Even in this unique year, the presidents of the various juries of the International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories will be entitled to a space where their work will be exhibited. Visitors will surely recognize the names of British designer Jonathan Anderson for the fashion competition or Italian Paolo Roversi for photography. The surname of Hubert Barrère, of the fashion accessories jury, on the other hand, is best known to insiders. A luxury craftsman in the shadows, since 2011 he has been the artistic director of the embroiderer Lesage. “I wanted to take advantage of this exhibition to return to two passions, ancient culture and the corset, with busts of Athena on which you can see corsets with illusionist embroidery,” says Barrère, met at the beginning of October in the Parisian premises of Chanel, parent company of Métiers d’art.
“I tried, despite its rigidity, to make the corset an instrument of freedom and comfort. “
Blond hair with peroxidized highlights, pink sweater, tinted glasses, jeweled fingers and wrists: his look today has little to do with that of the civil servant he was. At the end of the 1980s, this Nantes native born into a healthy family of soldiers – “Had to scratch for a laugh! “ – had studied law and worked in the office of individualization of sentences at the Ministry of Justice. “Yet I continued to draw, as when I scribbled imaginary collections in my class notebooks as a child. One day, Élisabeth Badinter came across my drawings at the office: “But Hubert, what do you draw well!” A stone’s throw from Place Vendôme, rue Saint-Roch, he dares to show his sketches at the School of the Parisian Couture Union Chamber, enters, takes out a student loan, asks for availability from the ministry. He will never go back.
Trained by the embroiderer Vermont, this travel enthusiast (Papua, Sumatra, Komodo, Flores, Amazonia…) became a corset maker in the 1990s, for Emanuel Ungaro, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano at Dior or Alexander McQueen at Givenchy. “I tried, despite its rigidity, to make the corset an instrument of freedom and comfort. “ But embroidery caught up with him in 1997, when Hurel, official supplier to Chanel since 1921, hired him as artistic director. He then met Karl Lagerfeld, with whom he would work until his death in 2019, and with whom he shared a taste for wit.
A manual gesture to protect
Fifteen years later, François Lesage, who liked to say that“A haute couture fashion show without embroidery is like a July 14th without fireworks”, debauchery. The contract provides that it will start on 1is December 2011. That day, at 4 am, the embroiderer, ill for months, succumbs. Barrère is warned at 7 am, takes his first steps in the workshop at 9:30 am He remembers : “Lesage’s last words were ‘everything is in order’, while I was anything but serene, disoriented in the midst of weeping embroiderers. »
But since then, the successor has struggled to carry the torch to the 300 employees of Lesage, including 80 in Paris. ” I feel responsible, Hubert Barrère said today. The profession has not changed much since the Middle Ages, except for the invention, at the beginning of the XIXe century, from the Lunéville stitch, which allows you to crochet faster. For everything else, this manual gesture is to be protected and promoted. Little by little, embroidery had been forgotten, devalued. She has been coming back for ten years and I am happy about it, because in my opinion she is a trace of our heritage and of our humanity. “
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