Sonia Rykiel
Fashion designer known as the ‘Queen of Knitwear’ who made clothes for the ‘woman who fights’
SONIA RYKIEL, the fashion designer, who has died aged 86, was known as the “Queen of Knitwear” and was as eccentric and flamboyant in person 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 with the first of her two children, 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, Sonia Rykiel wanted a tight sweater which she saw 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 recalled, while what became known as the “Poor Boy Sweater” proved so popular that in December 1963, Elle magazine featured the teenage pop star Françoise Hardy wearing a red and pink striped version on its cover. In 1967 Sonia Rykiel was declared the “Queen of Knitwear” by the American magazine Women’s Wear Daily.
At first Sonia Rykiel sold her creations from her husband’s boutique. She founded her eponymous label when she opened her own boutique on the Rue de Grenelle, at the height of the radical student événements 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, luxe materials such as angora and mohair, matelot-style stripes, sweaters bearing slogans (she was the first designer to print words on her knitwear) or trompe l’oeil motifs like bow ties.
Other designs included fun-fur jackets, rhinestone-embellished berets and quirky additions like 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, she said, “it’s indecent when well worn, intense and disturbing, striking and stops the eye”. It was also, she maintained, “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 eye-popping 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. She had a pathological abhorrence of “the natural look”.
Her unconventional approach was apparent, too, in her catwalk shows. Unlike other designers, for whom serious, even dour, expressions are de rigueur, Sonia Rykiel instructed her models to “act spontaneous” and look happy, which, as one fashion 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”: “It hasn’t been important to put a woman in a blue dress. I wanted to dress women who wanted to look at themselves. To stand out. To be women who were not part of the crowd. A woman who fights and advances.”
The oldest of five daughters, 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, she recalled: “My family was very bourgeois. Fashion is what they would call frivolity... I was boyish, I wanted to ride my bike and pick apples.” As she became older her purpose in life changed to getting married and “having 10 children”.
After working for a time as a window dresser in the Grande Maison de Blanc, in 1953 she married Sam Rykiel, the owner of a boutique selling elegant clothing in the 14th arrondissement. Their first child, Nathalie, was born in 1955 and their second, Jean-Philippe, in 1961.
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. While her interest in clothes persisted, the marriage ended in divorce shortly before she established her own fashion label.
After her daughter, Nathalie, joined the business in 1975, she branched out into other ventures, including introducing childrenswear and a men’s collection, redecorating international hotels and developing sidelines in fragrances, chinaware and even chocolates.
She also published several books, including an A to Z of fashion, a collection of children’s stories, and several novels with titles such as Casanova was a Woman (featuring three characters, she explained, “a man a woman and a sweater”). Disappointingly for some, perhaps, her Et je la voudrais nue (1979 – “And I Would Like Her Naked”) was a book of her opinions on fashion, women, children and life in general.
Over the years, numerous artists, inspired by her fine-boned, angular features and dramatic, leonine mane of hair, asked to do Sonia Rykiel’s portrait. Jean Cocteau drew her in the 1950s, portraying her as a stylised faun. Andy Warhol did a screen print of her in the 1980s and Karl Lagerfeld also did dozens of portrait sketches.
She was also the inspiration for the main character (played by Anouk Aimée) in Robert Altman’s film Prêt-àporter (1994), in which she appeared as herself. The pop impresario Malcolm McLaren recorded a duet with her for the song Who the Hell is Sonia Rykiel? on his 1994 album Paris.
After she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the late 1990s, she addressed the subject in a book N’oubliez pas que je joue (2012, “Don’t Forget It’s A Game”), written in collaboration with Judith Perrignon.
Sonia Rykiel was awarded many honours but was not a woman to express an enthusiasm she did not feel. The ceremony in 2008 at which she was appointed a Commandeur of the Légion d’honneur by the French president, left her deeply unimpressed: “Sarkozy got there very late, read out a piece of paper that had no doubt been dictated to him by someone else, thanking me for having worked hard for France, and that was it.’’
In 2012 she was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the following year was promoted to the rank of Grand Officer of the national Order of Merit.
“I don’t know if I’m perceived as being provocative,” she told an interviewer in 2006. “I suppose it’s an attitude that I’ve had since Day One. I am not swayed by anybody else. Who cares what they think?”
Sonia Rykiel is survived by her daughter Nathalie, now managing and artistic director of the Sonia Rykiel fashion label, and her son JeanPhilippe, a composer, arranger and musician. Sonia Rykiel, born May 25 1930 died August 25 2016