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source: nytimes.com

Part One

August 6, 2006
Is There a Place for Olivier Theyskens?

By LYNN HIRSCHBERG

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n the first Wednesday of July, in the entry of the Rochas atelier, which is located in a reconfigured three-story house on a residential street in the somewhat unfashionable 17th Arrondissement of Paris, four headless mannequins were wearing some of the most beautiful gowns ever created. One was white lace and, like its twin in black, had an ease in the drape of the fabric that masked the skill of construction. The third gown was a sheer, iridescent gray cotton with chiffon flowers of varying sizes decorating the bodice at irregular intervals. The fourth dress was the most striking: a natural linen accented with a roughly sewn embroidery that from a distance looked like a sort of burlap lace. The halter top of the dress was snug, and yet just below the natural waist, the gown exploded into a wide skirt that seemed to float.

These four gowns, two of which took around 200 hours to sew, and the rest of the 100-piece spring 2007 precollection for Rochas were designed by Olivier Theyskens. Since taking control of the house in 2002, Theyskens (pronounced tey-skins), who is 29 and was born in Belgium, has imagined a carefully defined identity for Rochas: his clothes conjure a particularly French world, full of femininity and grace. When he took over at Rochas, which was established in 1925, the house was known, if it was known at all, for a perfume that arrived in a pale pink box decorated in black lace. Theyskens took that lace and transformed it into dresses, skirts and jackets (he didn’t show pants at first) that mixed the tight bodices and full skirts of the 50’s with an entirely new sense of proportion and tailoring. Instead of copying the formula established by companies like Gucci, which successfully revived a moribund fashion house by establishing a global brand built on image, Theyskens chose a riskier path. From his first full collection for fall 2003, Theyskens has tried to re-establish Rochas through the power of design, with a romantic, elegant and precisely realized sensibility.

When I visited the Rochas atelier in early July, it was to see Theyskens’s precollection for spring ’07. Precollections, which are presented three months ahead of the official start of each season, have become crucial to the economic health of the industry. Buyers cannot wait for the runway shows in October (and March, for the following fall’s lines), when the full lines are shown, if they hope to get new merchandise in their stores just before the shopping season begins in earnest. The customer for expensive, innovative brands like Rochas, where a jacket can cost $3,500 and a gown up to $100,000, like the one from the precollection for spring ’05 that required more than 500 yards of rooster feathers to be attached to the dress with one long thread, is interested in having the clothes before anyone else.

As models showed off Theyskens’s newest creations — a tan pantsuit with a modified safari jacket, a washed slate blue velvet coat with billowing sleeves, a sleeveless silk sundress with a flirty skirt — buyers from stores like Neiman Marcus and Barneys placed their orders and magazine editors fought over who would get to photograph which gown first. The bright white Rochas showroom was like a small, exclusive fashion party. The weather was unusually hot for Paris, and these clothes seemed to have a cooling effect — if you wore them, you would immediately be lighter, prettier, happier. “It’s a little bit hippie,” said Nicolas Frontière, the public-relations manager for Rochas, who has known Theyskens since he was 20. Frontière laughed, then added, “But it’s Olivier’s version of hippie.” Meaning a very refined Parisian hippie who understands how complicated it is to create clothes that look effortless.

Theyskens did not attend the precollection viewings at his showroom, which lasted for 10 days. He could usually be found upstairs in his office, out of sight, sketching the new spring collection that he planned to show in October, as he has for the past four years, in a large tent in the Tuileries. He was given regular updates from the sales force below — the buyers and editors loved the gowns; they loved the collection.

During the time Theyskens was presenting his precollection, a rumor began circulating in Paris: Procter & Gamble, the American conglomerate that owns Rochas, had decided to close the fashion branch of the company. Soon enough, the story was confirmed. The beautiful gowns would never be shown or produced; the atelier would be shuttered. When the shows of the spring collections began in October, the Rochas brand would exist only as that perfume in the pink box with the black lace. Apparently, P.&G. had been trying to sell off the fashion house for months.

