Instant Success : * Boutiques: Former model Ines de la Fressange is wowing Paris with her new shop. Her handpicked goods range from linen sheets to navy blazers.
Ines de la Fressange, the longtime Chanel model and muse, is bemused.
On Oct. 9, she opened a boutique on Avenue Montaigne and three days later wound up selling shoes.
“My associates said it wasn’t dignified,” Ines says with a laugh, “but guess how many people we had in here on Saturday? Twenty-nine hundred customers. I couldn’t believe it. I thought we would have enough stock to last through Christmas, and now we’ve had to reorder just about everything.”
Gone are the acorn earrings, at just under $50 probably the best and only bargain on the ultra-expensive street where Ines’ neighbors include Christian Dior, Valentino, Ungaro, Chanel and Nina Ricci. Almost gone are the moccasins she had designed for the shop, as well as the black velvet bodysuits.
Ines is the first to admit she isn’t a designer. What she hoped to do with the boutique was assemble some of her favorite things, from pure linen sheets to velvet jeans to navy-blue blazers.
While most of the neighboring shops can be intimidating (Ines says she’d rather buy perfume in a department store than venture into one of those Avenue Montaigne couture houses), hers is inviting.
Enchanting papier-mache circus window displays draw customers through the boutique’s wide-open doors. Inside, light pours in from skylights and bounces off walls and furniture painted in happy shades of coral, jade and lapis.
“I don’t like modern furniture and I can’t afford the antiques I like, so this was the solution I worked out with Alexis de la Falaise, who designed all the furniture as well. He did it, more or less, in the spirit of my country house in Normandy,” Ines says.
“Already, everyone wants to buy the standing lamps Alexis did for the shop, and if we can find someone who’ll make them at an affordable price, we’ll sell them,” she says.
The idea for the boutique came to Ines while she was sitting out the last year of her Chanel contract. (Ines and Karl Lagerfeld had a falling out in 1989.)
“I had various boutiques asking me to be a consultant, and friends asking me what to wear to a wedding in the country. And everywhere I went, I seemed to run into Henri Racamier and Michel Peltrini.”
Racamier is the president of Orcofi, a luxury-oriented investment company controlled by France’s Vuitton family. Its first major investment, with cosmetics giant L’Oreal, was the Lanvin couture house, of which Peltrini is chairman.
The men encouraged Ines to think about a boutique of her own and, more important, offered financial support.
“My idea was to create a new ‘name’ in the sense of a trademark that didn’t exist,” Racamier says. “But with Ines we already had a ‘name’ that’s internationally known, that represents taste and elegance. She brings that to us. We are putting at her disposition our industrial and commercial resources.”
Racamier also believes the “fashion for the sake of change” of the 1980s is giving way to a new kind of luxury.
Plans include 30 boutiques within three years, with one scheduled to open next year in an undisclosed location in Europe. By the end of 1992, there will be two Ines de la Fressange boutiques in the Far East. “But no licenses, no franchises. We’ll control the image and the distribution,” Racamier says.
Ines also likes to be in control. “Chanel was a good school,” she says. “Look how they’ve always controlled their image. I’ve had people trying to sign me up for a perfume. When I did the sunglasses for the shop, I could have picked something from an existing line, but that isn’t my way. I wanted only one pair of sunglasses and they had to be perfect. I drove the factory crazy, but I got what I wanted,” she says. “Same thing for the men’s ties. I went to Geneva to the factory, picked the fabrics, and had them done my way.”
And although she confesses she’s surprised by the success of the boutique, she isn’t overwhelmed.
“Don’t forget. I was rich and famous young,” she says, laughing.
And Ines’ is probably the only storekeeper in the world who claims she doesn’t want customers to feel they have to buy.
“If it’s what you want, then OK. But if you don’t need it, this is just a shop. I want it--from the windows to the way it looks inside--to be a marvelous present.”
