Red Flower by Céline Sorigue

These are the very first addresses of the Parisian fashion world – names like Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Balmain, or Galliano – that belong to the exclusive clientele of the Atelier Alexandre et Céline, artistically led by Céline Sorigue. And the unique fabric creations produced there are used only in the Haute Couture collections, the most exclusive lines of these houses. The Atelier Alexandre et Céline thus belongs to the small group of highly specialized, artistically and craft-wise textile companies that, although largely invisible to the public behind the scenes of the Haute Couture houses, establish the special status of the fashion city Paris. At the absolute top of the international fashion pyramid, where Céline Sorigue works today, the air is thin. To get there, assuming a solid education, special inventiveness, tenacity, and assertiveness are required. Céline Sorigue possesses all of this, yet her path to the top was not entirely straightforward.

It was during a two-year stay in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s that her passion for design, or as she puts it, for decoration, was awakened. Half out of curiosity, half to earn some money, she worked at that time in the scenography department of a large Hollywood studio. Soon she was able to take on smaller creative tasks there as well. Back in Paris, she completed training as a fashion designer between 1986 and 1989 at the traditional ESMOD (École Supérieure des Arts et techniques de la Mode). A year at Saint Roch, as the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which is dedicated specifically to training young talent for Haute Couture, is called in fashion circles, rounded off her apprenticeship. While still a student, she founded an event agency with friends, mainly active in advertising, where she was responsible for sets and costumes for several years. In 1991, she then took the step into self-employment. She founded the label Joli tambour, which produced clothing for infants and toddlers. Comfortable, practical, and still pretty to look at – that was the program of this quite successful brand positioned in the upper price segment, where Sorigue took on design and management in one person. However, when it was not possible to resolve the conflict between her own perfectionist demands and the price constraints of the market, Sorigue stopped working on the project after four years.

An established workshop for silk dyeing and printing, originally operated by the parents of Sorigue’s partner Alexandre Leu and already among the suppliers of important fashion houses, formed the basis for the founding of Atelier Alexandre et Céline in 1994.

Here, Sorigue has devoted herself entirely to creating exclusive fabrics for Haute Couture. Besides working with colors and patterns, her interest focuses especially on developing novel textures. In fact, her atelier is an experimentally designed laboratory where fabrics are given a special quality, a peculiar life. For this purpose, textiles are treated, manipulated, and sometimes even handled in every conceivable way, sometimes chemically, sometimes mechanically. Silk remains an important raw material; for a long time, the atelier has also worked with other fabric qualities as well as with non-textile materials.

Sorigue understands Haute Couture as a fascinating field of activity in which she is repeatedly faced with new creative challenges. However, the longer she works in the fashion world, the more she laments the hectic pace and short-lived nature of this industry, which hardly allows for long-term developments. For a few years now, she has therefore been trying to build a second pillar in the world of Haute Décoration, where unusual, sophisticated textiles also have a place. Initial projects with renowned interior designers and stars of the scene such as Philippe Starck have been successful. Against this background, the collaboration with Ruckstuhl within the framework of the edition for Céline Sorigue is a welcome opportunity to step out from behind the scenes of Haute Couture and to profile herself artistically in a new field.

For her rugs Red Flower and Golden Stripes, she chose felt as a deliberately simple base material. The powerful designs she applies to it and permanently protects with a transparent synthetic resin coating enhance the plain floor covering into a jewel all the more effectively. For Sorigue, the appeal of her designs for Ruckstuhl lies not least in the combination of traditional craftsmanship and high-tech processes. The formal references to Art Déco and the lacquer work so popular in that era can certainly be interpreted as a tribute to a great epoch of Parisian applied arts.