Paris is a city that lets you become. You can arrive from anywhere and make a name on what you do, not on where you come from; no one asks where you’re from, they look at what you show. It doesn’t forgive the easy way and it rewards stubbornness. For me, a house could be born nowhere else.
Art held me before fashion did, and at heart they’re the same thing. A painting, a material, a cut: they’re ways of saying something without speaking. Paris puts art everywhere, in its museums as in its streets, and you end up breathing it without noticing.
“None of it can be quoted; all of it is felt.”
A colour seen at the Louvre, a light caught on a rooftop at dawn, a silhouette passed in the evening. None of it can be quoted; all of it is felt. That is what I want to put into our pieces: not a reference you recognise, but a rightness you can’t name. Taste isn’t decreed; it’s caught, by dint of looking.
So we don’t hide it. Paris has a large share in what we do and in what inspires us: a street, a terrace, a dome, a car parked askew. A magnificent city, unique in the world; the only one where I wanted to begin. A Parisian house, to me, isn’t a backdrop you stick on; it’s a way of carrying yourself.
I didn’t grow up here, I chose it; and we love what we choose more than what we’re given. Paris, I wanted. The house speaks from this city, and it resembles it, just as much apart.
