Sophie Fontanel: writer and journalist

1. Fashion journalist, writer, icon… your schedule must be fully booked, do you give yourself time to make new artistic and cultural discoveries?

Sophie Fontanel: I jump on every single possibility to be in contact with art. It can be an exhibition, or the way in which my imagination is stimulated by listening to a radio show about art, a radio playing jazz, this music which is abstraction, or a Google search sending me down a rabbit hole of references. 

Instagram is also a wonderful way for me to discover painters, artists, by going from one post to another. I am always surprised to realise that certain people look down on what isn't a direct and majestic contact with art - in a museum or a gallery. Indeed, nowadays, the opportunities to encounter art have been multiplied. Moreover, I always carefully avoid closed circles. These private clubs bore me. They always encourage snobbery, selfishness, and a feeling of superiority that I find quite laughable. The art world is full of people incapable of being artists, but nonetheless quick to judge the world around them - and specifically to judge whether others have the right to even appreciate art.

I try to remain a free thinker, tolerant and welcoming. It is also because of social injustice that I was able to start life with a certain knowledge of art and culture. I was lucky.

2. Do you think social media has transformed our relationship to art as well as fashion?

Sophie Fontanel: Without a doubt, for the reason I mentioned earlier there is access to so many things. What I find interesting is that there are ultimately very few artists who accept to use social media. It is still seen as not very serious.

And then it does not bring in much money, at least on the surface. Artists sometimes watch their smallest artistic productions as if they were cash.

Yet I am convinced that through social media we have the means to achieve wonders. All the hatred present on social media should trigger in artists a desire to respond to this hatred and to neutralize it.

And there is an even more important point that I deal with every day social media makes it possible to connect with the people who love your work. It allows you to speak directly to this kind of audience.

Not connecting with these people who ask for nothing more, these people who want a link with what they accept in a deeply moving and very noble way to admire seems to me almost criminal, and above all such a loss for the artist. The artist in their ivory tower, I am sorry but that feels very outdated.

This connection made possible between the artist and their supporters oddly places the creator in an even more divine position. But it is a form of applied divinity, a bit like we say applied art. Sometimes a few cynical minds comment on a post on my Instagram account and I can read things like of course you and your worshippers. And you can sense that it is meant in a negative way.

But I do not see it that way. For me these people who accept to admire my work and a part of me are absolutely not fools, nor people who have been misled. They are enthusiasts of a new kind, of a new era.

They take part in your artistic creation. If I had been able to do the same with Françoise Sagan, with Barbara, with Niki de Saint Phalle, with Leonard Cohen, if I had been able to follow them and get a glimpse of their daily lives, it would have brought me so much.

3. What are your favorite artists?

Sophie Fontanel: t changes from year to year. Right now I am passionate about the painter Sorolla. He anticipates everything that Jacques Henri Lartigue will become.

I also really like Sargent, I think because of the clothes. I also like Louise Dahl Wolfe, the clarity she brings in response to all our approximations.

If I could own a valuable work of art, I would like to have a bas relief by Canova. Because I would not believe my eyes at having access to so much softness.

I also really like this African American artist Rico Gaston, and the way he paints the aura of the personalities he admires.

I am also passionate about the photographs of Jean Depara, that Congo where people are so modern and dance at night as if they were the entire New Wave all by themselves. And flip flops on their feet. The grace of all that.

4. What are your favorite cultural places?



Sophie Fontanel: The Musée du Jeu de Paume and its human dimension. The Louvre, which I know by heart. The Archaeological Museum of Athens. The great caves of Chauvet and Lascaux in their reconstructed form. The architecture of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The film costume museum at Warner.

5. You inspire several generations, do you have any advice for women today?

Sophie Fontanel: Try to be free from fashionable ways of thinking as well. It is good to be ecological and feminist, it is even vital, but it cannot make up your entire culture. Yoga also cannot be your relationship to the sacred. Read, read.

Listen to music. Read authors of great talent who do not think like you, read The Inutile Journal by Paul Morand.

The world is not limited to those who think like you. Also listen to what men have to say. We cannot build a world by making the same mistake as men, which is to despise the other sex.

All of this may seem far from art but it is not. Through art, man expresses his desire for power but also admits his fragility. Without fragility, we will not be strong women. Stay sensitive.

6. To finish, what are your upcoming news and future projects?

Sophie Fontanel: I am currently releasing a book that tries to imagine the reality of Shéhérazade’s life during those One Thousand and One Nights she spent humanizing the man who intended to have her executed. Working on her humour and her humanity fascinated me.

Their favorite artworks