When French designer Jeanne Damas’s agent known as her a yr in the past to suggest an performing position—a career-defining performing position, no much less—she politely declined. Her model, Rouje, was going from power to power. She didn’t do drama anymore. Her agent endured and the notion of the half—a starring position as Paloma Picasso in Disney+’s Changing into Karl Lagerfeld—started to percolate in Damas’s thoughts. She relented and did a display screen check; the casting group cherished the red-lipped businesswoman who stood earlier than them.
Other than Picasso’s personal signature cherry pout (the artist was dedicated to Revlon’s Definitely Purple and Love That Purple, and later launched her personal Mon Rouge line with L’Oréal), and the obscure recollection of a fragrance advert within the ’80s (the Paloma scent for L’Oréal was so profitable it grew to become its personal physique care line), Damas knew little concerning the lady she would embody on the small display screen. She purchased two books—The Stunning Fall: Style, Genius and Wonderful Extra in Nineteen Seventies Paris by Alicia Drake and Raphaelle Bacque’s Kaiser Karl: The Lifetime of Karl Lagerfeld—and immersed herself on this planet of ’70s vogue – the leaping off level for the brand new collection. What she uncovered was a real unique – a trailblazer who was decided to not stay within the shadow of her mother and father, the French artists Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot, however to forge her personal path at first designing jewelry, then later dabbling in scent.
“She used vogue and wonder to play and outline who she is,” remembers Jeanne, who discovered parallels between Paloma’s flea market wardrobe of ’40s attire and the retro-leaning items produced by Rouje, which majors in quintessential French-girl type. Taking part in a agency fixture within the vogue trade, like Damas herself who’s in Scotland for the Dior Cruise 2025 present once we converse, wouldn’t be such an insurmountable mountain to climb in spite of everything.
Jeanne discovered her means in by way of Paloma’s magnificence important—“a crimson lip is a approach to cover your self, but in addition present who you might be—it’s fairly contradictory,” notes Damas, and marvelled on the vibrant socialite’s potential to transcend the style politics of the day: “While you had been buddies with Karl Lagerfeld, you couldn’t be buddies with Yves Saint Laurent, however Paloma was buddies with each of them. She was an vital individual.”
