Carine Roitfeld is a sassy Parisian with famously kohl-rimmed eyes and mussed hair who is regarded by many as the most stylish woman in the world. She was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue — up until she put out a ballsy issue guest-edited by acclaimed designer Tom Ford that included a fashion spread of 6-year-olds made up like adults. The backlash led to her scolding, which led to her offer to resign, which wasn't refused. So she took the natural next steps: stopped speaking to the woman who took her place, launched a makeup line with MAC, appeared in some Barneys ads, and announced the launch of her own magazine, which, like Oprah's O, is named CR Fashion Book, for her initials.
After months and months of waiting, Women's Wear Daily alerts the world that the first full image from the first full issue of that magazine is finally upon us — and it is a GIF (GIF!) of a model draped with a purple scarf billowing in the wind. You can even pre-order a digital copy — which just might come with more GIFs.
This is one small step for Carine Roitfeld, but one HUGE leap for the fashion community at large, which, in its struggles with how to use the internet and up until a few years ago, was run by people hot girl moving around in skimpy clothes. Well, you know what fashion like totally <3s? Hot girls in skimpy clothes. So why they haven't been GIF-ing the crap out of all their fashion shoots is sort of mind-boggling. See, look at these fashion GIFs — aren't they fun? Don't they make more sense for fashion magazines and brands obsessed to invest time and energy into creating, instead of lengthy, pointless, wordless montages of models wearing clothes and doing banal things like walking out of a hotel room wearing a skirt suit? A GIF requires no investment of time on the part of the consumer, or energy plugging in headphones into a machine to watch, so all signs suggest fashion should do a lot more of these.
