The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
No place to call home
Persecuted and stateless, Burma’s Rohingya are living in desperate conditions. Greg Constantine tells Lucy Davies the stories behind his photographs of a humanitarian crisis
Photographer Greg Constantine records the Rohingya people’s desperate flight from Burma. By Lucy Davies
‘The refugees all tell the same story: of mobs and the military torching homes, killing, raping’
They arrive ill and exhausted, having walked for days through jungle, rice paddies and mountains, or having braved dangerous sea and river voyages in ramshackle boats. Some of them are newborn, others in their 80s. Not everyone survives the journey. All that do are desperate. Since 25 August, nearly 450,000 refugees have crossed from Burma (als o known as Myanmar) i nto neighb ouring Bangladesh, after long-running tensions b e tween Rohingya Muslims and the predominantly Buddhist Burmese population erupted into violence in the remote western state of Rakhine.
By the time you read this, that already staggering figure will have increas e d. The Unite d Nations, which has described the violence driving the Rohingya from a territory they have lived in for centuries as ‘a tex tbook ex ample of ethnic cleansing’, estimates many thousands are still arriving each week.
‘Every day that I was there,’ says American photographer Greg Constantine, who has recently returned
from a fortnight in the region, ‘ I would look across the border into northern Rakhine and see smoke pouring into the sky. [Burmese government leader] Aung San Suu Kyi claims the clearance operations have stopp e d, but they haven’t . Every one of those refugees tells the same story: of mobs and the military torching their homes, killing, raping, terrorising. And the scale of it – I’ve been here more than a dozen times over the last de cade, and every time I think, “It can’t get worse than this.” And it does.’
The three makeshift camps the refugees are headed for – Kutupalong, Nayapara and Balukhali – were established 25 years ago. Even before the most recent exodus they housed around 33,000 people, and many more Rohingya have settled in the wider area too. New arrivals sleep in the open until they can build shelters, which mostly consist of bamboo poles and tarpaulin. ‘It’s not even a specific place any more,’ explains Constantine. ‘ You drive down the highway from Ukhiya to Teknaf, and it’s just mile upon mile upon mile of huts and people sitting on the side of the road.’
Violence towards the Rohingya isn’t new – it goes back to 1784, when the Burman king Bodawpaya conquered Rakhine and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee to Bengal – but the current crisis is rooted in a belief among many Burmese that the Rohingya, who returned to Rakhine in large numbers during the British occupation of Burma between 1824 and 1948, want to turn Rakhine into a Muslim state.
Constantine, 47, who grew up in Indiana and taught himself photography in his 30s, first began documenting the Rohingya in 2006, as part of a series exploring the plight of the stateless. Nowhere People documents individuals and communities all over the world who have no official citizenship, no documentation and no rights. Rohingya babies, for instance, are not given
birth certificates. As adults, they can’t work or go to a doctor or obtain an education. They are regarded as illegal immigrants by the majority of Burma’s citizens and were excluded from the country’s most recent census (which did not allow people to register their identity as Rohingya).
‘The million-dollar question that everyone grapples with is why,’ says Constantine, who has been blacklisted by the Burmese government and banned from re-entering the country. ‘I’ve always believed that what is at the heart of it is a deeprooted racism. Is there a solution? Not unless things change inside Myanmar, and not just at a political level. The international community can put all the pressure it wants on the government but change has to happen among the attitudes of the citizenry for things to even begin heading in the right direction.’
Until then, Constantine says, he will keep going back to the camps. ‘I realised, somewhere along the way over these last 10 years, that what I was doing had changed from reporting on specific events to creating a timeline of slow violence towards a community. I want to show that what is happening now is something that has a history behind it. That all of this should have been expected. That we knew.’
