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Eventually, she embraced stripes, which would become a trademark of her designs. She relied on a woman’s body to provide the silhouette, and called her creations “clothes that have no shape unless they are worn.”
#Sonia rykiel free#
Rykiel’s tightly fitting sweaters would come to define the look of Paris’s Left Bank in the ’60s, and helped to free women from the more cumbersome fits of suits and shoulder pads. Remembering Sonia Rykiel’s Bold, Eccentric Personal Style The French fashion press caught on, and the story goes that soon after none other than Audrey Hepburn walked into the boutique and bought five sweaters for herself. Eventually dubbed the “poor boy” sweater, the closely cut, comfortable piece set off a fashion craze in 1963. The result was the first of Rykiel’s sweaters, which boldly showed off her pregnancy. With no other options, Rykiel took it upon herself to design an outfit to her liking, by working with her husband’s suppliers. “I wanted to wear clothes that would make me stand out from the crowd … so I decided to have a few things made up for me.” “My husband had a ready-to-wear boutique called Laura but there was really nothing in it that I liked,” she told The Guardian in 2014. Rykiel started her fashion empire back in in the ’50s simply because she couldn’t find anything comfortable to wear during her pregnancy, even at the Parisian boutique owned by her husband. “I convey my sincere condolences to her children Nathalie and Jean-Philippe and their family and close ones who are in pain.” “She had invented not only a style but an attitude, a way of life and gave women freedom of movement,” Hollande said in a statement. An icon in France, her passing was officially announced by the county’s president François Hollande.
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Sonia Rykiel, the pioneering Parisian fashion designer, passed away this morning at the age of 86 after a decades-long battle with Parkinson’s Disease.