Charvet — makers of the finest shirts since 1838
Tucked away in Paris, there is a shop you can visit for a shirt — and an experience — that is truly one of a kind. Michael Hainey explains why we need Charvet more than ever
The reasons to love Charvet are like the bolts of fabric inside its Paris atelier — too many to number, and each of them unique and unforgettable. My list of loves begins — as all things Charvet must begin — with Anne-Marie Colban, the co-owner. Spend an afternoon with her on the library-quiet third floor of Charvet, looking over those bolts of fabric, and you realise that you have not simply selected material for your shirts; you have also, in your casual conversation with her, been given the gift of a lovely little masterclass in What Truly Matters in Life. She’s a fairy godmother of taste and sophistication and charm. But most of all, she’s a keeper (and sharer) of truth and beauty.
Mademoiselle Colban is a petite, dark-eyed woman who has a gleam in her eye and a voice that is at times so soft, so finely pitched, that you will often find yourself leaning in to hear her. She’s disarmingly unassuming. When I first encountered her, she was so demure that I assumed she was one of the sales associates. I had been sent to Charvet by a friend, and after I met Anne-Marie on the first floor — itself a Technicolor wonderland of bow ties, silk robes, monkey’s-fist cuff links, silk pocket squares, and (my favourite) knit ties created in any shade one can imagine — she escorted me to a tiny elevator at the rear of the shop. We were soon transported to the fabric room.
On arriving, I had a reaction that I have since learned is quite common: I was struck speechless. All around the room — on ceiling-skimming shelves and stacked on the floor in shoulder-high cases — were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bolts of fabric, sorted by shade. (There were more than 6,000 different kinds, with many of the patterns exclusive to Charvet.) In a way, it reminded me of another legendary Parisian store, Deyrolle, where the wonders of the natural world are archived and arrayed. It is a library of fabrics, each sorted and stacked.
On the far side of the room were two tables. At the larger one, a man with scissors as big as fireplace tongs cut patterns for customers; at the other, a woman gathered and kept track of the selected fabrics. As I approached the second table, I noticed a single bolt of white cloth. Tied to it, in the embroidered grey Charvet ribbon, was the pattern file for the client who chose it. Written in black ink was “S Coppola” — Sofia is a loyal and vocal fan of Charvet, and makes these shirts part of her uniform when she is on set for her films.
Next to this simple still life were a dozen or so bolts of fabric piled high, each of them a riot of checks or stripes in blue, yellow, white or green. I looked at the accompanying pattern file and saw that it bore the name (and here I must be discreet, as the house Charvet places a premium on discretion) of a famous Brazilian musician.
I asked Anne-Marie if this gentleman was having shirts made. “Not shirts,” she said. “Boxer shorts.” I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, it is his little joke to himself — to have all his boxer shorts be the colour of the flag of Brazil.”
Charvet’s seven-storey limestone mansion, on the corner of Place Vendôme, can seem intimidating. Over the years, I’ve mentioned it to many people. Even the most hardened of the fashion set confess they have not gone in. Not because they don’t long to, and not because they don’t know of Charvet’s reputation, but because they mistakenly think it’s, well, too stuffy. But as our Brazilian friend has demonstrated, with Mademoiselle Colban nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a place where you can play and pursue your individuality. The hulking Ritz Paris across the way — that’s the magnet for snobs and poseurs and, all too often, those desperate to be perceived as having taste. Charvet? Au contraire.
And once you are inside Charvet, you understand what we have lost as a culture over the past couple of decades. How we have allowed our perception of what is truly valuable — craft, handmade-ness, originality — to be eclipsed by convenience and, frankly, by crap. By “fastfashion”; by “see-now-buy-now”; by a system in which any piece of clothing can be had by pressing a button, in which the same “luxury brands” on every continent sell the same “luxury goods” to the same hundreds of millions of people. Standing quietly apart, Charvet is a wonderfully stubborn reminder that the most precious object, the truly luxurious piece, is the object that has been created for only one.
Most of all, Charvet is a beautiful haven, like a Zen rock garden. It is a place that has not forgotten what we all yearn for — the thing we suspect we have lost in a “connected” age, relationships. To know the people who make our goods. The food world has spent the past 10 years getting granular about farm-to-table and the sourcing of what we eat and how it is produced. At Charvet, you can find the sartorial equivalent of farm-to-table. You experience something many of us never knew we could have: a personal connection with the men and women behind our clothes. What do we all long for? To be known. To be remembered. Once you are a client, you are known. You are remembered. And you have a relationship not just with Anne-Marie but with everyone else who helped create a shirt that is unique in the world. By incorporating more than 20 different measurements and two separate fittings, they have made something for your body. For you alone.
Once you have experienced Charvet, you have the knowledge that you are part of a rare institution: a house that came before just about every other menswear Mecca. A casual historian of men’s style likely believes that the
Brits invented menswear as we know it. In fact, Charvet, which was founded in 1838 by Christofle Charvet (son of the man who looked after Napoleon’s wardrobe), predates most of the stalwarts of Savile Row and all of the British shirtmakers of note. And it’s not merely the French who have worn Charvet. Name a guy who has killer style and chances are he has been fitted there: Yves Saint Laurent, Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Riccardo Tisci, the new creative head of Burberry and the man who, while at Givenchy, gave the world T-shirts bearing snarling rottweilers as fashion, reportedly buys gifts for his friends and staff at Charvet. And then there are the men of letters, real and imagined. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust writes about wearing it. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Lord Sebastian Flyte chooses Charvet, too.
It’s a history so rich it’s become something of a national treasure. In 1965, when General Charles de Gaulle, then the president of France, learned that the owners of Charvet were considering selling to an American company, he knew the treasure had to be retained. So he reached out to AnneMarie’s cloth-merchant father, Denis, who did what any good countryman would do — he stepped in and bought the house, keeping it firmly French. Today, Anne-Marie and her brother, Jean-Claude, own and operate Charvet, maintaining the library of fabrics and preserving the shirtmakers’ art.
I’ve been getting shirts made at Charvet for more than 20 years now. There is joy in knowing that I am, in some small way, a patron of this craft. Sustaining it. The shirts can seem expensive at first glance, but they are only slightly pricier than some of the shirts sold to you by the fashionconglomerate glitz machines — shirts that are inevitably made, no matter what they tell you, on a machine, and for the masses.
When it comes to style, you have, as Mademoiselle Colban will tell you, a choice between mass and class. Which would you rather choose?