It Girl

Author Marisa Meltzer joins us at the Paris Writers & Readers Club on the eve of the release of her highly-anticipated new book. For the occasion, she will also be signing book plates for pre-orders (in-store pick up only from Nov 6th). To join the salon remotely on October 2nd at 6.30pm, click here.

Yves Saint Laurent in his home in Normandy, Château Gabriel, in 1980.

Proust, turned her into a fictional princess and Ravel turned her into music. Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec couldn't stop painting her. Picasso was a confidante, Serge Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, a best friend, and Coco Chanel – her "soul sister"; possibly her lover too.

Ask any millennial with a heartbeat for fashion about the 90s cult-classic film, Clueless, and watch their eyes light up as they recall Cher Horowitz (played by Alicia Silverstone) and her “way normal” morning routine of mixing and matching pieces on her desktop computer to pick out an outfit for school from her revolving dream closet. But let’s step back about two-and-a-half centuries to the bedroom of another fashion heroine, where every morning, Marie Antoinette was presented with her prized fashion bible, the Gazette des Atours, a billowing compendium of fabric swatches that represents every conceivable garment in that vast arsenal of hers, a securely colour-coded and catalogued wardrobe…

In the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century, spectating at the races was a glamorous event beyond comparison. Paris’ Hippodrome de Longchamp racecourse was the place to see and be seen; it was a stage where the bold and the beautiful would strut their perfectly tailored, coiffed and manicured stuff for all to marvel at from beneath their lace parasols. The sophisticated French capitol was hands down the centre of the fashion universe. Its boulevards and grand department stores, its opera house and even the morgue (yes, you read that right) were the scenes of stylish displays of incomparable proportions. But there was arguably no greater stage than the Parisian racetrack.

Fabulous, free and fashionable, France bloomed in the 1930s. The avant-garde arts flourished, Paris was at the centre of it all and her output was bountiful. The creative giants of the day, Picasso, Cocteau, Coco Chanel, May Ray, Beauvoir and Sartre, the Lost Generation and their cultural circle basked in a warm summer evening’s glow of new culture and liberalism. But there’s one name that was very much a part of this moment, who you must meet. Bébé, aka, Christian Bérard.

Cast your eye over the creations of Jacques Griffe, and one can’t help but wonder why a designer so acutely gifted doesn’t also boast a couture legacy similar to that of many of his contemporaries. Griffe closed his business in the late 1960s despite earning his reputation as one of the great French couturiers of the mid-20th Century. We find shockingly little written about the life of this fashion genius, however.

To be one of “Antonio’s Girls”, as they were known, meant you were going places. You had “it”. Grace Jones, Jerry Hall, Tina Chow, Pate Cleveland and Jessica Lange are names that are much better known today than Antonio Lopez, but they were all key members of his unofficial talent school whose careers he launched into the fashion stratosphere. He is a figure with a fashion legacy to rival Andy Warhol’s influence on pop culture, but the Puerto Rico-born creative mastermind seems to have gotten stuck behind the back of history’s sofa lately.

A Cabinet of Curiosities in Paris