‘I have always believed that what is at the heart of this violence is a deeprooted racism’
Atravel tip for visitors to France: should you wish to receive attentive service in a Parisian restaurant, it helps to be Carine Roitfeld. While the rest of us may languish for half an hour without receiving so much as a sneer, no sooner does CR ascend the spiral staircase to the first-floor inner sanctum of Café de Flore (her choice: ‘ You like eet? Eez so French, no?’), two waiters ooze their way across the dining room and, with a hushed, ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ deliver a perfectly composed meal of salade niçoise, bread, butter, salt, pepper, bottled water and tea. Which will remain untouched for the next 45 minutes. ‘I don’t want to eat in front of you,’ she says, and her breathy, girlish voice comes as a surprise – she looks like she should speak in a gravelly, Nina Simone contralto.
The former editor of Vogue Paris has revamped herself as the personality and eye behind her eponymous CR Fashion Book, a biannual fashion magazine, and global fashion director across all 26 international e ditions of Harper’s Bazaar. Through Bazaar alone, the 63-year-old with the morning-after eyeliner and skyscraper stilettos reaches a combined audience of nearly 12 million people every month.
Her aesthetic blends frank sexuality with a ‘Who, me?’ playfulness. She produced the first all-black issue of a fashion magazine, put a bearded man in a turquoise dress on the cover of Vogue Paris and has broken more taboos than most editors-inchief have ever tiptoed around (including a shoot that featured a 10-year-old girl wearing full make-up and high heels while posing on a leopard-print bed). Even so, one of her biggest splashes came not from the freewheeling world of editorial fashion, but from advertising – specifically from a 2003 Tom Ford-era Gucci campaign she consulted on that featured the house’s graphic G shaved into a model’s intimate area. ‘Ze G?’ she laughs (even her laugh has a French accent, and you’re going to have to take that accent as read from now on: so, for the last time, the full Clouseau). ‘You know, I sink it’s great zat people memorise it, but I never do sings for shock. Eez just what I have in the mind at that moment. And,’ she continues, ‘I never shaved myself with a G, you know. I am very normal. Anyway my name is not Gucci, eet’s Carine. I would put a C.’
She takes a rare pause. ‘I’m less crazy than people think in my pictures. They think I’m a nymphomaniac – I’m not a nymphomaniac. My pictures are always about sex and easy relations, cool relations, but I’m more quiet. My fantasies go to my pictures, not to my life.’
The day we meet, Roitfeld has just returned to Paris after New York Fashion Week, where she co-hosted the Harper’s Bazaar Icons party at the Plaza Hotel. She’s fitting in our work- ing non-lunch before an evening shoot with Chanel designer and close friend Karl Lagerfeld. ‘It’s great but we never know what time he is going to finish. Karl is always a surprise.’
Many have noted a resemblance to Iggy Pop, but this is harsh. Roitfeld has a terrific smoulder, with big, kohlsmudged eyes, Groucho Marx eyebrows and expensively coloured, razor-cut hair. Her outfit – a grey Balenciaga blazer (balanced on the tips of her shoulders), fitted black T-shirt, Martin Margiela jean-suiting trouser hybrids that she unbuttons to sit down, a Cartier ‘Love’ bracelet on each wrist and high-vamp V-cut snakeskin shoes – broadcasts ‘very serious fashion person’ and ‘executive dominatrix’ vibes in equal measure. The trousers are big news, given that for most of her public life ‘the Carine look’ has meant pencil skirts. ‘I’m very into trousers this season. I think it is like my new uniform,’ she says. She wears it all on a body honed through daily ballet practice – the only time she slips into flats. ‘When you’re on high heels, you have another attitude. It gives you more confidence.’ She started wearing heels when she began working with Mario Testino. ‘I wanted to speak to him eyes to eyes, so I wear high heels. It changes your attitude, no? It is bad for you. For your back, is not the best. But,’ she shrugs, ‘I think it’s perfect.’
