Lacroix will have total creative freedom and a “generous” budget to create a couture collection, to bow this July, and a rtw line, slated to appear in stores by fall 1988.
The house of Lacroix will be different from the rest. “Just one more ‘maison de couture’ is not very useful,” he says. His plans remain a mystery, but he does admit the sketches for the first line are already completed. “I know what the trends are,” Lacroix smiles secretively. Poufs and bustles, the trademark trimmings that helped him grab attention at Patou, are things of the past. “What we did at Patou is over now.” He shrugs. “I feel I have a new skin.
The well-dressed woman, in Lacroix’s opinion, is not simply a woman in a beautiful dress. “Sometimes, though the dress is technically beautiful, there is no agreement between it and the woman wearing it. As for my personal taste,” he continues, “I’m attracted to a very extreme, funny and daring woman.”
“I was especially impressed by the women in American magazines. There is a certain sort American allure. It is casual and elegant at the same time. When you look at a McCall’s Magazine from the Forties and Fifties, it is unbelievable how modern women were. French women have no sense of the casual. Sometimes when they try, they tend to do a little too casual, and it’s ugly. Or if they dress elegantly they sometimes look too coquette.
During his sojourn at Patou, Lacroix could be seen wandering around the coldly elegant beige and blond wood salons in blue jeans, blazer, one of his eccentrically bright, striped shirts, printed ties and pocket squares, clutching a plastic bottle of mineral water and grinning mischievously as he presented another flamboyant model.
Lacroix studied art history at the Sorbonne, but quickly found himself in the world of fashion, first as an assistant to Guy Paulin and then at Hermes doing rtw.