Remembering François Lesage: The Last Embroiderer

François Lesage passed away in Paris on Thursday, aged 82, ‘after a long battle against his illness’ according to a statement from the house reported by the Associated Press.

The man who brought raw energy to the designs of Chanel, Christian Dior and Givenchy will be missed by the fashion world. The master embroider provided sparkle in the form of feathers, sequins and silk, which attracted the devotion and reliance of some of the biggest fashion houses globally. You could say François was born ‘on a heap of pearls’ inheriting the business of his father, Charles Frederick Worth, who bought the atelier of Napoleon III’s embroiderer, Michonet. François created his first embroidery in 1946 while his parents were away on holiday. At that point an important Italian client turned up demanding a dress inspired by Botticelli’s Birth of Venue. François was studying Philosophy at the Collège Saint-Jean de Béthune at the time, but had no qualms whipping up a flower design based on the painting.

The following year he was sent off to Los Angeles to learn English. There he met Lauren Bacall, Claudette Colbert and Lana Turner (with whom he claimed to have had an affair). In 1948, using his father’s samples, he set up his own embroidery business on Sunset Boulevard, where he produced dresses for Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich and worked with Edith Head and other film designers.
In 1949 his father died, and François returned to Paris to take over the family business. As post-war austerity turned into post-war boom Maison Lesage, a rabbit warren of rooms at 13 rue de la Grange Batelière, began to hum with industry. But he found that, whereas in America all he had had to do was adapt his father’s designs, in France things were different: “I had to learn that in business we don’t impose anything on the designers. They want to be the origin of everything.”

Over the next 60 years Lesage worked with such designers as Pierre Balmain, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga and Karl Lagerfeld, as well as with the Americans Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene and Oscar de la Renta. He created well over 65,000 designs to be worked into glittering perfection by his staff of highly skilled “petites mains” — the women artisans who transform a design into a sumptuous showpiece of luxury, hand-stitching sequins, tiny beads, rhinestones, shells, ribbons and feathers to pieces of exquisite fabric.

It was Lesage who produced the sparkly grape bunches on satin jackets that won Yves Saint Laurent a standing ovation at his 1988 winter couture collection. “Fabulous, like wind through the vines,” Saint Laurent told him when he saw the design. Other famous Lesage designs included “chess game” jackets for Chanel.

François Lesage, head of the world’s most famous embroidery salon, Maison Lesage and known to fashion cognoscenti as “The Beader”, was the unsung hero of countless haute couture shows.

[Source: telegraph.co.uk]