Celine Dion Poses Nude For ‘Vogue’ Shoot [PHOTOS]

Celine Dion stripped down naked for a fashion shoot with Vogue.

CELINE DION STRIPS DOWN FOR VOGUE

The 49-year-old singer posed nude between clothing changes, and the magazine captioned the snap with “a little naked fact” about Dion. The long post gave an exclusive insight into the fashion life of the singer.

“For the past five years she has worn haute couture near exclusively for her own performances (in Las Vegas and on her current “mini-tour” of Europe). She performs a minimum two hours a night, five or six nights a week, dancing and curtseying and generally gesticulating sans abandon, in handmade, hand-beaded delicacies designed solely to walk a catwalk or a carpet (and often with handlers). For Celine’s orders, the houses send teams to Nevada for typically three fittings, before the garments are ultimately finished in her local, private atelier. Armani Prive, Schiaparelli, Giambattista Valli, Versace…only a partial list. Everyone, basically. In Vegas, Velcro panels are added to allow for her ribcage to expand or for a quick outfit change. Micro straps of elasticized chiffon prevent a slit from becoming a sloppy situation mid-squat. Shoes—always heels, never platforms—are ordered one size smaller (she is normally a 38) and refitted with metal shanks. Says Celine, “We have to make haute couture industrial.” And, more enigmatically: “The clothes follow me; I do not follow the clothes.” Which is to say: the haute couture, with all its fragility and handcraft, has to perform professionally for Ms. Dion. And privately as well. Years ago, Celine bought a classic little black dress from the Christian Dior atelier when the house was overseen by John Galliano. It is simple, falling to mid calf, and narrow as can be with just a hint of stretch. It requires a minimum of jewelry, a statement bracelet or perhaps one of the major diamond rings she designed with her late husband Rene Angelil: two pear cuts set in a wide pave band, or two hearts of diamond and emerald abstractly interlocking, on a cushion of yet more diamonds. This LBD forces you to walk one foot in front of the other. This is a dress Celine knows well and clearly loves, the simplest evocation of the private luxury of couture and the total antithesis of the red carpet hoopla that attends the union of fashion and celebrity. It is also the dress she wore to Rene’s funeral. #CelineTakesCouture Photo by @sophfei.”

Here’s a little naked fact to ponder while Celine Dion changes looks between shows: for the past five years she has worn haute couture near exclusively for her own performances (in Las Vegas and on her current “mini-tour” of Europe). She performs a minimum two hours a night, five or six nights a week, dancing and curtseying and generally gesticulating sans abandon, in handmade, hand-beaded delicacies designed solely to walk a catwalk or a carpet (and often with handlers). For Celine’s orders, the houses send teams to Nevada for typically three fittings, before the garments are ultimately finished in her local, private atelier. Armani Prive, Schiaparelli, Giambattista Valli, Versace…only a partial list. Everyone, basically. In Vegas, Velcro panels are added to allow for her ribcage to expand or for a quick outfit change. Micro straps of elasticized chiffon prevent a slit from becoming a sloppy situation mid-squat. Shoes—always heels, never platforms—are ordered one size smaller (she is normally a 38) and refitted with metal shanks. Says Celine, “We have to make haute couture industrial.” And, more enigmatically: “The clothes follow me; I do not follow the clothes.” Which is to say: the haute couture, with all its fragility and handcraft, has to perform professionally for Ms. Dion. And privately as well. Years ago, Celine bought a classic little black dress from the Christian Dior atelier when the house was overseen by John Galliano. It is simple, falling to mid calf, and narrow as can be with just a hint of stretch. It requires a minimum of jewelry, a statement bracelet or perhaps one of the major diamond rings she designed with her late husband Rene Angelil: two pear cuts set in a wide pave band, or two hearts of diamond and emerald abstractly interlocking, on a cushion of yet more diamonds. This LBD forces you to walk one foot in front of the other. This is a dress Celine knows well and clearly loves, the simplest evocation of the private luxury of couture and the total antithesis of the red carpet hoopla that attends the union of fashion and celebrity. It is also the dress she wore to Rene’s funeral. #CelineTakesCouture Photo by @sophfei.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 3, 2017 at 10:25pm PDT

Dion gave exclusive words to the magazine, which they then posted in a series of Instagram shots. She speaks about her longtime passion for fashion, as well as her late husband, and her thoughts on couture.

