Chloe Malle’s mother, actress Candice Bergen, may have played an Anna Wintour-inspired character on “Sex and the City,” but that didn’t make it any easier for Malle to interview with the real-life Vogue editrix.
“There’s this whole sort of interview culture with Anna,” says Malle, 28, over breakfast at her go-to spot, the Lambs Club, in Midtown.
“You’re supposed to never wear black. I wore black. She asks you what you like to do in your free time. So I answered truthfully and said I like to sleep and cook.”
Wintour was nonplussed — apparently she’s not a fan of either activity — but Malle still got the job.
She was hired as the magazine’s social editor and, three years later, the comp lit major from Brown is still swanning around New York as one of the city’s pre-eminent (and best-dressed) party reporters — even though she doesn’t like to go out.
“It’s sort of Cinderella-like,” admits Malle as she sips her tea, her curly hair pulled back and her Marc Jacobs tweed suit accessorized with a Charlie McCarthy pin — the famous puppet her ventriloquist grandfather, Edgar Bergen, commanded (“I sort of feel like I’m a mixture of Diane Keaton and Melanie Griffith in ‘Working Girl,’ ” she says with a laugh).
“I wore this amazing Dolce & Gabbana dress to the Met Gala two years ago to the Schiaparelli exhibit, and it was completely jewel-encrusted. It looked like a piñata full of jewels had exploded on this dress. It was amazing.”
And expensive. When she saw the frock’s insurance tag the next morning — a cool $47,000 — she was shocked.
“I could have paid for a small car,” says Malle, who will be editing Vogue’s Met Gala special edition (on stands May 14) for the second time. “I’m so glad I didn’t know beforehand. ”
(As of Thursday, the Vogue-star’s top pick for tonight’s Met Gala, a black-feathered Alberta Ferretti gown, had to be nixed since Anna Wintour does not like black. See — she’s learning.)
You’d assume that a girl who grew up running around the “Murphy Brown” set, whose first concert (at age 11) was the Rolling Stones with Lorne Michaels in Amsterdam, would be a little bit more, well, jaded.
But André Leon Talley, who worked with Malle at Vogue, raves about the her polite charms.
“She’s always had, which comes from her mother, Candice, fabulous manners,” says Talley.
Somehow, Malle has managed to eschew the “child of” stigma, despite growing up with two famous parents: French film director father Louis Malle and her Emmy-award winning mother.
“I always joke with [p.r. powerhouse] Peggy Siegal because . . . [when introducing me] to someone she thinks is an intellectual, it’s Louis Malle’s daughter. And to someone she thinks is just a regular American, it’s Candice Bergen’s daughter,” says Malle.
She lived a relatively normal life in Los Angeles, where Bergen’s contract specified that she drove car pool in the mornings.
They moved to NYC when Malle was 15. She attended Riverdale High School there, then Brown, and after a one-year stint in Ethiopia, where she worked as an assistant at a medical practice, she moved into Bergen’s 1970s Central Park South bachelorette pad (Bergen currently lives further uptown with real estate magnate Marshall Rose; Louis Malle passed away in 1995).
Malle herself is not quite a swinging bachelorette. Her boyfriend, Graham Albert, proposed in January with a 1920s art deco Fred Leighton sapphire- and-diamond ring. She still seems to be getting used to her new status.
“The idea of being engaged seems very stuffy and bourgeois,” she says.
Meanwhile, her mom, Malle says, has “taken to wedding planning like a fish to water … I did not see that coming.”
No doubt, Malle will have plenty of fashionable colleagues weighing in on her wedding dress selection for next summer’s nuptials. After all, if any group has had (chic) decisiveness drilled into them, it is Wintour’s army.
“I actually love working with Anna, because I love someone telling me exactly what needs to be done and exactly what she thinks about something. There’s no indecision. There’s no ambiguity,” says Malle, who was a reporter for the New York Observer prior to working at Vogue (she says her mother was “very happy that I didn’t want to go into acting . . . I think, for her, it wasn’t an intellectual enough career for me”).
Anna’s no-no’s include: tardiness, flats, polka dots and the words “gown” and “posh,” both of which have been banned from Vogue.
But things can always change. “There’s definitely certain people that are not in the ‘Vogue register’ because they seem sort of cheesy or whatever. Of course, it’s a constantly revolving Ferris wheel, because many people end up on the cover who, two years ago, we would not have featured at all,” explains Malle.
While Kim Kardashian might have snuck her way onto the pages of the country’s most cherished fashion bible, chances are slim any “Star Trek” characters will get their chance to shine.
“A few seasons ago, Chanel did this sort of space age show and there were a lot of outfits that were sort of ‘Star Trek’-y,” says Malle, who edits the front-of-book “Flash” pages.
“So I did a ‘Star Trek’ page, and the art director who I work with and I thought it would be sort of funny to put a picture of Spock, and we got a post-it from Anna that said ‘No Doc Spock.’ ”
“You can push it a little bit [with Anna], but it’s definitely an interesting balance to sort of walk that line,” says Malle.
We have a feeling she will live long and prosper.