashion journalists) with their chief designer John Galliano (happy British journalists). Several demur and sensible suits later and everyone moved on from the naked images recently released from her modelling days. Although, that arrival outfit? Was she actually trying to look like Lady Penople from Thunderbirds when she got off the plane?
Anyway, yes she dresses nicely but I’m not rushing off to get myself a pair of ballet flats and a pillbox hat any time soon. Maybe I’m not fashionable enough to get why she is a style icon, or maybe my views are tainted by that fact that she seems like a cold, predatory, manipulative woman who I don’t wish to admire in any way, shape or form. I can think of 50 other women in the public eye who I would see as more of a style icon than Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy but maybe that’s because style, unlike fashion, is simply not just about your clothes (quite frankly after 20 years in the fashion business, she’d better know about clothes).
Maybe she really is a misunderstood style icon, just like Grace Kelly - another woman who came from the entertainment world, got a reputation as a homewreckers after having a couple of affairs with married co-stars, then married her Prince and lived quietly as the perfect royal wife. So is that what the future has in store for Carla? Can you really see her suddenly finding monogamy so enticing now? Hmmm.. I’m not quite sure.
However, I do know that it’s a damned good thing that France’s President had his wife sign a pre-nuptial agreement contracting her to stay married to him for as long as he’s in power. Now that might be the first time a man has got the better of woman who was one of the World’s most famous predators, oops, I mean supermodels….
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MisterSil 07.15.09 at 10:05 am
As italian, let me say she is so toffee-nosed.