Reprinted from Time Magazine, here is an interview with the fabulous Jeanne Moreau who served as guest editor for the December 1970 issue of Vogue Paris:
Only a standard cover with a picture of a beautiful woman identifies the magazine as the latest Vogue Paris. Inside, things are far from standard. In an effort to increase circulation and dress up its Christmas issue, Vogue Paris has twice chosen a guest editor for its year-end edition. Last year she was Françoise Sagan, who limited her tasks to writing only a couple of pages. This year the choice was actress Jeanne Moreau, who does nothing halfheartedly.
"Being a beginner, it was natural that I should lean toward something I knew," she says. That means sensuality and films. So she asked 15 couturiers to create dresses capturing the personality of 20 film makers. Some of the results are nothing short of smashing, witness Emanuel Ungaro's idea of Andy Warhol: a floor-length cape punctured by hundreds of holes with plastic spheres swinging in the openings. Or from Lanvin, the dramatic Pier Paolo Pasolini creation: a black sweater that takes a breast-baring plunge to the waist, with bold-patterned Zouave pants. For the sensual part, Moreau had Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph five of her favorite men, then ran the pictures opposite blowups of the precise segments of a woman's body that most attracts each of them. There, in all its grace and graininess, is the small of the back for actor Claude Rich; the belly, dappled with goose flesh, for dancer Jean Babilée.
Moreau hates the cold, so she decided to do a ski-fashion layout as a photographic comic book, shot in a studio. She commissioned playwright Françoise Dorin to write the scenario and got actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and actress Nathalie Delon (Alain's ex) to ham it up while modeling the necessary ski clothes. To caption 21 displays of Christmas-gift ideas, Moreau wrote poetry, which is reproduced in her own handwriting and reveals a whimsical side of the serious seductress:
In the hollow of the shoulder a pearl
Born of the breaking wave
Bathed in the Orient's gleam
I move only deliberately
I am fragile
Moreau seemed surprised by her own reaction to the female world of fashion magazines. "I loved working on the magazine," she says, "because it's full of women. Really, I mean it. I found I loved working with women because they do serious things lightly."
[Editor's note: Rumor has it that Laetitia Casta has been chosen as the special guest editor for the December/January issue of Vogue Paris. I'll give you more information as soon as this is confirmed.]
Photograph of Jeanne Moreau courtesy of 3oneseven.com