Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/175740
Garance Doré features photographs, musings and illustrations, including those seen here, on her wildly popular blog, garancedore.fr. conscious thing now," she muses. "There are so many channels and the way you speak on Instagram, your blog and Pinterest can be all different," she adds. "It's really about trying to understand your voice and what you stand for. I really question myself, 'What is my message?'" Video has been a wonderful way to deliver a fuller picture, she says. She actually first started toying with live shots in 2007, only a year into her blog. "My camera had a video option, so I just used that," she explains, chuckling. These days, she might be chatting up Stella McCartney or J. Crew's Jenna Lyons for her YouTube web series, "Pardon My French." If Doré looks enviably at ease on-camera ("I edit out the bad parts," she says, laughing), she keeps from "freaking out by interviewing" only those she's really interested in. At one point, "I was wondering if I should interview celebrities because maybe more people would want to watch," she recalls. "But then I thought that it wouldn't come from the heart. With celebrities, it can be very remote. It would become an exercise and I wouldn't want that." But as her YouTube channel has become a larger part of her work—Kering and Net-a-Porter, for example, have commissioned her for video projects—the irony is that she's become something of a celebrity herself. If people now stop her on the street, Doré claims it's been nothing but friendly. "I'm more careful about giving the address of the studio and stuff like that," she said. "But I read a piece on Vanessa Paradis once where she said it's all about the way you behave to people. If you're very nice, you usually don't have a problem." Besides, Doré likes hearing impromptu feedback. "I'm interested in what people think," she says. Part of it is keeping her thumb on the pulse and maintaining that elusive thing called influence. "It's not just how many visits I get to the blog," she says. "Influence is intangible. It's not just numbers because maybe one person is good at Instagram and someone else is better at Twitter." Plus, with the overflow of options out there, her own media diet has whittled down some. "I've changed a lot from the beginning," she says. "I used to follow a lot of blogs. But this morning with my coffee, I was looking at Pinterest and Tumblr, and then The New York Times, which I like because it always has a point of view. I don't have one favorite." Instead, Doré senses a broader shift in how we view fans and followings. "We live in an interesting time right now," she says. "Because somebody who is famous on TV might have a lot of followers. But then maybe a good actor might not do so much social media because it's more about his work. Twitter and social media are not a true vision of reality." BAL HARBOUR 171