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The Fall of Christian Lacroix
- AUGUST 3, 2009, 2:59 P.M. ET
After many clashes and 11 CEOs, a famed designer goes bust
Christian Lacroix at his atelier on July 6. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have been influenced by the idea that my name could be spread across the entire world,” he said.
By MAX COLCHESTER
PARIS—Christian Lacroix sat on a beige sofa in his Parisian atelier nibbling a pink macaroon as a lone client tried on one of his black pleated dresses.
The large ochre-colored room in which he created 22 years worth of high fashion was mostly empty. The seamstresses had left to go on holiday. They may not have jobs to return to in September.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have been influenced by the idea that my name could be spread across the entire world,” the designer said, running his hand through his closely cropped hair before aiming a taut smile at his client. “You need ego but mine is not blinding.”
It has been a long fall from grace for Mr. Lacroix. In 1987 the former art student stormed Paris’s staid haute couture scene with his warm colors and Mediterranean flair. Now after more than two decades of losses the brand filed for bankruptcy protection in May. Two potential buyers are being lined up, but as things stand the 58-year old once hailed by critics as savior of haute couture can no longer design clothes under his own name.
Like many fashion designers before him, Mr. Lacroix’s desire to be an artist hampered his brand’s development. Of the 11 chief executives that Mr. Lacroix worked with, not one managed to reconcile his creative ambition with a profitable model. “A dress is not a sculpture, it is a business,” says Jean-Jacques Picart, a consultant and Mr. Lacroix’s former business partner.
In an era of publicly-traded conglomerates, the business-end of the equation has never been more pressing. Christian Lacroix was to be the first and last time powerhouse LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton S.A. would attempt to create a fashion house from scratch.
As a boy growing up in the town of Arles in southern France Mr Lacroix never dreamt of fashion. At schools his teachers gave him dolls to play with while sheltering him from the midday sun. “I didn’t like the touch of their clothes,” Mr. Lacroix said. He wanted to illustrate books.
However in the early 1980s Mr. Picart found Mr. Lacroix a job as a designer at the fashion house Jean Patou, which nurtured top designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier. He swiftly caught the eye ofBernard Arnault , a then-aspiring tycoon who is now chief executive of LVMH. Mr. Arnault’s strategy was to harness Mr. Lacroix’s reputation for making upscale clothes to sell more affordable products. Mr. Lacroix sold the rights to his name and became the brand’s creative director.
In 1987 the first Christian Lacroix couture show, which featured bubble dresses and bright colors inspired by his native southern France, received raves. “He brought a bit of sunshine to the Parisian catwalk,” says Olivier Saillard, a fashion historian and curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. But the brand lacked world-wide recognition, and a global perfume launch in 1988 was a flop.
The perfume debacle set the tone for the next decade. Mr. Lacroix had wanted the perfume bottle to be in the shape of a flat stone with a branch of coral; the end result was a bottle shaped like a heart with what looked like an artery sticking out of the top. “It was disgusting,” says Mr. Lacroix. “The newspapers wrote that I was a maniac and sadist.”
Mr. Lacroix felt that LVMH was pushing his image down-market, picking the wrong people to make his ready-to-wear clothes and peddling a cheap Christian Lacroix hair dye. Mr. Picart says Mr. Lacroix made little effort to translate his vision to more wearable, sellable clothing. “He refused to play the game,” he says. When Mr. Picart argued that LVMH needed full control of the house to ensure the business’s success, Mr. Lacroix felt betrayed. In 1999 Mr. Picart left. LVMH declined to comment.
In 2005 LVMH sold Christian Lacroix to the Falic group, a U.S duty-free store operator that pledged to take the brand up market. “I thought at last my life would start,” says Mr. Lacroix. Despite the shift, the expensive clothes didn’t sell well, says Nicolas Topiol, Christian Lacroix’s current chief executive. Struggling to make payments, the Falic group shopped the brand but a buyer never emerged; by 2008 Christian Lacroix made a $14.1 million (€10 million) loss for $42.5 million (€30 million) of sales. The company filed for bankruptcy the following May, having invested $57.1 million (€40 million) in the brand.
Mr. Lacroix says the Falics weren’t willing to put enough money into the company. Mr. Topiol says the fact that Mr. Lacroix went through 11 chief executives suggests the designer was a source of problems. “When a pattern reproduces itself at length I think you can draw your own conclusions,” Mr. Topiol says.
In July a couture show, a stripped-down compilation of black skirts and navy dresses, was cobbled together with the help of donations from friends and admirers. Onlookers wept as the final couture gown swept past and his staff unfurled a banner which read “Lacroix forever.”
A week later the French Minister of Culture described the demise of Christian Lacroix as a “cultural disaster.” Four bidders have made offers for the brand. So far the Italian Borletti Group, which is associated with the Rinascente department store and Mr. Lacroix himself, is favored by the judicial administrator. A final decision comes in September.
Sitting in the showroom surrounded by boxes stuffed with unsold dresses, Laure du Pavillon, a colleague for 23 years, struggles to come to terms with the potential collapse. “It is a huge waste,” she says. “He doesn’t deserve this.”
Mr. Lacroix is sanguine. “Maybe we need something modest,” he says. “Something which makes a profit.”
Christian Lacroix’s Couture Through the Years
View Slideshow
AFP/Getty Images A look from the 1991 fall haute couture collection.
Three of his runway designs: Spring/Summer Haute Couture 1995, Fall/Winter Haute Couture, 1997-1998, Spring/Summer Haute Couture, 1999
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