Flawless faces
Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell serve as welcome antidotes to fraudulent beauty in ads
Is it not a fearful symmetry, in this of all weeks, that we are compelled to gaze upon the aspect of writer Joan Didion as the new face of French luxury fashion label Céline?
“I want you to understand what you are getting,” she is saying behind those wrongly chosen sunglasses. “You are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.”
The glasses are wrongly chosen because at the zenith of her birdlike beauty, Didion favoured shades that were more Jackie O and less Roy Orbison. (The temples, one can plainly see, are wrongly placed; the lenses wrongly shaped.)
Still, Harper’s Bazaar is very happy to report that in becoming the face of Céline, Ms. Didion “takes the reigns (sic) from perennial It model Daria Webowy (sic).” We can only hope that Ms. Didion, who started out at Vogue, does not read Harper’s. Or perhaps she should, as she has always been awfully good at taking a flick-knife to such big questions as what’s become of civilization, under which subject category one might include copy editing.
This advert, by the way, is meant to launch the spring line. How prescient of the French fashion house to deduce that this week, long before those Parisian chestnut trees burst into pink bloom, our minds are at their nadir. Minimalist. Monochromatic. Black. We can’t read too much into this. Or that Joni Mitchell has emerged as the latest face for Yves Saint Laurent, dressed in garb that casts back in time to an era of peasant skirts, embroidery and silvery belts that would tinkle to the sway of a girl. (Mitchell is said to be wearing a “folk tunic,” language clearly concocted by someone with no emotional connection to the rutting era of Haight-Ashbury. “Hair shirt” sounds about as appealing.)
Such portraiture is not a new idea. The fashion industry has a habit of remembering the “age cannot wither her” nostrum every decade or so. Some may recall the sharp-tongued Lillian Hellman — never a great beauty, it may be kindly said — posing at the age of 70 wrapped in fur and accompanied by a plume of cigarette smoke. “What becomes a legend most?” was the memorable ’70s tag line.
Contemporary examples include Charlotte Rampling, who recently signed with the cosmetics company NARS.
A relative kid at 68, Rampling’s hooded, smouldering eyes are undiminished, telegraphing life and loss now as much as sex.
What we see in the portraits of Didion and Mitchell is not the epitome of “cool,” as some would have it.
What we see is a combined 150 years of brain power, still in harness, defining all that epitomizes style by eschewing the fraudulent trickery of injections, hoists and wraparounds, or whatever it is that cosmetic surgeons do. Neither woman has the telltale facelift look of a woman with
As fashion ad campaigns go, there’s a habit of remembering the “age cannot wither her” nostrum every decade or so
an invisible guy wire lifting her visage from either side of a permanently upturned grimace.
These authentic, scrubbed, lived-in faces are lined and crepey, deepened in character by years of champion smoking. The Mitchell portraits would have been stronger, in fact, if the photographer had let her hold an unfiltered Camel instead of that prop guitar, the one that makes her look like the soft song siren of the Riverboat coffee house. Mitchell is 71. Didion is 80. They are not universally loved. A disenchanted listener might roughly lift the Blue vinyl from the turntable and fling it across the room. It has been known to happen. Caitlin Flanagan, writing three years ago in the Atlantic, had a good surgical go at Didion. And I quote: “Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime — artistic and personal — is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore.”
The kit bag is not empty yet. Didion’s nephew, Griffin Dunne, is filming a documentary about “Aunt Joan,” a writer who once described herself as “so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”
She was a clever plant. She made her reputation as a shrewd observer, an essayist, a chronicler of social upheaval, a social historian. She assays grief and loss with what some, Flanagan aside, assess as perfect pitch. It is this, isn’t it, that makes hers the flawless face for the moment.