Its ownership of Rochas was a kind of acquisitional accident: three years ago, it bought the German hair-care company Wella for $6.9 billion. Wella also owned Rochas, and P.&G. was thrust into the fashion business. It was an awkward fit. P.&G., based in Cincinnati, specializes in products like Duracel batteries and Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent. Fashion is a different business: a combustible admixture of commerce, buzz and, at its best, art, it does not adhere to the same reliable rules that help predict sales in household essentials. Often the most lucrative part of a fashion company is its fragrance line — after the initial cost of creating a scent, perfume sales can sustain a company for decades, paying for the evanescent world of luxury ready-to-wear. The Rochas scents generate an estimated $44 million a year; the clothing line reportedly had revenues of less than $12.6 million and probably cost more than that to run. The talk in Paris was that P.&G. tried to sell the fashion house while holding onto the perfumes, but no buyers were interested in just the clothes. P.&G. did need to make a decision about the house. Theyskens’s contract was up for renewal, and the company had begun negotiating with him back in December 2005, according to an official I spoke with at P.&G. More recently, P.&G. refused to authorize his fabric order for the spring collection. That was the first sign that Rochas might be closing.

The fashion world is a small world, in size and also in temperament, and the information that Rochas and Olivier Theyskens were (at least temporarily) finished spread quickly, with a mix of glee and dread. There was reason for jealousy: in just a few years, Theyskens had become a darling of the fashion media, especially in the United States. This June in New York, he won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for international designer, which is the fashion equivalent of winning Best Picture at the Oscars. Although Rochas had a policy of not buying advertising, fashion magazines nevertheless featured pages of photos of Theyskens’s exquisite dresses, and stars like Jennifer Aniston (who wore a black Rochas gown to the Academy Awards) and Kirsten Dunst (who wore a blue Rochas for the premiere of Sofia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette” at Cannes) regularly posed on the red carpet in his designs. Suddenly, it seemed, this moment was over.

“My idea for Rochas has always been the same,” Theyskens told me a few days before the story of the company’s demise began spreading. He was sitting at his large white desk in the room where he does all his fittings, wearing loose jeans, sneakers and a half-open white button-down shirt, his long black hair tied back in a loose braid. If he hadn’t taken recently to wearing a scruffy beard, it would have been easy to mistake him for a beautiful woman. As a child, Theyskens took ballet (he quit when he was the only boy in the class), and he moves gracefully — crouching on his studio floor to examine a hem, wrapping a tape measure around his neck as if it were a silk scarf.

“My sense of designing is a mix of intuition and intellectual control,” he continued. Although he speaks nearly perfect English, Theyskens’s locutions can be overly proper and sometimes sound like pronouncements. “I am interested in the idea of taste. And by taste, I mean opinion, inspiration and the craft of creating a personality through fabric and design.” He has never been interested in rushing to satisfy the marketplace or to fit a particular price point, focusing, instead, on what he believes only a designer can provide: a carefully considered creation. “I would like to stop global vulgarity,” Theyskens told me more than once in the days I spent with him.

This was a thinly veiled reference to the world of the megabrands that seek out the universal fashion customer — perhaps most famously, and most successfully, Gucci. In remaking Gucci, the designer Tom Ford pushed a sex-bomb image not just in his designs but also in every aspect of how they were presented, from stores to media events to advertising campaigns. The huge success of that business model has dominated and tantalized the fashion community for the last decade. Through extensive and consistent marketing, Ford sold a jet-set, vaguely kinky, sort-of-70’s image at Gucci. Whether you lived in Kansas or Cairo, you could purchase the same Gucci handbag and thus the same Gucci mood, one that did not depend on fitting into the particular look of the season. As much as anything, you were embracing an understood and easily recognizable symbol of desirability.

The Gucci global paradigm, which has since been copied by nearly every major fashion entity, from Marc Jacobs to Yves Saint Laurent to Balenciaga, requires a few key ingredients and a great deal of luck. It helps to have shops in every major city, a large advertising budget and a well-developed accessories line. In this marketplace, it is becoming almost impossible to be, like Rochas, a highly regarded small house with a high-end international clientele. “Olivier’s best dresses were his gowns,” said one longtime designer, who did not want to comment publicly on a colleague. “And that’s a niche business. That sort of perfect, made-to-measure business can’t exist today, which is really too bad. Everything is about business now, and fashion shouldn’t have to follow normal economic models — that’s not the point. What happened to investing in beauty?”

Because of the respect afforded Theyskens, the closing of Rochas, which became official on July 18, was shocking and symbolic: if business concerns could trump this kind of talent, then what chance did less gifted designers have? The industry insiders and forecasters all offered the same analysis. Theyskens made wonderful clothes, but he was too exclusive to prosper in a competitive global environment. In the post-Gucci age, fashion would need to be instantly commercially viable, even if the line being created was for a luxury brand. The critics complained that Theyskens had never developed a popular handbag or shoe, both commodities that can be reintroduced with slight modifications year after year. Bags do not have a size, and they are more affordable than evening gowns. But some in the business, like Julie Gilhart, senior vice president and design director of Barneys New York, where sales of Rochas doubled in the last year, felt that P.&G. could have embraced another strategy for Rochas —one that developed the line more slowly and steadily. “The Rochas bags and shoes were beginning to develop,” Gilhart said. “Olivier felt, and I agreed, that bags and shoes involved a design process like everything else. He did not want to rush out a bag just to satisfy the marketplace. He is too intelligent for that.”

