What Is It about Paris and Fashion? E-Book

Bénédicte Burguet-Journé

• Herausgeber: WS
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 101

Beschreibung

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast,”  Ernest Hemingway once said. 

Bénédicte Burguet-Journé explores the perennial question of what is it about Paris that makes it so unique, so inspiriting, and attractive for creatives from all around the world.

The book presents a series of leisurely interviews with leading fashion designers: Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Maroussia Rebecq, Kym Ellery, Bruno Frisoni, Jean Paul Gaultier, Martin Grant, Guillaume Henry, Journ/né, Christelle Kocher, Rabih Kayrouz, Julie de Libran, Roland Mouret, Vanessa Seward, Junko Shimada, Alexandre Vauthier.

In the prologue, Olivier Saillard muses about the impact fashion has had on the city’s urban canvas, and how it all started with an Englishman.

In the epilogue, Sarah Andelman, former founder and artistic director of the infamous Parisian shop colette, pays tribute to the light and sense of freedom that goes hand in hand with the Parisian spirit.

About the author

As a journalist and editor, Bénédicte Burguet-Journé has been a specialist lifestyle writer for Le Figaro and a lifestyle and fashion editor for Vanity Fair France; she is also a political correspondent for Shanghai Daily.

Burguet specializes in fashion, jewellery, and watches, attending all the major fashion weeks and luxury fairs.

www.benedicte-burguet.com

Leseprobe

“Fashion isn’t something that only exists in clothes. Fashion is in the air, carried by the wind. You sense it. Fashion is in the sky, and in the street.”

GABRIELLE CHANEL

About the author

As a journalist and editor, Bénédicte Burguet-Journé has been a specialist lifestyle writer for Le Figaro and a lifestyle and fashion editor for Vanity Fair France; she is also a political correspondent for Shanghai Daily.

Burguet specialises in fashion, jewellery and watches, attending all the major fashion weeks and luxury fairs.

“Paris is my city, my home. I hope you will enjoy taking this virtual stroll through its narrow streets and landmark places guided by twelve remarquable fashion designers.

It’s not something that’s shouted from the rooftops but histo-rians know it for a fact: Parisian fashion owes much to an Englishman. In the mid 19th century, Charles Frederick Worth crossed the Channel with barely two pennies to rub together and began a job as sales assistant at Gagelin. He was a self-confident young man, with a bold streak. Boosted by the spirit of entrepre-neurship that reigned during that century, he was determined to achieve his goal. He opened his own ladies’ tailor shop. Worth was a visionary in a period when marketing didn’t yet exist, and he invented the singular industry of Haute Couture. He was the first to impose the seasonal renewal of collections on his clients, offering them gowns that were not produced according to their wishes but to meet their expectations. He was a precursor in the use of live models, giving customers a better idea of his designs. At his shop he created a room that was illuminated so as to enable the customer to imagine the ball gowns in context. Worth was also the first to sign his designs the way painters did their canvases: brand names began to appear on garments worn by fashionable women, inside the waist, on a ribbon or inside a collar. In public, these ladies were Mrs so-and-so, wife of such-and-such a titled gentleman. But in the privacy of their attire, they were lovers of Worth. Fashion history began with that eccentric Englishman who dressed like Rembrandt. Worth not only spawned generations of couturiers and designers but also mapped out a world that turned Paris into the capital of fashion.

After Worth came Jacques Doucet, then Paul Poiret, who made the Chausée-d’Antin his chic and fashionable quarters. He was rivalled by Gabrielle Chanel, from her isolated base on Rue Cambon, which became her realm. Jeanne Lanvin was already in operation on Rue Boissy d’Anglas, where she had started out from an attic room and ended up buying up all the surrounding buildings. On Rue de Rivoli, then Avenue Montaigne, Madeleine Vionnet developed her businesses as models of social solidarity while turning out gowns as beautifully cut as a Rolls-Royce. But the French were not the only couturiers to hone the very Gallic art of superficiality in the quar-ters and boulevards of Paris. Cristóbal Balenciaga fled the Civil War in Spain and took refuge on Avenue Marceau, where he only had to nip across the road to meet someone for a drink at the embassy. The Italian Elsa Schiaparelli left Rome and eventually opened her fashion house on Place Vendôme. Madame Grès, that great “silent sphinx” of Haute Couture surveyed this world of appearances from Rue de la Paix. In the 1950s, Christian Dior breathed new life into Avenue Montaigne and Rue François 1er. Years later, his protégé Yves Saint Laurent would open his house on Avenue Marceau in the nurturing aura of the great Balenciaga, whose studio was close by.

