Greek designer Kokosalaki takes over at Vionnet
In an age when everything has been said, designed and done, rewriting fashion history is a challenge many designers face around the globe. Right now, a gifted Greek is coming face to face with one of fashion’s great legacies. Sophia Kokosalaki, the 33-year-old Greek-born, London-based designer, was appointed creative director at Madeleine Vionnet earlier this month. Vionnet, the pioneering French 20th century designer celebrated for her fashion innovations, which included the bias cut, is credited with giving women a sense of freedom through fluid designs. «It’s a great honor and a tremendous responsibility. Madeleine Vionnet has always been a reference point for fashion designers,» said Sophia Kokosalaki in an interview with Kathimerini English Edition. «Sophia Kokosalaki has always used her Greek heritage to explore the concepts of drape and shape. It makes good sense that she should be the creative director of Madeleine Vionnet, because the designer was so influenced by Grecian drapes, as well as inventing the concept of bias cutting,» said Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, to Kathimerini English Edition. The Vionnet legend rests upon a unique vision of fashion architecture and sculpture, in which garments follow the movement of the body. For the wider public, the Vionnet style was linked to the original glamour of the silver screen, the late designer’s creations having been associated with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. «The choice of Kokosalaki is very relevant, not because she works on the drape, but because she walks in the steps of Vionnet in the sense that she experiments with the dress and the fabric in a very free way, as well as having the heritage of Greek beauty. Vionnet created the absolute dress; she stood for absolute simplicity,» said fashion historian and Vionnet expert Lydia Kamitsis, also of Greek descent. The Madeleine Vionnet fashion house was established in Paris in 1923 on Montaigne Avenue and added a branch on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1925. Business flourished and the company grew to employ no fewer than 1,200 seamstresses. Vionnet signed her last collection in 1939, and the house was acquired by the De Lummen family in 1988. Intensely private and keeping a low profile, traits she shared with the label’s new designer, Vionnet quietly passed away in 1975. According to Kokosalaki, the French family is highly passionate about the fashion house, which currently operates with a series of perfumes and scarves. «My job is to add a ready-to-wear collection, based on the archives but bring it up to date with 2006, make it fresh,» she said. But can Kokosalaki resuscitate a house that has long lost its commercial power? «That is the question everybody has been asking since the house was bought in the late 1980s,» noted Kamitsis. «What is truly interesting in this case is that the house closed in 1939, subsequently vanishing from the memory of the public, but not from the memory of the professionals; all designers consider Vionnet an absolute master. The only thing that makes sense for this relaunch is to take it as a kind of laboratory, because her memory leads us to that.» What with having to come up with a collection in just two months, while also continuing to develop her own label, Kokosalaki is set for a busy summer and a challenging fall, when she is scheduled to unveil her debut Vionnet collection for spring 2007 to an eager, press-only, audience during Paris fashion week in October. «With a name like this, the house should not only experiment on the collection level, but also in the way they establish their relationships with their clients,» noted Kamitsis. For the time being, success in the stores is guaranteed by Barneys, the well-known department store chain which will distribute the collection through its outlets in the United States (the clothes will also be available at the Vionnet studio in Paris). Hard work and complete focus have long been priorities on Kokosalaki’s work agenda. Born and raised in Greece, the designer’s career took off in Athens before she moved to London to enroll at the authoritative Central Saint Martins fashion school. She began showing her collections in London in 1999, yet transferred her catwalk presentations to Paris in 2004. That same year, Kokosalaki was put in charge of the costumes for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympics. «It seems a good idea to have a woman designer at a house where Madeleine Vionnet seemed to express the needs and desires of the women of her generation,» said Menkes. As Kokosalaki commutes between her own studio in Hackney in London’s East End and the prestigious Vionnet headquarters on Paris’s Rive Droite, the two worlds are coming together thanks to the universal fashion values of a visionary designer. «Her work is timeless, yet all of Vionnet’s ideas have been used, copied in the good sense of the term, by all designers,» said Kokosalaki. «Because of this, I will have to work twice as hard.»
