Paris, Place Vendôme 28. For almost two centuries, the pioneering handmade clothing house Charvet has been making made-to-order, but now also ready-to-wear, luxury men’s and women’s clothing: shirts, pajamas, robes, ties, pochettes, suits, saharienne jackets, knitwear, leather slippers… Among its clients, kings and heads of state, such as Alfonso XII and XIII of Spain, Edward VII and VII and Charles of England, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Winston Churchill, General de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac, Barack Obama, as well as great figures of letters and the arts, such as Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Marguerite Duras, Ernest Hemingway, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Serge Gainsbourg, Catherine Deneuve, Faye Dunaway, Francis Ford Coppola and many others. Today, Jean-Claude Colban, director of Charvet Place Vendôme since the 1980s (with his sister Anne-Marie), welcomes us to his “headquarters” and talks to us about the history of the house, its principles and philosophy.

By George Archimandritis

How was Charvet born?

Our house was founded by Joseph-Christophe Charvet in 1838 and was the first shirt manufacturer in the world. Until then, shirts existed, but they were sewn at home by women called lingères. So, the creation of a house created specifically for this purpose was a small revolution for the time. Furthermore, until then, the shirt was square, without curves, somewhat like a kimono, and all its art was in the decorative elements, such as embroidery. However, as Charvet had trained as a tailor, he applied the techniques of sewing to the construction of shirts and invented elements that changed the form of this particular garment forever.

Like, for example?

The folded collar, as we know it today! Because until then, collars were upright. We also owe Charvet the “embrasure”, that piece of fabric on the shoulders that connects the front and back rectangular part of the shirt and which prevents it from deforming, while at the same time allowing it to hug the body and move with it. This element was part of a general revolution in the early 19th century, where clothes had begun to follow the shape of the body and reveal it. It was a movement that was quite hedonistic: greater sensuality in clothing and the enjoyment of good fabric, which was initially white, gradually became colored and then acquired patterns. It was a long way from the white linen fabric of the 19th century to the colored cotton we have today and Joseph-Christophe Charvet was at the beginning of this movement. Thirty years later, he was succeeded by his son Édouard and the Charvet business remained in the family until the 1960s when my father took it over.

Charvet’s example was followed by other houses…

Indeed. Charvet paved the way, but other great shirt houses soon appeared, all of which were, in a way, the glory of Paris. But we were the first, and the only ones that still exist today. This happened not only because our customers were rich and famous and could afford the best products, but also because they had good taste. Our waistcoats then, like ties today, were small textile touches that added decoration, design, color and imagination to the garment, and thus attracted many personalities of letters and arts. So our customers were not only kings, heads of state and businessmen, but also people who were at the forefront of creation. This mixture of power and art has always been part of our identity. Charvet’s ability to renew itself was particularly appealing to artists, painters and writers, who at the same time pushed us to renew ourselves. If it weren’t for them saying to us: “What’s new do you have to show us today?”, we might not exist today. It is, therefore, our duty to our customers to constantly renew ourselves and to be up to date. Because they create fashion, they bring the different, they do what we don’t do yet and what we will do tomorrow. We don’t force anyone to follow our ideas. We, of course, find new ideas, in terms of materials, weaves, light effects, color combinations, textures and so on, but our customers are the ones who will decide what they will wear.

You talked about colors. Jean Cocteau wrote that the rainbow draws its colors from Charvet…

The truth is that we create thousands of variations, twice a year, and we keep a large number of them active. One only has to look at how many ties there are on our ground floor. So there is no limit to the colors. We are constantly adding new ones and we are fighting with our suppliers to preserve them. Because, in the textile manufacturing sector, since the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a movement to simplify the ingredients in order to improve the physical properties of the color, its fastness and reproducibility, its resistance to light, water, sweat and so on, but at the expense of its variety, grace and delicacy. We keep as the apple of our eye the color series that we created during the heyday of color, the 1920s and 1930s. Imagine that back then the dyers in Lyon produced new color atlases twice a year! So we work in the same way to this day. We are like philatelists: our attention is focused on the shades that are missing from our collection.

What role do accessories play in a man’s outfit?

Absolutely fundamental. I’ll answer you with a little paradox. We recently created a swimwear collection in collaboration with a friend of our house and, to make them, we used some tie patterns that were particularly intense. We were amazed by the result, by how well these patterns worked on the swimwear. But we wondered how this is possible, since the two specific items have, seemingly, no connection between them. And yet, in reality, they do. Because they are small pieces of fabric, which, with their colorful touch, decorate a much larger surface, whether it is a suit or a naked body. In the very long history of men’s clothing, which, since the beginning of the 19th century, has been imbued with a spirit of rigor – men’s clothing began to become much more rigorous than in the 18th century – fashion focused on very few elements, such as the waistcoat and its button. Today we don’t wear a waistcoat anymore. What the waistcoat expressed at that time, is expressed today by the tie or the pochette. It is that touch of color, of light, the little touch of madness, let’s say, which, in a way, breaks the seriousness of the whole.

What does elegance mean to you?

I think there are two forms of elegance. That of people who are elegant because their sense is right, almost without thinking, instinctively. And then there is the elegance of those who, while having the same refinement, also have knowledge of the history and culture of clothing. I, by profession, perhaps have a little more affinity with the latter. For example, among our Japanese clients, there are quite a few young people who have a certain instinct for the balance of the various elements of clothing. But there are others, perhaps less young, who not only have this instinct, but also know how to put their choices into perspective, speaking beautifully, for example, on issues such as wrist exposure. That is, the issue is not just having a well-shaped wrist, but knowing how much skin to reveal. Isn’t that very charming?

Photos Courtesy of Charvet