![” ‘Fashion is unjust — even brilliant things sometimes don’t work.’ So complains one of the participants of RJ Cutler’s film The September Issue, a spectrographic analysis of the frivolous. And what more shocking example of this injustice could there be than the closure of the fashion house of the protean designer Christian Lacroix? The selling-off of the furniture of the couture salons this spring is a further distressing repercussion of the stroke of bad luck that hit the company last year.
There is no doubt that this sale will be epoch-making, precisely because it sets the seal on an era, in much the same way as a few years ago the destruction of the magical Royal Lieu, a stucco masterpiece on the Boulevard des Italiens did or more recently, the famous Café Costes on Place des Innocents, a Starckian embodiment of the 1980s. Very few places capture the spirit of a time and give it form; that is one of the qualities of the rooms seen here. Perhaps it stems from the union, the communality of references and culture, of three baby boomers who were not bound by anything: Lacroix, plus Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, two young designers in their late thirties on the verge of a famous collaboration (which they maintained until 2001).
Inquisitive and well-informed, a lover of the 1940s as well as of contemporary design, Lacroix had seen the exhibitions of the other two at Paris’s Galerie Néotú. He was a regular at the privilège, a restaurant later described as ;bijou; by Americans, where the pair first collaborated in 1981. He was familiar with their ‘Barbarian’ chair. Perhaps he had even seen their exhibition at the MAison JAnsen gallery on the Rue Royale, in which they were already using unexpected materials, such as papier-mâché and wrought iron.
‘I had no wish,’ said Lacroix at the time, ‘to surround myself with that cold and cerebral design that had been advocated for ages.; This was 1987, when Lacroix was the talk of the town. Having just left Jean Patou, he planned to produce out of nowhere something that had not been seen for a long time: a new haute-couture house. In April he got in touch with the two ‘Barbarians’; in July they held their first fashion show. ‘It was meteoric,’ says Mattia Bonetti placidly. They had to invent a place in three months starting from scratch: a suite of three salons, separated by arches and extending for 350sq m, between a courtyard and a garden. Lacroix adopted his usual manner: graphically, ‘graphomaniacally’ you might say, issuing ideas, cuttings, torn-out pages and suggestions, which all contributed to a gigantic collage that summed up his idea of the place. As none of the three designers particularly cared for the established codes, a first line of action was established. ‘We wanted,’ Elizabeth Garouste recalls, ‘to give an idea of luxury, without using traditionally luxurious materials’, to get away from the banal codes of good taste. Luxury, she says, would be expressed in the flamboyance of colour, in the richness of pattern and — Mattia Bonetti adds — in the ‘luxury of the handmade’, the skillful joinery of the furniture serving as shorthand for the perfectionism of haute couture.
Hence the sophisticated ‘poverty’ of the materials (Arte Povera was then in fashion): a simple block of wood (but studded with bronze); pieces of branch (but richly lacquered); long drops of natural linen (but hemmed with velvet arabesques); surfaces of teracotta (but enhanced with gold leaf)… The references intertwine or clash in a sustained assault on the economic orthodoxy of the design of previous decades. It was a return to what 18th-century theoreticians called architecture parlante, one that is expressive of its purpose: not so much in a narrative dimension but as a portrayal of a personal mythology. ‘Here,’ said Lacroix, you will find everything I love: the overtones of Jean-Michel Frank, the Cocteau Spirit, the influence of projects by [Emilio] Terry and a whole host of references to the theatrical aspect of things, but … devoid of any obsession with the past.’
[1]
[2]
The first allusions are obvious ones: Spain, Provence, small chairs with bulls’ horns, commedia dell’arte wall lamps, operatic colours, and the East — the fitting rooms, according to Bonetti, waver ‘between beach huts, sheds and the Kaaba’… Mediterranean references are accentuated by the black wooden cut-outs, reminiscent of moucharaby lattice, which slide open or shut against mirrored walls. But anyone familiar with Lacroix will recognize yet another dimension: that of the fairy tale, especially Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The story’s spirit can be seen in the contrast of scale that set for example giant sofas against tiny chairs, enhanced by fuchsia and chartreuse. And the idea of a plunge into the supernatural also lies behind the arrangement of the salons, which is conceived as a visual crescendo: from the understated beige sheen of the entrance to the orange reception hall, punctuated with the first graphic patterns and branches of coral, then in the final salon with its flamboyant furniture and carpets, ablaze with hot colours.
