Influential style blogger paints a bigger picture
Garance Doré’s online postings have been made into a book, and her fans will be thrilled
French or American? Those who follow Garance Doré’s blog know that both cultures have had an impact on her style and sense of design. Now, the influencer has come out with a more closely structured story in her book Love Style Life (Spiegel & Grau, $39).
The French illustrator and photographer is the only blogger to win the Council of Fashion Designers of America Eugenia Sheppard Media Award (an award she shared with her former boyfriend Scott Schuman a.k.a. The Sartorialist).
She produced a Pardon My French video series and her own line of stationery, as well as collaborating with luxury shirt brand Equipment on a capsule collection featuring her signature illustrations. So why a book? “It took me a long time to come up with the right idea of what I wanted to do because the blog is such a great way to express yourself. It’s not like I was in need of more self-expression,” says Doré, laughing. “But the idea of a book is that it’s a wonderful self-contained object.”
The book is gorgeous. Compact and bound in a soft, embossed cover the colour of ballet slippers, Love Style Life feels as intimate as a personal notebook.
Like Doré’s eponymous blog, the memoir is packed with her street photography, distinctive script and illustrations, and candid storytelling.
Describing her blog as an ongoing story where it’s often hard to see the big picture, she says: “With a book you can be much more clear about your message and what you want to say. That’s why I wanted to do a book.”
Doré built her message into the structure of Love Style Life. She wanted to talk about style not only because her quest for style brought her to where she is today, but also because of what she learned during a decade of blogging.
“What I love about the people that inspire me to take their photo, I realized, is it’s not so much about the clothing that they wear. It’s that the clothes are an expression of who they are,” she says. “That is real style.”
The book is divided into five sections: Doré describes Style as the exterior, Métier as career, Beauty as our intimate relationship with ourselves, Elegance as how to be in the world and, finally, there’s Love.
“If you look at the structure,” she says, “it’s from the outside to the inside. That’s a journey that I’ve been through and style is the sum of all that.”
Doré hopes readers will get to see her in a different light through the book. “To be very honest,” she says, “there are some subjects I don’t really touch on in the blog because of the nature of the Internet, and I go into that world.” She reveals the arc of her high-profile relationship with fellow blogger Schuman, and much more about her personal life, from teenage loves to a serious romance with a woman.
“I’m trying to share and to be inspiring because when I was young I couldn’t find people that inspired me to be myself,” says Doré, “(people) that didn’t do the things they were supposed to do, but it was still OK.”