[May 3 2011] : Magazine
Sonia Rykiel
interview by OLIVIER ZAHM and CAMILLE BIDAULT-WADDINGTON
personal photos of SONIA RYKIEL
SONIA RYKIEL is a wonderful woman — all of Paris loves her. In the past year we’ve seen intense publicity surrounding the 40th anniversary of her fashion house, yet Sonia herself REMAINS A MYSTERY. My friend, the stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington spends a lot of time working with Sonia, so she and I thought that together we might succeed in painting a revealing portrait of this iconic French designer.
PURPLE — A journalist once wrote that you were an “ungraspable woman.” What did he mean by that?
SONIA RYKIEL — I’d written a book that began with the phrase, “I am ungraspable, ungrasped, I roam … I open the ranks of restless women.” That was in the first book I wrote, called And I Want Her Naked… [Et je la voudrais nue… 1979], in 1968 — it’s my favorite of my 12 or 13 books. Let me quote from it: “I am ungraspable, ungrasped, I roam. I only accept the trenchant, the explosive. I hunt myself down to the point of the impenetrable to see if I can decipher myself, but the farther I go, the more I sink in. I’m in another language; another woman is speaking; I am the unexplained, a woman in exile who has lost her name, lent it to an untitled sheet of paper. I scheme. I slip into black clothes to have secret liaisons. Camouflaged, I say, ‘I am not hiding.’ I am a liar. I am the indissoluble, experiencing all the senses. Sliding through mystery, I do not understand myself. I pass through, I enter new flesh, I insert myself, I mold myself, but down deep, I don’t find myself. The more I say, the more I tell. Impalpable, disobedient, rebellious, I have to be tracked down. I open the ranks of restless women.”
PURPLE — Where is your family from, Sonia?
SONIA RYKIEL — My mother was Russian. My father was Romanian. So I’m Slavic from head to toe. I’ve written that all women, maybe all creators have something Slavic about them, even if they aren’t Slavic.
PURPLE — What does it mean to be Slavic?
SONIA RYKIEL — It means to be hopeless and hopeful, to be amazing and to be destroyed, to not know what you’re saying and to wriggle out of a situation — always wriggling out — and then...