CANNES, FRANCE: Sitting poolside at the palatial Hotel Barrière Le Majestic in Cannes on Wednesday evening, Coco Rocha takes a delicate sip of her margarita. “Oh, I have a story for you,” she says, breathing out a sigh. Her deep mauve eyeshadow – which she quips is inspired by Julia Fox – is lacquered with a glitter gloss, as sparkly as her diamond star stud earrings. As the 6pm sunlight ricochets off the tall white building before us, it catches Rocha’s blue eyes, like a director lighting his scene. Coco Rocha looks every bit the movie star.
On this particular night, the 33-year-old supermodel was scheduled to walk the Grand Théâtre Lumière red carpet at the world premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s spangly epic Elvis. But after an unpleasant experience with a female designer earlier that morning, Rocha pulled her appearance.
“It was the first time I had ever worked with this specific designer,” Rocha recalls. “When I went in to meet with her, she was still in bed. It was noon. I was held outside for a few minutes while her assistant woke her up and gave her headache medication for whatever hangover she had from the night before. I asked, ‘Do I have the wrong time?’ She said, ‘No you have the right time.’”
“She stays in bed and just points at clothing for me to wear,” she continues. “She was basically telling me ‘this is what you’ll wear and I need to approve your shoes, your hair and makeup.’ It was this designer’s first time doing Cannes and she didn’t realise it’s a talent-designer collaboration. It’s not a work-for-hire situation.”
“I think this person came from the angle of ‘I’m paying you, so I get to tell you everything you should wear.’”
Ever the professional, Rocha remained calm.
“Most people I have worked with can say they have always had a very good experience with me. I try my hardest and give 110 percent,” she says. “So here I was in the room still trying to achieve that same level of courtesy and be good to this person. As I asked to try some other dresses on, I got some very noticeable eye rolls [from the designer]. She was also barking orders – while she was still in bed.”
“In the back of my head, I remembered that this was the same way I felt when I was 15 years old and used to do shows,” Rocha continues. “I didn’t feel like I could stand up for myself because here was this woman believing that by paying me, I was hers. It felt so surreal that in this day and age, a woman, sitting in a bed, was barking, ‘look at me,’ ‘stand here’, ‘get back in your shoes, ‘hold it, don’t go anywhere.’”
When Rocha left the fitting, she got upset.
“I had never felt more ridiculous, embarrassed and flustered,” she says. “I teach women to be empowered [at Coco Rocha Model Camp], and this woman made me feel like I was nothing. My husband James and I looked at each other and said, ‘No. We have to stop this. It’s not about the money.’ I’m so relieved I’m not representing somebody like that.”
As she tells me this story, all I keep thinking is what an incredible waste of an opportunity for that designer. This is a model who doesn’t just wear a dress, she performs in it. She stands out. She gets you your headline.
When I first met Rocha on a GRAZIA cover shoot in September of 2018, she suggested grabbing a ladder and hoisting herself up onto a crane’s hook on the rooftop of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was one of the last warm days of the New York summer and we had already captured four, five, six – more than eight – cover-worthy shots of the model. While she had a hard exit at 4pm – it was 3.54pm – our crew welcomed her incredible determination to push for something even more spectacular than the shape-shifting, feline-like extraordinariness you’ll see in that print edition. Fighting against the clock – and with myself and our Beauty Editor, Emily, nursing an intense anxiety for both the welfare of the Dolce & Gabbana dress and the imminent liability should Rocha fall and break her legs – Rocha began navigating her best grip on the steel giant. “You ready?” she yelled from the sixth rung.
To the tune of (ironically) Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight”, Rocha leapt off the ladder as a gust of wind shooting across the East River picked up the layers of the D&G. Behold the finished product:
“I had shot in that studio many times and I’d always wanted to hang off of that hook,” Rocha says by the pool today. “People were always like, ‘oh no, that’s impossible or ‘no, that’s a bad idea’ or ‘we don’t want that photo’ so it was so exciting when your team was like, ‘let’s achieve it!’ I remember just trying to hold on for dear life. It’s been great content reminiscing on a good photoshoot.”