“What is making the people who are interested in fashion now interested in me when I have always been interested in fashion?” So asks Celine Dion en route to the Christian Dior haute couture show, security guards in tow. She wears a tunic and mid calf skirt, tucked and belted and elevated by thigh high black boots. She has done her own makeup–as is her way–but her precise and dramatic eye contouring is obscured by the massive Dior gold shades selected by her stylist Law Roach (@luxurylaw). (“Why did you make me wear makeup if I was going to wear glasses like this?”) Celine began working with Law a little over a year ago, after her husband Rene passed and she began the long road of living again with great loss of a partner (“an amazing man”) but also the incredible blessing of “the quality of the time we spent together.” More on that later. For now it is enough to know that while Law may have contributed to the answer to Celine’s original question–why dion mania now?–the answer clearly lies with the lady herself. She keeps a master file divided into mini files of pages torn from magazines. She circles looks from collections special issues, turns down pages, and despairs when a look or accessory is not produced and the sample unbuyable. Celine Dion knows clothes. (She is also at a point in her life where she can enjoy them. Going to a fashion show “gives me a bit of freedom when my life has been work, discipline, hard hard work.”) Today at @dior there was a little work (celebrity gridlock in and out, intense heat which is never ideal with leather) and a lot of fun. Celine admires Ruth Bell’s gamine crop (“I really want a haircut like that”), the flatform boots (“the strength today!”), a wool coat dress for day with an open assymetric neckline (“like a calla lily”), the mousseline peering out from the long belted coats. After she said, “I forgot the jungle, the theme, I don’t care. I am not buying the animals, the trees. But the clothes?” she smiles. “I am already broke.” More on that later, and the significance of one legendary CD to another…. #CelineTakesCouture Photo by @sophfei.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 3, 2017 at 10:08am PDT

Celine Dion doesn’t try to hide her feelings. Her candor is one of her many charms, coupled with lovely manners and an emotional transparency that’s unique in anyone (let alone a global popstar for over 30 years). Last year at the haute couture show for Giambattista Valli, she sang, clapped, oohed and cooed, before ultimately going backstage post-show to weep with Giamba and his mama. “No one else was applauding,” she recalls slightly sheepishly as she waits to enter the Petit Palais for this summer’s Valli catwalk. She is joined by a featured dancer in her European show by the name of Pepe Munoz. Pepe is a Spaniard, originally from Malaga; he is also a budding fashion illustrator (@pepemunozillustrations). Celine was introduced to Pepe by Las Vegas show folks she knows through her butler’s wife, who is a dancer herself. (“All the people I meet,” says Dion of her Vegas social life, “are acrobats, dancers, or divers. That’s family.”) Now the two are fast pals, inseparable onstage (her in a jeweled, super-heroic unitard, him in his basic helpless hotness) and off. And so when, this season, Celine decides to express her exuberant enthusiasm for Valli’s work it is by making flamenco hand signals to Pepe, who is across the aisle, and his front row neighbors, actress Rossy de Palma and the esteemed Spanish choreographer Blanca Li. And there are far too many runway winners to count. A delicate tiny floral tee-shirt of fully embroidered tulle worn with a collar or harness of black pailettes. Ball dresses of chantilly lace, pleated tulle, or broderie anglais, cut high in the front, trained in the back. This is a full-on Celine show in every sense. Celine’s hands are twirling; Pepe’s hands are Voguing; Rossy is inexplicably doing scissor kicks…. The models (the lucky ones!) are gliding by in ballet shoes, but the dancing is all going down in the seats. When it ends, Pepe is in tears. Blanca is in heaven. And Celine is saying that next year, if she is on tour in Europe, she will ask to have the whole week of the shows off from performing. “But they won’t let me,” she laughs, “for fear I will spend too much money!” #CelineTakesCouture Photographed by @denisetruscello.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 3, 2017 at 10:27pm PDT

“They see me; I don’t see them,” is Celine Dion’s line on the great blob of paparazzi and fans that follows her everywhere. She gives them any picture they ask for, plus a great many more. Consider an appointment with at the house of Schiaparelli, where she poses for the creative director Bertrand Guyon on a window sill overlooking the Place Vendome. She wears a tiny whimsical dress of Swarovski chainmail re-embroidered with yet more crystals and high sparkly Victorian boots–a little Twiggy, a little Tina Turner. Says her dancer Pepe Munoz: “That’s a rockstar!” Says Libby Hahn, who handles public relations for the house: “I am fairly certain she was a rockstar before she put on the dress.” Says Celine’s own longtime photographer Denise Truscello (a Canadian cinephile with her own rockstar style), thinking of the long lenses poised on the place below: “Is the dress pulled down in the back?” Says Celine Dion: “They might see my butt, but I don’t think they mind.” #CelineTakesCouture Photographed by @denisetruscello

