At 19, Theyskens left the prestigious La Cambre school of visual arts in Brussels after less than a year. “I really hated school,” he said. “I had the feeling I was losing a lot of time. And I also had the feeling that my family was losing a lot of money. My parents were serene about my decision. They learned very early to let me do my own things.”
The son of a Belgian chemical engineer and a French homemaker, Theyskens was one of four children. “When I was very young, I wanted to be a girl,” he told me. “I was jealous that girls got to be princesses and wear skirts. It tormented me. When I was 6, I even heard that you could change your sex, and I was very intrigued until the moment I realized that if I changed into a girl, I would be an ugly girl, and this is the last thing I wanted to be.” Theyskens laughed. “At 9 or 10, I realized I was happy as a boy. But my parents were always easy about it. They let me walk around on the street in a dress. They’d say, Our child is so creative!”
From an early age, Theyskens told me, he wanted to be a couturier. “You know, it’s like when you see a child, and before they are 6, you can tell if they would make a good footballer. I loved clothes — I could lose myself in a hem for hours.” After leaving La Cambre, Theyskens decided to create a collection for himself. “It was the hardest I ever worked, but necessary. I wanted to express what I had to say in fashion. There’s a logic to clothes, but there’s also beauty. That creates a perfect marriage.”
Within months, he had designed and created 25 outfits, which he presented as part of a fashion show in Paris. Julie Gilhart, from Barneys, was at the show, which featured dark ball gowns and fitted robelike coats, and she rushed backstage, offering to buy the entire collection. “But I wouldn’t sell it,” Theyskens recalled, pointing to a photo of a striking red gown from that time. The top half of the dress, which is made out of a rooster-patterned cotton toile de jouy, a fabric that is often used for curtains, is a structured capelet that connects to the skirt with long vertical threads, leaving the wearer’s torso exposed. “This dress was never produced,” Theyskens said. “They wanted it, but I said no — wait until my next collection.” Gilhart put the clothes in the store window at Barneys anyway, but they were not available for purchase. “I wouldn’t sell my next collection either,” Theyskens told me, revealing a stubborness that has characterized his professional life. “I didn’t feel I was ready.”
The excitement around Theyskens intensified when Madonna wore a black satin coat dress, from his first collection, to the Academy Awards in 1998. For publicity, Theyskens photographed his clothes and sent the pictures to those he admired in the fashion industry. One of these was the photographer Inez van Lamsweerde, who happened to be working with Madonna and her stylist, Arianne Phillips. Van Lamsweerde showed them Theyskens’s clothes. In less than a year and without a single dress for sale in any store, Theyskens was dressing one of the most famous women in the world.
By 1999, Theyskens was regarded as fashion’s king of Goth. His shows had a dark undercurrent. The models would smash shells strewn on the catwalk, or the stage would break away under their feet. There were a lot of heavy, black tailored clothes: leather corsets that fastened with his trademark hook and eyes, furs made from squirrel pelts and hair used as yarn. One show featured a nude bodysuit embroidered with a heart, arteries and blood vessels. “When I designed it,” Theyskens said, “I thought of a young girl who has so much hidden inside that one day her heart explodes.” He paused, then said, “I wanted then, and now, for the clothes to have passion.”
Not all of the Theyskens line, which was produced until 2002, was as dramatically conceived. Many of the pieces actually presage Theyskens’s work at Rochas. There’s a sense of airiness in the dresses, as well as a careful attention to craft. “My nearest assistant at Rochas has been with me since the beginning,” Theyskens said, still studying the photos of his past collections, “and he truly feels that I’ve returned to my roots at Rochas. When I started out, I was more romantic — the clothes were fluid and longer and a little more fragile.” Theyskens paused, then continued: “Having your own collection is difficult. Even now at Rochas, I’m thinking about what things cost all the time. It’s a reflex. In fashion, you can create, but there are some rules. You need to manage the business, and at the same time, people are waiting for designers to show their freedom and originality. There are a lot of different expectations.”
