Remembering Catherine Chaillet

This feature was originally published in September 2018 in Mastermind 04 – buy all issues here.

The first impression of Catherine Chaillet’s big, bright, white apartment is of perfectly ordered chaos. Everywhere you look – along the corridor, on the many pedestals, in display cases, on the mantelpiece, in bookcases – are countless items, mismatched and unrelated, yet carefully arranged. Precious objects and trinkets sit beside antique and modern objects, creating small, colorful tableaux everywhere you look. Large flower pots are filled with bouquets of colored pencils, hundreds of them. Five architecture lamps light up a single table. Chaillet herself wears several rings on each finger and bracelets by the dozen. She has not one, but two pairs of glasses on her head. “I also have a lot of hair,” jokes the 85-year-old, dressed in a gathered skirt and ballerina slippers. When asked to define her style, her immediate response is, “I don’t give a damn.”

Chaillet likes to tell stories but hates theorizing. The very word “collector” horrifies her. “It’s not a definition; it’s a way of being,” she says. “I have eight children. I don’t like people – or objects – to be alone. I may have been like that when I was small, but I didn’t analyze myself and I try to avoid doing so, because it would immediately become something else. There is a huge distance between things that are spontaneous and things that are calculated.”

Another thing she collects: Professions. In the fashion world, she is known for the Victoire boutique, capes, concertina bags, and the Hermès Constance bag. In the world of television, she is still Madam TF1, the French television channel for which she was the artistic director for 20 years. Watch enthusiasts remember her Kelton watches. But few people are aware of the full spectrum of her work and the singular career of this joyful Jane-of-all-trades.

As a young woman in the mid-1960s, Chaillet was studying architecture at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. A mother to one, at the time she needed a job. “I went to see a fabric merchant, Lalonde, that I found in the phone book.” She was set to work creating color ranges and designing weaves, and took it upon herself to set up a switchboard and reorganize the delivery and filing systems. “I had no training,” she says. “I was play acting, playing the merchant.”

Near the office, she noticed an attractive space used only by a woman who met her lover there at lunchtime. Chaillet suggested that it be turned into a showroom to display examples of what could be made with Lalonde fabrics. Given carte blanche, she quickly launched the Victoire shop, which would profoundly change the dynamics of the neighborhood – and Chaillet’s life. Without knowing it, she had invented the first Parisian concept store, 30 years before Colette.

The display windows attracted fashion editors from the neighborhood, where a number of dailies and magazines had their offices. For the first collection, she held a fashion show in a Beaux-Arts studio, with a brass band providing the music. “The girls were dancing,” she says. “They couldn’t help it.” Chaillet began presenting fabrics in the shop, but was soon selling accessories, and importing the latest fashions from Marimekko in Finland and Donald Davies in Ireland. “It all came together, with one thing leading to another. I made dresses, shoes, bags…” Even giving birth to a child seemed to come easy to her: “I gave birth on Saturday and was in the office on Monday. I worked with my baby next to me in a crib.”

Fashion editors were not the only ones who frequented her shop. The late Jean-Louis Dumas, former CEO of the Hermès group, was another. “He came to the shop often. I had bags made by a leatherworker, and he asked me to design a model. I got rid of the Hermès horse and carriage, which I thought was too old school, and made a clasp in the form of the letter H.” The design captures the 70s appetite for modernity, its indifference to the past, but also Chaillet’s taste for what’s evident.

Named Constance after her fifth child, the bag remains one of the house’s best-sellers. It was almost renamed ‘Onassis’ after Jackie discovered it and bought it for all her friends, but the original title endures.

Chaillet’s archives fill an entire cellar. A fleeting look reveals, for example, hundreds and hundreds of tiny textile patterns, doodles she makes while on the telephone. There are handbags for Hechter: “At first, it was just to accessorize a fashion show.” There is a reversible cape, once photographed by Peter Knapp for Elle. “It was edged with grosgrain, and the fabric was beautiful.” A little further down the pile is a set of delicate Christmas ornaments, drawings of flower arrangements, and table decorations for the Hotel Lutétia.

Chaillet helped launch Kelton watches, the first inexpensive watches, sold in tobacco shops, with a slogan that marked the 1970s: “You are changing, so change your Kelton.” I show her the one I am wearing, but she doesn’t know if she designed it: “I’m not sure. I designed hundreds of them.”