We’re here to talk about her latest project – a show called Seven in collaboration with champagne-maker Veuve Clicquot. For three nights in October she’ll take over 17 Islington Green, in London, with her interpretation of The Seven Deadly Sins. ‘Seven is my favourite number, my good-luck number,’ she says. It’s the rubric for many fashion features in CR Fashion Book: seven ways to style black, or seven ways to carry your bag. ‘I read a lot of Dante and got ideas about how I want to conceptualise the seven sins with the good and the bad.’ The idea is to depict the sin first, then its converse virtue; so while visitors to the ‘Pride’ room will see themselves distorted in a hall of funhouse mirrors, they ’ll emerge into a ‘Humility ’-themed cloud of butterflies.
It’s the third instalment in the Veuve Clicquot Widow Series (named after La Veuve, the Widow, Clicquot, who took over her husband’s champagne business in 1805 and raised it to new heights) and Roitfeld follows in the creative footsteps of FKA Twigs and Nick Knight. ‘Madame Clicquot brought a level of audacity, innovation and entrepreneurship to her work that goes into everything we do,’ says Jean-marc Gallot, president and CEO of Maison Veuve Clicquot . ‘Carine Roitfeld is an incredible, iconic, visionary person, very much in the spirit of Madame Clicquot. For this project, we give total carte blanche. I’m sure it ’s going to be super- crazy, and super-successful.’ It will be superstarry too, with collaborators including Lagerfeld and Ford. ‘It’s the first time I do an art job,’ Roitfeld says. ‘We’ve done campaigns and shows
‘I’m not a nymphomaniac… my fantasies go to my pictures, not to my life’
and editorial, but nothing this big. We need it to be perfection.’
There have been other collaborations. Roitfeld created a make-up range for Mac in 2012 (‘They even did the campaign in black and white for me’ – she abhors colour photographs of herself ), and a three-season partnership with Uniqlo, which saw the Japanese basics emporium turn out leopard-print coats, narrow-cut pencil skirts and other Carine-isms. ‘It was a great experience to learn how you can make not-so-expensive clothes. All the clothes had to be washable. I give everything to the dry cleaners myself because I never knew what was washable. I learnt a lot from them – now I know I can put all my Uniqlo sweaters in the washing machine.’
Born to a film-producer father and social-butterfly mother, Roitfeld has been a near-permanent fixture in France’s fashion firmament since the 1970s. She began her career as a stylist before succeeding Joan Juliet Buck to the editorship of Vogue Paris, a post she held for 10 years.
Besides all the sex, another of her calling cards has been a talent for highlighting under-represented faces in fashion at just the right moment (along with, of course, plenty of mainstream models and children of famous people). She put plussize model Candice Huffine into the 2015 Pirelli Calendar (‘It’s difficult to dress them [plus-size women], I’m honest, but now it’s easier and easier’), featured extra-curvy Gabourey Sidibe, star of American drama Empire, in a Harper’s Bazaar editorial and cast Halima Aden, a Somali-american teenager who wears a hijab, as one of the cover stars for a recent issue of CR. ‘I never look for something different. It just comes in front of my eyes,’ she says. ‘I saw a photo of her and thought, “Ohmigod, she is so beautiful. That smile!”’ Roitfeld cast Aden in the Maxmara and Alberta Ferretti shows in Milan in February this year, making her a breakout model of the season.
Even so, Roitfeld is still prone to pronouncements that show how divorced the world of high fashion can be from reality: speaking of Dutch beauty Lara Stone, who differs from most models in that she actually has breasts, she says, ‘She’s curvy, you know. But I think the face is so fantastic it’s OK not to zip up the skirt. She’s so beautiful.’ Within the industry, though, she counts as a diversity pioneer. ‘I was always pushing things that become almost natural today. It ’s my punk style,’ she says. ‘There is space for everyone in fashion now.’
How does she think the rest of the industry is doing? ‘They follow me,’ she says, eyes flashing.