The streets and avenues, passages and alleyways of Paris are studded with memories of the men and women who founded their couture houses there. Azzedine Alaïa will always be associated with Rue de la Verrerie. The glass-roofed building where he held his fashion shows and his kitchen where his friends would gather was a private world, a medina over which the couturier reigned. Jean Paul Gaultier dreamt up his most extraordinary dresses on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. For all those who knew him at the time, the galerie Vivienne, which famously housed his store, has the air of a melancholic dream about it today. Just as Rue du Faubourg Pois-sonnière, where Martin Margiela draped his premises in optical white, became a place of pilgrimage for nostalgic fashion freaks.

Since the 19th century, Paris has invented fashion as easily as shaking out a packet of pins and needles onto a table. When it’s grey and wet outside like a Brassaï photograph, inside modest or plush houses, people of every colour of skin, who have passed through the city for decades to make the Fashion Weeks the celebrations that they are, from every social background, and fabrics of every hue, are bursting out with the insouciance that is the greatest expression of tolerance.

PROLOGUE

Olivier Saillard

Fashion historian

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JEAN-CHARLES DE CASTELBAJAC

MAROUSSIA REBECQ

KYM ELLERY

JEAN PAUL GAULTIER

JEAN PAUL GAULTIER

MARTIN GRANT

GUILLAUME HENRY

JOUR/NÉ

RABIH KAYROUZ

CHRISTELLE KOCHER

JULIE DE LIBRAN

ROLAND MOURET

VANESSA SEWARD

JUNKO SHIMADA

ALEXANDRE VAUTHIER

ALL Designers

Olivier Saillard

Sarah Andelman

BRUNO FRISONI

Place of Inspiration:

Rue de La Sourdière, 75001 Paris

Showroom:

83 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris

Place of Inspiration:

Rue Montorgueil Neighborhood

75002 Paris

Preferred location:

Île Saint-Louis, 75004 Paris

Headquarters:

325 Rue Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris

Showroom:

10 Rue Charlot, 75003 Paris

Patou Headquarters:

Patou - 8, Quai du Marché Neuf, 75004 Paris

Place of Inspiration:

The Crazy Horse

12 Avenue George V, 75008 Paris

Showroom:

38 Boulevard Raspail, 75007 Paris

Private Showroom:

8 Cité du Labyrinthe, 75020 Paris

Place of Inspiration:

Musée Bourdelle

18, rue Antoine Bourdelle 75015 Paris

Favourite Place:

Pavillon de la Reine

28 Place des Vosges, 75003 Paris

Place of Inspiration:

Rue Saint-Anne, 75002 Paris

Showroom:

13 Rue Saint-Florentin, 75008 Paris

Showroom:

4 Rue de Galliera, 75016 Paris

Since he started out in 1968, the French designer has challenged fashion codes with his unique style. His first collection was spotted by Andrée Putman and he was soon dubbed the “Courrèges of the 70s” by the Amer-ican magazine Women’s Wear Daily. For Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, clothes are a “blank canvas” upon which he transposes an idea, through reinterpretation, accumula-tion and appropriation. Just as in the art world, to which he feels very close, fashion is a way for him to express himself.

As the multifaceted, unconventional artistic director of a string of prestigious fashion houses (Max Mara, Ellesse, Courrèges, Weston and, today, Le Coq Sportif and Benetton), Castelbajac has always loved to blend pop culture and French chic. In the 1980s, he already had a sense of the decompartmentalisation taking place today between art and fashion, and undertook numerous collaborations with artists, including Miquel Barceló, Ben, Robert Combas, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Paris-based since his teenage years, he continues to draw inspiration from the City of Light. He has his own way of appropriating it, with the “angels”, as he calls them, that he draws in chalk on the city’s old walls.

