Catherine Malandrino - Une Femme Française: The Seductive Style of French Women

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For my son, Oscar, my family, and everybody in love with French style

A big thank-you to:

Cait Hoyt and John Fierson, my agents at CAA; Elizabeth Beier, my editor; and Nicole Williams, Michael Storrings, and the team at St. Martins Press for believing in me, my style, and my fantasy.

CFDA Diane von Furstenberg and Steven Kolb for their fabulous organization and support to designers.

FIAF and Marie Monique Steckel for enhancing French culture in the United States.

Pascale Richard for starting the process with me.

Valerie Frankel for accompanying me all the way through the books writing. Veronique Gabai, Olga Krutoi, Valerie Pasquiou, Celia de la Varenne, Kristen Ingersoll, Selima Salaun, Michelle Gradin, Aline Matsika, Susan Seigel, Claudine Choquette, Kelly Rutherford, Akiko Kaneko, Delphine De Causans, and Julie De Noailles for their friendship, patience, and honest opinions.

My parents and sisters in France, Anne, Helene, Elisabeth, and their children Charlotte, Alexandre et Victoria, whom I love so much.

CATHERINE MALANDRINO is a French designer from Grenoble. After graduating from Esmod, she worked with several French designers, including Louis Fraud and Emanuel Ungaro. In 1998, Malandrino showed her first collection in New York. She continues to expand her brand, recently unveiling a new collection for the Home Shopping Network called Rendez-vous. Catherine is the author of Une Femme Franaise: The Seductive Style of French Women . You can sign up for email updates here.

French women dont talk about having it all, or checking things off a list. They aspire to have it, a charm, a quality, an attitude toward seduction, style, and confidence that will make life and everything beautiful.

There is one woman who represented a blend of French culture with American idealism in her marriage to her husband, and in her own style and personality: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

From a young age, she was drawn to European culture. At Vassar, Jackie majored in French literature. During her undergraduate year in Paris, she studied art at the Sorbonne and become fluent in French, later translating French texts into English.

In the White House, Jackie hired French interior designer Stphane Boudin to redecorate and chef Ren Verdon to cook state dinners of her favorite cuisine. (In later years, her taste for carr dagneau bouquetire and haricots verts almondine had her lunching at New York society bistros La Cte Basque and La Grenouille.) When she and her husband John visited Paris in 1961, Jackie charmed Parisians and Charles de Gaulle with her style and intelligence. President Kennedy felt a bit overshadowed by his wife, and he jokingly referred to himself as the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris. During that visit and for two years after, she used all of her powers of persuasion to convince reluctant French officials to allow a grande dame of Paristhe Mona Lisa to travel to Washington, D.C., for a historic visit at the National Gallery.

Not a legendary beauty, Jackies chic Francophile stylethe feminine hair, clean lines, and romantic rounded necklinesmade her a fashion icon. French-born Oleg Cassini created most of her couture wardrobe of satin pink gowns, cashmere coats, and bright dresses, but she also wore Chanel (like the pink suit she had on the day JFK was assassinated), Givenchy, Dior, and Herms. During the White House years, the Jackie look was the A-line skirt, three-quarter sleeves, kid gloves, pillbox hats, a three-strand pearl necklace, and gold and enamel bracelets by French jeweler Jean Schlumberger. But my favorite era was when she lived on Fifth Avenue and wore wide-leg trousers, white jeans, turtlenecks, trench coats, head scarves, and her ubiquitous black sunglasses, lending her a French air of mystery despite her very public life.

Over the years, she proved herself in every realm, as a diplomat, mother, lover (she allegedly had affairs with Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, and Frank Sinatra, among others), and in her career. Perfectly balancing American casualness and competence with a French style and flair, she set trends and captivated people all over the world. I grew up admiring this dignified survivor. She reinvented herself after Johns death to have a second life with Aristotle Onassis, and a third life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Her journey was intense, with fascinating chapters. Shes an example of an accomplished woman who grappled life with style.

Confidence, style, and charm arent birthrights even for icons or movie stars. They have to be developed for women to reach their full potential and become successful. Through my experience of living in America for twenty years, Ive built a bridge between Paris and New York. Today, I want to share what Ive learned about our differences and similarities.

I grew up in Seyssinet-Pariset, a small town of twelve thousand people, located on the outskirts of Grenoble in southeastern France, one hour away from Lyon. My parents came to Grenoble when they were very young, when their parents, involved in the resistance, followed the dream of freedom by fighting dictators ideas (Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain). After leaving the Mediterranean, my parents grew up, met, and married in France and raised their four daughters in the European way of life, happily at the foot of the French Alps.

I remember my childhood in colors. The blond hair of my Andalusian mother, the dark eyes of my Sicilian father, the pink cheeks of my sisters. Outside, it was a winter world with white peaks along a chain of mountains cutting into a clear blue sky right outside my window. The scheme changed in springtime, with all the hues of greens in the pines and the grass, sprinkled with a confetti of wildflowers: violets, red poppies, yellow buttercups, blue irises. In summer, I remember the rows of red roses in the gardens that surrounded our two-story house, and a wood swing that hung from a pink-flowering buckeye tree that later dropped golden-brown nuts on the ground. In the fall, the foliage turned brilliant orange, and then, by November, my world turned a peaceful, pure white again.

I was a little French Heidi and spent more time outside than in. The Four Mountainspart of the Vercors Massif range where World War II French Resistance fighters hid from the Naziswas my immense playground.