Charlotte Casiraghi – Grace Under Pressure

Cool, calm, and collected, Grace Kelly's granddaughter is the drama-free royal compass and princely philosopher of House Grimaldi. Should we all learn to chill like Charlotte Casiraghi?

- By Chloe Malle. Photographs by Ellen Von Unwerth

Charlotte Casiraghi is perched on a sharp-angled armchair, leaning forward with the anticipation of a child waiting for her birthday party to begin. And this really is her kind of party: a literary salon at the late Karl Lagerfeld’s photo studio, a soaring, skylit room on the Rue de Lille, in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, where the walls are covered floor to ceiling with books.

Her hair is pulled back into a sleek ponytail, and her square jaw is in profile as she faces the other women on the stage, the Cameroonian author Léonora Miano, the literary historian Fanny Arama, and the actress Anna Mouglalis. The novelist Marie NDiaye is seated in the front row, next to Casiraghi’s husband, the French film producer Dimitri Rassam, and Chanel creative director Virginie Viard, who is staging the house’s spring collection in a few days and conceived these “rendez-vous littéraires” with Casiraghi when she became an ambassador for Chanel two years ago. Unlike the mob scenes outside a typical fashion show, the crowd here is modest, a mixture of rapt French journalists and academics, though seemingly only attractive ones.