“If I’m going to be good at my job, I better be really good at it. I should be known for being good at it.”
“I really, truly don’t understand when people are lazy or heart-hearted at any job. The same applies to my kids. If they want to try something out, I’m totally for it. But put everything into it. Commit to achieving the best. I don’t expect perfection, I just want you to try.”
And try at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Coco did. Despite the aforementioned unfortunate event, Rocha delivered pose after pose along the French Riviera this year. Here she takes us through a few of her looks:
John Galliano
“This one was vintage John Galliano. I worked with him for many years and this piece was from 2012, the final collection before he had a break. To wear something from my generation – and for him to call it vintage [laughs] – it’s fun! You just saw Bella wear a vintage Versace, you saw Kim Kardashian wearing a Marilyn Monroe piece. That idea of wearing something old and bringing it back and making it fresh is special. There’s so many reasons why we’re doing that, from a sustainability perspective to a storytelling angle. This piece never saw the daylight of a red carpet before, it was just on the runway.”
Iris Van Herpen
“This was for a party for a magazine. It was one of those pieces where we were hoping to wear on a red carpet but then we had to choose because I had the privilege of doing three red carpets! Iris, I love her. I don’t think she gets enough limelight. Maybe it’s too avant-garde, but I got a lot of compliments for the couple of hours I was in this dress. I will wear Iris to the AmfAR dinner tomorrow evening as well. We heard a rumour that a lot of models are wearing black, so I thought, ‘I won’t wear black!’ This is the thing, you ask the different stylists to tell you who is wearing what so that you can find a way to stand out and represent your designer in a better way. There’s a lot of going on behind the scenes.”
“I want someone to look at my dress and go, ‘Oh wow’. You will remember it. It will be photographed.”
Pinko
“The designer really appreciated my point of view and the team were completely open to modifying it and making it even more bold on top. It was a really nice process. Even after I did the red carpet, I came back here to Le Majestic Hotel and had drinks with the Pinko team. I genuinely wanted to hang out and we were all like, ‘We did it!’ [Laughs]. I was even high-fiving the bodyguard!”
It’s at this point, Rocha launches into what actually happens as a model or actress enters the red carpet, particularly one as big as Cannes. And, I have to say, I was surprised at the production of it all – and understood it takes a veteran model to get the best shots.
“When you get to the red carpet, there is a very muddy area of a lot of people. They’re stuck. There’s no showing a ticket. Models keep arriving but they aren’t letting anyone on the carpet,” Rocha explains. “They call it ‘shutdown’. It might be because directors or the actual cast are coming.”
“What I’ve been told by a lot of [red carpet] producers is that the models frustrate them,” she continues. “The models take too long on the red carpet or are taking the limelight from the actual presentation. So when producers see a model, they aren’t really hurried to put them on the carpet, but they will hear the pit of photographers yelling ‘Coco!’ They might say, ‘OK go.’ Or they open it up. And once they do that, everybody that has been stuck, goes.”
Rocha tells me on her first Cannes carpet this year – where she was in Galliano and Chaumet jewellery – she chose to hang back.
“The producers of the red carpet were screaming to go but my team were telling me to wait. You don’t really want people in your background. On this particular carpet, I had a bodyguard to protect my Chaumet jewellery, a member of my team and a producer. Their jobs while I’m on the red carpet is to try and avoid all that mess. They then started holding people and the producers started yelling at them for holding people back. It is chaos at its worst. Everyone is trying to get a clean shot.”
While Rocha was wearing Pinko, Bella Hadid entered the carpet.
“There are certain models where producers will shut down the red carpet. Bella sells pages to the world. I am so proud of her. To me Bella is Cannes. She came with killer looks, we have not stopped talking about Schiaparelli from last year. When I saw her, they shut down the carpet for ten minutes and there were just three of us on there. In my head, I thought ‘Pinko is happy, Chaumet is happy, no one is crowding me.’ If you look at my images of Pinko and Galliano, you will notice, there are a lot more Pinko photos.”
“This is the mess of it all.”
Phew! There is so much more to the politics of a red carpet than we imagined. Another margarita?
