Maison Pierre Frey, founded in 1935, is a luxury fabric and wallcovering manufacturer, long known for creating custom textiles and patterns inspired by classical and contemporary art. While in Paris earlier this year, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to tour their Archives – and I jumped at the chance!
Read on for an excerpt of my journal entry from this day, and to see a photo gallery of images from this special visit:
After a quick cab ride to the Pierre Frey Paris headquarters, Emma and I were introduced to Sophie Rouart who was to be our guide. Sophie was the most lovely, knowledgeable and passionate resource on French history and textiles specifically. As it turned out, Sophie is an art historian as well as co-author of a book on Toiles de Jouy. She has managed the archives at Pierre Frey since 2003 in a space that meets museum quality standards. Each historic fabric (some dating back to the 16th century) has been micro-cleaned, inventoried, and then filed in dedicated drawers. Sophie’s narrative during our tour, delivered in excellent English, was incredibly interesting and dovetailed beautifully with my knowledge of French antiques. She lovingly handled each historic piece with gloves and showed me how these relics have inspired their most current collections. Often, the company looks to these historic pieces for pattern and texture and then updates or changes the colorway. Sophie also demonstrated how the hand blocking techniques were performed and pointed out the resulting imperfections. Today, when copying these old hand blocked patterns, the company intentionally prints these imperfections to give authenticity to the new fabric. It was then time for even more “show and tell” with antique garments constructed from Pierre Frey fabrics, old design mood boards, and even a 3D paper room model. Our time with Sophie passed much too quickly but I will never forget her kindness, the gorgeous and colorful fabrics, and Pierre Frey’s ability to partner with designers to reproduce any of their archived fabrics in ANY color. What a gift!
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