La Réserve Magazine Rethinking Luxury

Your creations are extremely innovative, yet you seem firmly attached to tradition?
When I arrived in France in 1996, I felt the need to acquire deeper knowledge of lacework and its roots. I worked in the Calais workshops and learned incredibly rich techniques offering infinite creative possibilities. They made me want to give a new lease on life to this artistic craft. My workshop is an authentic laboratory, in which I explore textures and technologies to develop surprising creations respectful of tradition and embedded in modernity.

What types of collaborative endeavors do you enjoy?
I love looking around, working with designers who agree to share with me a path that leaves scope for the unexpected. This dialogue around matter and its surprises is a source of innovation.

I loved entering the mystical world of Jean-Paul Gaultier and imagining highly distinctive monochrome models. And I was dazzled by the talent of Christian Lacroix, by the incredible refinement of his voluptuous materials and harmonious aesthetics. In film-making, it’s exciting to play with historical periods and to propel lace work into a futuristic dimension, as in The Three Musketeers by Paul William Scott Anderson, where Milla Jovovich wore a Victorian dress equipped with a high-tech button that triggered an explosion!

What stories do you tell through your lacework?
I speak of my sense of wonderment with the organic world and its fascinating structures observed under a microscope. I enjoy surprising people through matter, like my ‘coral’ jewelry models with their sensual, disconcerting touch. I also love mixing aesthetic codes, as when a piece of jewelry slides onto the shoulder and becomes an item of clothing.

Based on an interview by Michèle Wouters