Influencer chooses Wellington
Top French fashion blogger Garance Dore hopes the world doesn’t rush back to living the way it was after lockdown, she tells Josie Steenhart.
Anyone who has had more than a passing interest in fashion in the past 15 years will be familiar with the name Garance Dore. Dore started out as an illustrator in Paris, but in 2006, keen to reach a broader audience, she launched her blog Dore, soon incorporating into the website writing, then street style photography, then video.
She started working on content for fashion brands like Dior, J Crew and Tiffany & Co, started dating acclaimed street style photographer Scott Schuman (aka The Sartorialist) and started featuring front row at all the hottest fashion shows, from Paris and Milan to New York and London.
She’s interviewed major fashion names from Dries Van Noten to Stella McCartney, drawn illustrations for the likes of Louis Vuitton, penned a monthly column for Vogue Paris and, in 2015, published her first book, Love Style Life ,a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 15 languages.
The New York Times Magazine once called her ‘‘the guardian of all style’’.
Three years ago, the 44-year-old French-born Dore moved from New York to Los Angeles, and has since made no secret of her love for the laidback LA lifestyle, beautiful weather and focus on wellbeing, health and the good life.
So you can imagine her followers’ surprise – she has 739,000 followers on her personal Instagram account @garancedore and 260,000 on the account linked to her website – to see that suddenly Dore was living in Wellington.
The first reference to this seemingly surprise move was a sketch on her Instagram of some distinctly New Zealand-looking trees and ferns overlooking a bay, titled ‘‘Wellington Harbour, March 2020’’.
Dore captioned the drawing ‘‘A view of the Wellington Harbour, the place I am happy to call home in this crazy, crazy, crazy time …’’
More Instagram posts followed, with little hints about local life and photos of sea and bush, then a typically quirky newsletter hit inboxes with the subject line ‘‘Guess where I am!!!’’ which elaborated only slightly more – she’d ‘‘met someone and he, well, he lives in New Zealand, sorta’’.
‘‘Kiwis, if you’ve seen a crazy woman running up and down the islands, don’t worry, it’s me. Keep your distance!’’
When I speak to her on day 23 of level four lockdown, she seems to have settled into what must have been an even stranger strange new life than most of us.
Dore is reluctant to share too many details about her mystery man – ‘‘I am worried. In the past I overshared some stuff and it came back to bite me in the butt’’ – but explains the pair got together only two months before Dore made the decision to temporarily up sticks.
The house she flew halfway around the world to, just ahead of a strict national lockdown, is also home to her partner’s two children.
Dore had never been to New Zealand before and has seen almost nothing of it as she travelled straight from the airport into self-isolation.
She has left behind her beloved LA house and dog Lulu, and though by luck has several sets of comfy clothing – ‘‘I never travel in jeans or things like that, I like to be very soft and comfortable’’ – forgot to pack a pair of slippers.
It’s the slippers that really get me, and the first thing I ask her about – once we’re past the nowobligatory exchange of self-isolation info – is whether she’s managed to get hold of a pair.
‘‘No, but it’s OK, I’m surviving. I’m a big fan of slippers, too. I have a big collection. I didn’t think about all these details, but, at the same time, if you think about it, it makes me look like I’m dressed, wearing actual shoes!
‘‘What I didn’t think so much about, because I live in a kind of weatherless place, was going into winter – living in LA, you kind of forget that weather exists.’’
Like the rest of us, she regularly catches up with friends, family and colleagues via phone and Zoom, and has been doing plenty of yoga, enjoying nearby bush walks and preparing a typically French mix of ‘‘extremely rich foods, those foods with lots of cream and butter and love in them’’ and what she says are her favourite lockdown foods – salads.
The one foray into local culture she’s been able to make? Sampling New Zealand wine.
‘‘I also went to Commonsense Organics a few days ago and you should have seen me. I mean, it was heaven for me, because this is the type of food that I love.
‘‘The food here is amazing, lots of things you buy in supermarkets here are local, which is so cool. Even the yoghurt, the milk, is all quite amazing – I don’t know if you realise!’’
So as someone whose insights and observations are sought after and celebrated around the world, what does Dore make of the current state of things?
‘‘I was talking to my mum this morning and she was like, ‘Oh we just have to be patient,’ but I was like, ‘No, if you say that, it means we’re just waiting for things to go back to normal, and is that what we really want? Just to go back and rush into exactly what it was?’
‘‘For me, for sure not, because I’ve been shaken in my core.
‘‘I think it’s a good time to see what we’re missing and what we’re not missing.
‘‘I’m trying to make sense of things and find meaning, but personally I’m worried we’re just going to rush back to how it was, because that’s what we know.
‘‘I’m sorry to be a bit cynical, but I feel like that’s what’s going to happen – though I hope that some things will change.
‘‘I was just talking with one of my friends who has a fashion brand and I was like, ‘OK, I don’t think people are going to want to dress the same way.’
‘‘But then there was a story on Business of Fashion that said, ‘no, people are going to go back to consuming more, as soon as they can’.’’
Or perhaps, says Dore, the sea change will just be slower, less immediate.
She gives the example of friends in places like New York who are realising if they can work from home, ‘‘it means they can work from anywhere, it doesn’t have to be big cities, and in different ways.
‘‘They’re just feeling so trapped in the city right now and so many of them just want to be out.
‘‘So, past the first rush of, ‘Oh my God, let’s go back to normal,’ there might still be some deeper changes.’’
‘‘I’ve been shaken in my core. I think it’s a good time to see what we’re missing and what we’re not missing.’’