LE BOOK sits with Tatiana Fuchs

From Guerlain to Baron & Baron and now Coup d’État, Tatiana Fuchs has spent nearly two decades shaping images for some of beauty and luxury’s most recognisable names. As she builds a new chapter in New York, she reflects on the evolution of the industry, the changing language of luxury, and what happens when Parisian creative culture meets the speed and diversity of New York.

There is something consistent in Tatiana Fuchs’ career, despite the very different environments she has moved through. From her early years in Parisian agencies to more than a decade at Guerlain, then Baron & Baron and now Coup d’État, she has remained deeply focused on image — not simply as an aesthetic exercise, but as a way of creating emotion, desire and meaning around a brand.

Her trajectory has also given her an unusual perspective on the industry. She has experienced both sides of the creative equation: the long-term stewardship of a brand from within a luxury house, and the pace, variety and constant reinvention of agency life. Today, based in New York, she is observing another shift from the inside: the changing relationship between creativity, advertising, technology and culture in the United States.

For Tatiana, the thread running through all of it is curiosity.

A CAREER BUILT AROUND IMAGE

Looking back at a career that began in Paris and has moved between agencies, luxury houses and creative studios, Tatiana doesn't identify one particular role or environment as the defining experience. What has remained constant is a fascination with image — and with the emotional reaction it can provoke.

“I think the constant has always been emotion and the way an image can make you feel something.”

That instinct has followed her through very different projects and visual worlds. At Guerlain, she spent more than ten years working across the brand's image, from Abeille Royale and Aqua Allegoria to Orchidée Impériale and Art et la Matière. Later, at Baron & Baron, the spectrum widened again, with projects for Zara Beauty, Narciso Rodriguez, NARS and Mugler.

The transition between in-house and agency work also changed the way she thinks about creativity. At Guerlain, the relationship with the brand was necessarily long-term. You learn its history, its codes, its products and its ambitions deeply enough to think beyond a single campaign. Agency life brings a different rhythm: different brands, different challenges, different creative languages, and often a much shorter amount of time to immerse yourself in each one. Rather than seeing these experiences as opposites, Tatiana sees them as complementary.

“I think the ideal would be to have both experiences because they bring very different things.”

The agency environment keeps the creative muscle active, while working inside a house teaches you how to protect and develop an identity over time. For someone working in luxury, that relationship with time becomes particularly important.

WHAT LUXURY TEACHES YOU ABOUT TIME

After more than a decade at Guerlain, Tatiana learned that luxury operates on a different temporal scale. A brand can carry decades — sometimes centuries — of history, while still needing to speak to a contemporary audience. The challenge is not simply to preserve heritage, but to keep it alive.

“You have to respect the heritage, but you also have to make it relevant.”

For Tatiana, relevance does not necessarily mean following every trend. Luxury brands can easily lose themselves when they constantly chase whatever is currently considered desirable. The task is more subtle: understanding what makes a brand recognisable, then finding new ways to express it. That balance is visible throughout her work. From the botanical world of Guerlain's Orchidée Impériale to the more disruptive energy of Mugler's Alien Hypersense, the visual language changes dramatically from one project to another. Yet each project needs to create its own reason to exist.

For Tatiana, the most successful images are not necessarily the most technically elaborate.

“Sometimes it's just a very simple idea, but it's executed in a way that makes you feel something.”

That emotional dimension is particularly important in luxury and beauty, industries built not only around functional products but around projection, aspiration and fantasy. A memorable campaign gives the viewer somewhere to go emotionally. Among her own projects, she singles out Alien Hypersense as a particularly meaningful experience — partly because of the creative freedom involved in reinterpreting an existing franchise and reconnecting fragrance with Mugler's fashion identity. The project became an opportunity to work within an established universe without simply reproducing what had already been done.

And that may be one of the defining challenges facing luxury today: how do you build on recognition without falling into repetition?

BETWEEN HERITAGE AND THE NEW

Beauty has its own visual vocabulary: perfection, skin, light, transformation, desirability. These codes can create immediate recognition, but they can also produce an increasingly familiar visual landscape.

But for Tatiana, the answer isn't necessarily about using the newest tool. It is about developing a point of view strong enough to know what to do with it. This is where her thinking around AI becomes particularly relevant.

“The human has to decide why this image deserves to exist.”

Generative AI can accelerate visualisation and production, opening up possibilities that would previously have required considerable time and resources. But the same accessibility can also create visual sameness. The danger, she suggests, is not simply that AI will make bad images. It may make it easier to make good-looking images — and therefore harder to make images that actually have something to say. The responsibility of the creative becomes less about mastering a single production technique and more about developing taste, intention and a distinctive perspective.

For Tatiana, AI should help develop a concept rather than replace the conceptual thinking itself. And in that sense, the challenge isn't entirely new. She points to the rise of platforms such as Pinterest as an earlier example of technology contributing to a shared visual language. When everyone has access to the same references, the ability to create a genuinely personal visual universe becomes even more valuable.

