‘Knitwear Queen’ who designed for herself

1930 - 2016

FASHION designer Sonia Rykiel, who has died aged 86, was known as the “Queen of Knitwear” and was as eccentric and flamboyant as the clothes she designed.

In her native France she was looked on not just as a designer, but as an intellectual who even published a book of her philosophy as well as several novels, some of them erotic.

She never intended to be a fashion designer and never trained at some smart Paris atelier. She fell into it by chance in the 1950s, after becoming pregnant, when she could not find a dress that would allow her to express the joy she felt. At the time women were encouraged to hide pregnancy, but she wanted to show it off.

“All the clothes were very sad,” she recalled. “So I made a dress that was bigger, fuller, more gay.”

After her pregnancy, Rykiel wanted a tight sweater as a “completion” of her personality, but all she could find were bulky pullovers. So she set to work making a figure-hugging jersey with the help of a woman who worked in a Left Bank boutique owned by her husband.

Both items were instant hits. “All the women who saw me in the dress wanted it even if they were not pregnant,” she said, while what became known as the “Poor Boy Sweater” proved so popular that in December 1963, Elle magazine featured pop star Françoise Hardy wearing one on its cover. In 1967, Rykiel was declared the “Queen of Knitwear” by US magazine Women’s Wear Daily.

At first she sold her creations from her husband’s boutique. She founded her eponymous label when she opened her own boutique at the height of the radical student unrest of May 1968.

In the spirit of the times, she favoured inside-out stitching, no-hem and “unlined” pieces that reflected a new philosophy known as “la demode”, or “unfashion”. She created knitted sweater dresses in soft, luxurious materials such as angora and mohair, matelot-style stripes, sweaters with slogans (she was the first designer to print words on knitwear) or trompe l’oeil motifs like bow ties.

Other designs included fun-fur jackets, rhinestoneembellished berets and quirky additions such as wool ruffles, lace and knitted bows. “I made clothes spontaneously,” she explained. “When it rained, for example, I designed a trench coat. When it was cold, I did a coat. I followed my instincts. It was fantastic for someone who knew absolutely nothing about fashion.”

Black was her signature colour because “it’s indecent when well worn, intense and disturbing, striking and stops the eye”. It was also “the colour of philosophers, writers and artists” — and it set off her own frizzy shock of acid-red hair. But she also went in for brighter hues. Electric blue and fuchsia pink were favourites, often paired with black, white or beige for contrast.

She would do almost anything to get a colour she liked. Once she chipped a piece off a wall in Venice because she fell in love with the shade of pink it was painted, and when in Bermuda she cut up a parasol to capture a particular shade of grey.

Her unconventional approach was apparent in her catwalk shows. Unlike other designers, Rykiel instructed her models to “act spontaneous” and look happy, which, one journalist observed, seemed to be “a tall order” for some girls.

She claimed she always designed for herself, “because I am typically and ideally the kind of woman I want to make things for — women who move, women who travel, women who live even with difficulty, women who have children, women who have men, women who feel sad, women who play.”

Size was of no importance (“it’s not true that clothes look better on skinny girls — what counts is the attitude’’), and she insisted that what really mattered was “to have a philosophy”.

She was born Sonia Flis in the plush Parisian suburb of Neuilly on May 25 1930, to a Romanian watchmaker father and a Russian housewife mother.

Fashion did not inspire her as a child. “My family was very bourgeois. Fashion is what they would call frivolity.”

In 1953 she married Sam Rykiel, owner of a boutique selling elegant clothing.

It was her husband’s business that sparked an interest in fashion. “It was the beginning of pret-a-porter and he sold interesting clothes, luxurious fabrics and other bits and bobs that women like to spend their money on,” she recalled. The marriage ended in divorce shortly before she established her own fashion label. — © The Daily Telegraph, London

All the clothes were very sad. So I made a dress that was bigger, fuller, more gay