Torrente

French high fashion house founded by Rose Torrente-Mett in 1968 in Paris. This fashion designer, with her green eyes and mop of red hair a la Shirley MacLaine, had the determination and energy of a Madeleine Vionnet or a Coco Chanel. Of Russian descent, the daughter of a tailor and the sister of Ted Lapidus (she was born Rosette Lapidus in 1936), worked for her brother in the second half of the 1950s. At the tender age of 23 she decided to go into business on her own: “I am like a jet plane, my engine is revving, I have to take off,” she confessed to her brother. She opened her atelier in Avenue Matignon at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She excelled in designing highly structured tailleurs and overcoats, simple and essential, and her style was so new that it attracted and immediately seduced sophisticated and demanding clients like Marlene Dietrich, Romy Schneider, Natalie Wood, Marina Vlady, Raquel Welch, Paulette Goddard, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, and Ursula Andress. Since she could not use her brother’s surname, nor the surname of her husband Jean Mett who owned an apparel-manufacturing company, she invented Torrente as a name for herself, a name that she chose because it “evoked music and water.” In 1971 she made her official entry into the world of haute couture and joined the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Quite soon she had a number of licensing contracts in France and worldwide, and she launched a prêt-à-porter line, Miss Torrente (which was at first manufactured by her husband, until he joined the maison as administrator in 1974). In 1971, she launched with Vestra the Torrente Uomo menswear line and a line of accessories, eyeglasses, foulards, and leather goods. With her brother she began a project that she would carry on alone, a Maison de la Mode, at 9, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In 1988 she moved to the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées, in a hÂtel particulier that once housed the atelier of Paul Poiret. In 1992 she was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She added jewelry to her prêt-à-porter lines (especially Tahitian pearls) and, in 2002, Torrente Maison, an elegant line of home underwear (bed and bath). Also in 2002 she won the Marionnaud prize for the launch of the perfume L’Or de Torrente, a potpourri of flowers, fruits, and vegetables captured in an egg-shaped bottle decorated with iridescent opaline leaves in relief. She began a policy of opening new sales outlets. In Paris a boutique on the Avenue Victor Hugo, then others in various points around France. In January 2003, she launched her first Collection of men’s and women’s shoes and, after a few seasons’ absence, she resumed her menswear Collection for Spring 2003 and 2004. She was the managing director, the president, and the artistic director of the maison. Since 1985 she had been delivering lectures at the school for higher commercial studies and she was deputy chairman of the Institut Franµais de la Mode. In February 2003, after 34 years as a creator of fashion, she decided to retire (to spend more time with her family, according to the press release), left the stage, and sold her shares in the Torrente Group to the Chammas Group which, as a shareholder since 1985, in fact controlled the maison since March 2002.