Christian Lacroix
The couturier who brought color, baroque splendor, and theatrical joy back to Paris couture.
Few designers arrived with the force that Christian Lacroix did, and few did more to remind fashion that couture could be joyful. The maison he founded in 1987 brought baroque color, Provençal romance, and unabashed theater back to Paris at the height of minimalism, and made bold costume jewelry a signature in its own right.
From Arles to His Own House
Christian Lacroix was born in 1951 in Arles, in the south of France, steeped in the color and pageantry of Provence, the Camargue, and the bullring. He studied art history in Montpellier and then in Paris, intending to become a museum curator. That deep knowledge of historical dress, learned in galleries rather than ateliers, would shape everything he later made.
His sketches reached Hermès through his future wife, Françoise, and he found a footing there before designing for Guy Paulin. In 1981 he became the designer at Jean Patou, where he revived the house's couture and won the industry's serious attention for the first time.
A House of His Own
In 1987, with the backing of Bernard Arnault's group, Lacroix opened his own maison and showed his first couture collection in Paris that July. It landed like fireworks. Against the era's reigning minimalism he offered the pouf, the puffball skirt, clashing prints, corsetry, and the hot colors of the Mediterranean. He became a star overnight and took the industry's highest honors with him.
Couture should be fun, foolish, and almost unwearable.Christian Lacroix
Why His Jewelry Matters
For Lacroix, jewelry was never an afterthought. It was part of the costume, conceived with the same theatrical eye as the clothes and launched alongside his accessories at the end of the 1980s. Where other houses prized restraint, Lacroix prized the wow, and his pieces grew as recognizable as his dresses.
Two motifs above all became his emblems: the heart and the cross, reimagined in gilt metal, enamel, poured glass, and resin, often ex-voto in spirit and baroque in finish. Suns and starbursts, cherubs, bulls' heads, and Byzantine scrollwork joined them. He drew on the great Paris workshops, among them Gripoix and Desrues, and most pieces are signed Christian Lacroix with the CL monogram and marked Made in France.
His limited-edition Christmas pins are especially sought, and because nothing in this spirit has been made since the couture house closed in 2009, the vintage pieces hold a value all their own. This is costume jewelry as pure expression, the haute couture spirit worn close to the skin.
A World of His Own
More than any contemporary, Lacroix wore his origins openly. The processions and festivals of Arles, the embroidered dress of the Arlésienne, the toreador's suit of lights, the gypsy and the Camargue, the baroque churches of the south, all of it found its way into his work, mixed without hierarchy and lit with Mediterranean color.
He referenced the corset and the crinoline, folklore and far-off cultures, the eighteenth century and the street, and he layered them with a curator's eye and a showman's nerve. To wear Lacroix was to carry a little of that pageant with you, and his jewelry distilled the whole spectacle into something you could clasp at the throat or pin to a lapel.
The House Today
For all its acclaim, the house never turned a steady profit. LVMH sold it to the Falic Group in 2005, and in 2009, amid the financial crisis, the couture and ready-to-wear lines closed and Lacroix left the house that bore his name. He returned to what he had always loved, designing for theater and opera, for hotels, even for trains and Air France uniforms, and in 2019 he made a celebrated runway return as a guest of Dries Van Noten.
In 2025 the Spanish group Sociedad Textil Lonia acquired the house, archives intact, and set out to restore it to its former prestige. Whatever the next chapter holds, the Lacroix of the late 1980s and 1990s remains one of the most joyful and collected bodies of work in modern fashion.
Christian Lacroix at MDVII
At MDVII we treasure Lacroix for the very quality that once made him an outlier, his refusal to be quiet. We seek out his finest costume jewelry, the crosses and hearts and suns that no one else could have made. The Christian Lacroix pieces available now are gathered below.
