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Inès de La Fressange

Biography

Inès Marie Lætitia Églantine Isabelle de Seignard de La Fressange (born 11 August 1957), is a French supermodel, fashion designer and perfumer. She was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1998.

La Fressange was born in Gassin, Var, the daughter of André Jean Bernard de Seignard, Marquis de La Fressange (b. 1932), a French stockbroker, and his wife, the former Cecilia Lita Sánchez-Davila (b. 1935), an Argentine-Colombian model closely related to two former presidents of Colombia, Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo and Alfonso Lopez Michelsen.

Her family on her father's side comes from an old French nobility, and had the seigneury of Fressange in the Velay (in Auvergne). Her uncle, Hubert de La Fressange (b. 1923), died in the Second World War on 2 October 1944 in Anglemont, during which he participated in its liberation. Her grandmother, the Marquise Simone de La Fressange, née Lazard was heiress to the Lazard banking fortune (Banque Lazard). She married two ministers in succession, Maurice Petsche, and then Louis Jacquinot.

Ines grew up in an 18th-century mill outside Paris with two brothers, Emmanuel, the eldest, and her younger brother, Ivan. She studied at the Tournelle Institution in Courgent, then at the Notre-Dame de Mantes-la-Jolie Institution in the Yvelines where she got her baccalaureate at the age of 16, and then went to the École du Louvre in Paris.

Tall at 180 cm (5'11") and with a weight of 50 kg (110 lb), she began her career as a model in 1974 at the age of 17. She quickly became nicknamed by many as "the talking mannequin", due to her tendency to talk with fashion journalists and express her opinions on her profession and on fashion.

In 1975, at the age of 18, La Fressange appeared for the first time in photos by Oliviero Toscani for Elle magazine, then modelled for Thierry Mugler and other designers.