In the opinion of Garouste and Bonetti, these salons marked the beginning of their rise to international prominence. They were, and are, one of the essential elements of Christian Lacroix’s ‘brand image’. They express a particular moment when it finally became possible, and urgent, to move away from the cold functionalism of Modernist orthodoxy. It was a return therefore to the imagination, the dream, the taste for ornament, to the short circuit between past and present. Thirty years have passed. ‘That it is dated is a fact,’ comments Bonetti, ‘that has to be accepted. That you can even immediately date it is great… I have gone onto something else, but I don’t repudiate any of what we did. It’s not an “evolution” to move from the Neo-Baroque towards the minimal; I am, at least, dual: I can want something clean and pure one day, and something “baroque” the next. In matters of style… you don’t go from something “less good” towards something “good”. The worst errors are committed in the name of progress.’
Engraved in its time, but always of the moment: perhaps this stems from the perfect harmony that presided over the birth of these rooms. It also stems from the fact that this place, this work of applied art, was just one of may means of expression open to Lacroix, a self-described ‘creator of illusions’ — and illusions, remember, lie beyond the grasp of time.”
ALL TEXT AND MOST IMAGES AS TAKEN FROM THE JUNE 2010 ISSUE OF THE WORLD OF INTERIORS; IMAGES 1 AND 2 TAKEN FROM SOTHEBYS.COM; TEXT BY MARIE-FRANCE BOYER; PHOTOGRAPHY BY IVAN TERESTCHENKO; FURNITURE AND WORKS OF ART BY GAROUSTE AND BONETTI FOR THE CHRISTIAN LACROIX FASHION HOUSE](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3trj5OoIl1qz93lzo1_500.jpg)
” ‘Fashion is unjust — even brilliant things sometimes don’t work.’ So complains one of the participants of RJ Cutler’s film The September Issue, a spectrographic analysis of the frivolous. And what more shocking example of this injustice could there be than the closure of the fashion house of the protean designer Christian Lacroix? The selling-off of the furniture of the couture salons this spring is a further distressing repercussion of the stroke of bad luck that hit the company last year.
There is no doubt that this sale will be epoch-making, precisely because it sets the seal on an era, in much the same way as a few years ago the destruction of the magical Royal Lieu, a stucco masterpiece on the Boulevard des Italiens did or more recently, the famous Café Costes on Place des Innocents, a Starckian embodiment of the 1980s. Very few places capture the spirit of a time and give it form; that is one of the qualities of the rooms seen here. Perhaps it stems from the union, the communality of references and culture, of three baby boomers who were not bound by anything: Lacroix, plus Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, two young designers in their late thirties on the verge of a famous collaboration (which they maintained until 2001).
Inquisitive and well-informed, a lover of the 1940s as well as of contemporary design, Lacroix had seen the exhibitions of the other two at Paris’s Galerie Néotú. He was a regular at the privilège, a restaurant later described as ;bijou; by Americans, where the pair first collaborated in 1981. He was familiar with their ‘Barbarian’ chair. Perhaps he had even seen their exhibition at the MAison JAnsen gallery on the Rue Royale, in which they were already using unexpected materials, such as papier-mâché and wrought iron.