These remarks would seem to foreshadow future events at Rochas, but they also refer to the recent past. The financial shocks that followed Sept. 11, 2001, were not without their effects on the global luxury business, causing panic even in large companies like Gucci. The nonstop shopping spree of the late 90’s immediately stopped, and for months travel was severely curtailed. This meant that no one was buying perfume in duty-free airport shops, a primary source of income for large fashion houses.
“It was a difficult time,” Theyskens said. The collection he showed that fall was particularly strong. He decorated the shoes with small stuffed canaries, and he kept the clothes very simple. “I wanted the birds to look like they fell out of the nest,” he told me as he searched for photos from the collection he designed in the fall of 2001. His use of 19th-century ornamentation to make a political analogy was well received, but Theyskens, who was living in Brussels and showing in France, was ready for a change. “I wanted to move to Paris,” he said, still searching through the packet in front of him for the pictures of the 2001 collection, the last he designed under his own name.
“Oh, look,” he said, coming across a photo that ran in American Vogue in 2000. Captioned “The Style Council,” it spotlighted 14 designers as “ 21st-century fashion-makers.” “There’s Hedi,” Theyskens said, singling out Hedi Slimane, the current designer of Dior Homme. “And Nicolas,” pointing to Nicolas Ghesquière, who at that time was already designing for Balenciaga. Theyskens looked perplexed. “Comment s’appelle?” he asked in French, pointing to a man in the back row of the picture. “Oh, that’s. . .Joseph Thimister. He was so nice. Where is he now?” The photo is revealing of the fickle nature of the fashion business: very few of the so-called style council fulfilled their promise, and one — Miguel Adrover — is out of the business altogether. Joseph Thimister, too, is no longer designing clothes.
“I remember that day,” Theyskens said. “They had set up some folding chairs for the photo, and I was outside smoking. When I came in, everyone was trying to sit in the first row.” Theyskens smiled. “The photographer put me in the front, on the floor,” he said. “Thank God I am still a designer, or it would be very embarrassing.”
ix weeks before the spring ’07 precollection and eight weeks before the design house was closed, Theyskens was in his office at Rochas, sketching at his desk before a fitting. Unlike many designers, who begin with a pattern or a muslin draped on a model’s body, Theyskens has always started the design process by elaborately sketching each garment. “I use very thin paper,” he said on this sunny afternoon in mid-May, “and for every season I seem to find a new way of drawing. Lately, I’ve been using very soft lead pencils. But in the past, I’d use a crayon or colored pencils.” He paused and shaded in the slightly bent leg of the figure he was sketching. She was wearing flat-front pants with an elongated narrow jacket that looked pliable enough to be a sweater.
The drawing was precise, every button and tuck and seam delineated. Unlike those of many designers, Theyskens’s sketches do not resemble fashion cartoons. They are more like painterly blueprints — exact, architectural guides to the finished garments. “When I drew my own collection, I used to draw the face, the eyes and everything,” Theyskens said while he sketched. “But when I started Rochas, I was so much into this Parisian approach, that I was less interested in the attitude of the individual girl. I stopped drawing the head. I liked the anonymity. It imposed a certain set of rules. I have never had a muse, but this allows me to concentrate on what I think should purely represent Rochas.”
For last spring’s collection, Theyskens also stopped sketching to music. He had started to worry about the role music was playing in determining the mood of the collection, and he decided to sketch in silence. “I don’t like addictions,” he explained. “So in January 2005, I got rid of the TV and decided no more music. I wanted to divorce myself from modern things. And then the collection grew.”
The result was a collection that he showed last fall in Paris and that was inspired by Monet’s paintings of water lilies, although he has not visited the paintings in the newly restored Orangerie, where they are displayed. Theyskens would rather draw from his memory of their loveliness, as if he had seen them in a dream. The sea greens, slate blues and pearly grays of those paintings inspired one of Theyskens’s best collections, a bold show in which he featured only full-length gowns and his first-ever pantsuits. No day dresses, no coats, nothing that hit at the knee. Theyskens has often said that he sees beauty as something “elegant and noble,” and that collection, which was risky and distinctly uncommercial, epitomized his sense of Rochas as a stand against “global vulgarity.”
