Monday, May. 12, 2003

Designing Men

Forty-four years ago, when a 21-year-old Yves Saint Laurent presented his first collection for the house of Christian Dior, headlines in Paris screamed "Saint Laurent Has Saved France!" But now Christian Dior women's wear is designed by an Englishman. As is Givenchy's. Ready-to-wear at Louis Vuitton, Céline and Yves Saint Laurent is in the hands of American designers. Paris is still the center for creativity in fashion, but the most exciting shows have been those put on by foreigners. Until now. Two more French houses are ripe for turnaround — and this time the talent behind them is French.

Nicolas Ghesquière
When the then-owners of the legendary couture house of Balenciaga, Groupe Jacques Bogart, decided they wanted to turn the brand around in 1997, they did a very un-chic thing. They gave the job of chief designer to one of their current staffers.

Nicolas Ghesquière had been at the company since 1996, designing unglamorous things like uniforms for a Japanese license partner. Suddenly he was in the hot seat. Sort of. The owners gave him six months, then a year, then three. By the time Gucci Group became interested in buying Balenciaga in 2000, Ghesquière was the hottest young designer working in fashion. "They hired me as an accident," Ghesquière says of Groupe Jacques Bogart. "I was not famous. I was an assistant. I didn't have my own collection." And he still doesn't. When Domenico De Sole, CEO of Gucci Group, came calling Ghesquière was the core property. "The main idea was to have Nicolas join us," says De Sole. Balenciaga didn't have the recognition of an Yves Saint Laurent or a Gucci. The investment needed to make it profitable would be substantial. Almost as substantial as that required to build a Nicolas Ghesquière brand from scratch.

"The key driver was Nicolas," says De Sole. "Nicolas made it clear he loved the brand and that he had an attachment to it." So Gucci made an agreement with Ghesquière that said he would join the group no matter what and, if possible, Gucci would buy Balenciaga for him too. If not, they would launch a Nicolas Ghesquière line. Groupe Jacques Bogart eventually realized that without Ghesquière, Balenciaga wasn't much. A license agreement in Japan made negotiations difficult, but eventually Gucci Group completed the acquisition, which was announced in July of 2000. "Balenciaga is fascinating because now we have both the novelty and excitement surrounding Nicolas and the history of Balenciaga," says De Sole. Still, it's not every designer who would give up the chance of his own label in order to revive someone else's brand.

But Ghesquière's motivation was fashion, not himself — or France. "When I started at Balenciaga I was trying not to think French but globally," Ghesquière says. His designs are based on the spirit of Balenciaga, not the archives. The early collections, famous for their '80s references, were noticed first by the British and American press, and sold primarily to Italy, Britain, the U.S. and Japan. But not the French. It's not a unique problem. Marie-Christiane Marek, host of Paris Mode, a Canal Plus TV show about fashion, recently produced a program on young designers from around the world. "Every one of them said, 'We sell to the Japanese. We sell around the world, but not in Paris.' The stores here are very cold to the idea of new designers." Ghesquière showed his most recent collection in New York because he had the freedom to do so. But it's no coincidence that the U.S. is Balenciaga's biggest market, making up some 35% of the brand's sales. The show was deemed by many as the creative highlight of a rather dull fashion week. The world's only Balenciaga store, on Avenue George V in Paris, is in the midst of a renovation and De Sole says the next priority is a second Balenciaga store in — where else? — New York City.

Hedi Slimane
Hedi Slimane's first big break in fashion came in 1996 when he was named designer of the Yves Saint Laurent men's collection. The obvious benefit of working for such a well-known brand is the ease with which a designer's work can attract attention. There's another benefit, less obvious to outsiders, in working for such an established French name — the opportunity to work with the atelier: the men and women who had been making clothes for the Yves Saint Laurent company for over 30 years.

But when Slimane began he found a bit of French resistance. "They don't let you in very easily," he says. "They have to accept you." And the fact that Slimane was French didn't help one bit. "I'd ask for a correction and they would not do it. They wanted to see if I would react." He did, of course, and his men's collections for Saint Laurent attracted the attention of fashion editors and store buyers around the world. So when Slimane left Saint Laurent to become the designer for Christian Dior Homme in 2000, he decided to build his own atelier from scratch. He invited not only some of the tailors he had worked with before at Saint Laurent Homme, but also some of the workers from the Saint Laurent haute couture atelier. "I wanted that mix of high fashion and traditional tailoring," he says. That mix has made his designs for men popular with women also. Slimane says there's no way to know exactly what percentage of his customers are women, but it's enough to spark an interest in the possibility of launching a separate line for them.

But Slimane's fondness for French techniques and French technicians doesn't make him a full-fledged Francophile. He divides his time between Paris and Berlin and travels frequently to New York. It's the differences that entice him. "I was amazed at how the city recovered" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he says. "I don't think the same would have happened in Paris. Here we have a more individual spirit. There people are more civic-minded."

Slimane is also spending a lot of time in Los Angeles these days. In late March he went there to personally supervise the production of clothes for Oscar-bound stars. "Hollywood is the projection of the American dream," Slimane says, adding that he could live quite happily in the U.S. Just as Ghesquière was discovered first by the press outside Paris, so too was Slimane. "The French don't comment so much on French creativity," he says. "Every French designer has been recognized first by others. It's very typical. And not just in fashion."