'I’m Mademoiselle Agnès. I’m working for French TV. I used to be a host of a different show—I still have one on Canal Plus called Habillé(e)s pour L’Hiver or Habillé(e)s pour l’été—it’s about fashion week twice a year. And I’m a producer for different shows on TV, one on Paris Première called La Mode, La Mode, La Mode with Alexandra Golovanoff, and some documentaries. We just finished three documentaries about thirty years of fashion: the eighties, the nineties, and two thousand. I love the last one—it’s more about business and globalization—but I like the nineties one also, with people like Yohji Yamamoto. It’s not the funniest, but poetic, with a lot of emotion. The last one is more bling bling—there’s a lot of money everywhere. We just finished this, and now I’m doing some videos for some brands. I did one with Vogue and Emmanuelle Alt, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. I was Andrew [Ridgeley], she was George [Michael], and I’m playing guitar, and we are dancing in cool sweatshirts.

I’m born in Pau, in the south-west of France, but I arrived in Paris twenty-five years ago. I still have the same hair. I did a big mistake one day: I was fourteen or fifteen and I wanted to cut my hair. This awful hairdresser said to me, ‘You should do what we call the mini vague,' or a permanante [perm]. It’s for if you have straight hair and you want to have curly hair, you do this. So imagine, with curly hair, the permanante. I looked like a sheep during two years; it was a big mistake. And it’s really depressing, when you do something bad with your hair, you don’t want to go out—no school.

I would like to change my hair, but I can’t imagine myself with short hair. I can play with my hair straight or curly, but I can wear also a little chignon to be more sophisticated sometimes. But it’s naturally curly. I never use a hair dryer—I just wash and let them dry off. The best is the sun on the beach. I have a good towel, too. I keep it on about ten minutes—not so long—and it’s a really absorbent material, like a sponge, and then, voilà! Dry shampoo can be cool sometimes, and some cream just for the end of the hair. I use the shampoos of Leonor Greyl. Also, Bain de Terre oil. I keep on all night long, and then I wash my hair. If not, Kérastase has a good line for curly hair, also. You can find it everywhere.

My beauty is very natural—that means I do the minimum. I really care about my eyebrows. I go to a small place in the quartier of Montorgueil in Paris. It’s a Turkish woman, and she uses a fil, a thread. She puts it in her mouth, she does something and pshew! I think it’s a special Oriental technique; it’s very pricey. In the morning I have a makeup artist, he can waste half an hour on my lashes because he uses this torture instrument. He puts a curler under a hairdryer to make it extremely hot; the problem with my eyelashes is they’re straight. Now you have the Diorshow Heat Curl Heating Lash Curler, but it’s a lot of work. I have a lot of makeup, but I never use it. I have a beautiful red lipstick from Saint Laurent, and I like Chanel Rouge Coco because it’s quite natural. Also, MAC lip pencil in Spice—very natural. If not, the best lipstick for me is Homeoplasmine, which you buy in the pharmacy—it’s more for irritation of the skin. This is the one for all the makeup artists—Tom Pecheux uses Homeoplasmine everywhere. I like Serge Lutens powder; it’s like Guerlain Terracotta. It’s very matte—no sparkle, no gold things inside. Also, my favorite is the Chanel Sculpting Eyebrow Pencil. You have one for blonde and another one for brunette. I don’t know how to make up myself in a good way, so I go with the finger, and it works, I think.

Des autres are maniacs with makeup; I am always a skin person—it’s very important to me to have beautiful skin and beautiful hair. So, I use the products of a woman named Joëlle Ciocco—she’s a very careful woman but also really, really expensive. I have to say, crazy expensive. But I know her now maybe fifteen years, and she saved my skin when I was twenty-two and had a little problem. Since then, I always used her product. But it’s kind of a protocol: you have to follow the instructions, and by the end you’ll have ten or twelve different products for the morning, evening, sun, cold weather….But if I see her twice a year, it’s enough—the best is four, once each season. She can clean your skin, and you stay two or three hours with her—no aggressive stuff, just massage. The bank is not happy, but I am.

And this is my perfume. C’est twenty years that I have the same one. My old friends, if I don’t see them for five years, they [sniffs], ‘Oh Agnes, you have the same perfume still!’ They can recognize me. It’s Ambre by Reminiscence, which is a shop for jewels actually, but they’ve had this perfume for a long time. As you can see, the bottle is not beautiful, but I really like the smell.The things I can’t live without are ma cherie— mon amour—and, I cannot live without my perfume, because I feel naked if I go out without a bit of perfume. But in general, I think the French women have good genes. We have to be careful also not to be too, too, too natural—it’s good when you’re twenty years-old, twenty-five, but after you need a little effort to look natural.”

—as told to ITG