The Story Behind Her Designs - Olympia Le Tan
The Designer
Olympia Le-Tan is a self-taught fashion designer. She was born in London and raised in Paris. She started her career at the Chanel design studio with Karl Lagerfeld then went on to Balmain where she worked closely with Gilles Dufour who then created his own brand with Olympia by his side.
In 2009, she launched her eponymous accessories label, combining her two obsessions, embroidery (a talent she inherited from her grandmother), and literature (a passion she shares with her father, French illustrator Pierre Le-Tan) to create one of a kind handbags and minaudières.
The brand’s signature book-clutch has been seen on Tilda Swinton, Natalie Portman or Michelle Williams to name a few.
In March 2012, she launched her first ready to wear collection, in the official Paris Fashion Week calendar. These classic clothes with a twist and a sense of humour are a mix between Olympia's British and Parisian heritage.
The first Paris store opened its doors in December 2014 on the outskirts of the jardin du Palais Royal.
The Brand's 5 Key Points
AW17 Collection
Mood Board
The Book Clutch Collection
Alfred Hitchcock
Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most famous film directors of the 20th century. He directed more than 50 feature-length films from the 1920s to the 1970s. His influence can be felt in virtually every thriller made today. Rear Window, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Notorious and Academy Award-winning Rebecca are few of his best films.
Robert Maguire
Renowned illustrator/painter Robert A. Maguire created gorgeous cover images for more than a thousand books and worked for virtually every mainstream publisher in the U.S. He is best known for his incomparably sexy "femme fatale" images for pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s.
Raoul & Robert Giordan
Born in Nice, Raoul and Robert Giordan were brothers who worked together on several illustrations for pulp novel publishing house La Tarente. Some of the drawings were used for Larry Saunders’s book covers such as « Tu paieras de ta chair », « Pas de bouches inutiles » or « La pire des garces ».
Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming is an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. He wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952. It was a success, with three print runs being commissioned to cope with the demand. Eleven Bond novels and two short-story collections followed between 1953 and 1966. The novels revolved around James Bond, an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. Bond was also known by his code number, 007, and was a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve. The Bond stories rank among the best-selling series of fictional books of all time, having sold over 100 million copies worldwide.
French Crime Novelists
Maurice Leblanc (1864 –1941) was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.
Gaston Leroux is best known as the creator of the 1911 novel, The Phantom of the Opera, about a masked figure who haunts the hidden parts of the Paris Opera House. Leroux was born in Paris in 1868. The only child of financially well-off parents. Leroux wrote several mystery and fantasy novels, including the well-received The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) and The Man Who Came Back from the Dead (1912).
Raymond Queneau was born in the French town of Le Havre and educated at the Sorbonne. An early association with the Surrealists ended in 1929, and after completing a scholarly study of literary madmen of the nineteenth century for which he was unable to find a publisher, Queneau turned to fiction, writing his first novel, Le Chiendent in Greece in the summer of 1932. He also wrote as Sally Mara and published « her » Œuvres completes in 1962.
