90s style icon: Vanessa Paradis

“It’s difficult when you want it all,” Vanessa Paradis once said.

She’s the gap-toothed French beauty who, as 14-year-old, recorded a Number One in France for 11 weeks. Many, many songs later, the singer, songwriter, actress, muse and model has remixed Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side, worked with Serge Gainsbourg and was quizzed for Interview Magazine by the one and only Patti Smith. She’s been famous longer than she hasn’t. And if not all, she’s done most of it.  

She’s seen what Smith calls “Karl Lagerfeld’s secret, his beautiful eyes”, she’s recorded and run with Lenny Kravitz and called Johnny Depp her partner.

In the 90s, we saw her everywhere. In body-con or in stonewashed denim and peasant tops, hers was, as VOGUE Paris’ Emmanuelle Alt puts it, “a soft innocence, challenging gaze and Lolita figure in denim hot pants.”

Fast forward almost two decades and a Harper’s writer asked her what advice she’d offer her teenage self.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Paradis replied, “because lessons are only useful after the experience. You have to go, ‘Oh, I’ve learnt my lesson,’ and you won’t do the same thing afterwards ... So I don’t know I would say anything except ‘enjoy’.”

Here are some of our favourite Paradis moments – enjoy.