PARIS— May 1968. The French students were rebelling, the paving stones were uprooted and a young woman with flame-red hair was at the heart of a dramatic revolution. A fashion revolution.
Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the student riots in Paris, and, not quite coincidentally, of the boutique Sonia Rykiel opened on the Left Bank with "three sweaters and books in the window."
Although the turbulent events forced her to close temporarily, Rykiel captured in her "poor boy" sweaters — snuggled over bra-less bosoms above narrow, androgynous hips — the spirit of changing times. The cultural and sexual upheaval expressed in the youthquake and in fashion's "new wave" has proved to be more profound and enduring than the political changes.
The Sixty-Eighters, as France's baby-boom generation is known, may have been absorbed into the bourgeoisie. Yet women who had a taste of fashion freedom never went back to their mother's polite, constricting clothes.
"It was a revolution," says Rykiel, referring to her supple jersey suits, easy pants and dresses where the hems were eliminated and seams were sewn on the outside. Dressing women night and day in knits, worn with a seductive insouciance, was a break with the traditionally feminine. These were clothes for the new woman.
But in a typical "Rykiel-ism," the designer says that she saw pants as representing equality — "not with men, but with women who have good legs."
"I never played a part in the feminist movement — it touches me, but I am not a militant," she says. "To me, the biggest revolution of the 20th century was the pill. I think of my mother. How did they manage to live a sexual life that is as much part of a woman's life as books, cooking and children? The pill was the liberation of the spirit of women."
Rykiel — tossing her red hair above a sinuous black coat, walking in that precise French way on platform-soled shoes, toting a roomy bag — could claim, even as a sixty-something grandmother, to be the spirit of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Although her fellow designer Yves Saint Laurent purloined the name "Rive Gauche" (Left Bank) for his ready-to-wear collections, Rykiel incarnates the stylish, intellectual Bohemian who is the mythical inhabitant of the Café Flore. She's the one with a cup of coffee in hand, cigarette smoke curling, a book on the table and a rumpled, earnest young man at her side.
"Artifice is art," Rykiel proclaims, making it sound like a manifesto, but referring to her dislike of "the natural look" and her passion for sophisticated dressing. She likes black, existentialist black, as a canvas for slogans picked out in rhinestones on sweater fronts or waist-cinching belts.
Ninety thousand of those sweaters were sold in 1997, some plain, others with the signature messages. They have read "V.I.P" or "Artist" or "Paris" or "Black Is Beautiful" because Rykiel's "intellectual and cerebral" side demanded that the "the body should speak." Even before she published her first book "Et Je La Voudrais Nue" ("I Would Like Her Naked") in 1979, Rykiel would read out her poems as the soundtrack to her shows.
"I feel more like a novelist than a fashion designer, someone who writes a new chapter each season, including everything I see around me," she says.
Born the eldest of five high-achieving daughters of a Russian Jewish family implanted in the French middle class, Rykiel's life represents a 20th century woman's odyssey.
As a mother of two small children, her son handicapped by blindness, she turned her hand to designing in her husband's clothing business. The Left Bank boutique was born of her divorce and the need to make a life of her own. Consecrated as an international designer in the 1970s when the American press dubbed her "Queen of Knits" and "Coco Rykiel," comparing her to Chanel, Rykiel built up a business that includes clothes, accessories, menswear and fragrance. (The latest perfume bottle is shaped like her signature tiny sweater.)
Thirty years on, she heads a family empire with an annual income in 1997 of 450 million francs ($75 million). She works in close collaboration with her daughter, Nathalie, who directs the image of the house, and with her son-in-law as business manager. One of her sisters works on the accessories.
She pays tribute to this family support: "I don't know if I would still be here, if they weren't here."
Nathalie Rykiel, who started her career in film and savored the depiction of her mother in Robert Altman's fashion movie "Pret a Porter," says that her work is complementary to Rykiel's.
"I don't draw, I don't want to design. If I was a frustrated creator, I would be unhappy," she says.
Rykiel says that she respects her daughter "as a woman for what she does, she is very intelligent and that is fabulous." As well as defining Rykiel for a new generation, Nathalie has contributed three daughters to the "tribe of women," two of whom have already been down the runway.
In 30 years, hasn't Rykiel ever have had bad patches and longed to escape from a profession that demands a new proof of creativity every six months?
"I doubt as much today as I did 30 years ago," she says. "What pushes me forward is everything I have learned: political, social, cultural. I put all that into the clothes. Fashion should be a kind of bouillon de culture [a cultural broth]. To be modern is to be aware of what is going on."
She admits that it is difficult to accept the physical aging process, when "the spirit is enriched, but the body is destroyed." It is inevitable that her signature look sometimes slips out of fashion, and that she should have moments of depression and anxiety.
Rykiel ascribes her sense of the dramatic to her "Slav" side and to the fact that she was marked from childhood by the distinctive red hair that she celebrates as something "triumphant and glorious."
In the collections, the Rykiel woman seems eternally youthful and coquettish. The anniversary show last month, held in the ultra-modern Bibliotheque Nationale featured models looking quintessentially French, with bras peeking from mannish plaid pants suits or feet encased in fur-trimmed mules. Rykiel calls it the "quirky" spirit she injects into her classics.
What do the events of May 1968 mean to her?
She describes 1968 not as a political revolution, but as a student uprising due to a need for a new generation to have a voice. What was supposed to be a "mighty battle" was actually "quite folkloric" and more about "existentialist" angst than real issues.
Outside the Saint-Germain boutique, where the paving stones are now as flat and smooth as the plate glass store windows, a crowd has gathered to look at the 30-year display of magazine covers telling the Rykiel story. "Happy Birthday," in a version played by her musician son, Jean-Phillipe, echoes down the block.
Rykiel tilts her red head in profile.
"I wrote the story of women across the world," she says. "We all have the same needs and desires, the demands of work and family life. The Rykiel woman? She always has a bag on her shoulders so that she can stride forward — with a child in each hand."
