Christian Lacroix Shares His Personal Highlights From a Life in the Haute Couture
Editor’s note: With the news that the Christian Lacroix brand has been acquired by STL, we’re taking a look back at this story, which was first published in October 2019 when the designer collaborated on Dries Van Noten’s spring 2020 collection.
Anyone who has seen a Lacroix collection—or watched Absolutely Fabulous, the British sitcom in which one of the leads, Edina, is obsessed with Lacroix—knows the designer’s place in fashion history is eternally secure. Recently his archival pieces have been showing up on the red carpet, suggesting a revival of romance.
In 2019, 32 years after his debut and 10 years after he left his namesake house, Lacroix made a runway cameo chez Dries Van Noten for spring 2020. The Belgian designer lured the couturier, who was then (and now) designing opera costumes, into his atelier in Antwerp, where they collaborated on a collection that married excess and minimalism. “It was wonderful,” said Lacroix when speaking about the project with the New York Times, “but this is my last day in fashion.”
“Lacroix,” noted the historian Anne Hollander soon after the designer arrived on the scene in 1987, “is daring like Picasso.” He reveled in color and volume, and he was credited with making haute couture feel vital and relevant in a way it hadn’t for years. Lacroix’s exuberant, joyful clothes captured the era’s zeitgeist—“my motto when I was a teenager was too much is never enough,” he once said. And the bullish market of the late ’80s meant that there were people with money, inherited or otherwise, to spend on his wild confections. With their historical references—Corsets! Bustles! Crinolines!—lineage was sewn into their seams, lending them a sort of social imprimatur. (It didn’t hurt that the designer’s muse Marie Seznec looked like a latter-day Marie Antoinette, either.)
To look at Lacroix’s past couture designs is to see the work of artists like Giovanni Boldini, François Boucher, and Christian Bérard assume three dimensions, and the palettes of Kees van Dongen and Jean-Honoré Fragonard come alive. On the eve of a new era full of unknowns, Lacroix’s work links us to distant and nearer pasts and recalls lines from John Keats’s poem, “Endymion”:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep.”
Here, at Vogue’s request, the designer waxes poetic about 31 of his couture creations.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Photo: Daniel Simon / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images1/20Christian Lacroix Couture Fall 1987
Katoucha’s nickname was “the Peul Princess,” but she was a true empress. For many seasons, I chose her to open and close the show before the bride. I would have loved to see all of my collections pictured on her. Here she is in a look from the first season, first collection, wearing a “front pouf” (silly 1980s!!!) of silk taffeta faille that was especially made for us in Como, Italy, by the Setarium Company from a 19th-century Arlesian document.
Photos: Guy Marineau2/20Christian Lacroix Couture Fall 1988
Anne Rohart is wearing this look, shown in July 1988, one year after the debut and our third collection. It was dedicated to the city of Arles. On my mood board there were antique draperies; Roman, Gallo-Roman, and Early Christian documents; plus many reliquaries; ecclesiastical art; religious masterpieces in the Byzantine style…. (My native town was a residence for Emperor Constantine, who founded Constantinople, and at one time, planned to make Arles the capital of the Roman Empire). I had the idea of having one of these famous crosses (as a symbol/signature of my name) blown up on a simple duchess satin jacket. François Lesage embroidered it in a magnificent way.
When I presented my “Luxe” ready-to-wear collection in October at the Faubourg Saint Honoré couture salons, Carlyne Cerf came backstage and asked me if I was upset with the now-famous November 1988 issue of Vogue, the first by Anna [Wintour]. I must confess that between summer holidays and the preparation of two collections, I hadn’t seen it. Of course, I was over the moon and so proud when Carlyne, who styled it, showed me the famous picture by our dear, late Peter Lindbergh, with the jacket worn with jeans by a delicious young model, Michaela Berçu. I went straight into the audience to thank Anna and to apologize for having missed it. That was 31 years ago. I can’t believe it; it’s as if we were talking about a 1957 cover. Anyway, that’s the story of how this jacket made Vogue history—and I was not even aware of it!
Photo: Daniel Simon / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images3/20Christian Lacroix Couture Spring 1994
This was one of the most elaborate wedding dresses we ever did. It was a kind of Louis 14th country gown that was delicately embroidered by François Lesage. François was my dear godfather in haute couture: helpful, supportive, attentive, generous, and beloved since the very beginning. For Christmas he gave me a 17th-century embroidered engraving of the Holy Mary, and we used some details from this piece, including the patchwork of brocades, on the dress and for building the corset.
Photos: JB Villareal / Shoot Digital for Style.com4/20Christian Lacroix Couture Spring 2001
This wasn’t my favorite collection; there was a weird mood about it. Still, I fancied this dress Karolina Kurkova wore. It’s made in rough canvas (toile de jute). We finished it on the very morning of the show! The bustle was made of several quilted pieces of patchwork embroidered in a naive folk style. [There was] this giant lizard jewel on the front of the bustier. I found great pleasure in leaving things looking like a work in progress, mid-process. Hannelore Knuts wore this 18th century jacket without sleeves—as if they had been forgotten—and the shoulder pads were exposed. The bustier, in rough white canvas was unfinished and the skirt was roughly done. It was just draped organza with the embroidery just put on as during fittings—half of the top embroidered, but with a reverse effect, a flow of tulle just pinned with a jewel. Björk saw this in a magazine and had the couture house open on a Sunday so she could buy the prototype.
Photos: Antoine de Parseval / Shoot Digital for Style.com; Marcio Madeira5/20Christian Lacroix Couture Spring 2002; Spring 2008
In this collection I let go of a lot of gimmicky Spanish provençal themes in favor of something more abstract. This is a deconstructed, patch-worked summer look: a vest, a 1920s-style blouse, a folky skirt, and tulip pants. We used a lot of white with red strings. And there’s a white satin boater with a veil. Depending on how you look at it, it was very turn of the century or 1940—a mix of proportions, a mix of horizons, a mix of periods. Right: Since my childhood, I have been inspired by the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as by the Belle Époque Parisienne of 1900-1910. I was also very impressed—passionately so—by the work of Christian Bérard and Cecil Beaton.
