Designer marks 20 years with Lanvin

Press, 15 August 1984, Page 14

Designer marks 20 years with Lanvin

A great fashion designer was born in his mother’s dressmaking workroom, in her Liege fashion house. By the age of 15, because of the time he spent in the workroom and . his passionate interest in the craft, Jules-Francois Crahay knew how to do everything. But when he told his father, a strict businessman, that he also wanted to be a fashion designer, his father at first refused. Then, upon reflection, he gave his consent, on the condition that Jules-Francois went to Paris to learn the profession.

However, Crahay’s professor found his student wellversed in the craft. After two years study the young man returned to Liege to work with his mother. The Second World War interrupted his career, but in 1945, when he began to

work with her again, his mother gave him the reins. He dressed a rich, active, worldly clientele, a clientele he chose himself. He only liked slim women; he wouldn’t dress any other kind.

Women often had to lose several pounds to get past his door.

Paris was then a dazzling place, the fashion capital of the world. So Jules-Francois Crahay went to Paris.

In 1951, he opened his own couture house on Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie, with Germaine de Vilmorin. The following year Robert Ricci asked him to go and work for him. It was there, in January 1959, that he became internationally famous, thanks to John Fairchild, of “Women’s Wear Daily,” who "discovered” his talent.

It was also while he was at Nina Ricci that he was asked to join Lanvin. “I accepted. I wanted a Faubourg Saint Honore address,” he recalls. In the 19605, the era of a very constructed fashion, he developed a highly successful and individual silhouette for suits, giving free range to his taste for easy, loose clothes. He launched capes, short or long, for the day and evening, and buttoned his coats high up to let the cross-over fall open freely. Taste for colour's Jules-Francois Crahay only began to travel after the age of 35. The Mediterranean light was a revelation to the eyes of a man accustomed to the grey skies and subtle, shaded light of Flanders.

Just like the Flemish painters of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century before him, he went on the pilgrimage to Italy. The colours of Capri, Naples, and Rome altered his conception of shades and tones, and inspired in him a taste for colour combinations that were to become the backbone of his collections.

He developed friends and acquaintances among artists, particularly painters. With his friends, Paolozzi, Michel Lablais, and Ferdinando Coloretti, he created fabric designs to make “dress-paintings.” The eye of a contemporary artist translates art into fashion. Invisible man There are no photographs of Jules-Francois in’ the gossip columns.

He goes out very little, and has not attended fashionable parties and receptions for some time now.

He has never been interested in promoting his own personal publicity, nor his own public relations. He hardly ever lets himself be acknowledged at the end of a collection.

He is an artist, pursuing the relentless task of internal development, and a fashion designer: a man who throws out ideas. “One creates for the sake of creating. One does not think about what is the current fad. One does not systematically exploit one idea in a collection.”

“I do not want to be confined to a commercial system.” If one season he designs plunging necklines, he will refuse the “sexy” label,

and will be prim and proper the following season, not so much to baffle people as to hang on to his freedom. Preferences He expresses his tastes through a technique, and since clothes are designed to be worn, he expresses a personal view of women. “I do not like affected styles, nor women who overdress. The most beautiful thing in a woman is her movement. “Clothes should enhance and help her gestures, her posture, and her way of walking. Clothes are only

beautiful if they are lived in.” The art of a fashion designer does not restrict itself to the science of the cut, and of couture. It is really the art of organisation. Knowing how to tie a shawl counts as much as the fall of a suit.

“Elegance is a secretly sought after stroke of luck.”

“Clothes should not look contrived and should become timeless from their moment of creation. After that, you can wear them for ten years,” he says. Crahay likes clothes with a sense of humour, outfits co-ordinated by each individual. The invis-

ible, impeccable fall of clothes, leaving behind an impression of living, breathing ease of movement, is his trademark.

His colour combinations allow freedom of interpretation; lively bursts of colour for dynamic days, muted harmonies ‘ for calmer days. Even the collection titles are not restricting. One can escape from the theme, if one feels the need. His favourite model? “I don’t know. Over the years I have loved a lot of them. But my favourite... I haven’t made it yet.”