Have an Emmanuelle Khanh Summer

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Emmanuelle Khanh once stated that the designs she created were timeless and, as I leafed through a magazine from the late 60s that featured images of models wearing her bathing suits, I realised she was right.

Born in 1937, Renée Meziére worked as a model for famous fashion houses such as Balenciaga and Givenchy between the late 50s and the early 60s.

After marrying designer Quasar Khanh in 1957, Meziére began collaborating with different companies and fashion houses, among them Belletête, Missoni, Dorothée Bis, Cacharel, Pierre d'Alby, Krizia, Guy Paulin, Anne Marie Beretta, Karl Lagerfeld, Luciano Soprani, Max Mara and Le Bistrot du Tricot.

Meziére's most important project, though, was her own label, Emmanuelle Khanh.

Her own experiences as fashion model actually inspired her to found the label.

Working with important haute couture houses, Meziére understood that high fashion could only appeal to a very small part of the population and, tired of what she called “box-like dresses” created by high fashion designers, she focused on developing a ready–to-wear line.

The launch of Emmanuelle Khanh coincided with the beginnings of French read-to-wear and the label developed new trends, from bowlers to culotte skirts and battle jackets.

Soon Emmanuelle Khanh became the superstar of French ready-to-wear, launching a new look called ‘The Droop’, a slim and narrow silhouette that had a flowing 1930s feeling about it, with scalloped collars, funnelled sleeves and curvy hemlines indented at the knee.

Among the materials favoured by Khanh there was denim, but also chenille and even plastic.

Emmanuelle Khanh's patchwork designs - solid-coloured suits with outlines of the bosom and hips - became quite popular, especially in the USA where American buyers considered the brand's designs rather exciting.

Major fashion houses soon understood the importance of the new young designs and tried to lure them away and at the time Emmanuelle Khanh declined many offers.

In November 1963 the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune wrote: “The tide has changed in French ready-to-wear. It used to be that American store buyers came to Paris this time of year to buy simple adaptations of French couture clothes, put out by the designers themselves in their ready-to-wear collections. Now, obscure, cheaply priced and formerly neglected houses are stealing the show from Paris big names. The reason is that they have turned over the styling of their collections to a group of new, young, original designers, of whom the most famous is Emmanuelle Khanh.”

Jean Rosenberg, vice president of New York-based store Henri Bendel, stated at the time that these new brands and young designers were producing a strikingly original and innovative look and claimed haute couture would have been influenced by the work of these young designers.

Khanh’s clothes became rather popular in department stores across the USA, and Meziére also teamed up with ex-Balenciaga model, Christiane Bailly, developing the Emmachristie collection in 1962.

Bailly’s dresses were rather successful and she was the first to show bare backs, yet she wasn’t as lucky as Khanh who managed to export the new ready-to-wear look to the USA.

Look magazine often featured Khanh's designs and Bedel became the first American store to carry her clothes in their ‘Limited Editions’ department.

In the mid-to-late 60s Emmanuelle Khanh, Christiane Bailly, Michèle Rosier and Paco Rabanne took part in a catwalk show that featured white quilted dresses (Khanh), outfits with shredded plastic hoods (Rabanne), crushed metal yokes on brown silk (Bailly) and sparkling silver outfits (Rosier).

Fashion specialists took note and Diane Vreeland, then editor of American Vogue, claimed she had been impressed by all the collections.

Emmanuelle Khanh became popular in more recent years for her original eyewear designs.

I found these pictures of bathing suits by Emmanuelle Khanh in a 1967 magazine and absolutely fell in love with them.

The green bikini (pic two in this post) was made in plasticised nylon jersey, a soft and thin experimental fabric that had a sort of leather-like effect. As you can see, the bikini featured suspender-style straps kept together by a metal ring.

The yellow and fuchsia swimsuits with silvery straps and the bikini in the third and fourth picture in this post actually make me think about the brightly coloured costumes for Mihalis Kakogiannis' film The Day the Fish Came Out (see previous post). I particularly like the yellow and orange bikini with the violet necklace-like strap.

The silvery bikini with cut out motifs in the fourth image ties in with the futuristic fashion trends so popular in the 60s, but it is worn with a swim cap that makes me think about comic heroines (another rather fashionable trend at the time).

All the bathing suits were designed by Emmanuelle Khanh for Mitex International and they go rather well with the hair pieces and jewels in metallic paper sold by Diana Monili, a Milan-based shop located at the time in Via Senato 24 (also designer and architect Nanni Strada created between 1964-1967 jewels and accessories for Diana Monili in experimental materials from fabrics to plastic).