Details, Details

Like a doctor studying an X-ray, Francois Lesage examines a swatch of sky-blue sparkles, a gazillion itty-bitty salt-sized granules glittering like sapphires.

“This fabric is for--how shall I say?--a fashion emergency,” says the director of the world’s most famous embroidery salon--the House of Lesage--rubbing his hand on the gorgeous glitz of fabric.

In a nearby--how shall we say?--emergency room, several of Lesage’s embroiderers, or “my girls,” as he affectionately calls the 50 women on his staff, are busy sewing the teeniest of beads onto a Michael Kors gown destined for a movie star in Hollywood in the next 72 hours.

He gets rush jobs all the time. “Once, my girls worked for days, almost 3,000 hours, on a John Galliano gown that didn’t even make it on the runway,” he says matter-of-factly, as if to imply it’s, well, c’est la vie.

Au contraire.

To the fashion cognoscenti, Lesage, 70, is a living legend and simply known as “the beader.” He supplies designers with exquisite fabric, hand stitched with sequins, rhinestones and such. He has created at least 65,000 designs of embroidery, the European term for what Americans typically call beading.

It was Lesage who produced the glitzy grape bunches on Yves Saint Laurent’s satin jackets that wowed the fashion world a decade ago. For Chanel, he created memorable chess game jackets. And Lesage takes great pride in having helped put Christian LaCroix, his honorary godson, on the fashion map.

But his work doesn’t come cheap--not at $100 an hour (only 3% of the cost is in beads; the rest in labor). Such custom work--he uses about 150 pounds of pearls and 100 million sequins in a year--is what drives couture prices up to the heavenly heights of $100,000 for a gown or $60,000 for a jacket. He does about $7 million in business a year, netting a 15% profit.

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Not bad for a man who admits, “I don’t know how to sew a button.” He does, however, know how to design--a craft he learned from his parents, Albert and Marie-Louise. Twice a year he and his staff design about 200 swatches, ranging from landscapes to clowns.

Designers can either choose from Lesage’s swatch batch or come up with their own ideas.

For 51 years the master has worked with such designers as Pierre Balmain, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga and Karl Lagerfeld, as well Americans Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene and Oscar de la Renta.

“I’ve grown with the designers, with the industry,” he says. He has worked with Saint Laurent for 40 years, with Givenchy for 42, and as a kid was bounced on the knee of Elsa Schiaparelli.

He only works with designers face to face. “I have to see the designer, the sparkle in the eyes. I have to undress the mind of the couturier.”

Designers, he says, tapping his forehead, “have a very London kind of brain. It’s foggy in there. They come to me and say, ‘I want tigers, rats, Van Gogh.’ Saint Laurent once said, ‘Francois, make me something that is like a chandelier reflecting off the mirror with the sky of Paris in the background.’ ” Lesage succeeded in the vague mission.

Once Lesage was befuddled when Galliano said a rose beaded coat was too pretty and new.

“He wanted it to look like an old rag from 1890. So we put alcohol on it. We walked on it. We varnished it. We pulled it apart. He loved it. I said to him, ‘Why didn’t you just go to a flea market?’ But, they throw me ideas; it’s up to me to catch them.”

The walls of his attic office are covered with letters proclaiming his brilliance, his friendship and the reason why his name alone--Lesage--makes him, well, the Sage Embroiderer.

From LaCroix, who has written several notes, is this: “My Dear Godfather, Your embroidery is like lightning, pure genius.” Gaultier always draws a picture with his notes: “Dear Francois, What you did for me is sublime. I kiss you.”

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Everywhere are photos of Lesage: with his four kids, Paco Rabanne, Monaco’s Princess Caroline, socialites and his girlfriends. “She’s one,” he points to a photo of a dark-haired beauty. “That’s another and another. I’m married, but I have girlfriends. I’m French,” he says, laughing. “It’s in my blood.”

So is embroidery. “When I bleed, I bleed beads and sequins.”

Since 1948, Lesage has ruled the roost at 13 rue de la Grange Bateliere, not far from another famous house, the Paris Opera.

Several small rooms on two floors serve as his workshop. It is here where women, most in their 20s and 30s, work in groups of two, four and six, stitching by hand with hooked needles.

Aline Gonzalez put her French literature studies on hold two years ago “because I love haute couture,” she says as she and three others stitch the first of 80,000 sequins onto a Chanel gown.

“It’s like magic doing this,” she says. “We are all magicians.”

But Lesage, everyone seems to agree, is the most magical, a bon vivant who smokes French cigarettes and loves to tell jokes (“Did you hear about the old man who took Viagra? He couldn’t remember what it was for”).

Lesage took over the family business after his father, who at one time worked as a designer for Marshall Field’s in Chicago, died in 1949. Lesage, then 20, was running his own atelier in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. His embroideries, based on his father’s work, attracted designers and costumers such as Jean Louis and Edith Head.

His embroidery landed on the curves of Ava Gardner, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Olivia de Havilland and Lana Turner, with whom he says he had a love affair.

“Those women were the supermodels of the screen,” he says. “Today, I am fed up with these girls on the runway. They don’t smile, they have poached eyes, they are dressed in clothes made of paper and their arms are longer than their legs. They give the impression that they walk on the Earth and don’t know where they are going.”

In many ways, he says, haute couture--which is purchased by only about 3,000 women worldwide--also seems to be at a crossroads. He recalls the spend-crazy decade of the 1980s when he employed more than 100 embroiderers. “That’s no longer the case.

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“Everyone says haute couture is finished because it seems immoral for a woman to spend that kind of money on a gown when people are starving in the streets. But is it immoral to race a $250,000 car? To live in a million-dollar mansion?

“Haute couture is the only fashion craft left where you can take your fingers and make what is only limited by your imagination, all by hand. It is part of fashion culture and the most important window for the rest of the business of fashion.”

Whether haute couture survives in the next century is anyone’s guess. But one thing is for certain: The legacy of Lesage will live on. He opened his Art Embroidery School in 1992 and people come from around the world to learn the craft. And he has a collection of everything he’s ever made.

“It’s funny, you know, because when I received my degree in design, the title of my paper was ‘The Man Thinks Because He Has a Hand.’

“As long as I have these,” he says, raising his hands, holding his fashion emergency swatch, “I will keep thinking. I will keep working, because without embroidery there is no fireworks in fashion.”

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Times staff writer Michael Quintanilla can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.