Fashionista Street: Dig That Pill Box Hat!

First she sexed up the ratings of a French President who’s been caricatured as a “Corsican hoodlum.” Now she’s pumping a much-needed glamor infusion into the House of Windsor, and the House of Dior is cashing in on the coup. What’s next? Carla Bruni might just revive the pillbox hat as a fetish object. (Bob Dylan, eat your heart out.) In the Reuters photo ( left), Carlaa’s hat looks as prim as Jackie O’s when she was Jackie K. The Queen’s head gear, by comparison, could be stage property from Dr. Doolittle.

Historical precedents for Carla’s British triumph stretch from William the Conqueror to Princess Di. If the French won’t appoint her President, maybe Liz and Prince Charles should abdicate so Bruni can be crowned Queen. After the U.K. media feeding frenzy, she has the world at her feet. Foot fanciers can study her shoes (Sarko’s too). “With her flat Dior pumps and calf-length gray overcoat,” one reporter suggested, she could have been ” a high school student on vacation.” Another, less decorous, journalist tried to proposition her during the interview. Meanwhile, the rest of us can admire the Nude First Lady. Just remember, it isn’t prurience, it’s  art.

You can read the indecent proposition story for yourself. Here’s how Gawker purloined it:

In the UK, entertainment reporters have a reputation for being tough and heartless when it comes to reporting on celebrities. But you have to give them this: They’re also horny sleazebags. At least one is. His name is Rob Grainge, and he works for the London Paper. Now that French first lady Carla Bruni is getting so much press for her tour of England and other endeavors, the London Paper is trying to get some renewed interest in Grainge’s interview with Bruni last year, when she was still a simple model and celebrity. And it is interesting, as a case study in a reporter being unable to control his metaphorical boner while interviewing a pretty woman.

The Telegraph, by contrast, is all business in its fashionista spin:

In the first sign of the power of the Carla product, photographs of the clothes she wore during the state visit to London and Windsor, have been circulated around the world by Dior the fashion house who clothed her.

Even before she took London by storm, the 40-year-old heiress to the Italian tyre manufacturing company CEAT was often described as one of the world’s most beautiful women.

She began modelling at 19, working for Christian Dior, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Yves Saint-Laurent, Chanel and Versace.

By the 1990s she was among the 20 highest-paid fashion models in the world. She will now become the most photographed first lady since Jackie Kennedy.

Sarah Mower, a Telegraph columnist and contributing editor to US Vogue, said: “Fashion houses will be begging her to go back on the catwalk. Every supermodel is going to be green with envy. She has performed the greatest escape any supermodel has ever made by marrying a president. Why would she want to go back?”