FROM PARIS TO NEW YORK

Tatiana's move to New York adds another layer to this question of perspective. Having built much of her career in Paris, moving to the United States meant entering a creative ecosystem with a different rhythm, a different cultural mix and a different relationship to the advertising industry. New York, she says, has expanded her references. The city is intensely international, bringing together people from different countries, cultures and creative disciplines. That diversity inevitably changes the way ideas are developed.

“When you have people from different backgrounds working together, they bring different references, and that can make the idea richer.”

It has also changed her understanding of the relationship between disciplines. In New York, the boundaries between advertising, fashion, art, film, design and culture can feel particularly fluid. Creative profiles are increasingly hybrid, and collaborations can emerge from places that would not necessarily have been connected within a more traditional agency structure. Tatiana has experienced this first-hand through her collaborations with contemporary artists — encounters that might not have emerged in quite the same way in Paris.

But the move has not meant leaving her European creative culture behind. If anything, the two perspectives now coexist. From Europe, she brings an attachment to image-making, detail, history and heritage, as well as a tendency to think about creative work over a longer period of time. New York, meanwhile, has reinforced the value of speed, movement and openness to possibility. Neither replaces the other. For Tatiana, the interesting space is somewhere between them.

THE NEW YORK CREATIVE SCENE

That tension is particularly visible in the New York advertising and creative scene today. The traditional boundaries of the industry are shifting. Brands increasingly operate across culture rather than within clearly defined advertising categories, while creatives move between disciplines and formats with much greater fluidity.

For Tatiana, that is one of the most exciting things about being in New York now: the possibility of meeting people who don't necessarily define themselves through one discipline. But she is also conscious that the city can sometimes amplify trends just as quickly as it creates them. The challenge is to remain open without becoming absorbed by the dominant visual language of the moment. That balance — between being culturally aware and maintaining a personal point of view — runs through much of her thinking about creative leadership too.

WHO OWNS THE IDEA?

As Tatiana's career has progressed, her role has increasingly shifted from simply creating images herself to building the conditions in which other people can create them. For her, that required letting go of the idea of the creative director as a solitary author.

“I really believe in desacralising the idea of creative ownership.”

A good idea can come from anywhere within a team. The role of the creative leader is therefore not necessarily to arrive with the answer, but to recognise an interesting thought, give it space and help it become stronger. It is a collaborative approach that also changes how success is attributed. A campaign may have the name of an executive creative director or creative director attached to it, but the final image is shaped by art directors, copywriters, photographers, directors, stylists, producers, designers, retouchers, artists, strategists and countless other contributors.

For Tatiana, giving credit to those people is part of the responsibility of creative leadership. The same principle applies to the relationship between creativity and business. Rather than framing commercial objectives as the enemy of creative ambition, she sees business as the framework within which creativity operates. There will always be constraints. The interesting question is what you can create within them.

And importantly, she recognises that creative success and commercial success are not necessarily the same thing. A project can be creatively satisfying without achieving every business objective — and vice versa. The real challenge is finding a relationship between the two that allows both to exist.

A NEW CHAPTER: COUP D’ÉTAT

That philosophy now feeds directly into Tatiana's newest chapter with Coup d'État. After years spent moving between established brands and agencies, building a new agency offers something completely different: a blank page.

With Christophe Derigon, she is working on creating an environment that brings strategy and craft closer together while preserving the creative energy that brought them into the industry in the first place. There is no sense, in her description of this new chapter, that the years behind her have made her less curious. Quite the opposite. New clients, new franchises, new photographers, directors, studios and tools continue to trigger the same instinct that has been present throughout her career: I want to see what happens here.

“I'm still a bit of a geek about images.”

It is perhaps the simplest explanation for a career that has moved through so many different contexts without losing its central focus.

FROM CONNECTIONS PARIS TO NEW YORK

That curiosity is also what has kept Tatiana connected to LE BOOK. She has participated in several editions of CONNECTIONS Paris as a jury member, meeting creatives, producers, agencies and brands outside the immediate circles of her day-to-day work. For her, the value of CONNECTIONS goes beyond networking. The event creates a dedicated space to step outside the usual professional rhythm — to discover people, exchange ideas, debate, and potentially create unexpected connections.

Now, on October 8, she will join the LE BOOK community again, this time for CONNECTIONS New York at WSA. After experiencing the event from Paris, she is particularly curious about what changes when the same principle enters a different creative ecosystem. Who will be in the room? What new collaborations might emerge? And how will the energy of New York transform conversations that have traditionally happened within the Parisian creative community?

In many ways, it brings together the different strands of Tatiana's own journey. Paris and New York. Heritage and reinvention. Luxury and contemporary culture. Strategy and craft. Individual vision and collective creation. She has spent years moving between these worlds. Now, with Coup d'État and CONNECTIONS New York, she finds herself in a position to connect them.

And perhaps that is what has remained unchanged throughout the journey: not a particular aesthetic, title or market, but the desire to keep looking. To remain curious about an image before it becomes familiar. To question a visual language before it becomes a code. And to stay interested in the people who might change where the industry goes next.