Remembering Tan Giudicelli: Part I
1934-2024
In mid-April, a week after my baby was born, by chance I caught an Instagram post from a long-retired French fashion editor stating that her old friend Tan Giudicelli had passed away. As a fashion designer, Giudicelli has long interested me—popularizing American-style sportswear in France then selling it back to Americans as French chic with MicMac, and a party page favorite who outfitted socialites in gowns and cocktail dresses. Years ago, on a trip to Paris, I tried to track him down for an interview but had little luck. Hearing of his passing at 90 years old saddened me. In those long, freshly postpartum days and nights, I would regularly google his name, expecting to find an obituary, but one never appeared—there are still none, just some Instagram posts from old friends from the Seventies Parisian fashion world and his former company, MicMac.
While not an obituary, I set out to capture some of his life and work—a biography of an intriguing character and talented designer—an elegy of sorts with lots of images. I will send out the second part on Sunday. If this post is too long for email, please open in your browser or the Substack app.
If you were a friend of Tan’s, I would love to hear from you.
With a Vietnamese mother and a Corsican father, Giudicelli was born in 1934 in North Vietnam—his maternal ancestors had run a silk business on the Silk Road in Hanoi. He emigrated from Hanoi around 1956, after the outbreak of the Vietnam War. It seems likely that Giudicelli studied fashion design in North Vietnam; as soon as he arrived in Paris he began working for Christian Dior. He stayed there for a year following Dior’s death in 1957, working under Yves Saint Laurent, before stints working under Jules François Crahay at Nina Ricci and Jacques Heim. In 1962, Giudicelli was hired by Gaby Aghion to be part of her team of designers at Chloé, which included during his years there Christiane Bailly, Maxime de la Falaise, Graziella Fontana, Gérard Pipart, Michèle Rosier, and Karl Lagerfeld. Part of a movement toward more youthful clothing, Chloé was a ready-to-wear line; as Tan told an interviewer in 2020, “I came from couture. That's why I could judge that Gaby Aghion had really invented something new. We were a whole generation that wanted to overcome couture."
In the mid-60s, he appears to have spent some time in the United States, working for three months at Youth Guild (a teen fashion line founded in late 1947), and then designing a line of brightly colored, geometrically pieced lingerie, cut-out swimwear, and louche ‘30s-style sleepwear for Triumph International in 1966 through spring 1967. The following year, Giudicelli took over as head designer of Max Mozes, which Women’s Wear Daily described as “one of Paris’ oldest rtw houses” (though the first record I found of it was from 1953). His designs were dubbed “young and snappy”—for spring, pumpkin wool coats with matching helmet hats, marigold yellow jersey tunics over matching micro miniskirts, and oversized beige coats faced in bright yellow. His winter 1966-67 collection was “active…short swinging skirts are ready for action…knickers kick up a storm…pants zip off like a breeze.” Early that year, he also founded Stylbox, a group of fashion designers for hire who would “work together on a fashion collection, on a form research for gadgets, containers, etc., on anything you suggest.” Alongside him were his friends Kenzo Takata, Anne Vuthi, the famous model Denise Sarrault, Michel [Michèle Rosier, I believe], and his brother François.
“There is no more fashion. We each have our own personal theatre.” – Tan Giudicelli, Women’s Wear Daily, September 19, 1969
In late 1967, Giudicelli was hired to lead design at MicMac, the St. Tropez-based boutique line founded in 1965 by playboy millionaire Gunter Sachs alongside his former brother-in-law Michel Faure. MicMac was at the forefront of the casual bohemian beach chic popularized along the Côte d'Azur, a rejection of the rigidity and formality of the Parisian haute couture and celebration of a more louche, relaxed lifestyle. Their most notable client was Brigitte Bardot, who in 1966 became Sachs’ wife. Not content with one small boutique, in October 1966 Sachs showed a MicMac collection during Paris Fashion Week and began opening more stores across France. Giudicelli was brought in to elevate the collection beyond sportswear and beachwear, fashioning a full ready-to-wear line.
