Emmanuelle Khanh, Pioneer of French Ready-to-Wear, Dies at 79

PARIS – Emmanuelle Khanh, one of the pioneers of French ready-to-wear in the Sixties, has died of cancer at the age of 79, her family said Friday.

Khanh began designing anonymously as part of a generation of freelance stylists that also included Karl Lagerfeld. She launched her own brand in the Seventies, joining a new wave of design talents alongside Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Issey Miyake.

“I think if people remember her for one thing, it’s for her signature glasses,” said Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, French fashion’s governing body.

“She was an interesting personality because she had a triple career. First she was a model, then she was a freelance designer for houses like Cacharel and Dorothée Bis,” he recalled. “And she was part of the first generation of ready-to-wear designers of the Seventies.”

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Khanh was a fit model for Givenchy and Balenciaga in the late Fifties when she caught the eye of Claude Brouet, then deputy fashion editor at French Elle. “She was leaving a show dressed in a way that was so unusual and striking that I asked where she got her outfit, and she told me she made it herself,” Brouet said.

“Naturally I asked her to come to the magazine, which she did. I introduced her to [Elle founder] Hélène Lazareff and we immediately took a picture and created a pattern so that our readers could copy the look. It was a skirt with a slightly dropped waist, which was very new at the time, and a little waistcoat that dipped in front,” she recalled.

Khanh subsequently joined forces with Christine Bailly, another young designer, on the Emma-Christie line, launched in 1962. After it folded, she designed collections for brands including Missoni, Max Mara and mail order retailer La Redoute.

In 1965, she headed to New York with Bailly, Paco Rabanne and Michèle Rosier to showcase her designs at the April in Paris ball, raising her international profile.

“She was featured in Elle a lot in the Sixties. It was the boom of ready-to-wear. It was really the birth of youth fashion in France,” said Brouet. “Her designs were very young and modern, at a time when fashion was still very strongly influenced by haute couture.”

Didier Grumbach, the former head of the French fashion federation, said Khanh was the first designer to join Créateurs et Industriels, the venture he created in 1971 to develop new brands alongside storied couture names. This was the springboard for the launch of her own label.

“She became really well known from 1972. Her collections were extremely new. She would feature printed quilted cottons in winter. There were also military coats, which she did very well,” he said.

Khanh left her label in the late Nineties. The then-dormant brand was subsequently acquired by the Dutch investment fund Rencorp in 2007.

It initially focused on resurrecting the label’s eyewear activities, tapping Thierry Lasry in 2009 to revisit Khanh’s designs. Didier Marder, managing director of the revived label, told WWD: “We realized that it was her eyewear that has really stuck in people’s minds. Her clothing labels even used to feature a photo of her in these big glasses.”

“Emmanuelle Khanh is the designer who really made everybody realize how sunglasses and glasses in general could help define your personality. I feel like any thick heavy acetate frames that you can see today are somehow an indirect tribute to her aesthetic,” Lasry said after learning of her death.

Poignantly, Khanh had recently become involved in her namesake brand once again after Marder invited her to collaborate on a knitwear capsule for the brand’s e-shop for fall 2016.

The brand this year is reigniting the Emmanuelle Khanh ready-to-wear line, starting with a small spring 2017 collection due to launch on the brand’s e-shop and that of French retailer L’Exception in April, that will include a swimwear capsule designed by Khanh. A full collection for fall 2017 — designed in-house — will be presented at the Paris sur Mode trade show in March, according to Marder, who said he kept Khanh regularly updated on the evolution of the brand.

She was due to work on a third capsule for the brand, but pulled out late last year due to illness, he said. “She was a pioneer. Even at 79, she had such an eye, with this vision of modernity, but also comfort,” said Marder. “She would always say that clothing should enhance a woman’s body.”

She is survived by her son, Othello Khanh, and her daughter, designer Atlantique Ascoli. Details of funeral services were not immediately available.