Oh La la! We worked with Catherine Lévy & Sigolène Prébois – (Tsé-Tsé Associées). Selling the collection in shops: Liwan (Paris), Selfridges (London), and Paillette Géante, label collection Le Comptoir des Indes, I was lucky to work with some wondrous people – 1991/2000 - Rajeev Sethi, Francis Wacziarg, Catherine Lévy, Irène Silvagni), who shape and cajoled a young mind into existence. Out of which came my first: design company Bilzarian (Boston), Hot Pink and Aman Resort (India). In these formative years, we learn how to … make mistakes and transform experiences into beautiful things.
Fortunately, Indian craft endures and I still have the same feeling of ‘magic’ whilst wandering in Bazar, sitting with a printer, an embroiderer or a dyer – a fascination with the hand, how it meets the eye and opens the heart. 20 years later the fashion/art/design scene has bloomed into bazar Fortunately, Indian crafts endure and I still have the same feeling of ‘magic’ whilst wandering in a cauldron of ideas – mixing old and new, good and bad. The energy persists albeit in a ‘corporate’ manner – as fashion houses and shopping malls flood the ‘new India’ with its bulbuls ‘n’ trinkets.
Three kids and a husband in a toe (artist Desmond Lazaro, www.desmondlazaro.com), we live our dream – where craft, Art and life – find expression, nurtured with laughter, a little irony and a gentle dose of humour…
La Maison Rose, as you can see in the following pages was a rich space where much of what I cherish found its way in and flourished.
But life moves on, and somehow took us across the world, towards the end of it, in Australia, Victoria.
For a school, we moved from +40 to - 4C Degrees Celcius...
Then Covid happened.
During these locked-in months, I trained and certified as an Intuitive Intelligence trained with the Institute for Intuitive Intelligence in 2019-2020, Institute founded by the incredible Ricci-Jane Adams.
Further to this Transpersonal psychotherapie education I learnt about the Poly-vagal Theory of our nervous system according to Dr. S. Porgès, Evolution a course delivered by my Mentor Elisa Tishelle.
Both these expertise weaved with my design process to reflect one's true intentions while also promoting harmony and supporting physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
I have looped this journey with a complementary course on Biophilia that create a beautiful scaffold for my new approach to design.
In 1982 the artist - Pierre Lesieur – led my family to India, I was just 12 years old. At 24 (& many trips later) I decided to leave France and settle in India. Or perhaps India settled in me.
Back then the fashion scene was in its infancy, designers like Manish Arora had just popped out of school and the art/design world was virtually non-existent. And yet the buzz was visceral – an energy that was able to draw from India’s craft heritage, reimagining how we could make things, and grasp what the future could offer…an exciting time.