Tan showed his first collection for MicMac on April 3, 1968, at a photo studio in Neuilly. While Bardot and Sachs sipped champagne in the front row, Bardot-lookalikes modeled a winter collection of mottled ribbed wool knit jerkins with matching floppy pants and evening silk Oriental tunics, with a small resort collection of white linen bikinis. Most notable were Giudicelli’s maxicoats, “swirling ankle-deep… long-line greatcoats, cut close to the midriff, fitted with high flying collars and fastened by double rows of buttons, flare into deeply banded hems that swirl six inches off the ground like maxi-crinolines…”—others featured leather buckles instead of buttons. Unlike anything else on the market, Bloomingdale’s picked them up and heavily marketed them in a new MicMac in-store boutique, patterned on the Paris store (orange carpets, white walls, and stainless-steel bars as racks). The maxi coats were a smash—profiled in the New York Times, Bloomingdale’s sold “every one we could get our hands on.”
When Sachs and Faure were asked what they thought made MicMac so successful during a visit to New York in September 1969, Faure responded, “Well, for one thing, our designer,” shining attention on Giudicelli. Though he wasn’t named on the label, Women’s Wear Daily feted him as the “first to envision women in maxi coats.” They went on to call him “one of the great emancipators,” whose easy clothes liberated women’s bodies—favoring a braless look, he told them, “Movements prove whether a woman is free or not. That’s what this no-bra thing is all about. I don’t like bras at all. If a woman needs one all that much, why not surgery?” (quite a change from designing bras just three years earlier). His design philosophy combined an interest in creating “cinematographic” looks (like the swirling maxicoats) with ease of movement and comfort; clothes that looked good yet allowed for an active lifestyle. Giudicelli, as WWD pointed out, was one of the first designers to make pull-on pants in ribbon cotton jerseys and to innovatively pare down the polo shirt “to a sliver and put epaulets on it,” to be copied around the world. He was also the first designer to extend a t-shirt into an evening dress; Tan later remembered, “It was modern, it was light. Women could wear it during the day and in the evening.”
“To me, nothing is worse than the woman who takes the ideas of fashion and follows them to the letter. What I like about MicMac, is that we get the conventional woman out of her convention. Because it is sportswear, she is already thinking of herself in a new role—on holiday—so she’s willing to get a little bit out of her convention—her established vision of herself.” – Tan Giudicelli, Women’s Wear Daily, September 19, 1969
1969 and 1970 were busy years for Tan. While the MicMac maxicoats continued to sell out each season and be copied by high-end designers and mass manufacturers, he looked to expand his business in other ways. Traveling back and forth to America many times throughout 1969, MicMac opened ten in-store boutiques in department stores nationwide, from Dayton’s in Minneapolis to May Company in Los Angeles. During these publicity trips, Giudicelli became friendly with some American designers, including Liz Claiborne, and briefly looked into establishing a bicontinental design agency with her. Similarly, MicMac opened in-store boutiques and freestanding shops across Europe and the Middle East, with its director forecasting them to do “some $2 million in export business this year” while becoming one of the 10 largest French RTW firms. They also launched menswear, with Tan designing “see-through suits” and a “lean, long, hip-hugging look… carried out by a couple of groups of tunics… [worn with] matching knitted slacks with slightly flared legs,” all of double-knit wool.
In March 1970, Giudicelli signed a five-year contract with MicMac to create a ready-to-wear line under his own name. That April he showed both collections for the first time; MicMac was “filled with Tan’s highly salable approach to fashion” of primarily knits, while for his collection, “Tan came up with two interesting new pant shapes—both cling from the thigh to the knee and then flare with deep controlled pleats.”
