“When I was growing up, this whole area of Paris was leather and fur,” says Yves Salomon, head of the eponymous brand and manufacturer. “We’re buried in this little street, Cité Paradis, but all around us it was nothing but animal production – on Rue d’Hauteville and Rue des Petites Écuries. Now we’re the only one left.
“I remember first walking down these streets with my father when I was young, and I hated it. These men with skins piled on top of their shoulders, leather everywhere. I never wanted to work in this industry.”
We’re interviewing Yves in the company’s quite anonymous, modern offices, sitting on the first floor looking down on Cité Paradis. We’ve long been a fan of the work Yves Salomon does in its London atelier, and they’ve made two pieces for me in the past. But this is our first visit to Paris, to the HQ.
“My son wasn’t so keen at the beginning either,” Yves continues. “But when you’ve worked around this craft long enough, you become passionate about the beauty of it and preserving it. That’s what happened to me, and Thomas feels the same way now as well.”
The company was founded in 1920 as a manufacturer by Gregory Salomon, Yves’s grandfather. His father, Boris, began experimenting with different ways of using fur in the 1960s and drew the attention of the fashion houses.
In the 1980s Yves took over and really pushed that forward – working for the likes of Azzedine Alaïa, Nina Ricci, Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier – before setting up his own brand.
Later on in the day we meet Thomas, who is deep into presentations for Fashion Week. He’s helped steer the brand into full collections, with lots of leather pieces (all of which the company makes in-house) and then trousers, knits and shirts around them.
Most of Yves Salomon’s work with fur these days involves re-using old pieces, with customers bringing in their grandmothers’ coats and having them re-cut into something more modern. Fur lasts very well, and the historical value of these coats means they’ve often been kept for generations. From that point of view they’re among the most sustainable clothing.
The last piece I had made was a liner for a raincoat, entirely made of the offcuts from such work in the London atelier. It’s amazing what a luxurious piece can be made out of literal scraps – at the same quality as something new, unlike the degrading that happens with recycled wool for example.
In Paris, we saw the master of this work, a senior craftsman who was patiently working in one corner of the basement workshop. “He is the best there is, he blends the skins together in an wonderful way,” says Yves.
It was certainly impressive when we looked at both the back and the front of these coats (above). On the front the skins were blended so effectively that they looked like long strips of a single material. Each one runs smoothly into the next, thanks to close matching of the colours and careful cutting of the seams.
On the back you can see how complicated these seams are, with each side cut into long spikes that fit into each other, and sometimes cuts in those as well (below).
“The key to finding new ways to use fur in the early days was to try and use it as a fabric,” says Yves. That included shaving down the fur so it looked more like velvet, or even moleskin. They would also use laser cutters to make patterns in the surface.
More recently, the company has developed methods for cutting long lines in these closely shaved pieces, so they look like corduroy. One piece we saw (pictured higher up) looks like a fairly regular jean jacket in black cord, but the surface is incredibly soft – not what you expect.
“Something else we came up with was a very lightweight fur piece using strips of organza,” says Yves, picking up a coat a worker is finishing (below). The material is made up of alternating strips of organza and fur, but the strips are so thin (and the hair so long) that from the outside it just looks like fur, yet is very lightweight.
“Many of these innovations were driven by the demands of the designers,” says Yves. “Jean-Paul Gaulthier was the worst for this – he would ask us to do things that we were absolutely not able to. do Like stretch fur for example – he wanted to do his classic mariniere [sweater] but completely fitted to the body.
“I’d say I didn’t know how to do that, it doesn’t exist, and he’d say ‘just do it’! We found ways to do something close, and then we moved into knitted fur too. Soon after we did our most famous piece as a brand – the vintage parka with fur lining.”
Yves Salomon did become well known for this as a technique, and has had versions going through its collections ever since. “The problem initially was that the pieces were for women, and the sleeves on the coats were too long. So we thought we’d have to make them ourselves. But then we found most of them were being bought by men and that had the opposite problem – the sleeves were too short!
“That was how we started doing clothes for men as well. That was in 2013.”
Soon after that the pressure on fur generally became greater, with a lot of designer brands ceasing to use it. So Yves started the process of diversifying – into leather, shearling, knitwear – as well as focusing more on re-using and re-modelling old pieces.
Our visit feels like the end of a long arc for the company, as they did their first presentation of the full men’s collection just the day before. It’s taken over 100 years, but you feel the consistent, steady journey nonetheless.
“This is just me, my personal culture (and my staff suffer a lot for it) but I don’t like ever to stay on the same thing. I want to keep moving,” says Yves.
I have to say, it was this attitude towards innovation that impressed us most at Yves Salomon. Wonderful as the products and the techniques are, it was the attitude that really set it apart from the manufacturers we normally cover for Permanent Style.
Most of those are highly conservative, and resist comparatively small changes like making unlined shoes, or new types of rubber soles. Sometimes they can be restricted by skills or machinery, but often you feel there’s an instinctive fear too – no matter how many times they have had to change in the past, they don’t want to do so again until they’re forced to do so.
It will be interesting to see how the approach of Yves Salomon carries across into leather going forward. Yves himself explained a recent innovation where they use the thinnest calf possible for outerwear – 2mm – backed with nylon for the whole coat, so it can be reversed and worn either way, whether for fashion or weather.
When we then went to see Thomas later at the showroom, in the middle of several bustling appointments, we tried on that coat and it was just beautiful. As fur becomes increasingly niche, I look forward to seeing what Yves Salomon (the man and the company) does with leather as well.
For more on fur, its ethics and sustainability, see PS article here. The points on this issue are all made there, whether in the article or the comments, so please add to that debate rather than replicating them here.
