Emmanuelle Alt Taught Me How To Dress
Paris Fashion Week is upon us, and I can't stop thinking about her. Plus, what's "hot foot"?
During the digital street style boom of the mid-2000s and 2010s, many of the outfits photographed were fantastical, fresh from the runway, and, at times, fabulously outré. There were asphalt characters like the flamboyant, leggy Anna Dello Russo and her majestic dome contraptions. The perpetually coiffed comrade of Russians like Miroslava Duma and Anya Ziourova. The blindingly bright bloggerdom of Bryan Boy, Susie Lau, and Tavi Gevinson. Even Carine Roitfeld and her catlike kohl and itty-bitty wiggle skirts felt otherworldly.
And then there was Emmanuelle Alt, a fashion director at French Vogue who later became the magazine’s editor-in-chief. The lithe brunette stylist transformed Brazilian bombshell Isabeli Fontana and Canadian model Daria Werbowy into dozens of personalities, like a glorious gunslinging cowboy, a glam biker, or a girl next door. Her looks were, well, simple.
Alt’s get-ups often followed the same silhouette: skinny jeans, a blazer, a button-down or a T-shirt, and a teetering heel. At times, she’d delicately experiment with proportions, like wearing an oversized jacket that she whittled at the waist with a tightly wound belt—typically not fastened but tied. Then, there was a rotation of glitzed-out Christophe Decarnin-era Balmain jackets. However, ultimately, her looks had no tricks. No gimmicks. No shock factor. In some instances, she walked out in an easy black sweater or a white oversized collared shirt with pleated trousers or low-rise skinny jeans. I could have easily plucked these shirts from my boyfriend’s or father’s closets.
One detail that always struck me was that many of her pieces appeared thrifted or at least worn down the thread, like a roughed-up denim jacket. But she’d mix her vintage with investment accessories, like a Balmain belt with a handful of gold loops. Nevertheless, even if the piece retailed in the triple digits, it felt like something you could replicate by searching the secondhand market.
Make no mistake: Alt has runway model hanger appeal, and I can’t wear everything she wears. Regardless, I felt alienated by the prim and proper feminine looks I saw in street style images at the time. I’m not the only one. After I recently posted an image of Alt in her casual green button-up, Lauren Gersick, a Director of College Counseling at a small independent school in San Francisco, messaged me via Instagram: “As a sort of masc of center queer/lesbian whatever, who LOVES clothing and history of clothing and style, she presaged (for me) the current moment of gender and clothing being seriously reexamined. She married a rigorous interest in clothing and dress with a pretty SEXXXY but not overly fem look.”
I can understand how Alt’s casual-seeming style was a reprieve from an era when women were primed for the cameras while attending fashion week shows. As writer Faran Krentcil loosely reminded me over the phone, street style arrived at an era when Instagram was taking off, and people wanted to curate their outfits for that one killer shot. As loudly as they could! As brightly as they wanted!
However, at this point in my life, I was far from manicured. Instead, I was perpetually sweating on endless subway rides and scarfing down Papaya dogs whenever I could. There was no time for perfect shots, and certainly no new clean-cut designer looks, pretty dresses, or picturesque taxi hails in teetering heels. (Then again, none of these things have ever existed in my wardrobe.) I was lost on how to get dressed.
Except I knew that I liked the way Alt looked, almost as if she stole half of her wardrobe from some beautiful guy. Her garb felt real: sweat-in, smoked-in, and she looked as if she was living her life in an actual heel-to-the-pavement way in lieu of outfit changes between shows. Perhaps she was the sort of aspirational woman I could even see on the subway. Maybe someone I would want to know because I could relate to how her men’s shirt fell or where her denim hit. She also didn’t dress how I imagined a stereotypical fashion editor to dress and was far from the untouchable lore of the characters in The Devil Wears Prada.
Then there was the mystery of Alt herself. Even today, she rarely gives interviews. The most information I know about her personal life is from an interview in 2011 that she gave to The Telegraph about how she only drinks kidney-obliterating Diet Coke and gets her dead ends hacked off by whatever hair stylist is on the shoot. It was almost as if Alt’s classic, muted wardrobe was a non-descript but chic shroud. I liked this leggy enigma.
