She posts selfies from the gym, on the beach and the front row – and is Anna Wintour’s latest favourite. Meet Claire Thomson-Jonville, the new editor of fashion bible Vogue France.
At first glance, it is hard to tell the difference on Claire Thomson-Jonville’s Instagram between the often naked vintage
Then again, wearing nothing but a pair of Converse – oh no, wait, that’s a Gisele Bundchen shot for Vogue by Patrick Demarchelier. You get the gist.
Welcome to Conde Nast’s newest take on Pygmalion. Magazine editors have always been other species-level glamorous but, as the recently announced editor of the magazine’s French edition, Claire isn’t just the woman deciding what goes on its glossy pages; she is something that has stepped out of them too, from weekend florist runs in leather trousers to motivational slogans in hip retro fonts: “The name of the game is radical acceptance”; “You know it’s the right decision when it gives you energy”. She even runs her own silent retreats – the latest must-have ticket post-fashion week for burned-out models, influencers and other industry types.
In the past, there were editors and there were influencers, but Claire is the ultimate Paris cool girl in charge of the ultimate Paris style bible. What’s more, she isn’t even French – she’s a friendly blonde Brit, Glasgow-born and Cotswolds-raised by Scottish parents.
“They’re avid Times readers,” she says, laughing, when she pops up on my Zoom screen in a plain white T-shirt, silver jewellery and barely a scrap of make-up, just like the off-duty models she regularly posts (Noughties Daria Werbowy, Nineties Kate Moss), moodboard catnip among the most ultra-fashiony of the fashion set.
Claire has lived in Paris since her twenties, when she went to the Sorbonne on an exchange from Edinburgh. Since then, she has made herself at home and part of the industry landscape there, working first at independent publications Self Service and i-D, then advising brands and designers – including Victoria Beckham, who moved her catwalk shows to Paris Fashion Week in 2022.
“I grew up in the UK but also in France, so I have both sensibilities,” she says.
So much is obvious in the scattering of female nudes across her social media. The Francophone edition of the world’s most famous fashion magazine has long had a certain je ne sais quoi: sexier, edgier, cooler than the rest. More at ease with nakedness. When, in 2017, the former editor of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman posted a picture of herself on holiday in a bikini, it became a news event in itself; at the age of 59, she was branded “heroic” for sharing it. For Claire – “Let’s just say I’m 40″ – it is, like working out and meditation, almost daily practice.
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Advertise with NZME.“I don’t want to sound annoying, but I have to [meditate] and work out every day … I need to recharge myself,” she says. “I’m a single mother and, in order to function and be good for everyone, I need time for me – I can’t feel guilty about that.”
She lives in the 16th arrondissement, whose boulevards are stacked with museums and Haussmannian apartments, with her daughter, 10, and son, 8. Both often appear on her feed and in her modelling gigs.
“We live in an Instagram age,” she says with a shrug so Gallic it is practically native. “I’ve been putting myself out there in a very curated way for years, so I don’t suddenly feel exposed. I’m very grounded. I don’t feel like [becoming a Vogue editor] is going to change how I live that much.”
They’re called heads of editorial content these days, as it happens. Yet Vogue France’s brings with her a look as revolutionary to French fashion culture as Dior’s once was. Gym kit and abs. Hoodies and jeans. Kids. Until recently, Vogue France’s readers were still more likely to spot a cigarette in its pages than a pair of leggings.
Indeed, the magazine has long been such a specific distillation of the national insouciance so envied by the rest of the world that it even inspired what fashion observers called “the French Vogue look”. Its previous editors Carine Roitfeld and Emmanuelle Alt, became street-style stars for the blazers, skinny jeans or pencil skirts and heels they were snapped in en route to their front-row seats.
Claire Thomson-Jonville is every bit as glamorous – in thigh-high boots, miniskirts and faux fur coats on Instagram –but her style hinges on an easy elegance of T-shirts and trackpants more than, say, the 11cm Alaia stilettos favoured by Roitfeld. (“Vogue is a very specific world,” Roitfeld once said. “You are either ‘Vogue’ or ‘not Vogue’.”)
