Christian Lacroix: 'I am too angry to cry'
Famously over-the-top French designer Christian Lacroix says that fighting to save his couture business will spark his creative renaissance.
By Celia Walden
Published: 7:00AM BST 21 Jun 2009
Christian Lacroix was founded in 1987 by the eponymous designer Photo: DAVID ROSE
"What really hurts," says Christian Lacroix slowly, "is that my name, which I have now lost, is the name of my family. Whoever does take over the business can use it and abuse it as they like, but it's my father's name, and my grandfather's name – men who brought me up to have a very rigid moral backbone; men who taught me never to have any debts."
Were his father alive today, the 58-year-old designer admits, he would be agonised to learn that his son's celebrated couture house – currently owned by the US-based Falic Group – went into voluntary receivership last week as a consequence of 10 million euro losses. And with 125 jobs at stake (including Lacroix's) unless a new investor is found in the next fortnight, the future looks bleak for the many workers who have stayed loyal to Lacroix since the company started trading 22 years ago.
"I'm fighting," he smiles, setting off those Machiavellian eyebrows.
"Don't tell anyone, because I'm not allowed to do this, but we absolutely are going to have a show in mid-July, during Fashion Week – and it won't be a funeral: it'll be a fightback." That there is not enough money to pay the seamstresses, fabric suppliers, models or even the stationers printing the invitations is something Lacroix is striving to overcome. "It can't cost us a single euro to put this show on, because I'm not having my workers lose a penny from their pockets, but so far, it looks like thanks to other people's kindness – friends and suppliers working for free – it might happen.
"I can't stand the idea that people think I am to blame," he adds, despondent for a moment. "But to a certain extent I am paying for not having done what everyone else did, with their logos and It-bags. I never went down that route."
Sitting in his fuchsia-painted couture studio above a quiet courtyard off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in jeans and one of his own tricolour jackets worn over a pig-motif Comme des Garçons jumper, Lacroix looks anything but defeated. There is, however, an element of tempered hysteria to his defiance, a yearning for levity in his frequent, gurgling fits of laughter.
"The recession was a gift to the management, really, because they could blame everything on that, but it was only partly responsible. Do you know that I haven't been paid for a year and a half?"
This sets him off again. "I'm owed one million two hundred thousand euros." Has he shed a tear, I ask? He rattles off a quick succession of Gallic tuts. "No, no, no: I am too angry to cry."
These statements – as theatrical as the taffeta, lace and embroidered creations hanging behind him – are part of the reason why Lacroix quickly became a part of modern fashion folklore. Who else would, in laughable fashionese during one Nineties catwalk show, describe a garment as "a 'cold-dawn' shot razimir spiral sheath dress with 'apricot' and 'melon' kick pleat"?
To many, I tell him, haute couture is so baffling that they consider it natural it should lose its place in today's world. "But fashion isn't something dead," he says. "Fashion needs to be worn. People are wrong when they see it as being disconnected from reality: every morning, before I sit down to draw, I read all the papers, listen to the radio and find out what is going on in Iran – all that influences me. Besides, in periods of crisis, people need to see beautiful things around them."
As a child growing up in Arles to an engineer father and a fashion-loving mother ("Even as the sirens went off during the blitz, she would put on her best shoes"), Lacroix remembers being intoxicated by the coquetries of women. "My mother and her friends would wear these wonderful big 1950s puffball skirts and I would crawl around underneath them, breathing in their strong perfumes."
After a history of art degree taken largely "to reassure his parents", Lacroix moved to Paris where he dreamt of working as a curator in the Louvre. It wasn't until a few years later, after a spell at Hermès, that – influenced by the gipsy and Provencal traditions he grew up with – Lacroix started designing the opulent corseted and crinolined dresses that were to make him famous.
"My extended family were very embarrassed," he giggles. " 'Why don't you make things like Yves Saint Laurent?' they'd ask. 'Because my name is Christian Lacroix,' I told them."
These baroque tendencies meant that Lacroix was soon designing costumes for the theatre, ballet and opera, and accruing a celebrity clientele. Madonna, Nicole Kidman and the Princess of Wales, with whom he became close, were dedicated admirers of his.
"I still have all Diana's letters," he smiles. "And they tell me what I could see for myself during all the years that I knew her: that she was morphing from a blushing, shy girl into a woman."
At that time, a running joke in the TV series,
Absolutely Fabulous, was helping to make him a household name in Britain. "It was the best introduction I could have had in England," he says, "where you guys all think French designers are brainless frogs."
It's a stereotype that Lacroix is far from realising. Throughout the interview his opinionated outbursts are peppered with cultural references and lightened by a rare, very un-French ability to send himself up. He is surprisingly optimistic about the effects the recession will have on his industry ("If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes – the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War – they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play") and loves the British for being "stylistically free; not bound up like we are", but is saddened by the new puritanism he sees in young people "which makes me feel like an old pervert".
Today's size zero culture, which recently provoked Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British
Vogue, to send a letter to all major designers asking them to make larger sizes, is another cause for concern. "She was right to do that. Very skinny women don't look beautiful in clothes. What I cannot stomach, because it evokes the war to me, is when you can see a woman's kneecap protruding in its entirety, skinny elbows, or a woman's chest bones. I won't tell you who they are because it would be hurtful, but there are certain models I cancelled jobs with because they were too thin. It's a terribly sad cloning of young women today which actually means that there is no room for anything to stand out – except bones."
As a "Mediterranean lover of women", Lacroix feels that the primary female attraction is their capacity to seduce. "That said, I've always been bisexual," he volunteers. "But I could never live with a man – too similar." Off goes that great runaway laugh again, the kind of laugh that would have been cut short by a parent as a child. "And my wife, whom I married in 1974, still fascinates me, still touches me, still makes me want to weep with joy in the mornings. She makes me laugh, I think she's beautiful, she's like my child and my lover – all at once."
As he walks me out, confiding
a propos of nothing that he has given up chocolate and Bordeaux, he has an epiphany. "Actually losing a few pounds and having this battle to fight makes me feel that I am undergoing a renaissance," he declares.
I quote a line from a – perhaps premature – fashion obituary in a British paper last week, intrigued to know what he makes of it. The worry is that "there just aren't enough Beluga-eating, stunningly beautiful, moneyed women in this world to keep Christian Lacroix's fantasy alive."
"Probably true," he deadpans. Then bursts out laughing
