‘Bandage dress’ guru had it all wrapped up
HERVé Léger, who has died of an aneurysm, was a French fashion designer who will forever be associated with the “bandage dress”, the figure-hugging garments first made popular by supermodels in the mid-1990s and then revived almost everywhere a decade later.
And by the time of that latter incarnation, Léger had lost control of the company that bore his name and was running a second fashion business, Hervé Leroux, which never quite achieved the heights of his former glory but which established a loyal clientele – including reality TV star Kim Kardashian.
Hervé Peugnet was born in Bapaume, northern France, and studied at the école des Beaux Arts in Paris before dropping out after a year and training to be a hairdresser. He started working at fashion shows, during which he taught himself how to make hats and dresses before meeting Karl Lagerfeld, then chief designer at the fashion label Chloé, at a dinner party.
“Kaiser Karl” was looking for an assistant and took on Hervé in 1980. Four years later, when Hervé was setting up on his own, Lagerfeld advised him to change his name to Léger, meaning lightness.
It took Hervé a while to find his form but it happened after he came across a factory bin full of stretchy, lurex-style material in the 1990s.
His experience in making hats from using strips of fabric was put to good use when he started to make dresses, with the tubes and panels wound around the body, rather than falling straight down. This was the era of the supermodel and both they and the dresses became a sensation: “I like bodies with a bosom, a waist and curves,” said Léger, who later bemoaned the advent of the stickinsect model. Cindy Crawford in particular was known for wearing Léger’s clothes and soon he had become so successful the Canadian conglomerate Seagram’s invested in his business.
It built up a 95 per cent holding in the firm, which meant that when it was sold in 1999 to Max Azria, who already owned the BCBG label, Léger was horribly exposed and indeed was fired shortly afterwards.
Azria might not have valued the man but he valued the clothes: his company spent five years buying up the originals to study them before launching their own version in 2007.
By now though Léger was running a boutique in Paris under the new name of Hervé Leroux – Lagerfeld again chose the moniker, this time inspired by Hervé’s red hair. He ran the business, in Rue du Bac, with his sister Jocelyne but they struggled and Léger had to continue to make swimwear and couture elsewhere.
For a time he also worked for Guy Laroche and Wolford. But the revival of his famous dresses, even though they were being made elsewhere, returned him to the limelight and in latter years he flourished, with the likes of Jemima Khan, Naomi Watts, Dita Von Teese and Kylie Minogue wearing his clothes. He began to show his collections from 2013.
He is survived by his sister.