Sonia Rykiel - Resort 2013

Sonia Rykiel - Resort 2013

So quintessentially a Left Bank celebrity is Sonia Rykiel that the Café de Flore has named a sandwich in her honor. This queen of knits, who never learned how to actually work a pair of needles, is a self-taught designer who describes her method as off-the-cuff: “First I made a dress because I was pregnant and I wanted to be the most beautiful pregnant woman,” Rykiel said in 2008, on the occasion of her company’s fortieth anniversary. “Then I made a sweater”—the popular poor boy—“because I wanted to have one that wasn’t like anyone else’s.”


Rykiel opened shop on rue de Grenelle in Paris in 1968, after designing for many years for Laura, her husband’s boutique. Her label was among the pioneers of the créateur, or ready-to-wear, movement in France—but, as G. Y. Dryansky wrote in Vogue, “She marched to a different rhythm: quieter, more personal.”

Rykiel has always been a proponent of “uncomplicated comfort,” as The New York Timesonce put it. She likes to design interchangeable separates with what one ad copywriter described as “that close-to-the-body, nothing-on fit.” She created her first “braless” dress in 1964, promoted the layered look, and popularized rainbow stripes, massive fur wraps, marabou, vintage-y dresses, and culottes.

In 1974, long before the Japanese and Belgians made catchwords of deconstruction and minimalism, this black-clad, flame-haired designer was exposing seams, unhemming hems, and removing linings—in the process creating the “démodé,” or undone, look. “People said making clothes inside out was not proper,” Rykiel later told Women’s Wear Daily. “I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral.”

The striking designer who was first introduced to Vogue readers in 1967 as the “ravishing, red-headed Sonia Rykiel,” remains an object of fascination decades into her career. “She is a paradox,” Christian Lacroix said in 2008. “She’s elegant and erotic, distant and sensual.”

Rykiel, it seems, would agree with at least the latter part of Lacroix’s assessment. “The key to my collections is sensuality,” she told Vogue in 1981. “Being one step ahead of a fashion trend is not so important to me,” she told the magazine some two decades later, “what matters is to always forge ahead.” Since 1965 she has been doing just that with her daughter Nathalie, now the company president, at her side.