Claire is its most modern expression yet. Google lists her as an “internet personality”, which doesn’t quite encapsulate her career so far as stylist, model, creative consultant and director of holistic wellness retreats. Yet it does give some insight into what is required, in the digital era, to reach the heights of fashion’s uppermost tier: to be as comfortable in front of the camera as behind a desk.
Her boss, Conde Nast’s 75-year-old global editorial director, Anna Wintour, is so often the subject of gossip columns and documentaries – not to mention a certain fictionalised memoir turned into a West End musical by Elton John – that she is often accompanied by her own security. How is it, working with the woman once nicknamed “Nuclear”?
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Advertise with NZME.“She’s an inspiration,” Claire says, without missing a beat. “I grew up admiring Anna, and it’s an honour to work with her – she has so many ideas, but she also understands France has its own style and its own culture.
“My own taste has changed since living in France,” she admits. “Less is more. Always one thing undone: if I have full make-up, I won’t do my hair perfectly. If I’m in a suit, I’ll wear it with sneakers.”
It strikes me as the modern equivalent of Coco Chanel’s “Look in the mirror and take one thing off”, though who can say what that fashion doyenne would make of Claire’s gym shorts with Asics trainers and socks pulled high, Gen Z-style.
“You can still be very Parisian without having a cigarette, you know? A lot of it is attitude. French women have a confidence in themselves, a way of operating, which [comes from being] comfortable in what they’re wearing.”
Is this then the final nail in the coffin of the fashion diva stereotype of high heels, haute couture and a hierarchy as rigid as the bi-weekly blowdry? Where once Vogue editor was not so much paid employment as birthright, the generation now taking the reins is bringing softer edges to the role. Claire joins 45-year-old Chioma Nnadi, who arrived in the top job at British Vogue in 2023, and Francesca Ragazzi, 35, at Vogue Italia.
“I have a daughter and I grew up in the Nineties,” she says. “Magazines were a certain way. I feel a responsibility about the message we’re sending. The woman is always confident and beautiful, never soumise [submissive] or dark. I’m all about positive energy and optimism. Lifting up, rather than trying to be weird.”
Given the S&M overtones of so much of the photographer Helmut Newton’s imagery for French Vogue in the Seventies, this feels refreshing. For her first issue, Claire is featuring nine 30- and 40-something supermodels, including Joan Smalls and Anja Rubik, on the streets of Paris in jeans, white T-shirts and what she (and fashion people) calls “nothing hair” — non-bouncy, with the perfect amount of undeliberate muss.
It looks not unlike the version of the City of Light on her Insta. She often hangs out at Paris’s celebrity haunt Chateau Voltaire but prefers meditating. Or lifting weights, swimming, Jivamukti yoga or a Barry’s Bootcamp session.
“Some people go on holiday to the south of France to drink wine and tour vineyards, but I go on a cleanse and don’t speak to anyone for 10 days, doing yoga.”
Her Out of State wellness business began as a “side hustle” in 2022, masterminding expert rosters for sold-out spiritual and silent retreats from Turkey to the Loire Valley. Given the global wellness economy is predicted to grow by 7% per year between now and 2028, her appointment at Vogue makes business sense on more than just a fashion level.
She has been sporty since her teens, she tells me. Her father was in retail, so she always had the latest trainers. When I ask whether she was cool at school, she is slightly horrified.
“There’s no way to answer that question, because if you say you’re cool, you’re definitely not. I wasn’t at all, but I had a style. When I was 17, I was really into Helmut Lang.”
(For the avoidance of doubt, this indicates that she definitely was.)
“But I always wanted to be shorter, with smaller feet,” she says, laughing. “That’s another thing, isn’t it, about style and nonchalance: accepting who you are.”
So, how does it feel to be editor of Vogue France?
She grins. “When I put my new role on Instagram, a couple of girls I was at school with were like, ‘Oh my God, you did it.’”
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