1945 is the year when Hélène Lazareff founded ELLE magazine in Paris. This French journalist, who’d returned to Paris after several years in New York working for fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, launched the first edition of ELLE with a subversive and elegantly simple vision: to “open women’s appetites.” At that time Paris had been ravaged by the war. And France had been duty and class-bound for centuries. That’s why the mission of Hélène Lazareff was so unique, bold and revolutionary: a woman creating a magazine that will be run by another one, with the objective to help all women figure out what they wanted instead to dictate them what to do! With such a perspective and philosophy, its influence was huge. ELLE democratized fashion. A simple example: Lazareff was the one to suggest to wear pants during the winter. It became a post war fashion trend, freeing working women everywhere from the physically and psychologically limiting uniform of stockings and skirts.

What is essential to understand is that ELLE, since the beginning, wasn’t simply a fashion magazine. It became the cultural bellwether for all French women. Hélène Lazareff published in the magazine the work of French feminine free-spirit writers like Simone de Beauvoir or Colette, and she wrote herself about women’s rights. She discovered Brigitte Bardot. She built the bridge between the Couture salons and the street: the Dior New Look exploded as soon as it appeared in ELLE pages, the Chanel fragrance make a huge come-back in 1956 for the same reason. With the years, the magazine opened its editorial line to subjects as diverse as women’s rights (one of the main battle of Hélène Lazareff), vacation planning, advice on romance or cooking. The strength of ELLE was to be as attractive to factory girls as to manufacturers’ wives. Nowadays, ELLE is such a part of the French way of living that nearly every woman in the country is said to have read it.