Christian Lacroix Profiles

Christian Marie Marc Lacroix was born in May 1951 and is a French fashion designer. Christian Lacroix is the name of the company that he founded — and few founders have built a house faster, or in a clearer sequence. This profiles page tells his story: the couturier who opened his own house in 1987 and, within three years, had given it ready-to-wear, accessories and an international boutique network. His is the rare designer biography that can be told almost entirely in the founding chronology, because the founding was the career's defining act — everything after it is the working-out of those three years.

The biography searches in the references gather the career coverage; the official Christian Lacroix website is also linked there. Pair this page with the collections page for the work itself, and with the main Christian Lacroix page for the news, photo and video routes.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

1987: The Couture House

In 1987 he opened his own couture house. The choice of starting point defines the career: before any wider line, before any accessory carried his name, Lacroix established himself at the top of the Paris system, designing couture on the couturier's authority. Everything the house later became — the color, the ornament, the inspiration drawn from diverse cultures — rests on that first year's discipline, and the collections in this guide are filed from it. The couture-first choice also fixed his reputation's order: the craft was certified before the color was famous, so the exuberance that followed was read by Paris as a master's play rather than a beginner's excess.

The speed of what followed suggests the plan was whole from the beginning. A designer who opens a couture house one year, a ready-to-wear line the next and an accessories empire the year after is not improvising; he is executing a design for a house as completely as for a dress. The profiles record therefore treats 1987 as the biography's hinge: before it, a French designer born in May 1951; after it, a house with a name the whole industry knew.

1988–1989: The World, Whole

In 1988 he began putting out ready-to-wear, drawing inspiration from diverse cultures — the phrase that defines his design method. Where couture had established the standard, ready-to-wear carried the standard's sources worldwide: the colors, patterns and ornaments of many traditions, composed into his unmistakable register. In 1989, Lacroix launched jewelry, handbags, shoes, glasses, scarves and ties along with ready-to-wear, completing the wardrobe around the clothes. The accessories list is worth reading slowly, because it is a wardrobe plan in disguise: jewelry for the neckline, handbags and shoes for the silhouette, glasses, scarves and ties for the finishing register — every point where an outfit can carry color, assigned its own product.

In this same year, he opened boutiques within Paris, Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, London, Geneva and Japan. The map tells the biography in one line: Paris, the couture capital; Arles and Aix-en-Provence, the southern French cities of his home ground; Toulouse; and then London, Geneva and Japan — a house of three years' standing already trading on three continents. Read with the collections and runway pages of this series, the profiles give the complete picture of fashion's great colorist at work. The news page continues the biography in the present tense, story by story.

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