'I never think about political correctness': French Vogue's former editor Carine Roitfeld

The former umpire of taste at French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, is familiar with scandalous art.

- Carmen Sin

Under her rule as editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2011, the fashion title issued busty, smoky and kinky covers that raised hackles in the French suburbs.

But the operative word was always art. She says: “When I’m doing an image and I like what I see, I want to have the picture to frame it up.”

The latest December cover of American Vogue, though - the last by fashion’s iron lady Anna Wintour — is a totally different thing, adds Roitfeld.

American-French actor Timothee Chalamet in a power stance conspicuously edited against a nebula background might have been a successful agitation, but it is not something for your wall, she says.

Roitfeld and her close collaborator, Italian photographer Brigitte Niedermair, are in town for UBS House Of Craft x Dior, the haute couture photo exhibition they co-created, running from Nov 21 to 23 at New Art Museum Singapore in Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

They are fresh off a lengthy media tour of the show when they meet The Straits Times on Nov 18, but still keen to dig into the tenets of good imagery. When Niedermair, 54, suggests that a great picture elicits a conflict of attraction and repulsion in the viewer, Roitfeld sits up.

“You know, they call me the queen of porno-chic,” she says. The 71-year-old Frenchwoman picked up the title for her racy styling work for American designer Tom Ford’s 1990s reinvention of Gucci, which turned the round and brown Italian luxury brand young and hunky.

Citations: A 2003 campaign starring a model’s pubic hair shaved in the shape of a “G”, which a kneeling male model meekly regards. A recreation of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, where the female model is blindfolded, but it is the male who looks submissive.