Kim who? Joan Didion might have just broken the fashion internet. As news leaked of Celine’s new SS15 face, the delicate bone structure and elegant grey bob of legendary American novelist and scriptwriter Joan Didion flooded our Instagram feeds.
The 80 year old writer - famed for her spare prose and, almost incidentally, her inimitably minimal style – is, as the fashion world have exclaimed, possibly the perfect ambassador for Phoebe Philo’s game-changing and purist aesthetic. Didion joins the ranks of achingly brilliant (and also incidentally, +60 women) Jessica Lange and Charlotte Rampling to be shot by Jeurgen Teller for a high-fashion campaign. The unveiling of Didion x Celine crowns a long-awaited love affair between fashion and grace.
The announcement arrives shortly after news that Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne successfully ised Kickstarter to fund a documentary following an inspirational life - one that has seen her on political campaign trails, writing on Hollywood scripts with her husband John Gregory Dunne, musing on the disintegration of America and offering exquisite wisdom on losing both her husband and only daughter. If you’re not already familiar with her work, get on it – her audience is set to become larger than ever in the wake of this fashion revolution.
A taster of Didion’s wise, wise words:* “I'm not telling you to make the world better because I don't think progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."***