She’s the Queen of Babe Wear : Designer Veronique Leroy Finds Beauty in the Feminine and the Ordinary
The long-stemmed blonde sashays across the parquet, cocks a hip and strikes a practiced pout for the cameras of a Canadian television crew. She’s modeling the perfect outfit to wear to Canter’s for an overstuffed pastrami sandwich around 3 a.m.--a cobalt-blue acrylic pile mini-dress with V-shaped slits in front and back, sheer black-cherry stockings and cuffed, plum-colored stiletto heels.
It’s not exactly a look that says Paris to most people, but as the super-models know, thanks to Veronique Leroy, the French capital has become the essential source of some of the world’s very best babe wear.
Leroy seems poised on the brink of larger fame, having garnered lavish coverage from the trendiest European press as well as a client list of bellwether boutiques, including Fred Segal in Los Angeles and Charivari and If Soho in New York. She’s even received a semi-official benediction from the lofty but prestigious Chambre Syndicale, the French Fashion Assn., which sponsored her last runway show in one of the otherwise beyond-her-budget auditoriums under the Louvre in October.
Like a lot of European clothing, Leroy’s designs have a winning dose of what the French call deuxieme degree, or irony. At 30, Leroy is also a card-carrying member of the post-women’s lib generation.
“Happily,” she says, “the menswear look for women is finally ending. I always found all of those suits sad, since they were ultimately meant to disguise a woman’s femininity.”
The diminutive designer, who, with her cropped butterscotch hair and soft but intense face resembles Jean Seberg, rejects the idea that “it’s humiliating for a woman to try and be pretty.”
“The feminists didn’t want women to show their curves, which I find ridiculous. I think that for the last 15 years we’ve been going backwards. Designers, especially the Japanese and some of the Italians, have been doing clothing that hid or denied the female body,” says Leroy, standing tall but tiny in her favorite black patent leather Stephane Kelian spike sandals, tight indigo cotton flares, a Dale-Evans-goes-postmodern tan suede jacket and a raspberry crepe de Chine blouse.
Leroy’s outfit has a whiff of the ‘70s about it, but without the heavy-handed retro attitude recently seen on runways from New York to Paris to Milan. At her age, the ‘70s retain the same just-out-of-reach fascination they had for her as an adolescent growing up in Liege, a small French-speaking Belgian industrial city with a New Orleans style reputation for being a good-times town.
“I spent a lot of time in clubs and in cafes,” Leroy says. “We love to party in Liege, and even though I’ve lived in Paris for a long time, I think the down-to-earth attitude of Liege still comes through in what I do.”
The core of Leroy’s imagination remains tethered to Liege too. “I’m fascinated and moved by everything that ‘normal’ women do to make themselves more attractive. I love the way that waitresses or cashiers or office managers dress, do their hair, put on their makeup. There’s something honest and very sweet in female vanity when it hasn’t been made too self-conscious. These women inspire me a lot.”
Still, Leroy insists that unlike several male designers she declines to name, she’d never do anything “to make fun of women. The point of everything I do is to make women more attractive.” Talking about fashion makes the designer restless, though.
“I hate it when people intellectualize clothing, which is why I have absolutely nothing in common with the Antwerp designers [Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester].”
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Leroy’s Flintstones colors and fabrics--she loves cheap-looking fabrics and eagerly volunteers her enthusiasm for polyester, vinyl and all the other fakes--are somewhat misleading. If you look at her clothing carefully, you’ll see that it was cut by a master.
Forsaking the beloved disco inferno of Liege, Leroy moved to Paris in 1984 and spent a year studying to be a seamstress before enrolling at the Studio Bercot, an “alternative” Paris fashion school where young creativity is disciplined--but not espaliered, as is the case at other French schools--with intensive technical training in how clothing is made.
Leroy spent three years working for Azzedine Alaia and did a stint at Martine Sitbon before striking out on her own. She credits Alaia as being her mentor and retains a plain-spoken admiration for his clothing: “He’s a genius, also a lovely man.” She’s also a fan of designer Karl Lagerfeld, who--in his recent incarnation as a photographer--returned the compliment by asking her to sit for a portrait.
“Lagerfeld’s really courageous. He says what he thinks,” Leroy says, adding that she also has great respect for Yves Saint Laurent. Unlike these chateau-dwelling titans, however, Leroy revels in reality.
“My universe touches that of Raymond Carver [the late American writer],” Leroy says. “I’m a little bit of a peasant, really. I love the idea of finding beauty in the ordinary.”
As a proponent of the proletariat, Leroy occupies a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the teeming immigrant quarter of Belleville. She enjoys the odd shot of well-chilled vodka and loves to frequent some of Paris’s funkier clubs, like the Satellit Cafe, where they spin a Third World mix that runs from Algeria to Ivory Coast.
Asked about what she’s planning for next season (which will be shown in Paris in October), Leroy says she doesn’t have a clue. “I like to be spontaneous,” she adds. “I try hard not to become too serious about what I’m doing, because I think fashion should amuse people.”
