François Lesage’s first encounter with Christian Dior was as a teenager, when he would accompany his father to present embroidery samples at the house. “We [Parisian artisans] would line up one by one, like hospital patients waiting to be received,” he said, describing Dior as looking like a “fat bishop” surrounded by his team. “As a 20-year-old, it was pretty intimidating.”
Dior’s assistants, according to Lesage, oversaw most of the selection of samples. But for the final choice, Lesage would be summoned to the studio. He would often be made to wait while Dior’s muse, Mitzah Bricard, covered herself. “She’d walk around the studio practically naked, draped in panther skin,” Lesage recounted. “It was rather a lot for a young man to take.”
Following Dior’s death, an event Lesage refers to as a “tsunami” for the industry, he went on to produce around 60 percent of the embroidery for Marc Bohan’s collections for Dior. But it was with Gianfranco Ferré, according to Lesage, that things got interesting again. He can recall working on one blouse featuring monkeys and angels, made in homage to Dior’s friend, the artist Christian Bérard. Ferré invited Bérard to the studio to paint sketches of the collection.
“Bérard was a really filthy man and kept wiping his paint brush on his beard and then on the carpet,” recalled Lesage with a laugh.
His relationship with John Galliano almost got off to a rocky start when Lesage read a quote by him in a British paper saying that couture was “not only about the constipated embroidery of Monsieur Lesage.” When the designer visited Lesage’s atelier upon joining Dior, he asked for the toilet. “But I don’t have a toilet,” joked Lesage. “I’m constipated.”
Relations improved, and today Lesage deems Galliano the most creative of the lot — and the most demanding. Around 90 percent of Dior’s Egyptian collection, for example, was heavily embroidered under severe time constraints. “In the old days, we would work for five weeks on couture collections; now, it’s more like three weeks,” said Lesage. “And with Dior, it’s one.”