Homme Lanvin
Elbaz's office is very small
There is no question that Alber Elbaz is a deeply anxious fellow. But, while worrying about everything is his nature, to a certain extent it is also his job. Lanvin is a smaller operation than its prominence would suggest, and Elbaz is ultimately responsible for almost every detail of the enterprise. The next day, he went to try to energize his merchandisers-the middlemen whose job it is to sell Lanvin to the buyers at department stores.
About a hundred people sat listening to Elbaz in a large room with a view of the Eiffel Tower, in an unused section of the Lycra Leggings Musée de l'Homme. Next door, cavemen wandered in their dioramas. "What do men want? How do men shop today?" Elbaz asked the salespeople. "Does a man want just a classic suit? Do they want maybe a pink jacket? Or maybe they want to have a pajama because they have no job?" Everyone laughed at this. "I do believe that in times like today, when fashion is where it is because of economic crisis, the role of fashion is changing and it's no longer just to make sure that we look right and professional and comfortable, but it's maybe about giving the dream and making people feel good again-making a man or a woman think, Should I go to a psychiatrist or should I go to buy a Lanvin suit?"
"This guy talks a lot about the economy," an American merchandiser in the audience whispered to the person next to him.
"Some of them act like nothing's even happened!" his friend replied. "It's insane!"
"I think that, in times like this, fashion is more important than ever," Elbaz asserted.
It was a point of view making its way around Paris just then. A few days later, a television journalist approached Catherine Deneuve in the front row at Jean Paul Gaultier's show. "Tell us, Ms. Deneuve, why we need fashion now more than ever. Do you agree?"
Deneuve appeared baffled, and said, "Certainly not."
Elbaz got in a car with his director of communications, Hania Destelle, and Daphne Karras, a senior designer, to scout a potential locale for the upcoming women's show. The driver kept going until he was deep in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, and everyone in the car said the neighborhood looked unfamiliar. They pulled up in front of a building that seemed abandoned. Elbaz gasped.
"It's like a Mafia place," he said.
The space was a former loading station for trucks and trains. Growling dogs guarded the entrance, to deter squatters. Inside, the ground was littered with crystals shaped like stars and moons and teardrops, the remainders of the last fashion show-John Galliano's-that was held at the site. It was enormous, empty, and very bright, as the ceiling was composed almost entirely of grimy panes of glass. Elbaz chatted with the manager, a man wearing a full-length white leather trenchcoat. "Vintage?" Elbaz asked him.
It was cold enough to see your breath, and Destelle took off her scarf and wrapped it around Elbaz's neck. She noticed a pile of dog droppings interspersed with the crystals on the floor near a lattice of faded yellow lines once used to delineate parking spots for trucks. "In the morning, at the Crillon," Destelle said, stepping over the unsavory heap in her high heels. "The afternoon, here." She smiled. "It's fashion."
The dogs woofed wildly as Elbaz ambled out of the building. He did not seem happy. "I have a feeling of going to a prison for the mental patients-everything I hate," he said, getting back into the car. "Daphne, what do you say?"
"It's a weird space," she replied. "But I like that it's rough, the opposite of what we saw at the Crillon."
"I had many, many thoughts," Elbaz said. "The dogs. The black car waiting outside. The man with the white coat and the dirty hands. The crystal on the floor and the train station just in the back. I'm looking for something clean to my eyes!" He sighed. "Maybe when they put everything together, it will be perfect and lose the bad spirit. There was a time in fashion, in the eighties, when every designer was trying to find a space nobody had seen before. Maybe today people want to go somewhere familiar? Latex Catsuits Maybe I am less modern. Maybe it's time to leave fashion."
Elbaz's office is very small, and the walls are covered with his drawings, along with miniature versions of his garments. Nearly every Lanvin piece starts with a wee mockup in satin or velvet or lace. People have made Elbaz stuffed fabric dolls to wear some of these small clothes, and they hang along one wall. A blond doll wears a yellow gown. Elbaz pulled up her skirt to reveal blue bloomers. A nurse holds an IV bag full of paper hearts. "Mathilde made that for me when I was sick," Elbaz said. In the middle of these little ladies is, unmistakably, an Alber Elbaz doll. He is shorter than the rest, with a bow tie and glasses.
In a room behind Elbaz's office, eight people, all of whom looked to be in their twenties or thirties, were working. It felt like the art room at camp. One young woman sorted through a pile of jet beads, stitching one after another onto a piece of ribbon by hand. Another, Mathilde, was pinning gold lace on a mannequin. She showed Elbaz how she was trying to create petals of gold tulle to layer with black lace, to make a kind of shadowy tutu. "I love the texture going all the way up," he said, moving a row so that everything became very different. "Do you?"
"Yes," she said, and grinned. "Now I feel free." He held her face in his hand for a second and then walked on to the next person.
The clothes for Lanvin's runway shows are produced on the floor below. The people there were all a decade or two older than the designers on the top floor working on the prototypes, and everyone was French. It was extremely quiet-the laboratory, the scientists at work. Elbaz greeted each one by name and kissed them on both cheeks. One seamstress cried, because her father had just died, and Elbaz hugged her. His mother passed away last year, and Elbaz remains haunted by the loss. "It was the worst," he told me. "Oh! And I was, like, so close to her. She was the one person who could make me really crazy in a split second, and make me relax in a split second. It was a very difficult time."
Pinned to the wall by the seamstress's workstation-a sewing machine and a drafting table-was a pink tulle frock lined in chiffon with hot-pink sequinned trim which would fit a very chic, very lucky elf.
About the Author
The space was a former loading station for trucks and trains. Growling dogs guarded the entrance, to deter squatters. Inside, the ground was littered with crystals shaped like stars and moons and teardrops, the remainders of the last fashion show-John Galliano's-that was held at the site. It was enormous, empty, and very bright, as the ceiling was composed almost entirely of grimy panes of glass. Elbaz chatted with the manager, a man wearing a full-length white leather trenchcoat. "Vintage?" Elbaz asked him.
FashionTV I FTV.com - PARIS MEN FW 10-11 - LANVIN HOMME SHOW
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