ENGLISH TEXTS
P. 64
Master Class
How do you become the most prominent French fashion designer of the moment? How do you reinvent cuts and movement? People, knowhow, inspirations, commitments, research and work… The wizard of Koché reveals the secrets of her art.
Véronique Philipponnat
We thought she was platinum blonde, but she’s gone dark again. We imagined her in a chaotic and eccentric universe overflowing with fabrics and samples, but instead, stepping through the door at the end of a leafy alley in Ménilmontant, we are stunned to discover her white and silent workshop. We were expecting her to be stressed out by the current context, worried about the survival of her little company and yet all she wanted to talk about was creating, and not about figures or marketing. We got it all wrong, well almost.
Christelle Kocher is an oxymoron. She can jump from talking about Berlin’s electronic music scene and the life of Emilio Pucci, to Virginia Woolf and women’s football, or the landscapes of the Cévennes and Italian craftsmanship. Her weeks must be pretty busy too: she is the creative director of the prestigious Maison Lemarié (one of Chanel’s partners) and in charge of its sewing, feather and flower workshops, as well as the fabric pleater Atelier Lognon. She works with Virginie Viard on eight collections a year for Chanel. As if that wasn’t enough, she founded her own (almost eponymous) brand in 2014, collaborated with Nike in 2019 and designed Pucci’s autumn/winter 2020 collection — and yet she doesn’t seem to suffer from hyperactivity or attention deficiency disorder and certainly doesn’t make hasty decisions. The whole morning long, her mobile stays out of sight and doesn’t ring once, probably tucked away at the bottom of her handbag. Talkative and to the point, she gave all her attention to our conversation, getting out a small Stockman dressmaker’s dummy to explain her creative process. “So this is how I begin. I take some fabric, drape it and then cut it. And then I sometimes draw, but not every time.” Christelle is a master seamstress for whom creativity goes hand in hand with the art of sewing. She knows the work of Madame Grès and Madeleine Vionnet by heart and evokes many other great names, first and foremost Karl Lagerfeld, with whom she worked for more than nine years. “His drawings left nothing out. It was crazy how every single line was so precise. You could get a feel for the volume of the garment, see exactly how to attach the sleeves, place a pleat, or design a slit…”
Christelle talks a lot about others and rarely talks about herself in the first person. She talks about the people she feels a connection with inventing a new family tree. She studied at the prestigious Central Saint Martin’s school and speaks fondly about her teacher. “Mr Stewart was 72 years old. He had worked with Charles James, an English designer renowned for structured dresses which seemed to be sculpted onto women’s bodies. For weeks, even months on end, he showed me how to analyse the way cloth hangs, how to cut a bias and apprehend volume. We used to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum, he gave me books and we visited shops such as Comme des Garçons.” It is when one of Christelle’s dresses is in movement that her talent for cutting and structuring fabric is truly revealed: apparently
