LE BOOK sits with Marie Taylor

Marie Taylor: The New Parisian Attitude

There is a kind of Parisian designer who doesn't look at the city the way tourists do  or even the way fashion tends to. Marie Taylor is one of them. For her, Paris isn't about the woman on the street or the polished codes of French chic. It's about the Belle Époque courtesan catching the light at a brocante. 

The dancer from the Moulin Rouge, mid-spin. The sticky glamour of a late-night bar tabac. "I don't take inspiration from Parisian women," she says plainly. "I take it from objects, old posters, costumes from vintage films."

Founded in 2024 and handcrafted entirely in her Parisian studio, the Marie Taylor house moves fast but thinks slowly. A graduate of the Institut Français de Mode who went on to gain experience at Courrèges, Taylor came to her own label with a clear point of view: fashion that is simultaneously chic and festive, historical and pop, structured and alive. Each piece is made by hand. The broderies, the pleating, the bead-by-bead assembly that can take hours. "Luxury, to me, is the time spent making something," she says. "The hours of work on a single piece."

Paris as a Living Archive

Taylor's relationship with Paris is deeply historical. Passionate about history since childhood, she finds it easy to slip into an older version of the city  one that most people walk past without noticing. The Belle Époque obsesses her. Its great marginalized stars: La Belle Otéro, La Goulue, Cléo de Mérode. Courtisanes and cabaret dancers who built their own iconography in a world that wasn't designed for them. "These women are my stars," she says. They are not references in the mood-board sense. They are something closer to ancestors.

But her Paris is not only gilded. She is equally drawn to its nocturnal, working-class energy the world of late-night bar tabacs, brasseries, nightclubs. The kind of places that don't make it onto the cover of a lifestyle magazine. She finds her material in brocantes and flea markets, in souvenir shops and antique stalls, hunting for objects that are, as she puts it, "unexpected and frozen in time." An old poster. A costume fragment. A piece of crockery that shouldn't be beautiful but is. This is where Marie Taylor collections begin not on a runway, but in a dusty corner of the Puces de Saint-Ouen on a Sunday morning.

Craft as Obsession

At the heart of the Marie Taylor house is an almost stubborn belief in making things by hand. She does as much as possible herself  the embroideries, the structural details, the pleating. She has spent hours assembling pearl after pearl in bead weaving, a process that is meditative, exacting, and entirely at odds with the pace of contemporary fashion. Recently, she went further: she taught herself to make stained glass, collaborating with artist Suzy Melchior on a piece called Hollywood. It is the kind of detour that makes complete sense within her logic, ancient technique, unexpected material, extraordinary result.

For Taylor, luxury is not a price point. It is not a logo or a heritage narrative. It is time. "Luxury is the time spent making a garment," she says. "The hours of work on a single piece." In a landscape where production cycles have collapsed and fast fashion has redefined the baseline, this is a genuinely radical position  held quietly, without manifesto, and expressed entirely through the work itself.

That commitment extends to her wildest ideas, most of which she auto-censors for now. She has imagined a dress made entirely of hand-woven beading reimagining a stained-glass window  every bead placed by hand, the whole piece a wearable cathedral. She hasn't made it yet. It would take years. "Maybe I'll do it one day," she says. The tone suggests she absolutely will.

The Custom Request, and the Limits That Aren't Really Limits

When clients come to Taylor with unusual custom requests, her instinct is not caution  it's curiosity. She describes her reaction to strange briefs as finding them "offbeat and amusing," and confirms that she has never refused a wild request. The only person who has ever truly stopped her is herself, when an idea is too ambitious, too expensive, or too time-consuming to execute right now. "The craziest requests tend to come from me," she admits. In general, clients already arrive in her universe; their proposals tend to orbit the same aesthetic world she inhabits. Nobody, so far, has managed to truly surprise her. That might be because her own imagination has already gone further.

Cinematic Heroines and the Women She Dresses

Ask Taylor which fictional character she would dress and the answer arrives without hesitation: Isabelle Adjani in L'Été meurtrier, and Patricia Arquette in True Romance. "Both together, if possible," she says. The pairing is telling one a French psychological thriller heroine, one an American crime film romantic, both women of extreme intensity and visual force. Neither particularly concerned with being likeable. Both dressed, in their respective films, in ways that feel inseparable from who they are.

This is the Marie Taylor client in miniature: someone for whom clothing is not decoration but declaration. Someone who understands that what you wear is also what you say about the world and your place in it.

The Malibu Coconut Club and the Beginning of Everything

Her debut student collection at IFM in 2022 was called Malibu Coconut Club  a title that tells you almost everything about her sensibility. The theme: grandmothers and cagoles. A collision of inherited elegance and unabashed tackiness, of lace and leopard print, of dignity and camp. It is a combination that could only work if handled with genuine affection for both ends of the spectrum. Taylor pulled it off. The playlist she would soundtrack it with today: "Love Don't Let Me Go" by David Guetta, and a selection of tracks she describes as "very Ibiza vibe." No irony. Full commitment.

She has always known, she says, that she would create Marie Taylor. The ideas have been there since childhood, accumulated and waiting. "I have so many ideas in my head and I need to get them out and bring them to life," she says. "There are so many things to do, so many projects to come." A martini blanc in hand she is, by her own admission, a disaster in the kitchen she is already onto the next thing. Bead by bead, stitch by stitch, object by unexpected object.