It is impossible to get her to choose the object or project of which she is proudest: “They’re my children.” Chaillet deflects praise with humour. “I designed bags like a chicken lays an egg,” she says. “What’s difficult for me is making lunch. It annoys me.” Chaillet eats mainly raw vegetables and fruits. She hates meat, but refuses to call herself a vegetarian. She has a similar distaste for the word feminism. Asked if she identifies with the movement, Chaillet instead tells of a time when she went skydiving, just to prove to her eight children she was not a soft chicken. “And not only did I jump once, but twice.”

With all due respect to the modest Chaillet, it is not quite true that she had “no training”. It began in Lebanon, just before World War II. Originally from Paris, her family moved there, following her father, an architectural engineer. “While my father worked, I had the use of a corner of his drawing board. I scratched out errors with a blade. I watched what he was doing and went with him to construction sites.” As a teenager, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where her father would ask her to send – “by boat”, she recalls with precision – tracing paper and pencils purchased from the Beaux-Arts stationery-seller Monsieur Jourde.

Chaillet’s father died when she was 15. Shortly after, she left Lebanon, alone. “I didn’t agree with what my mother wanted from me. I had refused to have lunch with an important man. She said to me, ‘Do you realize what a great help this would have been for the whole family?’” In Paris, she enrolled in architecture courses, following in her father’s footsteps: “I went to the École des Beaux-Arts out of devotion to him.”

But Chaillet never graduated. She got married – taking the name of her husband, also an architect. She had her first child, followed soon after by twins, and found work to support her growing family. Yet, whether she was designing patterns, or logos, or organizing a space, she was still “doing architecture everywhere I could”, she says. “It’s a way of thinking, of putting things together: Bathroom, living room, kitchen.”

Putting things together is a fitting description of the TF1 logo she would design in 1975. Her career in the audiovisual industry, the second major act of her life, began at FR3 Couleur – France’s third TV channel, the first in color. “During the breaks, they were still showing a Provençale,” meaning a traditionally dressed girl from Provence, “with a basket of fruit. We didn’t even have opening and closing credits. I designed credits and an identity.” When the CEO Jean-Louis Guillard left the channel for TF1, she followed him.

Chaillet’s TF1 logo features the channel’s letters slotted together like puzzle pieces. Paris-based graphic designer Yorgo Tloupas, who is preparing a book on the history of logos, ad- mires the design’s cohesiveness: “The letters fit together but are still perfectly readable, each one filling the white space of the other,” he says. The logo’s thick lines and bright colors may be typical of the 70s, but “it is still completely topical; it could be brought up to date with just a little tweaking, unlike the completely flat and banal logo TF1 has now. Beyond the nostalgia we might feel for TV shows from our childhood, it shows that some things really were better before.” With the computerization and democratization of the graphic design profession, Tloupas believes the quality of logo design is declining. “Today, the public doesn’t know any logo designers, but there are many famous industrial designers and architects. When you use an anonymous agency, you have an anonymous logo. With Catherine Chaillet, you have the vision of Catherine Chaillet.”

Not only did she invent the TF1 logo, but Chaillet created the company’s sets, the credits for internally produced programs – the channel’s visual identity, or what we would now call branding. Looking for a way to fill the breaks between shows, she created The Tifins, a cartoon where the TF1 logo letters are characters who go on adventures. The Tifins was a hit, and lead to tie-in merchandise – cakes, dolls; village festivals would feature giant Tifins puppets. Étienne Robial, who coined the term “habillage” – a television station’s visual identity, its clothing – and created branding for Canal Plus, M6 and the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team, among others, lauds Chaillet’s “360-degree eye”. “She was to TF1 what Folon was to Antenne 2. I admire her greatly; she was one of the few people who took a global approach to the elements of a TV station’s identity.”

Browsing through Chaillet’s archives, I find some attractive handwriting that was oddly familiar. It was a letter from Jacques Prévert, a master of wordplay and one of France’s most popular poets during his lifetime. “He was adorable,” she recalls. “He came by often to buy things for his wife.” The poet wrote to her: “Of all the TV logos, yours, for TF1, is the best, the most agreeable, so clever even though it looks simple. It is a model of telegraphic style.” On the next page, he drew a ghost, with the caption: “Self-portrait as a TV spectator.”

Chaillet avoids any explanation of her design influences, or speculation about what drove her to such varying design disciplines, saying only, “I needed to make a living.” It’s a testament to her pragmatic approach to life.

“If I were better educated, I might try to follow words or concepts. Let’s just say that I’m a non-conformist. I was lucky to have had no training; otherwise I would have done what everyone else was doing.”