Carla covers up as she woos London fashion critics

     LONDON, March 27, 2008  – President Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife Carla
Bruni-Sarkozy impressed fashion experts with her restrained glamour Wednesday as the French presidential couple arrived in Britain for a state visit.
   There was agreement that she looked demure and dignified in a high-necked grey coat, matching hat, black belt and black gloves, on the day a nude photograph from her modelling days appeared in some British newspapers.
   “My first impression was that it was kind of Jackie Kennedy meets Madeline the little French schoolgirl,” said Lucy Yeomans, editor of upmarket British fashion and lifestyle magazine Harper’s Bazaar.
   “It was very elegant, but very, very safe, with all the accesories, like the gloves. I also thought it was eerily reminscent of the young Lady Diana when she was trying to do everything correctly.”
   “It was very beautifully tailored and in its way, very on-trend, but it was also a little bit nun-like,” Yeomans added. “I don’t know whether it was because she knows that there is this naked picture of her around.”
   The editor of Vogue.com, Dolly Jones, said that with media attention focused on the new French first lady, Bruni-Sarkozy, 40, was “perfectly demure… her tiny matching hat and rounded collar an elegant reference to
Jackie O”.
   “She really looks the part, while the sober grey wool fabric of her coat dress blends into the British weather. She’s certainly not trying to upstage anybody. That seems to be the message.”
   Image consultant Angela Marshall said the outfit, set off with black flat pumps to lessen the height difference with her husband as well as Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, was an attempt to strike the right note.
   “I would say that it is very simple, very elegant and she is trying to play it safe,” she said. “The only comment I would make is that although it is fashionable, I would have preferred to have seen her hair up.”
   A number of British tabloid newspapers on Wednesday published a full-frontal nude photograph of her dating from 1993, to be sold by Christie’s auction house. Presidential aides declined to comment on the image.

AFP