Carine Roitfeld Channels Ballet

February 11, 2013

It’s fashion week in NYC! One of the things I love about this city is that all the glamorous fall runway shows, now held at Lincoln Center, overlap New York City Ballet’s winter season at the Koch Theater. Two of my favorite things in one beautiful plaza? Yes please!

But as we’ve discussed before, there’s more to the ballet-fashion connection than a happy geographic accident. Fashion icon (and former Vogue Paris editor in chief) Carine Roitfeld began to discover the parallels between the two when she started taking ballet lessons a year and a half ago. Intrigued, she decided to devote the second issue of her chic CR Fashion Book to dance—ballet in particular.

And since Carine Roitfeld doesn’t do things by halves, the issue’s lineup sounds insanely cool. There are flip covers, one featuring a shot of ballet star Sergei Polunin by filmmaker Gus Van Sant, the other a bizarrely fascinating take on the pointe shoe by artist Brigitte Niedermair. There’s a conversation with New York City Ballet legend Jacques d’Amboise, a feature on American Ballet Theatre and—get this—“an interview with the legendary (and long-dead) dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who speaks from beyond the grave about sex and seduction, life and death,” conducted by the amazing (and very much alive) Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Marie-Agnès Gillot. Crazy? Epic? I’m going to go with both.

The issue doesn’t hit newsstands until February 28th in the U.S., but you can get a sneak peek at Roitfeld’s foreward and a few of the issue’s spreads at crfashionbook.com.