Hey Everyone,
Very exciting news: Isabel Marant has opened at H&M on Thursday(only in about 250 H&M's worldwide and online). Her designs have been seen on celebrities, such as Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel.
About Isabel Marant(from Vogue.com):
Isabel Marant
Photograph by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Published in Vanity Fair, January 2011.
You know her. The French girl with the just-rolled-out-of-bed, can’t-be-bothered look. She pulls on last night’s clothes—slouchy tee, gray jeans. Fingers through the hair, a touch of makeup, and she goes out. Yet she looks smashing. Perhaps it’s her ankle boots (scuffed just so), boyish jacket, and lambskin shoulder bag. Or maybe it’s the way that skinny chain-mail scarf or mass of bracelets comes off as an afterthought. Equal parts confidence and nonchalance—that’s what makes this Gallic girl so enviable, and no one captures it better than Isabel Marant.
A native Parisian, Marant blends ethnic bohemia and tomboy street chic effortlessly, and her name has long been on the lips of fashion insiders: editors, models, and sexy actresses like
Sienna Miller and Rachel Weisz. Until recently, Americans had to jet across the pond to get their hands on her notoriously hard-to-find pieces—slim pants, sheer tees, and draped minis—which they carried home by the armload. (The more enterprising could turn a quick profit on eBay.) The label’s exclusivity was just part of its mystique. “It took some time to build up,” Marant acknowledged in 2008, “but I have never fallen.”
[1]
But even after fifteen years in the business, with a rock-solid fan base and booming boutiques, Marant didn’t quite know how to bring her vision to a wider audience—that is, until she reconnected with her childhood friend Emmanuelle Alt, then the fashion director of French
Vogue. “My strength is not putting clothes together,” Marant said in 2010. “Emmanuelle, on the other hand, is perfect for this. . . . It’s funny because she has managed to create exactly the image I wanted.”
[2]
By 2011, that look of perfectly tousled French cool was hitting its stride, with waiting lists for Marant’s fringed and studded boots wrapping clear around the globe. Stateside fans can now get their Isabel fix in SoHo, New York, where Marant and Jerome Dreyfuss, her bag-designer husband, have set up side-by-side shops.
Isabel Marant born in Paris to a German mother (a model and a director of the Elite agency) and French father. After her parents’ divorce, Isabel will split her time between households. Growing up, she later tells L’Express, “I wanted to be a vet, like everyone else. I was a tomboy . . . I hated wearing a skirt or dress. How horrible!”[3] Childhood trips to Africa, Asia, India, and the Caribbean will later influence her work.
Rejecting the girlish style popular in her suburban Paris neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, asks her father for a sewing machine and begins reworking old army jackets and remnants into a more bohemian wardrobe. Changes into these original creations before class. “I wanted to wear things that I liked. Fashion, I did not even know what it was!”[4] she later recalls, noting her proclivity for wearing ballet flats, sans socks, even in cold weather.
Has modest success selling pieces created with friend Christophe Lemaire to a shop in Les Halles. Abandons plans to study economics to take up design at Studio Berçot fashion school. A crush on Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren inspires her to make clothes from dishcloths. “But dishcloths are really nice in France,”[5] she later says.
Following her studies, apprentices with Parisian designer Michel Klein. In the next year or two will also collaborate with Bridget Yorke on two collections for Yorke & Cole, and assist art director Marc Ascoli on projects for Yohji Yamamoto, Martine Sitbon, and Chloe.
Launches a small collection of outsize jewelry. “I started in fashion in jewelry, putting myself behind torches and soldering irons!”[6] she later says. (Will go on to design accessories and jewelry for Claude Montana, Michel Perry, and Yorke & Cole.)
Launches knitwear label Twen with her mother, with whom she works “until I felt strong enough to stand on my own,”[7] she later recalls.
Establishes her own label, setting up a studio on the Passage Saint-Sébastien in the Marais. Her logo, a hand-drawn star, is taken from her school days, when she replaced the dot over the I in her name with such a star in order to stand out. “When I made my mark at 26 years old,” she later says, “I had set myself a simple goal: I wanted to create clothes that I myself wished to buy, clothes for girls, working women, who have taste and are willing to spend a little money on their looks without breaking the bank.”[8] The first show is held in the debris-strewn courtyard of a squat, with Marant’s friends modeling.
