ReportingThis year, the Chanel Métiers d’Art show took place in the brand new building specially designed for eleven of its Parisian workshops. Among them, that of Maison Lognon, which produced several pieces from this exceptional collection.
It’s a little black pleated skirt, light as a breath, which dances on the tapered thighs of the model Akon Changkou when she walks. Made in a silk organza, it owes its accordion pleating to the Lognon workshops and is one of the 59 silhouettes imagined by artistic director Virginie Viard for the 2021-2022 Chanel Métiers d’art collection.
Why stop on her? Exemplary in more than one way, this skirt tells, like each of the pieces in this wardrobe, a unique know-how, its oral transmission in the workshop itself (no school to learn to pleat, and a gesture that requires about two years before being mastered) and its ability to seduce, despite the passage of time and the charming sirens of modernity, passionate young people.
At Lognon, the average age of the staff is 30 years. One of the lowest in the eleven houses grouped together recently Porte d’Aubervilliers in a gigantic building called 19M, signed by the architect Rudy Ricciotti, and as if wrapped in threads of concrete molded in a single piece over 25 meters of high, both structural (because they support balconies and passageways) and poetic in their evocation of the fabrics manipulated by craftsmen working between its walls.
Two cardboard boards
This Tuesday, December 7, we explain to the small group of guests who came to visit the workshop before attending the Chanel fashion show, that the plisseur Lognon has existed since 1853 and owes everything to “Emilie Lognon, linen maid under Napoleon III, who had the idea of curling her fabrics and giving them shapes with her irons. She then developed her know-how with her children and great-grandchildren, who perpetuated the pleating technique in the trade ”.
By trade, we mean here, not a heavy steel machine and its artillery, but large creased cardboard boards laid flat on a vast table which will be (following precisely the creasing now carried out by computer) folded by hand. hand in a kind of giant origami. To constitute a loom, you need two cardboard boards folded identically, between which we will slide the material to be pleated (polyester, silk, leather, wool, etc.) which we will heat in an oven and do well. dry to allow it to keep the pattern and type of pleating chosen (flat, sun, accordion, fantasy, etc.). Flat, a fancy craft can reach 80 centimeters by 2.50 meters. A one-millimeter error in the folding of the cardboard or in the juxtaposition of the boards, and you have to start again.
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