When Theyskens was offered the job at Rochas in early 2002, he had taken a year off to travel and had, reportedly, just priced himself out of the top job at Givenchy. “It was chemical with Rochas,” he said, still sketching. “You hear the name, and you know it’s right.” Although he is not well remembered as a fashion-world figure, Marcel Rochas was an innovative designer. He not only invented the guepière, a kind of long-line corset that smoothed the curves of women like Marlene Dietrich; he also expanded that undergarment into ball gowns, many of which were accented with lace. “Rochas believed in a sophisticated femininity that was not that girly,” Theyskens said, “and so do I. I also liked that there was no immediate imagery associated with his name. I knew I could have freedom here.”
Theyskens’s first collection for Rochas in 2003 may still be his most thrilling. In just a few months, he designed and executed an entirely new silhouette for the house and ushered in a new movement of refined, French-influenced fashion. Inspired by bees and their hives (although it’s nearly impossible to see how), Theyskens visibly altered the proportions of the clothes. He raised the waist so that the dresses and suits were long and slim. A narrow, oyster gray satin suit was topped by a tiny empire jacket, a satin evening dress was constructed in three triangular layers like a tiered cake and, most notably, a black jacket had a lace bustle that began between the shoulder blades and fanned out. The front of the jacket was close-fitting and then, like a bridal veil that has been tossed back, the jacket suddenly poufed dramatically.
This lace jacket, which cost $3,500 in 2003, sold out. Not only did its surprising shape become a kind of trademark at Rochas, but the fact that it sold briskly emboldened Theyskens to seek out a customer who didn’t mind paying more for a spectacular, unique item. Even before the catchword caught on this summer, Theyskens was creating “demicouture” at Rochas. Unlike classic, traditional couture, which has strict rules about the numbers of fittings and hand-stitching, demicouture implies special pieces, usually evening dresses, that are hand-crafted and too expensive and time-consuming to mass-produce. Last year, Theyskens designed, as part of his Monet-inspired collection, a shimmering dark blue green fishtail gown with long sleeves and an open, oval back that was embellished with water-lily embroidery. It sold for $23,440. Another gown, which seemed to be inspired by Marcel Rochas’s famous corset, was steel gray satin and took 75 hours to sew. That dress was priced at $19,920.
Many fashion-world insiders question Theyskens’s decision to concentrate on such high-end creations. When celebrities wear the gowns, they generally receive them for free, and very few noncelebrity women can afford them. No matter how gorgeous, demicouture may not be practical as an overall business strategy. It is, however, the fantasy version of what fashion can be: a grand pronouncement of grace and beauty. A handbag may make economic sense, but a beautiful ball gown conjures cinematic scenarios. And that’s the predicament that Theyskens presents. His Monet collection was an electric moment in fashion — the designs showed how powerful clothes can be, how they can be a kind of wearable art that has the ability to alter the temperature in the room. Yet, no matter how transcendent, the Monet gowns were not created with an eye to the marketplace. Realistically, most women will not wear floor-sweeping dresses in their day-to-day lives. For Theyskens, that was never the point, and maybe it shouldn’t be. In other houses where brave, influential fashion is encouraged — like Balenciaga or Marc Jacobs — accessories or cheaper secondary lines provide a financial cushion. The purity of Theyskens’s approach and his reluctance to speed up the more lucrative areas of design have both rewarded and cost him.
As Theyskens continued to sketch, a model and four members of his design team walked into the studio. There are 40 employees at Rochas, a small number. Theyskens’s large white desk was cluttered with cans of Coca-Cola Light, button samples, scissors, fat spools of metallic thread, a cellphone, three scented candles and many piles of fabric swatches in a limited range of colors, from pale gray to denim blue to cream. There was a large stack of photocopies of finished drawings placed to the side. Each sketch had elaborate instructions in the margins — covering measurements, hand-stitching, seaming or whatever special treatment was required — giving the 10 seamstresses who work in the basement of the Rochas building directions on how to approach each garment.
where is that camera when you need it