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 4, 2017 at 5:35am PDT

Celine Dion is frustrated by fashion’s current revolving door policy, the relentless firings and hirings at the top (amen to that!). She is concerned that “the dream” of elegance is disappearing, for as much fun as she had in her beloved Vetements Titanic sweatshirt (and we have Law Roach for that brilliant post-ironic gesture!), she believe in the magic of hats, gloves and total looks, of a world in which Lisa Fonssagrives could step from the pages of Vogue and through the doors of today’s Ritz. Mostly she laments the red carpet hordes with the incessant questions about whose clothes and jewels one is wearing. “Mine” is her answer. Fashion is public for Celine; jewelry is personal. Sometimes, when she is at home in Las Vegas and missing her partner Rene, she slips on a caftan and all her jewels, and quietly retreats to her bath, sans children, sans fans, sans circus. #CelineTakesCouture Photo by @sophfei.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 4, 2017 at 7:38am PDT

In the minutes before her show at the AccorHotels Arena at Bercy, Celine Dion is presented with an award by the French division of Sony for her 2016 francophone release Encore un soir. Dion thanks the clutch of executives assembled avec champagne and macaroons in the green room (hell, this is Paris after all) and reminds them quietly that this award means even so much more because the recording was her first without Rene and made during the most raw and difficult of times. Now it is a “diamond,” meaning it has sold over 500k in France. Actually it has sold over 800k, and this is at a time when, hello, NO ONE BUYS RECORDS ANYMORE. Except for people in France who adore Celine, that is, nearly 20k of which are soon singing along—every lyric, every song—to their beloved diva. For a stadium show it is an extremely personal affair—everyone cries!—and never more so than when Dion’s three sons make an appearance, via projection, during her cover of Michael Jackson’s Black or White. Rene-Charles, aged 16, raps the King of Pop’s spoken word bits, and when he is finished the twins, Nelson and Eddy, make a smiling cameo. Her children are not in the business–“I am not that kind of mother”–but they travel with her on tour and share some of her passions. Rene-Charles loves music and shoes (“the apple did not fall far from the tree”) and, like her, habitually over-packs. On this tour he has brought 70 pairs of sneakers. The 6-year-old twins Nelson and Eddy love to dress up, as kids do, and recently asked to have their hair cut and styled like James Brown. Yes, that James Brown. Tres difficile! Fun fact: It was Nelson and Eddy’s love of Disney-era Zendaya that made Celine aware of the stylish teen star. She then clocked Z’s picture on the red carpet and in magazines. So she googled “who is Zendaya’s stylist,” as one does, and found Law Roach. Yes, that actually happened. #CelineTakesCouture Photographed by @denisetruscello

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 5, 2017 at 2:15am PDT

“My energy feels younger, more dynamic, excited,” says Celine Dion. “Everything now feels like it is a first.” Celine’s positive spirit and genuine enthusiasm for everything beautiful and fun-fun-fun is perhaps one big reason the fashion world is loving her lately. She gives standing ovations. She hugs the designers. In a couture week filled with drab gray clothes and even grayer moods, it’s a joy to see bedazzlement (and from a grand duchess of dazzle). But this happiness is hard won. Celine Dion is no Merry Widow, more the sanguine survivor. Her greatest accomplishment, in her words? “The way I prepared my children for their father’s death.” During the three years in which Rene had a feeding tube in his stomach, Celine insisted her children be aware of the nursing care she and others were giving him, but to not be scared by it (the babies) or distraught (the adolescent Rene-Charles). When he passed, she turned to the Disney film Up to make sense for them of a truly devastating situation. She explained that their house would stay on earth while there father went “up” with his loving home metaphorically protecting him. She had the boys write messages to Rene which were sent skyward in helium balloons. They blew “fairy dust” overhead. She told them that when someone goes “up” they can’t come down, but that their father was now healthy, dancing, singing, and reunited with their grandparents. In her own unfathomable bereavement Celine was careful and conscientious with theirs. Rene-Charles turned to sports to process his grief–hockey and golf (Celine thinks he could turn pro one day). Then there was the night when she found one of the twins tucked away in a closet in which hung a picture of Rene. He was talking to his father, he explained. So every night, before bedtime, she and the twins take time to speak to Rene and send kisses heavenward. For now the three share a room. It is a process. “Fashion, fame, celebrity…all of this,” she says, driving past the glistening dome of the Invalides, “it’s just for fun. It doesn’t mean anything. There are more important things: children, family, the world.” #CelineTakesCouture Photographed by @denisetruscello.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Jul 5, 2017 at 10:10am PDT