Wins the year’s Award de la Mode.
January: Launches I*M line in Japan. Guest-designs the first of several collections for French clothing catalog La Redoute. February: Opens her first store, in a former artist’s studio in the Bastille district. Designs a collection of patchwork rabbit-fur coats and fur-lined rainwear for Parisian furrier Yves Salomon. March: The New York Times reports on her fusion of “a layered, often floor-length silhouette with Asian and African influences”; the overall look “says trekking in Tibet via the Bastille.”[9]
Lower-priced Étoile line debuts at Pret-a-Porter Paris, with a focus on jeans and T-shirts.
Opens a second Paris shop at 1 Rue Jacob on the Left Bank. “To me, this is the authentic Paris,”[10] she says. (She will add a third store, on the Rue de Saintonge, in 2007.) First full Étoile collection, including lingerie, is introduced.
Designs a line of lingerie with Beautiful People by DIM.
Gives birth to a son, Tal, with husband Jerome Dreyfuss, a handbag designer.
February: Isabel Marant pop-up boutique opens at Paris’s new Printemps de la Mode department store. September: Childrenswear line is launched.
Collaborates with Anthropologie on a collection.
French fashion chain Naf Naf is ordered to pay damages of $120,000 to Marant for copying a dress from her fall 2006 collection.
July: Brit actress Rachel Weisz wears Marant’s leopard minidress while promoting A Streetcar Named Desire in London. (French siren Marion Cotillard wears a similar look when she appears on Oprah in December). August: Action villain Sienna Miller wears Marant’s ruched printed cocktail dress and Otway booties to the London premiere of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
January: The Wall Street Journal reports on the buying frenzy sparked by Marant’s Otway studded biker bootie with isosceles-triangle heel. March: “The heels came from the little cowboy cartoon from Bugs Bunny,” she elaborates in Vogue. “If you exaggerate the shape all the way, it becomes a triangle.”[11] April: First Stateside boutique opens in SoHo in New York, with Dreyfuss’s handbags in the adjoining space. “I’ve always had a very secure way of development, because I created my brand in ’94 with my own money and really increased, increased, increased step by step,”[12] she says. May: Actress Jennifer Connelly wears Marant’s jewel-neck LBD, black stockings, and black Balenciaga heels at the Tribeca Ball. June: Marant is crowned Fashion Designer of the Year at British Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards. July: Model Kate Moss is the face of the fall campaign. August: “My ideal woman is Serge Gainsbourg,” the designer tells Love magazine. “Not that he was a woman.”[13] MTV It girl Alexa Chung tells Vogue, “I buy everything Isabel Marant ever looked at.”[14]
January: Actress Diane Kruger wears Marant’s cropped fur jacket over a lacy Valentino floor-sweeper to the Golden Camera Awards in Berlin. August: T magazine visits Marant and Dreyfuss’s rustic, bare-bones country cabin in Fontainebleu, outside Paris. November: She debuts a paint-splattered T-shirt for the Gap’s (Product) RED project, which benefits the Global Fund to fight disease in Africa.
Moves her Paris headquarters to a 21,500-square-foot space, and expands her network of boutiques to Tokyo and Seoul. Launches a wedge sneaker that instantly becomes a cult best-seller, spawning numerous imitations. April: Designs a limited-edition gold watch and bracelet. June: Model Arizona Muse stars in the fall campaign. September: Marant makes “The Vogue 120” roster of young movers and shakers in style. November: “The attitude of what I make is very difficult for me to describe,” she tells the blog Into the Gloss. “It’s really me . . . most of the time I have to try things on myself to feel if it’s right or not. I cannot see it on a model because a model, she’s just perfect.”[15]
January: Opens a new boutique on Melrose Place in West Hollywood. February: Creates limited-edition skateboards with Heritage House Paris, to be sold at her L.A. outpost. June: A collaboration with H&M—for womenswear as well and men’s and children’s clothing—is announced.
Now to some of her work:
For more info on how much people were willing to get up at 3am and start waiting in line at 4a...then check out this article with pics all over the world at different H&M stores.
Here's some photos from her recent collection with H&M:
Isabel Marant is one of my women to look up to. She is a fighter, a mother, and a success(not to mention super fabulous and talented)! I believe she is someone we can all look up to(no matter what our age/style).
Until next time,
CR
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