FAMILY TIES: A mix of fashion folk and high society gathered at Christie’s in Paris on Monday night for a book signing session by Marisa Berenson for her illustrated tome “Elsa Schiaparelli’s Private Album.”
Haider Ackermann, Katia Toledano, Elie Top, Catherine Baba, Mathilde Meyer, hairdresser Alexandre Zouari and veteran actor Jean Rochefort joined the throng on the first floor of the auction house, where large-scale prints from its upcoming “Photographs – Icons & Style” sale were on show. Sitting underneath a portrait of Icelandic singer Björk by Stéphane Sednaoui, Berenson happily autographed a pile of books with her own personal flourish.
“I do like a little sketch of myself in a heart,” she said in a telephone interview the morning after the event. “I do a little heart shape with big eyes and frizzy hair. By the time I’d done 200 of them, they looked a little strange. They were getting very wonky,” she added with a laugh.
Released late last year, the book contains dozens of photographs showing the private side of Schiaparelli, who was Berenson’s grandmother.
“They’re all personal pictures of her intimate life, her family, her loves, her dogs. It’s much more of a personal book than anything that’s been published and since I knew her so well and nobody else knows her, obviously, the way I do, and I had all these beautiful pictures, it’s an homage to my darling grandmother,” she explained.
Berenson hopes to do another signing session in the United States this fall. She will also be heading to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills in September for an event marking the launch of her natural luxury cosmetics line, which went on sale at the department store in late June.
In the meantime, she will spend the summer decorating a house in Marrakesh and working on the launch of her line of butterfly-shaped jewels. “I might do them on order,” she mused.