‘I had no wish,’ said Lacroix at the time, ‘to surround myself with that cold and cerebral design that had been advocated for ages.; This was 1987, when Lacroix was the talk of the town. Having just left Jean Patou, he planned to produce out of nowhere something that had not been seen for a long time: a new haute-couture house. In April he got in touch with the two ‘Barbarians’; in July they held their first fashion show. ‘It was meteoric,’ says Mattia Bonetti placidly. They had to invent a place in three months starting from scratch: a suite of three salons, separated by arches and extending for 350sq m, between a courtyard and a garden. Lacroix adopted his usual manner: graphically, ‘graphomaniacally’ you might say, issuing ideas, cuttings, torn-out pages and suggestions, which all contributed to a gigantic collage that summed up his idea of the place. As none of the three designers particularly cared for the established codes, a first line of action was established. ‘We wanted,’ Elizabeth Garouste recalls, ‘to give an idea of luxury, without using traditionally luxurious materials’, to get away from the banal codes of good taste. Luxury, she says, would be expressed in the flamboyance of colour, in the richness of pattern and — Mattia Bonetti adds — in the ‘luxury of the handmade’, the skillful joinery of the furniture serving as shorthand for the perfectionism of haute couture.
Hence the sophisticated ‘poverty’ of the materials (Arte Povera was then in fashion): a simple block of wood (but studded with bronze); pieces of branch (but richly lacquered); long drops of natural linen (but hemmed with velvet arabesques); surfaces of teracotta (but enhanced with gold leaf)… The references intertwine or clash in a sustained assault on the economic orthodoxy of the design of previous decades. It was a return to what 18th-century theoreticians called architecture parlante, one that is expressive of its purpose: not so much in a narrative dimension but as a portrayal of a personal mythology. ‘Here,’ said Lacroix, you will find everything I love: the overtones of Jean-Michel Frank, the Cocteau Spirit, the influence of projects by [Emilio] Terry and a whole host of references to the theatrical aspect of things, but … devoid of any obsession with the past.’
[1]
[2]
The first allusions are obvious ones: Spain, Provence, small chairs with bulls’ horns, commedia dell’arte wall lamps, operatic colours, and the East — the fitting rooms, according to Bonetti, waver ‘between beach huts, sheds and the Kaaba’… Mediterranean references are accentuated by the black wooden cut-outs, reminiscent of moucharaby lattice, which slide open or shut against mirrored walls. But anyone familiar with Lacroix will recognize yet another dimension: that of the fairy tale, especially Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The story’s spirit can be seen in the contrast of scale that set for example giant sofas against tiny chairs, enhanced by fuchsia and chartreuse. And the idea of a plunge into the supernatural also lies behind the arrangement of the salons, which is conceived as a visual crescendo: from the understated beige sheen of the entrance to the orange reception hall, punctuated with the first graphic patterns and branches of coral, then in the final salon with its flamboyant furniture and carpets, ablaze with hot colours.
In the opinion of Garouste and Bonetti, these salons marked the beginning of their rise to international prominence. They were, and are, one of the essential elements of Christian Lacroix’s ‘brand image’. They express a particular moment when it finally became possible, and urgent, to move away from the cold functionalism of Modernist orthodoxy. It was a return therefore to the imagination, the dream, the taste for ornament, to the short circuit between past and present. Thirty years have passed. ‘That it is dated is a fact,’ comments Bonetti, ‘that has to be accepted. That you can even immediately date it is great… I have gone onto something else, but I don’t repudiate any of what we did. It’s not an “evolution” to move from the Neo-Baroque towards the minimal; I am, at least, dual: I can want something clean and pure one day, and something “baroque” the next. In matters of style… you don’t go from something “less good” towards something “good”. The worst errors are committed in the name of progress.’
Engraved in its time, but always of the moment: perhaps this stems from the perfect harmony that presided over the birth of these rooms. It also stems from the fact that this place, this work of applied art, was just one of may means of expression open to Lacroix, a self-described ‘creator of illusions’ — and illusions, remember, lie beyond the grasp of time.”
ALL TEXT AND MOST IMAGES AS TAKEN FROM THE JUNE 2010 ISSUE OF THE WORLD OF INTERIORS; IMAGES 1 AND 2 TAKEN FROM SOTHEBYS.COM; TEXT BY MARIE-FRANCE BOYER; PHOTOGRAPHY BY IVAN TERESTCHENKO; FURNITURE AND WORKS OF ART BY GAROUSTE AND BONETTI FOR THE CHRISTIAN LACROIX FASHION HOUSE