While reviews of his early 1970s shows were generally complementary, with critics and buyers praising the ease of his designs, some collections fared less well. Giudicelli’s spring/summer 1971 show was described as “downright vulgar,” while for spring/summer 1972, his attempts with both collections “to be glamorous emerges as pure kitsch. In other words, bad taste.” Not that Giudicelli was personally opposed to bad taste; earlier, in 1969, he told WWD, “What I wish is that people would choose their clothes without thinking about ‘taste.’ Only ‘petite bourgeoise’ think about taste. I adore what Baudelaire said about good taste: ‘What is amusing about bad taste is its aristocratic pleasure to displease.’” A tunic and loose pants of devoré velvet, kaleidoscopic waves of white velvet on a transparent black chiffon ground, was one such example of an ensemble that straddled the line of elegant and bad taste—a highly successful idea for him as Jacqueline de Ribes bought it on the opening day of his boutique, while Anjelica Huston modeled it for Vogue.
By mid-1971, both MicMac and Tan Giudicelli had boutiques on the Rue de Tournon, just down the road from Yves Saint Laurent’s original Rive Gauche stores. In a shopping guide to the newly hip Left Bank, Angela Taylor of the New York Times explained the differences between Tan’s two brands: “While the MicMac designs are usually sporty, the clothes now shown in the new boutique [Tan Giudicelli] are dressier and somewhat more expensive. Blazers and pants are the thing here, but rather than the Mic Mac knits, they are made of satin or printed crepe and are meant for le cocktail or dinner.” ‘Tan Giudicelli’ was the evening progression from Micmac’s daytime ease, which became progressively “more soignée, more refined, more sophisticated” and less “popular sportswear for everyone,” in his own words, over the next few years.
Complementing his fashion lines, Giudicelli became a makeup consultant for Helena Rubinstein, charged with designing cosmetic colors and beauty looks. His first face premiered in January 1972 and featured two pairs of midnight blue eyebrows that “in a pale and moon-shaped face…compose an expression of startled astonishment…” with lips painted pimento red with an exaggerated cupid’s bow—a Surrealist visage to complement his similarly whimsical new millinery collection. Launching that spring, his venture into hats was lauded as a “personal outlet [that] allows him to give full rein to his private sense of fun and inventiveness”—the most photographed hats were felt or velvet cloches with appliqued life-size hands wrapping around the face, with polished fake nails adding bursts of color. Others included a cavalier style hat with a whole 3-D cockatoo in place of the traditional single feather, sailor hats filled to the brim with wax apples and pears, and his “friendship hat”—“a high-crowned helmet swathed in veiling like a meringue smothered in cream, it is topped by a life-size floppy hand, hinged to the back of the head to wave madly at everyone down the street.” Around this time, he also premiered his first two perfumes, “Green T” and “Smoked T.”
Giudicelli was depicted as “more Gallic than Asian in spirit,” though physically he took more after his Vietnamese side—the South China Morning Post wrote that “with his slanting eyes and completely bald head, Tan Giudicelli looks half Buddha half cat—indeed he is very much a feline, devoted to his family of cats and kittens which share his fantastic flat near Les Invalides.”
That flat was the stage set for many photoshoots, both portraits of Tan and as backdrops for his collections. Filling the top floor with a completely open plan, “set on different levels with low, deep, tobacco-coloured leather sofas and oval central platform to sit on,” with a terrace wrapping around two sides. Mounds of interesting pillows provided spots to lounge on the carpeted platform, which was backed by two large Art Deco screens. Several walls were covered in alternating narrow panels of black and regular mirror; on others hung or leaned large-scale photographs. Vertical blinds covered floor-to-ceiling windows, while a jungle of plants climbed up every corner. The main focal point was a six-foot-high statue of a pelican that supposedly used to belong to Sarah Bernhardt. It was an elegant apartment, as suited for parties as for shoots—he often hosted dinners there for the crème de la crème of the Parisian arts and fashion worlds, while his talent for cooking Vietnamese and Chinese dishes with a French twist was well-profiled in the press.
More to come this weekend…
Wow! Thanks for this! It's great to learn a bit more about MicMac, too! And I always love the images from the magazines you choose. I always get excited seeing a Newton photo I haven't seen before! (He and Penn are my favorites) Angelica's shirt reminds me of Gucci S/S 1996. And now I'm wondering what happened to that Pelican, haha.