When Theyskens heard that Rochas would be closed, he at first told friends he was not unhappy. Calling me from his cellphone two days later, he sounded almost giddy. “I am peaceful,” he said, perhaps meaning, instead, sanguine. He didn’t want to say much more, but he seemed to think, or to wish to imply, that someone would come along and put him back in business, perhaps as soon as the fall. A close colleague of his had a different perspective on what might come to pass. “Olivier wants to create a certain kind of world with his clothes,” she told me “and it’s possible that world no longer exists.”

A few days before the news spread about Rochas, Theyskens was drinking jasmine tea on the patio of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He was studying a photomontage of the clothes he designed under his own name in August 1997. The file, along with a collection of articles, had been prepared by the Rochas press office. “I was 20,” he said, looking at the pictures. “It’s very far away.” Theyskens, who was wearing a nondescript gray short-sleeve T-shirt and faded black jeans, pointed to a particular dress. It was, as many of his early dresses were, a kind of Goth extravaganza. Hooks and eyes, which Theyskens once called “jewelry for the dress,” connected the fabric of the bodice in a cross. “I made the pattern,” he said, “and I remember sewing the hem.” Theyskens studied the photo. “My first collection was made from sheets that my grandmother, who lived in Normandy, had been collecting for a long time. There are a lot of flea markets in that part of France, and she knew what I liked. She was the one who first gave me black lace like the kind Rochas used. I used all that in my first Theyskens collection — I loved the idea that you stripped the sheets off the beds and made dresses out of them. It has something of the Marquis de Sade.”

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.”
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source: nytimes.com

Second Part

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.”

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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.

The slim, pale model Tamara Cesnovar, who has worked with Theyskens since 2000, was wearing a subtly tailored Rochas silk dress. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and as she walked around the studio, she paused to look at her reflection in the mirror that covered two sides of the room. She then stopped in front of Theyskens, who considered her intently. The dress was clearly too large, and Theyskens began adjusting. “It’s all wrong,” he told me. “You want to cancel a look sometimes. And then you shorten it here or take it in there or move this here, and then it becomes the right thing. One half centimeter changes everything.”
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source: nytimes.com

Last Part

Until this season, Theyskens did all the Rochas fittings himself, literally pinning and repinning the garments. “In the end, my hands would bleed,” he said. “And I also needed the distance — I needed to get a better sense of the look.” Although he doesn’t now alter dresses himself, he is not a passive observer. Three times, he jumped out of his upholstered chair and circled the model. He asked her how the dress felt. He crouched on the floor and adjusted a side seam. He rolled the neckline between his fingers to check how it lay against the model’s collarbone. “Fashion design is mathematical,” Theyskens had said earlier. “I learned that from doing everything myself. And that’s very important, because you know what amount of time you need to make a dress. You know what it is to cut the paper.”

Fabric is a key element in Theyskens’s approach to clothes. The full-time job of one member of his team is fabric research, and he is intrigued by the possibilities that certain fabrics command. His pantsuits in the Monet collection, sewn in cotton and linen, had a slight sheen and a body that felt, somehow, new. For this season, he was also working with some cloth made out of nettles, sheer jerseys and a cashmere-wool blend that is remarkably thin. Nearly all the fabrics are washed, muting their colors and making them softer. Even the trademark Rochas lace, which Theyskens has utilized as a leitmotif in every collection, has been turned into fabric. “If you look carefully at lace, there are floral patterns,” Theyskens said, holding a strip of lace to the light. He has magnified that intricate pattern and transformed it into a print; he has pixelated an individual lace flower until it looks like a pointillist rendering and used that; he has added stretch and color to the lace and then frayed the edges before turning it into the trim on a jacket.

As the dress was taking shape, Theyskens returned to his desk and pulled out his drawing of a simple, loose-fitting, knee-length coat. He scrutinized the image. “The final result will depend so much on the fabric,” he said after a long pause. “One blue can be beautiful, and another can be horrible.” He rummaged through a small box that was filled with fabric swatches in various shades of gray. “Depending on the material, this coat could be less expensive,” Theyskens said. “It has always been one of our best sellers.” This was the first time I had heard Theyskens address the economics of his business. “Of course,” he said “I like something a bit arty in the collection. But I can also think in other ways.”