‘I know what a lot of people think of people working in the fashion industry,’ she continues. ‘When I was young and people asked what I want to do, I never said work in fashion – people think you are very not clever, very superficial, that you are just thinking about clothes. But I liked the image and the dream of fashion… Now it is amazing to see so many kids dreaming to be a part of fashion. So from something that some people think is very superficial and not interesting, now it becomes a huge business. Millions and millions and millions of people are obsessed with fashion, much more than before.’
Is it a good thing? ‘For me, of course it is good, because it makes me more popular,’ she says. Instagram, with its tiny grids o f sq u a r e - f o r mat i mage s, ha s expanded her reach and influence exponentially – she has 1.1 million followers. ‘People now even though they are not coming to Paris for the shows, they can see everything’ – she snaps her fingers – ‘right away. They can feel that they are part of
‘I was always pushing things that become almost natural today. It’s my punk style’
‘Kate Middleton has the perfect body for fashion. But I would love to make her a little more rock’n’roll’
fashion even if they cannot buy a magazine or go to the show. I think a lot of kids are dreaming of being in fashion. Even though they cannot buy it, they are dreaming about it.’
The magazine industry is in a moment of unprecedented editor churn. British Vogue and both UK and US Elle all have new editors, soon to be joined by new editors at US Glamour and Vanity Fair. If the bosses of publishing houses Hearst or Condé Nast called her tomorrow to offer her a top job, would she take it? ‘No,’ she says, flatly. Why?
‘Freedom. There are so many new opportunities when you are free. I want to always do something new and fresh and exciting,’ like Uniqlo, Mac and a fragrance line she hopes to release next year. ‘I try to push new doors because I don’t want to be bored or tired,’ she says, tipping into disdain, ‘with my bottle of water on my desk.’
She softens when talk turns to her family. Roitfeld has two children: Julia, 36, a model/art director/ blogger, and Vladimir, 33, now the president of CR Studio, with her partner Christian Restoin, creator of the Equipment fashion brand. They never married but she’s learnt plenty about love in their decades together. ‘It’s a lot of work. You have to do things you don’t like, you have to go to dinners you don’t like. You go to some holidays you don’t like. But if you want it, you take both sides.’
Julia also has a daughter, Romy, aged five, making Roitfeld an adoring grandmother, a role that was the emotional core of Mademoiselle C, a 2013 documentary about her, and it’s only become more embarrassing since then. ‘I honestly didn’t know it would change my life because when I see grandparents with grandchildren, I think, “Oh my God, they look stupid.” But I am one of them now. She can get anything she wants from me. I’ve become one of these grandmothers who starts to smile each time I talk about my granddaughter. Thank God she’s in New York and I’m in Paris so it doesn’t happen all the time.’
She proudly calls herself a ‘crazy grandma’ (albeit one who receives annual Mother’s Day bouquets from Lagerfeld) and insists she isn’t attempting to keep up or compete with the models a third her age who she spends so much of her time with. She knows that she’ll always wear a dangerous pair of heels. That a defined waist is a must for every outfit. That there’s no new black, just black. That her new discovery of trousers will surprise people. And that the Duchess of Cambridge could use a Cr-style makeover.
‘She is doing a perfect job and she looks very nice, but she’s very proper; this is her job. If she wants to come to me and be in my magazine, she is more than welcome. She has the perfect body for fashion, so it will be very easy. But I will change her a bit. I would love to make her a little more rock’n’roll. Take a bit of the Kate Moss to put in the Kate Middleton.’ In a moment Roitfeld will stand up, blazer still poised on her shoulders, look down at the still-open top button on her Margiela jean-suit trousers, roll her eyes and issue a fauxexasperated ‘Pffft’ before doing it up again. But first: an avowed vodka drinker, will the opening night of Seven find her with a glass of champagne in her hand?
‘Sometimes I do drink champagne,’ she says with a smile. ‘With all the champagne we’re going to have, it would be impossible not to.’ Seven, the Veuve Clicquot Widow Series event curated by Carine Roitfeld, takes place on 20-21 October in London; veuveclicquotwidowseries.co.uk