Starting A New

It’s time for Lanvin to turn the page. Olivier Lapidus tells ALICE FRANKLIN why he’s ready to make that change

- Alice Franklin

WHO IS OLIVIER Lapidus? This was the question that greeted Lanvin’s late-summer announcement that the Parisian grande dame maison was welcoming a new creative director. The Frenchman is a relatively unknown name in top-tier fashion, even with a family legacy that counts the pioneer of unisex dressing in its ranks (his father, Ted, is widely considered to have introduced the original genderless style to the populace).

Lapidus’ backstory is a tale of ingenuity and innovation; he spent time as the artistic director of Balmain Homme in the 1980s before moving, first to Japan for three years, and then back to Paris where he helmed his father’s house for a decade. A stint in Beijing followed, which was peppered with lifestyle and interior design, before his second return to his native France where collaborations with fashion houses continued.

That was until a phone call from the notoriously private Shaw Lan Wang — owner of Lanvin since 2001 — came. “The telephone rang, and Madame Wang was talking to me, and she said, ‘Olivier, it is time.’ ‘Time for what?’ ‘It’s time to work together’, she said. And she said, ‘I want to see you at six’, so I came at six. Then she explained to me the situation at Lanvin.”

“After three seasons, very difficult, but already in the past it started, since 2012 the turnover was decreasing. And so, it was the next generation of this problem. She said to me it was a kind of challenge, if I want to help her to do something for Lanvin. Reset the system. And then I had seven minutes and 35 seconds to answer. I talked to my family, and we found an agreement, and we said, ‘OK, let’s do it’”.