When did you first discover Paris?

“I came to Paris after leaving boarding school, at the age of seven-teen. The wild London scene and English rock music were my utopia at the time, but I had no contacts over there. So, being the romantic I was, I went “up to the capital” in 1968. At the time, I had lodgings in Rue de la Pompe in the very chic 16th arrondissement. Just on the other side of the Seine from that tranquil, bourgeois enclave, the Paris of the May 1968 student insurrection was under way. I was lucky to settle in Paris just at that time. I discovered a rebellious city in blue jeans and duffle coats, and saw the beautiful female students from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris – taking it all in as I walked over the city’s bridges...”

How did you become a designer?

“I’ve always drawn but it was a lengthy process, because I was left-handed. Drawing is the way I express myself. Then, in Paris, I was immediately swept up by the fashion world. I had no formal training; my designs were guided by instinct. This very direct, unfiltered approach probably explains the positive reception I got. I had asked my mother, who owned a textile factory in Limoges, to trust me, and I produced my first collection at the age of nineteen, including a jacket cut out of a blanket, that was quite successful. The next year, American Vogueput one of my designs on its cover. So the Paris of May 1968 triggered the way I approach my work, which is more of a manifesto than about sophistication. I’ve always wanted to compose clothes that existed through their own strength, their own message.”

Your secret Paris?

“The city of ghosts. I discovered the history of Paris in two books: Les Nuits de Paris, by Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne (1786), and that by Antoine Héron de Villefosse (1845–1919), in which he describes the construction and particularities of all the buildings. These are books you can’t find any more because they’re from a different era.

History and its great figures are to be found everywhere in Paris. The Rue de Rivoli, for example, was the way to the guillotine on Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution. It’s where the painter Jacques-Louis David made his drawing Marie-Antoinette conduite à l’échafaud(Marie-Antoinette Led to Her Execution). And it’s where the Louvre is, the residence of kings. The Saint-Honoré quarter has stayed completely frozen in this era of ghosts. That is why Paris inspires me, and it’s why Paris is a magnet, because the city’s breadth spans the centuries indiscriminately.”

Which is the most beautiful Paris?

“Paris is a multifaceted ball; I can’t favour one part of it. When I look at the city, I always get a sense of opening new doors into mysteries. It is place that’s always full of surprises. When I arrived in 1968, I went to a party in an apartment where there were some fifteen paintings by Auguste Renoir on the walls. They all depicted the same theme: a young girl on a swing; she was simply the great-grandmother of our host. That’s Paris: you come across beauty everywhere. You might pass from a cobbled street into a small shop where something humble becomes quite beautiful. You enter a patisserie where every detail seems like a work of art, far surpassing Jeff Koons. Or you push a wine merchant’s door and see the most marvellous names in the French language, like Château Chasse-Spleen or Château Pétrus.”

What is the greatest quality of the City of Light?

“Its insouciance. That’s what prevails here, it’s what wins through: insouciance as a form of resistance. It reminds me of the women during the Occupation who would draw a line on the back of their legs from ankle to thigh to create the illusion they were still wearing stockings. Paris will always be a flame.”

Your favourite walk?

“I’ve been running, of late, and I’ve always loved to stroll. When I walk down Rue de la Sourdière near the Saint-Roch church, in the 1st arrondissement, late at night, or when I’m just walking around, I can see that Paris hasn’t yet become a ‘cappuccino city’, like those capitals that are being subjected to a process of standardisation.

So I like walking. I look at the walls on which I do my drawings with my bit of chalk. Drawing on facades is my sensual relationship with the city. I probably get it from my friend Keith Haring, whom I saw tagging with chalk in New York. I often draw angels, and write something underneath them. Recently I wrote ‘Radiguet’ on Rue de Rivoli, and ‘Louis XIV’. I see them again, sometimes, on Instagram; they fly back to me.”

What is your cultural environment in Paris?

“The Paris of party life! It started with the Bus Palladium, le Gibus, Les Bains Douches, the Palace. I’ve been a trans-generational night owl. It was also Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, Jean-François Bizot, the talented founder of Actuel magazine and Radio Nova. Even if the rock culture