PORTRAIT: THE HAPPINESS OF SOPHIE FONTANEL

The first time we crossed Sophie Fontanel, she told us our blouse. Not to show that she had the same (this was the case). Just to say: "It's funny, me, it makes terrible." We laughed. She probably forgot this story. But the idea never left the garment created the connection between people. In The Calling (1), released January 7, it tells the story of integration. That of his family. Migrants was then called "refugees", Armenians landed in Paris that have made every effort to make their home. By dressing for example Montparnasse way and not how Bush, their hometown in Armenia. In these pages, Meline, his grandmother, sews sweaters for Elsa Schiaparelli. Empowerment through elegance, food-like Vogue, which she treasured it on a torn page just before leaving Armenia, it was the vocation of Meline. Fashion has become that of Sophia. CLOTHING SAVING LIFE It almost did not his story, though. At 17 and a half, baccalaureate, the young Fontanel begins studying literature, wants to become a linguist and moved to New York to intern at the UN. There she discovers the American consumer, jeans and 501. And in the US, we do not mess with that. "There was a whole rack, you could buy yourself whites, in v'lours (v'lours she said)." And then there were all these thrift stores in which it continues to drag today, because there's always a wonder to dig. At the end of the internship, she returned to France with "the devil clothes" and two large suitcases that: "It is as if I had radicalized." We laugh of the formula. Leaving the UN, she had warned that she wanted to "get into fashion" as it enters the orders. But how ? A friend told him about an internship at the Matin de Paris, a major newspaper of the time, a journalist who made the fashion shows of his last interview with Serge Gainsbourg ... Sophie is fascinated. With his most mischievous, she said today: "How to tell Imagining my life between the parades and the home of Serge Gainsbourg ...?" She rushes. At 22, she writes a column on the times, prominently in the newspaper. With her first paycheck, she bought a leather skirt Mac Douglas. And when she interviewed Gainsbourg in turn, she tells him that clothes. With man with white Repetto, they cause that the clothes can repair physical disgrace. "This is my theory: I do not agree with people who say," I do not feel well enough to dress "For me, clothes adorn you, you ennoble me, that.. saved my life. " His first show was a shock. Martine Sitbon A collection of the Museum of Fine Arts: "It gave me terribly want to live I thought. I will dress more like me, I will not do my hair like that." She left The Morning Cosmopolitan and Cosmopolitan for Canal +. On the set of Nowhere, she speaks little but changes the mode of agreement on how we dress then on TV.