Born in Provence, Clivia Nobili considers clothing as a medium facilitating encounters. “I do this job because I like to discover the person I call the inhabitant, that is to say the person who lives in the rooms that I design,” she said. When she arrived in Paris, barely 17 years old, she knocked on the doors of fashion brands, armed herself with patience and started as a press attaché, first at Lee Cooper, then at Yohji Yamamoto. Three years later, she flew to New York, became a photographer’s assistant and took evening classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Upon her return to France, she settled in Marseille, where she worked as a costume designer in the cinema. Coming from a family of tailors and workers, passionate about second-hand clothes and old photos, she found her way in workwear, which she also considers rich “historically, stylistically and politically.” In 2009, she launched her brand of workwear pieces, “freed from the codes of fashion and any seasonality”. Its logo in the form of a stylized factory was designed by graphic designer Stéphan Muntaner, who had created record covers for the Marseille group IAM. But, determined to produce her clothes in France, Clivia Nobili moved to Lille, where she opened her first boutique-workshop. It was here that her label really took shape. Her worker jackets, painter’s smocks, pants and other overalls, now made in the region, were aimed at “to modern day workers.”
However, there was one element missing for her project to be perfectly aligned with her convictions. The electric blue fabric from which she has her work clothes cut – her Collector line – is not made in Europe. With the help of a local weaver, she decides to reintroduce the weaving of this blue particularly in the north of France, to have complete control over its production. Its organic cotton thread, dyed in Belgium, is now woven in the Nord department, using traditional looms. “It is a project of the order of collective memory and of the long term”, explains Clivia Nobili. At the same time, the designer is developing her Prêt-à-travailler clothing line, aimed at professionals, which has won over the Lille Opera, the LUMA Foundation in Arles, and chefs Florent Ladeyn and Bruno Verjus.
