On a gray Saturday morning in Paris, a woman sat alone and mourned the death of a man who made clothes.
Roland Guipure Dies
read the headline on the front page of Le Figaro. The obituary continued,
Designer of Artful Power Found Dead
16 avril 2016
Roland Guipure, the fashion designer who consistently broke ground and raised the stakes as head of Sauveterre, the fashion label he founded, died on Thursday night. He was 40.
Guipure was found dead yesterday morning near the LaLa Lounge in the third arrondissement, where he had been celebrating his birthday. He had recently completed treatment for heroin addiction at a rehab facility in Greece. His death has been confirmed by the House of Sauveterre.
Roland Guipure began his design career at age 24, when he showed his “Nereid” collection during Paris Fashion Week in 2000. Critics called the collection “revolutionary” and “a challenge to anyone who thinks they know what fashion means.” Over the years that followed, Guipure’s rise was meteoric. He funded Sauveterre with an inheritance from his grandfather Maximilien Sauveterre, the much-admired art dealer, but the label soon became self-supporting under the financial management of his twin sister Antoinette. Sauveterre’s trademark double S, surrounded by guillemets—»§«—became a familiar sight on pieces worn by chic women. As the house became more established, Guipure’s designs became more serious, known for clean lines that were almost sculptural and often startling.
Although Guipure never had formal fashion training or worked under another designer, he apprenticed to a tailor after his graduation from secondary school, and this may account for his lack of interest in standard fashion expectations. His prêt-à-porter was as likely to feature square-cut suitings with peplums of burlap and leather as his haute couture was to feature a bridal gown created from gold-pinstriped red flannel (both feature in the house’s autumn/winter 2007 collections). His Ne Touche Pas dress, with its elaborate lapels of pleated organza and wired-back collar reminiscent of antlers or tentacles, is currently on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Over the last two years, however, Guipure became increasingly dependent on heroin. His health suffered, Sauveterre’s sales began to drop, and his 2015 collections were poorly received. Last year he entered a rehabilitation facility in Greece. Sauveterre showed no collections for spring/summer 2015 and no haute couture collection this January, but for spring/summer 2016 prêt-à-porter they presented looks Guipure designed while in recovery. Reactions were positive, with WWD calling it “a fresh revisioning that promises a strong future.”
Guipure’s recent autumn/winter 2016 prêt-à-porter collection, his first completed after emerging from désintoxification last November, was greeted rapturously. Based on this success, the house had decided to recommence showing haute couture next season.
The fashion world is reeling from this unexpected tragic afterword to what had seemed to be a happy ending. “Roland was a bright beacon,” said Marianne Faubois of French Vogue. “His death leaves a gaping hole in the future of couture.”
Roland Guipure was born on 12 April 1976 to Genevieve (née Sauveterre) and Paul Guipure, and died on 15 April 2016. He is survived by a sister, Antoinette Guipure.
It was silly, Rachel Levis knew. She had never met Roland Guipure. She couldn’t afford any of his haute couture fantasies, and at five foot two and a hundred and thirty pounds she wouldn’t have fit into them anyway. Yet she knew and loved his designs. Every woman in Paris with any kind of interest in fashion knew them: the early miniskirts and shirts that looked like Chanel jackets ripped apart and stuck back together at random; the combinations of angles and flow that made up his more recent collections. And a month ago his prêt-à-porter collection, the first he’d staged since finishing rehab, had made critics reach for new superlatives. She hated clichés, even when she only used them to herself, but Guipure genuinely had been full of promise, a talent that made fashion both surprising and significant.
Normally, she would have pointed out the obituary to her husband, Alan, but he was on his annual visit to his parents in Florida and wouldn’t be back for another month. As a poor substitute, she bit into her croissant and remembered the previous spring when, during a visit to London, she and her best friend Magda had seen the Ne Touche Pas dress in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The tight column of heavy marigold-colored silk had been lit from above, making its red organza ruffles and huge wired collar almost iridescent. They looked like the wings of a bold Elizabethan insect or the petals of an enormous glass poppy balanced on a golden stem. Although she had loved clothing for as long as she could remember, her encounter with the dress was the first time that she understood how fashion could blend nature and artifice to enhance life in the ordinary world.
The ring of her portable cut across this memory. The screen told her Magda was calling. She swiped at the green icon and took the call.
“Roland Guipure—”
“I know,” Rachel said, cutting her off. “I’m just reading the obituary now.”
Magda sighed. “Remember when we went to the V and A?”
For a few minutes they rehashed the day Rachel had been remembering, reminding each other about the dresses in the exhibition and the glossy hardback catalogue neither of them had felt rich enough to buy. Then Magda said with finality, “Well, it’s the curse of rehab, isn’t it? People seem great when they get out, but wait a couple of weeks and they fall right off the wagon.”
“You can’t be sure it happened that way,” Rachel protested, although she’d been thinking much the same. Still, she hated to think of anyone she admired, no matter how far removed, dead in an alley from an overdose. “The obituary just said he’d died, not how he died.”
“Oh, please! Dead outside a nightclub after his birthday party? If you say that, you don’t need to say overdose.”
What can I say? Rachel thought. She couldn’t disagree; she was as familiar with the clichés as Magda was. So instead of responding she moved the conversation onto another topic. After all, like all people who speak to each other daily, they had plenty to talk about.