Photo: Getty

Eric Wilson profiles the “new” post-Vogue Paris Carine Roitfeld in today’s Thursday Styles and she is, as she has been this year, completely, awesomely, unfiltered. We gotta say, we love the un-Condé-d Carine. Now that she’s a free agent–taking on styling gigs for Chanel and Givenchy and Barneys to name a few–she’s also free to speak her mind. And she does. She sounds off on everything from the demise of her relationship with her successor Emmanuelle Alt, to the rumors that she asked to be seated directly across from Alt during Paris Fashion Week as a way of asserting her still-considerable clout, to news about her forthcoming magazine.

The highlights:

On her friendship with Emmanuelle Alt:

[S]he said she regretted nothing about losing Ms. Alt’s friendship, which had lasted for the 10 years Ms. Roitfeld had edited the magazine.

“Maybe this was not supposed to be a friendship,” Ms. Roitfeld said. “If I look at the balance, maybe I lost some people I thought were my friends, but I made so many new friends. I am very happy, in the end, because I am the winner.”

Sorry? That French accent can be tough. Did you say … ?

“I am the winner,” she repeated. “At the end of the day.”

On rumors she asked to be seated across from Alt during Paris Fashion Week to prove her ‘star power’:

Ms. Roitfeld denied that any attempt at such seating manipulation took place. She said she sat closer to editors from American publications, or on the same side of the runway as Ms. Alt. “I was not very often sitting just in front of her,” she said.

On being more herself (against Tom Ford’s advice):

[S]ince leaving Vogue (and also since the news of her daughter’s pregnancy, which will make her a grandmother for the first time), has made some changes, including reverting to her natural unbridled brunette hairstyle. When she dyed her hair a lighter golden shade five years ago, it was because Tom Ford had told her that when you get older, you have to go blonder.

“I think I will be more me,” she said.

On the year she could have had:

“This could have been a terrible year for me…It could have been very sad for me. I could have gone off to hide at a spa, or to Riyadh, but instead I changed my personality, and it has been a very successful year.”

[Ed. note: Why Riyadh?]

On her new magazine:

Ms. Roitfeld mentioned that she has enlisted one of her “new friends,” the influential stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé, who left French Vogue in a dispute two years ago.

On being a brand:

“Funnily, it is true that my name has become almost a brand…Maybe I will follow Tom Ford. I will not be as successful as him, but I want to have as much fun.”