In The New York Times article “New Star in the Front Row” from 2011, writer Cathy Horyn focuses on Alt’s ascent to editor-in-chief of French Vogue. (Horyn talks about the rumor-pumped drama of how her predecessor, Carine Roitfeld, exited the magazine.) But Horyn also touches on Alt’s styling. “Indeed, for a shoot in the September 2008 issue, she styled Ms. Werbowy in the attitude Alt: skin-tight pants, snug jackets by Balmain and Chanel, plain T-shirts, Zanotti booties and flying hair. And she is as famous in fashion circles for not wearing skirts as Ms. Roitfeld is for showing leg. Her antenna is aimed at the street.”
It’s impossible to ignore that there is a down-to-earth sidewalk component to how Alt styles. In one of her only two quotes in the piece, Alt states her goals for the magazine, which doesn’t include pushing fashion-fashion in an untouchable, white-seamless way. “I think the street now takes its influence from the Internet and music more than what designers do. I would love to recreate this impact in the magazine,” she tells Horyn.
In the same article, the Times shows a photograph of Alt sitting in the front row with Roitfeld in that aforementioned green button-up military-style shirt. I spotted that same button-up on Alt many times in a handful of street style images. The piece certainly looked stellar, haphazardly tucked into a pair of leather pants or hanging over a tank top. And how much more real can you get? Showing your love for a shirt through multiple, public wears?
In the mid-2010s, I spent months and months trying to find an artfully faded army drab button-up shirt like Alt’s. (There’s in fact a heinous party photo of me in a bootleg version of the piece, which I believe I got from Buffalo Exchange and continued to wear for eons.) Alt perpetually outfit-repeated in street style pictures, quite the punk choice during an era that was all about the newest loan and the newest buy fit for the wires and the burgeoning beginnings of social media.
Alt left French Vogue in 2021, and today she styles covers for French magazines like Elle and Bazaar, as well as Self Service Magazine and Holiday. Though, I see much of her genius work in the label Isabel Marant. Yes, it’s commercial, but it’s buyable Alt at its core, perhaps with more oomph. In the fall 2024 collection, an ‘80s-shaped hulking leather jacket was lathered in a leopard print lining; there were bitchy leather pants in Hershey chocolate, a fuck-you Grace Jones hooded olive wrap dress, and shit-kicking shin-high heeled boots with ridiculous fringes. How great is it to see freakified glimpses of Alt like this? How stellar is it to see something we can recreate by trawling through vintage sites and secondhand shops? To see a piece that hangs and falls just the right way? Fantasy doesn’t always have to be colorful or neat.
Mini Rando Report:
Charli XCX wore Interview’s Mel Ottenberg’s vintage-inspired “Club Mel” T-shirt. (Club Med wishes. ‘00s Abercrombie wishes.) You can get it soon, too: The T-shirt will be headed to RE/DONE.
Eye on Conner Ives
London-based designer Conner Ives recreated the Plum Sykes skirt and tee look from the “Boss Women” (2000) as a trompe l’oeil body-skimming dress. The moment lives on in TikTok lore: In the clip, Sykes, a then 20-something Vogue writer and girl-about-town, goes on about the Vogue ladies wearing Prada to the office. (PS. You can watch my NEVERWORNS with Sykes here!) Also, the Ives-rendered bag that the model holds looks like a classic ‘90s-era Kate Spade bag silhouette. Former Vogue writer Pamela Lopez, who I interviewed in a Substack piece about a Kate Spade re-issue, first wrote about the bag in 1996. Fun fact: Lopez mentioned that the sturdy sac was a catnip for market editors. In other words, Ives nailed the classic editor look in a sleek, updated way along with some optical cheek.
PVC Foot Fog at Rabanne
This condensation in a closed PVC bootie at Rabanne gives me hives—and maybe a fungus? Don’t get me wrong: I love the space-age take on a delightful ladylike pump, but I can’t help but wonder about foot health. Then again, maybe I’m unwell in the dome because I’ve written about the condition called “hot foot” before.
Thank you, the fabulous Acielle of Style Du Monde, for letting me use your fab photos of Emmanuelle!
Watch NEVERWORNS here:
PVC foot fog is so real! Love Emmanuelle but Carine raw sex appeal will always be my French Vogue North Star 🔥
Loved the portrait of Emmanuelle's style! You highlighted so many points that are not visible at first sight. Such a good read!