Agnes B. (b.1941) is a French sportswear designer who began her career in the early 1970s as junior editor of Elle magazine and later as assistant to Dorothy Bis. In the mid 1970s she opened her own boutique in Paris where she remade French worker’s uniforms, black leather blazers and rugby fabric T-shirts. Her goal was to sell to those who did not want to look too “fashionable.” Her clothing, encompassing those for men, women and children, has a timeless quality being simple and relaxed in design.
Her clothes are made for the “real” person, not just the fashion conscious or the elite and her separates mix in well with one’s own vintage or mod clothing. Rather than her non-design type clothing being obscured and overlooked in a large department store environment, she went on to open many more of her own boutiques worldwide, including her first American one in New York in 1980.
A shrewd businesswoman, she states “I have no desire to dress an elite. It’s all a game. I work as if I were still in my grandmother’s attic, dressing up. Clothes aren’t everything. When they become too important, when they hide the person wearing them, then I don’t like them. Clothes should make you feel happy, relaxed, and ready to tackle other problems.”
Written by vintageclothesline
from an early 1990s skirt
Courtesy of fuzzylizzie.com
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