On Charvet, and Being Bought

Chanel has bought the French Shirtmaker Charvet.

I have been visiting 28 Place Vendôme for the better part of my career. It does not announce itself. No queue, no logo pressed onto everything within reach, nothing performing luxury for the street. There is a nonchalance to the place, very French, entirely unbothered by whether you notice it. You walk in and you are simply in a very good shirt shop that happens to sit on a square that has not changed its manners in a long time.

I never went for the shirts. I went for the ties and the pochettes, for the drawers of fabric kept behind the counter like a private library. Upstairs the shirtings floor does the same thing on a bigger scale. Simon Crompton, who wrote about commissioning a bespoke shirt there, described it as "a treasure trove, with bolts of cottons and linens stacked shoulder-high", and that is exactly right. It is a room built entirely around choice rather than display.

You describe what you want, or you say nothing and let the person serving you work it out from what you are already wearing, and out come three or four options better than anything you had in mind. Nothing is rushed, because nobody there is trying to sell you anything. They are showing you what they have.

What has always struck me is how little Charvet cared about being known. On buying trips and visits, in showrooms across Paris and Milan, designers and the people who ran those rooms spoke of it with a quiet reverence no advertising could buy, the way they speak of Hermès. Both houses built their standing on people who already knew, long before either needed to explain itself to anyone else.

So my honest reaction to the sale is mixed. Commercially, it is a clean piece of business. A freehold building on Place Vendôme, a fabric library, a name that means something to exactly the people it needs to mean something to. Chanel has bought a very good address wrapped in a very good story.

I am glad it went to Chanel and not Kering or LVMH, although I suspect that a sale would not have eventuated if that was the case. Those groups run superb houses, but at a pace and scale that would have sat uneasily with a business built on drawers and a family's judgement. Chanel still moves like a house rather than a portfolio. That matters here.

Even so, I will miss the version of Charvet that answered to nobody but itself. I hope what draws people through that door in ten years is still the unhurried service and not a story retold for a wider audience. I will keep going either way. Old habits, and better ones, are hard to give up.

Imagery Courtesy - Permanent Style