Like Father, Like Daughter - “Oh you’re going to shoot in Olympia’s new apartment?” asks Pierre Le-Tan, one of France’s most renowned illustrators. “I’m going to have to lend her some things.” There would be plenty for Olympia, Pierre’s 35-year-old handbag-designer daughter, to choose from: his 1,650-square-foot apartment on the Place du Palais Bourbon in Paris contains a collection of books, artwork and furniture that would give John Sotheby the vapors. There are Renaissance marbles, a sketch by Giacometti, stacks of 18th-century Turkish rugs, original works by Hokusai, a framed pencil drawing by Andy Warhol, a row of Cecil Beaton first editions, oxblood Pierre Cardin oxfords with hand-molded, articulated toes — that’s just a fraction of what’s in the first two rooms. “If I weren’t a collector, I’d be a gambler,” says the soft-spoken 62-year-old. “I love the auction room, the excitement of it.”
Sadly for Olympia, Pierre is only joking about the loaners. It’s a given that she and her three siblings aren’t allowed to borrow their father’s things. “He barely lets us touch them at all!” she says. In the past three years since the debut of Olympia’s line, complete with a logo created by Pierre, her precious minaudières, hand-embroidered to look like classic book and album covers, have become collectors’ items among the fashionable set. Last November, she moved into her “first real grown-up apartment.” Located in the Ninth Arrondissement and classically Parisian, it has herringbone parquet floors, marble fireplaces and ceilings decorated with lacy moldings. Both she and Pierre may describe the apartment as empty, but it’s clear the Le-Tans have a different definition of the word.
Olympia’s living room is actually a curio cabinet of retro toys, books and personal mementos. Along a mantelpiece, across walls of shelves and on coffee tables are: a miniature sewing machine from the 1960s in robin’s-egg blue, Polaroids of her by the famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, two Olivetti typewriters, a black and white photograph of her paternal grandfather (the Vietnamese painter Le Pho) and a pair of tiny metal Roger Vivier pumps about ¼-inch long that were a gift from her mother.
“All of us in the family have our own things that we display,” Olympia says. But the differences between what particular items set each Le-Tan heart aflutter are less important than the obsessiveness that unites them. For Pierre, despite the sheer abundance of finery in his home, the world he has drawn for more than 45 years, in ad campaigns, magazine covers, portraits, children’s books and more, is highly restrained. When his drawings are not actually about solitude — he often depicts rooms with only the faintest evidence of human presence, an open book here, a set table there — the emotional register of his figures is so still as to almost render them as objects. In certain works, views of jolly outdoor scenes are viewed through windows in quiet rooms. His latest, “The Adventures of Ralph & Wulfran,” is a collaboration with another illustrator, Emmanuel Pierre, that Le-Tan calls, “a nasty little book.” The two titular characters, “two very stupid people,” play the flâneur through modern Paris, bragging and offending as they go. “People often talk about how my books are nostalgic and when they see this, they don’t understand it,” he says. Pierre doesn’t go much deeper than to explain that the project was his publisher’s idea and a sort of experiment. But the impulse to create mythic characters, removed from reality and framed on the page by rigorous cross-hatching, has been a signature of his since he was a boy.
Olympia’s clutches also nod to a bygone era — when people carried actual books — and are imbued with childlike humor. Her latest collection, music themed, includes re-creations of “Tales of the Jazz Age” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Attaway’s “Calypso Song Book,” and a series of vinyl-record-themed bags. She’s also branched out recently with leather handbags and a line of ready-to-wear that mimics her own vintage pinup style. The new items are not bookish, but they are finely wrought, and the glamorous geek aesthetic still holds sway. “I see all sorts of references to things from her childhood in her work,” Pierre says, pleased that she would still find such inspiration there. The workmanship on her handmade clutches is as painstaking as her father’s technique on paper: she chooses graphic, often midcentury covers, which she renders with layers of felt and tiny picks of embroidery. Each bag is lined in contrasting Liberty print cotton and bears the label “Hand Made with Love in France.”
As for Pierre, he has moments of curiosity about life on a more modest scale. “I’d love to live in a place with very few things that are just impeccable,” he says, wistfully. But, ultimately, he knows he could never part with all the treasures he’s collected over half a century. That said, Olympia should take him up on the impulse while it lasts. There’s a 15th-century Flemish ink drawing that would look lovely in her bedroom. ( nytimes.com )
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