Designer known as the ‘Queen of knits’
Sonia Rykiel, fashion designer; b Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, May 25, 1930; m Sam Rykiel, 1d, 1s; d August 25, 2016, aged 86.
It was pregnancy that encouraged Sonia Rykiel to make her first foray into fashion design – by knitting her own maternity outfits. With fitted tops and flowing skirts, she curated a look that celebrated her pregnancy, unlike so many of the unflattering maternity clothes she had seen that tried to conceal it.
‘‘I wanted to show the world how happy I was,’’ Rykiel said. The result was a career lasting nearly half a century and an undisputed reputation as ‘‘the Queen of Knitwear’’, a nickname coined by the American magazine Women’s Wear Daily.
‘‘When I started in fashion, for the first 10 years I said to myself every day, ‘I’m going to quit tomorrow (Saturday). People are going to figure out that I don’t know anything’,’’ she said in one interview in 2005.
Yet Rykiel clearly knew something. Flame-haired and freespirited, she was hailed as a pioneer of French chic who became famous for her colourful knitwear designs – although she would usually dress all in black, which she described as ‘‘her colour’’.
With no formal training and little interest in trends, she took advantage of her creative freedom. ‘‘I did everything I wanted. I didn’t listen to anyone. I was so violent, so authoritarian, only listening to what I wanted and myself.’’
Rykiel sought to make clothes that appealed to women of all ages and sizes, but particularly professional women who, while juggling a career with family life, preferred to have timeless staple items in their wardrobe rather than monitor the latest musthaves.
‘‘We are working women,’’ she once said of her clientele. ‘‘Also, we have the problem of children, of men, to take care of our houses, so many things. I try to explain that in my clothes. They are clothes for everyday life.’’
Her designs were flexible, featuring reversible dresses and jackets, and culottes that were elegant but more comfortable than skirts. ‘‘I invented everything in the Seventies,’’ she reflected. ‘‘Sweaters without shoulders; quilted jackets; showing inside seams outside.’’
She spoke frequently of the importance of lovers in a woman’s life. After her own marriage broke down she enjoyed the company of male companions and had several ‘‘intense love affairs’’.
‘‘I remember a period in my life when I was in love with two men in Paris, one in Italy, and one in New York. I’d buy them cigarettes at the airport. Each one had his favourite brand. Then one day, by accident, I gave the Murattis to the wrong lover. The relationship was over.’’
When it came to building a multimillion-pound retail empire, however, Rykiel did not put a foot wrong. She also wrote magazine columns, children’s stories and novels, including an erotic tale, Casanova was a Woman, about ‘‘a love triangle between a man, a woman and a sweater’’.
She produced 16 works in total. ‘‘Some of my books tell women how to take care of themselves. Because when we go to school we learn only how to be mathematicians, to be scientists, to write. No one teaches you how to dress.’’
She was born Sonia Flis in Paris in 1930, the eldest of five sisters in a close-knit, bourgeois household where literature and politics were part of the daily discussion. Her Romanian father was a watchmaker; her Russian mother was a housewife who took an interest in fashion, once telling Sonia that she ‘‘would never become a woman’’ because she dressed like a tomboy.
Aged 17 she began working as a window dresser in Grande Maison de Blanc, a luxury textile store. One of her displays – an elegant assortment of scarves – caught the eye of the artist Henri Matisse, who proceeded to walk into the store and buy all of them. In 1953 she married Sam Rykiel, the owner of a clothing boutique in the 14th arrondissment where she would sell her first sweaters. They had a daughter, Nathalie, who modelled her mother’s designs on the catwalk before helping to manage the business, and a son, Jean-Philippe, who was born blind and became a composer and keyboard player.
One of Rykiel’s figure-hugging knits – she called it the ‘‘Poor Boy Sweater’’ – was spotted in the window of her husband’s shop by a fashion magazine editor. Shortly afterwards, in 1963, the pop star Francoise Hardy appeared on the front cover of French Elle wearing a red and pink striped Rykiel sweater. Audrey Hepburn was seen wearing too, and Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve were also among Rykiel’s earliest clients.
When her marriage ended in 1968 she remained on good terms with her ex-husband, and that year Rykiel opened her own store on Paris’s Left Bank. In the 1970s her name became synonymous with striped sweaters; in the decades that followed she expanded her empire to include accessories, children’s clothing, menswear, cosmetics, perfumes and household items.
Her flagship store opened in 1990 on Boulevard St-Germain. By then her label had 200 retail outlets across three continents – a figure that has since increased to more than 1000.
‘‘I think creativity is inside you,’’ Rykiel said. ‘‘If you have something to tell, you expose it.’’
The Times