Embroidering Socialite: Mourir Auprès de Toi

Olympia Le-Tan has created an enterprise, called Olympia Le-Tan, that embroiders and sows with ribbon, string and felt some of the most beautiful clutches I've seen. Following the 'return' of the done-by-hand-with-love movement, all the embroidering is done by a cute Japanese girl in the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, and results in products selling for a month's worth of the legal minimun wage in France (SMIC).

She's also a great extroverted socialite, so if you want any information about  her date of birth, who her parents are, when she's in New York or Paris, what she looked like when she was 6, or who her favorite manga character is, just go check out her blog.

In any case earlier this year she worked with Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn on a felt embroidered-based short. Since the clutches' designs are reproductions of vintage book covers and their success based on a lot of socialite hyping, the filming was done in the setting of most Litt majors' and other American tourists's wet dreams, Shakespeare and Co. Like the clutches, while the result is remarkable by its aesthetic and required manual labor, Olympia's unabashing use of her person, socialite connections and stereotypes make it hard for me not to think of this as a marketing strategy more than an honest creation.

Speaking of Inventors...

This is a beautiful stop-motion film made of paper cut-outs about the trials and tribulations of inventors, their inventions and avant-gardist ideas. It's touching and absolutely stunning - especially the end:

Embroidery classes at l'Atelier Lesage and Jean-Paul Gaultier's hoddie: French material culture and métisses origins

JP Gaultier's fall/winter 2010-11 Prêt-à-Porter collection of embroidered patterns on skirts, hoodies and jackets is up at Colette - a collection the concept store describes as one "dédiée à la France métissée. Afrique, Mongolie, Chine, Mexique, ses influences sont multiples et mixées à son propre style." 

Which doesn't say much - fashion likes to find its origins in concepts by simplifying them - but does demonstrate that this year's crew of interns, while forgetting to include Peruvians to their list of bearers of colourful patterns and being particularly out-of-date with what is multiculturalism, struck up an interesting point, not so much on contemporary French identity, as on contemporary French (and more broadly western) material culture.

I just finished an intensive 18 hour embroidery stage in the last of Paris' embroidering ateliers:  Atelier Lesage - an all female crew of 70 pattern makers, designers and embroiders headed by one man (François Lesage, the owner) who spend hours crocheying and needling beads, threads and precious jewels unto haute-couture creations. The last atelier of a French tradition that now is done in countries with cheaper labour - 101 econ: this is called offshoaring.

Back at Colette, with my newly acquired knowledge of point de Boulogne and point de graine, it was clear that Gaultier's prêt-à porter hadn't, indeed, gone through these brodeuses' hands - with the inside full of small industrial white strings. It's hard to blame JP in today's economic structure (the hoddie's already selling for 1561 bucks), but with the chances of the hoodie coming straight from China - just like it's so-called conceptual roots - it's a perfect artefact of our Western contemporary material culture's base: a métissage of concepts, sure, maybe, but especially a métissage of producers, makers and consumers. And not even a métissage really but more an international chain of production/consumption that goes mostly one way.

I still love it. But that's because I'm French, and as Gaultier has demonstrated the French are all about métissage.