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hen Theyskens took the job at Rochas, he decided to stop designing under his own name. His eponymous company had lost its financial backer, and Theyskens, who had always wanted to work for a French fashion house, concentrated on reviving Rochas. “I had to choose my own name or Rochas,” he said months ago in New York, where he was attending the Fashion Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considered by many to be the social event of the year. That day, in early May, was chilly, and Theyskens was dressed in suit trousers, a loose sweater and a long, narrow gray scarf that was looped around his neck and hair. We were supposed to meet for a late breakfast, but we never ordered and instead talked in the lobby of Theyskens’s hotel, the W in Union Square, for an hour.

He had just heard that he had won the C.F.D.A. award for best international designer, and he was pleased. “When I was young, I always dreamed of designing in Paris,” he said. “But the French don’t have the capacity for awards. They are very quick to criticize.”

This outburst was surprising. Theyskens has spoken often about his affection for classic Parisian design. “France is very special,” he continued, “but the French world of fashion is being destroyed little by little. The French factories and ateliers were once dedicated to the little nuances. That luxurious approach and that refinement disappeared in the 80’s and 90’s, and I fear it may be disappearing again.”

Given that P.&G. was trying to sell Rochas for six months and that Theyskens was aware of its plans, his remarks in New York now sound pre-emptive. There is a history in fashion of great designers, from Yves Saint Laurent to Marc Jacobs to Calvin Klein, working with equally visionary businessmen. Most famously, Pierre Bergé steered YSL into lucrative relationships with different product lines, like perfume and shoes, while Saint Laurent concentrated on his vision. But P.&G. never expressed interest in the high-end luxury clothing business, and even within his own ranks, Theyskens didn’t have a strong business partner to advise and direct him.

“Olivier needed some help, someone to say that diversification is the key to a successful fashion house,” said Robert Burke, who is head of a luxury consulting group and was senior vice president of Bergdorf Goodman for six years. “The luxury business is booming today, but the consumer’s buying pattern has changed. You cannot survive in a ready-to-wear business just by creating clothes. Olivier is wildly talented, but there wasn’t a lot of balance at Rochas from a retail perspective. His clothes inched up to couture in terms of beauty and cost, and to be successful, a luxury line needs to be broader.” He pointed to a recent Women’s Wear Daily article, which stated that Oscar de la Renta generated $100 million wholesale from his collection and received $650 million retail through his licensing arrangements. “His name is on everything from bridal wear to china to wallpaper to towels.”

With the closing of Rochas, many fashion observers began to speculate that Theyskens might start designing under his own name again. Belgian designers like Dries Van Noten and Raf Simons have small but lucrative independent labels that do not have the global financial ambitions of Gucci or Chanel. “But those Belgian houses do not make ball gowns,” a top fashion analyst said. “They don’t have actresses wearing their dresses at premieres, and they don’t get 10-page photo layouts in Vogue every month. Their clothes are not rarefied in the way that Olivier’s have been at Rochas. If he went on his own, he would have to change in ways that he might not want to change.”

Yet if he chose to expand his sartorial range and could find a strong business partner, the current economic climate in fashion would likely be welcoming to Theyskens. Lanvin, for instance, was sold by L’Oréal to an investment group headed by Shaw-Lan Wang, a Taiwanese publishing magnate, who supported the designer Alber Elbaz. “Without a really good partner, I don’t think Olivier can prosper,” I was told by a fashion consultant who directs campaigns for several large houses. “Olivier doesn’t need a lot of customers, but those customers need something to wear before 5. Where’s his day wear? Where are his bags? His vision is too narrow for the consumer who wants to spend.”

After the closing of Rochas, the fashion rumor mill buzzed about where Theyskens might land. It was said that his close adviser Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, was suggesting he take over Oscar de la Renta’s company in America. That seemed an odd fit: Theyskens’s romantic vision would very likely clash with the demands of the mainstream American consumer. In late July, another rumor circulated: Theyskens would replace Valentino, who at 74 had recently hinted at retirement from the house he built that bears his name. That match seemed ideal. Valentino has a strong business side and a thriving high-end history.

Theyskens himself would not reveal his plans, if he had firmed them up, but hinted that a big announcement would be made in the fall. He did not sound sad or shocked or worried. Similarly, Nicolas Frontière, his public-relations manager, said he turned down a “big job” to stay with Theyskens — the suggestion being that he was following him into a new venture.

