Written by Nicole Štěch

She was born in Paris in 1867, the eldest of eleven children. At the age of sixteen, she began working for a milliner and gradually worked her way up to establishing her own business. In 1889, at the age of twenty-two, she opened her own hat shop at 16 rue Boissy-d’Anglas. Four years later, she secured a prestigious address on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. From this small millinery workshop, a fashion empire began to take shape – one that, as we now know, would outlive its founder by generations. In 1897, Lanvin’s daughter Marguerite, her only child, was born. Jeanne began creating an extraordinarily elaborate wardrobe for her, using luxurious fabrics and furs. Other women noticed little Marguerite’s clothes and began asking for similar designs for their own daughters. Children’s clothing gradually became a new business segment – and it was here that Lanvin grasped something remarkably modern for her time: children could be not only customers, but also a gateway to their mothers.

It was an idea she explored decades before the fashion industry at large began asking the same questions. And, in many ways, it is a question we are still asking today: how do you ensure a fashion house’s prosperity for generations to come? How do you remain relevant? Today, Lanvin’s mechanism works in much the same way, but in reverse: a customer remains loyal to a brand and invests not only in her own wardrobe, but also in that of their children. Those children, in turn, become part of the brand’s visual world, just as the brand becomes part of the family’s identity. Luxury fashion has long since stopped selling clothes alone. It sells an aesthetic world into which customers can dress themselves, their partners, their homes and, ultimately, even their children or their dogs. Take Dior, for example, which now offers an extensive children’s line. The house recently presented a campaign featuring child protagonists, sending a clear message: the attention luxury houses devote to children is growing. When Jacquemus introduced Mini Me by Jacquemus in 2023, translating the defining elements of its adult brand into children’s proportions, one of its aims was also to test the audience’s appetite for children’s fashion, while targeting affluent customers – and, by extension, their children, who may themselves become customers one day.

But let us return to Lanvin. It did not take long for her clients to want more than just clothes for their children – they wanted clothes for themselves, too. So, when she presented her first children’s collection in 1908, she introduced a line for women the following year. Around the same time, her business officially established itself as a fashion house through the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. When speaking of Lanvin, one inevitably comes to the iconic robe de style silhouette. It began to emerge in the early 1920s, and Lanvin continued to develop it throughout the 1930s. Instead of the narrow, geometrically modernist lines of the era, she offered a romantic silhouette with a fuller skirt inspired by the 18th century. Lanvin succeeded in translating a nostalgia for the past into lightweight contemporary fabrics, innovative decorative techniques and extraordinarily refined details. She worked with embroidery, pearls, ribbons, appliqué, crystals and a variety of fabric textures, combining long, fluid lines with more rigorous geometry inspired by Cubism and Art Deco. And she was so obsessed with colour that, in 1923, she opened her own dye works in Nanterre. This gave her greater control over the shades of her fabrics and allowed her to develop the colour that would later become known as Lanvin blue. Her sensitivity to colour, however, was never isolated from the wider world of art. Lanvin moved in artistic circles, socialising, for example, with painters from the Nabis group, and she was an avid collector of their work. Her collection included works by Renoir, Degas, Fantin-Latour and Fragonard, among others. During the 1920s, her business expanded into furs, lingerie, menswear, home furnishings and fragrances. In 1927, the fragrance Arpège was created as a gift from Jeanne to her daughter Marguerite for her thirtieth birthday. The scent went on to become one of the house’s most iconic products.

None of this was simply a random assortment of categories. Lanvin was gradually shaping a vision of a modern lifestyle. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has identified this very ability as one of the clearest indications of her entrepreneurial talent. Her ability to connect fashion with other areas of culture was extraordinary for her time. She collaborated with artists and craftspeople, working with Jean Dunand on textiles, Louise de Vilmorin on calligraphy, and the Sèvres porcelain manufactory on perfume bottles. At a party hosted by fashion designer Paul Poiret in 1920, for instance, Lanvin met the architect and decorator Armand-Albert Rateau. Together, they decided to create a pavilion dedicated to the art de vivre at 15 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The space offered furniture, rugs, curtains, stained glass, wallpaper and other furnishings, all in the pure Art Deco style of the era. She was a true pioneer in many fields and, above all, a woman determined to control the entire visual world surrounding her brand. She shaped it through inspiration drawn from her travels and from everything around her. Her travel journals were always close at hand while she worked, and alongside her memories, Jeanne Lanvin recorded notes about objects she had discovered, fabric samples and the traditional dress of countries she or her close friends and family had visited: Indian saris, Chinese garments, toreador costumes, as well as ethnic embroideries and materials.

Through her own distinctive taste, she built an empire and heralded a revolution in lifestyle. She developed the business by regularly opening new departments to meet the needs of an evolving society. This is perhaps where one of her most modern qualities can be found: she was a designer who was able to assert her vision of excellence throughout the entire production process. And she was exceptionally demanding in doing so. Lanvin’s perfectionism was not merely an aesthetic quality, it was a way of managing her business, one that helped her build the longest-running fashion house in the world. She understood early on that fashion was not simply a matter of seasons, but a matter of good taste and a better quality of life.