Rive Gauche

It took the crisis of haute couture, which had triumphed for a full century on the rive droite of the Seine, to encourage a number of its creators to cross the river and launch into a new adventure on the Left Bank. Here, the new center of gravity of fashion was situated between the Place de Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Place de Saint Sulpice, dominated by the church of Saint Sulpice which represented the most hide-bound nineteenth-century traditionalism (in Parisian slang, sulpicien is synonymous with bad taste). And yet it was here that, in 1966, the renowned Saint Laurent, already set up on the Avenue Georges V, on the Right Bank, decided to create the subsidiary, Saint Laurent-Rive Gauche. His undertaking won many followers: Féraud and Castelbajac opened their boutiques in Saint Sulpice, and Rykiel, Givenchy, Kenzo, and Rabanne did so in adjoining streets. But the most astonishing development came in 1997 with the simultaneous inauguration, on the Place de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, of a subsidiary of Christian Dior and an Armani shop. In vain a petition circulated by French intellectuals attempted to prevent the invasion of fashion in what had been from the 1940s to the 1960s the headquarters of Sartre and the most daring avant-garde writers and artists. The bottle was lost. There is a dense presence of Italians such as Versace or Romeo Gigli and Japanese designers such as Yamamoto, Kawabuko, and Miyake. In practical terms, fashion in Paris has long since abolished the old social boundary between rive droite and rive gauche.