- 1867 (MDCCCLXVII)
- 1946 (MCMXLVI)
- French
- Lanvin
- •The robe de style
- •Lanvin Blue
- •Mother-daughter couture
- •Oldest surviving French couture house
Jeanne Lanvin
The milliner’s apprentice who founded, in 1889, the oldest continuously-operating French couture house — and dressed her daughter into the century’s most famous logo.
Jeanne Lanvin was born in 1867 in Paris, the eldest of eleven children. She began as an errand-girl for a milliner at thirteen, apprenticed as a hat-maker at sixteen, and opened her own millinery shop at 22 in 1889, at 16 rue Boissy d'Anglas. The house has been continuously operating, under the name Lanvin, since that date — the oldest surviving French couture house.
The Daughter
Lanvin's daughter Marguerite — later Marie-Blanche, Comtesse Jean de Polignac — was born in 1897 and was, for much of Lanvin's career, her design muse. Lanvin's couture line, launched formally in 1909 after clients began requesting dresses matching the children's garments she had been making, was rooted in the mother-daughter imagery. The house's logo, designed by Paul Iribe in 1923, depicts Lanvin and Marguerite in evening dress, hand in hand. It remains the house's logo.
The Robe de Style
Lanvin's signature silhouette was the robe de style — a dress with a dropped waist and a full, mid-calf skirt supported by panniers. The shape was deliberately counter-current: where Chanel and Patou were drawing the silhouette straight and flat, Lanvin was drawing it out from the hip. The robe de style survived as an alternative silhouette through the 1920s and 1930s, particularly for evening and bridal.
Modern clothes need a certain romantic feel. — Jeanne Lanvin
Lanvin Blue
The colour Lanvin Blue — a saturated medieval blue drawn from the frescoes of Fra Angelico at the Convent of San Marco in Florence — was trademarked by the house in 1927 and remains associated with it.
Lanvin died in Paris in 1946 at seventy-eight. Her daughter inherited the house; she passed it to Antonio del Castillo (1950–1962), then Jérome-Charles Guerrand, and through several owners to the current proprietor, Fosun International, who installed Bruno Sialelli as creative director in 2019 and Peter Copping in 2024.
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