Collaborations with artists, architects and designers are key to making sure the longevity of a heritage model and modernising design classics for a brand new era, says Longchamp inventive director Sophie Delafontaine on this interview.
Talking to Dezeen on the luxurious purse model’s showroom in London, Delafontaine mentioned that although the push-and-pull of collaboration can show tough, it in the end serves to pressure a heritage model like Longchamp to develop exterior of its consolation zone.
“It is our personal accountability as an organization to make one of the best merchandise that we are able to,” Delafontaine defined. “[We create] iconic merchandise which have a really sturdy character [and] are very properly made, however my position is to push them.”
The model has lately launched a collaboration with Italian artwork journal Toiletpaper.
Greatest recognized for its origami-informed Le Pliage tote bag, Longchamp was based by Delafontaine’s grandfather, Jean Cassegrain, as a tobacco and smoking equipment model in post-war Paris.
“We do not want the identical kind of product now that we did 15 years in the past”
Delafontaine, who grew up above the model’s first store within the metropolis’s ninth arrondissement and beforehand designed for French luxurious childrenswear model Bonpoint, has been on the helm as inventive director because the early nineties.
She famous that some Longchamp merchandise, just like the Roseau leather-based shoulder bag, have gone by means of a number of redesigns over that point with a purpose to sustain with altering traits.
“It is like Chanel’s quantity 5 fragrance – the juice has been remade many instances. The standard of the fabric has improved, in addition to the form, element and proportion.”
“We definitely do not precisely want the identical kind of product now that we did 15 years in the past as a result of we’ve got every little thing in our cellphones and the baggage are smaller,” she added.
“It is exhausting to collaborate with architects”
Collaborations have change into a mainstay of Longchamp throughout Delafontaine’s tenure, with Turner-nominated artist Tracey Emin, Japanese design agency Nendo, Hood By Air design director Shayne Oliver and British designer Thomas Heatherwick all producing highly-publicised collections for the model previously three a long time.
The important thing to managing these collaborations efficiently, Delafontaine says, is “to maintain the DNA of Longchamp” – generally, the construction and design of a Longchamp bag – whereas introducing “the DNA of the folks [the brand] is collaborating with”.
“The thought is for [collaborations] to really feel each Longchamp and their universe,” she says. “I do not prefer to impose too many restrictions as a result of, for me, the concept is de facto to catch as a lot of that creativity as I can.”
“The one restriction is {our capability} to provide it. It is all the time a problem, nevertheless it’s an awesome problem for our know-how.”
One such designer who challenged the model’s capacity to provide was Heatherwick, whose 2004 Zip Bag was “very exhausting” to understand, Delafointaine recollects.
A zipper wound in horizontal concentric rings ran the size of the cowhide leather-based bag, permitting it to broaden and contract like an accordion.
“It was actually almost like an architectural bag,” Delafontaine defined, citing the malleability of leather-based as counterintuitive to Heatherwick’s fastidiously engineered design.
“And Thomas additionally has a really exact imaginative and prescient,” she added. “So it was tremendous exhausting, however we had been very joyful to have the ability to make it.”
Although now a uncommon discover on resale websites, the bag that Heatherwick pitched and produced for Longchamp was the start of a long-running relationship, which noticed the British designer commissioned to design the model’s world flagship retailer in Manhattan in 2006.
Now, Delafontaine says, Heatherwick is at the moment within the technique of finishing a “very shocking” renovation of the identical retailer.
The Heatherwick collaboration wasn’t Longchamp’s first foray into structure: the model tapped French architect Paul Andreu, the lead architect on Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, to design a bag for its fiftieth anniversary within the late nineties.
“It is exhausting to collaborate with architects,” she admitted. “They’re used to doing exhausting issues and I’m used to doing delicate.”
“So generally it is troublesome as a result of their product goes to remain precisely as it’s. My merchandise are going to reside.”
Toiletpaper is a “very optimistic, playful imaginative and prescient of life”
If structure is an outlier for Delafontaine, then Longchamp’s newest collaboration with artwork title Toiletpaper has a richer precedent.
It follows on from collections with Emin – which Delfontaine cites because the model’s “first main collaboration” – Swedish-French graffiti artist André Saraiva and American-British artist Sarah Morris.
“I feel [art] is a approach of being artistic with out constraints, which isn’t my case as a designer – I create with constraints,” says Delafontaine.
“After all, I have been following Toiletpaper for a really very long time. It is actually a really optimistic, playful imaginative and prescient of life, which I actually love and which can also be one thing I attempt to enter when creating at Longchamp.”
Based in 2010 by Italian artist and photographer duo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, the bi-annual photograph journal is thought for extremely saturated pictures that satirise the zeitgeist.
Toiletpaper’s designs for Longchamp’s Le Pliage vary characteristic every little thing from a French bulldog smoking an archival Longchamp pipe designed by Delafontaine’s grandfather to a flying horse.
Regardless of its many trendy reinventions, Longchamp has retained the identical emblem for the previous 70 years – a jockey on a galloping racehorse that nods to the origin of the model’s title, which Delafontaine’s grandfather borrowed from the Longchamp Racecourse in Paris.
“I feel we’ve got an emblem that’s talking about what Longchamp actually is,” says Delafontaine. “He is a winner.”
Requested why the model has chosen to maintain the identical emblem, she replied: “Effectively, as a result of we prefer it.”
The images is courtesy of Longchamp.
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