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| Sonia Rykiel photographed by elias |
With her dramatic smoky-eyed, flame-haired looks, the bookish designer Sonia Rykiel was like a latter-day Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, and Marchesa Casati rolled into one—and as powerful, independently minded, and captivating as any of them.
I first became aware of her legend through the dog-eared pages of my schoolboy copies of British Vogue, whose editors worshipped the designer in the early ’70s and celebrated her work in some memorable fashion spreads by photographers such as David Bailey, Norman Parkinson, and Barry Lategan. The visionary London retailer Joan Burstein of Browns was also an important early proselytizer for Rykiel’s talents, and in the Bursteins’ stores on the pedestrian thoroughfare of South Molton Street I was able to see the clothes for myself: deep-pocketed linear knits with a Coco Chanel–in–Deauville flavor (with highly contemporary innovations like inside-out exterior seaming and unfinished hems) and fanciful marabou coats. They always seemed designed for intelligent women like Rykiel, who had presence enough of their own and wanted womanly clothes that were uncomplicated to wear and would proclaim their sophistication without freighting them down with too much “fashion.” (The Bursteins’ professional relationship with Rykiel, meanwhile, became a family one when their son Simon married Rykiel’s daughter Nathalie.)
When I started attending Rykiel shows in the 1980s, they were memorable for the staging, which generally featured vast girl gangs romping down the runway giggling and chatting to one another in the designer’s celebrated motto sweaters or forming chorus-girl lineups wearing the same outfit in a rainbow spectrum of colors. For the designer’s 40th anniversary show in 2008, Nathalie, who had taken over the creative direction of the house in 1995, had secretly asked 30 of the world’s top designers to create a look in homage to her mother.
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The results revealed the profound respect and esteem in which talents as disparate as Jean Paul Gaultier, Alber Elbaz, Martin Margiela, and Ralph Lauren held her, and Rykiel herself was deeply moved by the inventive tributes.
Rykiel started her fashion life at her husband Sam Rykiel’s Laura fashion boutique, designing maternity clothes when she couldn’t find any that she wanted to wear herself (she deemed the available options “abominable”). Her design breakthrough came soon after with the skinny, long-sleeved poor-boy sweater. Characteristically, this thoroughly liberated woman encouraged her customers to wear them without bras. French Elle put the poor-boy on its cover, and Audrey Hepburn popped by the store and bought 14—one in every color. In 1966, William Klein photographed the actress for American Vogue wearing Rykiel’s “speedy little shift of navy blue wool jersey with bike racer sleeves” and a matching tam o’-shanter.
In 1968 Rykiel divorced her husband and opened her first eponymous boutique on the Rue de Grenelle, helping—with Yves Saint Laurent, who had recently opened his Rive Gauche boutique on the Place Saint-Sulpice—to establish the edgy Left Bank as a fashion destination. A day later she had to close it due to the unrest on the streets in that year of student uprisings. The store was soon up and running, however, and “filled with superb shapes,” raved Vogue, which photographed Rykiel and three shop assistants in 1968 wearing the designer’s wide-leg jumpsuits, “all curve, cling, and great line”—just the kind of clothes to dress a newly liberated generation. The following year, Britt Ekland was shot by Penati for the April Vogue cover wearing Rykiel’s gold Lurex turtleneck. By 1972 she was deemed “one of the 12 top designers in the European ready-to-wear,” and her timeless knitwear pieces continued to defy fashion for decades.
The bluestocking Rykiel filled her shops with books and penned several herself—including an erotic novel. Her very first message sweater featured the word sensuous, which is what she and her clothes indubitably were.