“Olivier Theyskens is one of the most talented designers in the world, and we haven’t heard the last of him,” said Jonathan Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast International, when I phoned him in London. “But what is missing in his story is a business operator who can navigate this world. The fashion houses are doing very well at the moment. They are reaching new markets in places like China, Russia and South America. But you still need patience, a long-term effort and a sound strategy. Unfortunately, great talent is not enough.”

Since it is impossible to imagine Theyskens abandoning his artistic approach to fashion design, there would need to be a shift in the business part of the equation. “You have to figure out how to fix each company on a case-by-case basis,” I was told by Robert Burke. “Early on, Marc Jacobs, who designs under his own name and for Louis Vuitton, had all the earmarks of a wildly talented designer who might not succeed. He was fired from Perry Ellis, and everyone said that an American designer would never excel at a French luxury house like Louis Vuitton. Well, they were completely wrong, and now he’s become the model of how you reinvigorate a brand. There’s no reason Olivier Theyskens’s story could not have the same ending.”

Can Theyskens make such an adjustment — change his story? “It’s a very particular business,” Theyskens told me just days before his company was shuttered, “but it makes you intuitive about the future. I’m forced to think ahead, to imagine what a girl should look like in a year from now. That makes your mind sensitive to signs. And looking for signs makes life more logical in a way: you are always ready for the future.”

Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.
Click to expand...
 
Avant Garde said:
Thanks and karma :woot: :flower:
Click to expand...


My pleasure ^_^

I forgot to add the pictures that accompanied the article :blush:

source: nytimes.com
06theys1650ip1.jpg

[SIZE=-1]Theyskens pondering a new creation — or maybe his future — in the Rochas atelier in Paris.

06theysslide1qo9.jpg

[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]A Theyskens dress begins to take shape.

06theysslide2br1.jpg

[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]One of Theyskens’s intricate sketches and a fabric especially created for Rochas.

06theysslide3tx7.jpg

[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Final preparations for the precollection.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]
[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]
06theysslide4oc8.jpg

Paperwork and product.

06theysslide5ze5.jpg

[/SIZE][SIZE=-1]The designer attending to details.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]
[/SIZE]
06theysslide6fi7.jpg

[SIZE=-1]From left: Pantsuit, spring 2006; Signature jacket, fall 2003; Monet collection dress, spring 2006.
[/SIZE]
06theysslide7au7.jpg

[SIZE=-1]From left: Satin evening dress, fall 2006; Fishtail gown, fall 2005; Tiered ensemble, fall 2003.[/SIZE]
Click to expand...
 
Oh, my dream is to work in an atelier with a designer like Theyskens. These images are amazing, thanks so much for posting them. Whoever that man is with the vest, I want that job!
 
Mutterlein said:
Oh, my dream is to work in an atelier with a designer like Theyskens. These images are amazing, thanks so much for posting them. Whoever that man is with the vest, I want that job!
Click to expand...

the man in the vest seems to be a cutter or a pattern maker, two of the most critical but unglamorous jobs in fashion.
they pay a lot of money though, and can be really fulfilling if you love what you do
 
I think it is what I want! I like the problemsolving and technical aspect. I was orignally going to go into industrial design. I'd much rather figure out spacial and engineering problems for luxury clothes than power tools and cars. And if I were making clothes for someone like Olivier it would be a amazing!
 
Mutterlein said:
Oh, my dream is to work in an atelier with a designer like Theyskens. These images are amazing, thanks so much for posting them. Whoever that man is with the vest, I want that job!
Click to expand...
OMG, this might very well be the friend of mine I was talking about before, the one who did have a menswear collection of his own and then quit to commence working for Olivier as a bias-cut specialist... :woot:
 
Thank you DosViolines, that was a gorgeous article.

Whenever I see or hear of Olivier I feel like I've found an estranged brother in ethic, aesthetic, soul and body; so happy he exists. So Symboliste. Those Belgians.

Whoever said Madame Gres, I totally agree with.
But Givenchy's legacy would suit him well too; I feel as if Audrey Hepburn would have been beautiful in his creations, this past spring 06 collection especially. The article mentions Valentino, which seems a bit too traditional Italian glamour for this fin-de-siecle poet, but it may be a practical solution...non, non to de la Renta.

Anyway, I'm rambling to myself.
So excited to see what he's up to next.:heart:
He will create his beautiful Giverny in this world, no matter how big or small.
 
reading that article took me on a magical journey. thanks for posting it! :flower:
 
Ooooh! Nice video! A little surreal for my tastes, but it was great to see his designs in movement.
 
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