In July 2022, just before the Balenciaga couture show, Didier Ludot returned from lunch to discover “the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen” at his eponymous vintage couture boutique in the shopping arcades. of the Palais-Royal. They belonged to Nicole Kidman, who was in Paris to walk in the Balenciaga show and was waiting patiently with her husband, Keith Urban.
They spent three hours searching, with Urban finding dresses for his wife, helping her close them, and then carefully placing them on their hangers, prompting Ludot to jokingly offer her a position as his assistant. “They were a pleasure,” Ludot, 72, recently recalled.
It's hard to imagine, now that every red carpet features one or two “vintage” dresses, many of them only a few years old and now that the term has become something of a buzzword for sustainability, but when Ludot opened opened its doors in 1974, he was the only boutique owner who curated his stock as if he were collecting couture for an art gallery. Like anyone, he helped start the current phenomenon. And after 50 years, he has stories to prove it.
She has always operated the boutique “like an art gallery, except we sell couture,” Ludot said. “Everything in the store belongs to me. There is no shipping, I buy each piece in cash. It's a fashion gallery and I'm its antique dealer. Next week, for example, I have an appointment to see some Courrèges coats. If I like them and we agree on the price, the lady will leave my store with her check.
The same month Kidman appeared, Julia Roberts arrived at the boutique with her two bulldogs. “I need a coat!” she told him under her breath: it was an unusually cold summer. She left, she said, warmer and happier in an orange and green plaid Balenciaga.
“It makes me happy when my customer walks away with their purchase,” Ludot said.
“I love selling clothes that modern women can actually wear,” she said. “Of course I'll buy a 1920s beaded Poiret dress, but it's museum quality, too fragile to wear. It will be filed, laid flat, wrapped in tissue and protected from daylight. I prefer to see these beautiful pieces have a second life, to be worn again (the reason for a garment), to be admired and appreciated again. Because if vintage haute couture represents anything, it is the embodiment of emotion.”
Her boutique, now 125 square meters (1,345 square feet), triple its original size, is well known as a showcase for one of the world's finest collections of vintage couture, a source not only for fashion lovers. seeking distinctive pieces, but also for leading fashion house designers, museum curators, design students and professional collectors.
Some of the notable celebrities who have made it there, she said, include Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Stephanie Seymour, Kate Winslet, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Lucy Liu, Sarah Paulson, Fan Bingbing, Joanna Lumley, Naomi Campbell and Kris. Jenner.
Ludot said her favorite celebrity memory dates back to 2006 and involves a 1956 Christian Dior ballgown in silver tulle, intricately embellished with satin fringes and fabric roses, so exquisite that she intended to keep it for her private collection.
He had just finished placing it in the boutique window when a group of Americans came in asking the price. He told them it was not for sale. When they politely insisted, saying they were representing a Hollywood actress, he said 35,000 euros, or about $42,700 at the time. Undeterred, they made an appointment for a test.
The appointment was for Reese Witherspoon and Mr. Ludot and her husband, Felix Farrington, helped her into the fragile dress. She wore it to the 2006 Academy Awards, where she won best actress for her role as June Carter Cash in “Walk the Line.”
“This is the magical moment we live for!” said Mr. Ludot. “This haute couture party dress was custom made by Dior for an unknown woman. Fifty years later, another woman who wasn't even born at the time puts on her dress and it fits as if it were made for her. She also brought him luck, as she won an Oscar.”
As for designers, Karl Lagerfeld, Hubert de Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Anthony Vaccarello, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Donatella Versace, John Galliano, Calvin Klein and Azzedine Alaïa have been among its regulars.
Hamish Bowles, global editor of Vogue, is a frequent visitor, as is Miuccia Prada, who often arrived with Manuela Pavesi, her friend and colleague, until Pavesi's death in 2015.
“Manuela Pavesi was the most elegant woman I have ever met,” Ludot said. She “arrived with diamonds in her hair and was wearing a fur coat over a pair of pajamas and men's Weston shoes. She once bought me some Courrèges vinyl pieces with crocodile skin print. In Prada's next runway collection, there they were!
“It's not that they copy or imitate,” he added, referring to the designers, “they are inspired by the best they find here.”
“Fashion has no memory,” said Serge Carreira, director of the emerging brands initiative at the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode and professor at Sciences Po Paris. “Didier Ludot's brilliant curation gives us time to examine fashion's past.”
In 2010, Mr. Ludot was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a lifetime achievement award for his antiquarian work in fashion, presented by the French Ministry of Culture.
That experience was evident before an auction of part of his private collection early last year, when Ludot examined a lime green satin jacket by Yves Saint Laurent, lavishly embroidered by Maison Lesage in a tribute to the French painter Pierre Bonnard.
He noted that the jacket had bolduc d'atelier, or shop tape, sewn inside. To the right of the YSL monogram printed on the ribbon was the name of Anne Fiona, the model who wore it on the catwalk, and to the left was the label AH88, indicating that it was from the fall 1988 haute couture collection. Both were handwritten with black ink.
“This shows that this is the designer's prototype,” Mr. Ludot said. “It is the perfect execution of Monsieur Saint Laurent's original vision. The proportions have not been adjusted to suit a client or modified in any way to their taste.”
He had estimated that the piece would sell for about 30,000 euros; It sold for €34,112.
It is not the age of a piece that qualifies it as “vintage,” he said, but its uniqueness, the defining aspect of a collection that reveals what he described as “the madness and fantasy” of the creator. Some of the examples chosen from him: “Sphinx Collection 2015 by Rick Owens. Or Jean Paul Gaultier’s electric blue couture African Mask dress from 2005, with its pleated bodice inspired by Madame Grès.”
On February 25, to commemorate its 50th anniversary at the Palais-Royal, Ludot plans to premiere a week-long retrospective, showcasing iconic pieces by Cristóbal Balenciaga, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent for Christian Dior. along with contemporary creations from Stéphane Rolland's fall 2023 couture collection, in homage to Maria Callas.
Ludot said he invited the independent French couturier to be the exhibition's guest of honor because “Stéphane Rolland's architectural creations reassure me and give me hope that haute couture can survive.” In that sense, he continued, they are the crop of the future.
