When you think of couture, you probably picture some fabulous, extravagant creation by Dior or Chanel, the fruit of Karl Lagerfeld's extraordinary polymath brain or John Galliano's fevered imagination. You may not, though, envision a sprightly 80-year-old man with a Maurice Chevalier twinkle in the eye, a ready laugh and an old, wood-lined office near Montmartre, plastered with photographs, letters and mementos and boasting a view of the Sacré-Coeur.
This is François Lesage, the paterfamilias at the couture world's most famous maison d'art: Lesage, which has designed and hand-executed embroidery for every important house from Jean Patou to Lacroix. The warren of rooms on the fifth floor of 13 rue de la Grange Batelière, a classically Parisian building with a polished wood spiral staircase and large windows, is home to the 50 employees of Lesage, who, with elfin skill, spend their days beading and stitching panels of lace and mousseline ready to be constructed into the world's most exquisite - and expensive - garments.
It is a rare art with an extremely limited and apparently diminishing client base, as fashion houses drop their costly couture lines in favour of the more practical and affordable ready-to-wear collections. "When I started there were 40 or 50 fashion houses. Now haute couture can be counted on one hand and embroiderers, too," says Lesage. But he doesn't sound too concerned. He has run the atelier since 1949, when he inherited it from his parents, Albert and Marie-Louise Lesage. His mother previously worked for Madame Vionnet and bought the business with Albert in 1924, when it was called Michonet. (The house has an even longer heritage: in 1858, Albert Michonet had become the embroiderer for Charles F Worth, the designer who is considered the father of couture.)
In that time, Lesage has seen the closure of famous houses such as Madame Grès and Schiaparelli, the rise of designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld, and heard countless predictions of the death of the archaic traditions of haute couture. But he is still here, and so is his atelier. This is, of course, partly thanks to Chanel, which bought Lesage, along with six other maisons d'art (the costume jewellers Desrues, the milliner Michel, the feather specialists Lemarié, the shoemakers Massaro, the silk flower designers Guillet, and the silversmiths Goosens), establishing them under the Paraffection umbrella, to ensure the continuation of the crafts - and to be certain that Chanel would always have a source for the couture craftsmanship it relies on. As well as its couture production, Chanel produces an annual Métiers d'Art show, which falls between couture and ready-to-wear, and is designed as a showcase for the skills of the maisons. (Some items from the last collection, entitled Paris-Moscou, are currently available at the Dubai Mall branch of Chanel.) The ateliers are still able to work for other couture labels, but, says Lesage's right-hand woman, Emily Barrell, the work with Karl Lagerfeld is the most demanding and rewarding.
"At the moment our new creations are based, couture-wise, on Chanel, so another label might come and comb our archives, then it might have to be resampled by the girls in the atelier. However, you're trying to provide Karl with something he can work with and I think my responsibility here is to advance things. Some people come in and just rob the archive, and I think it's quite disappointing for the general public, if they knew what was behind some of the designs. For me it's about finding a new technique."
Barrell, who is hunched over a piece of black-and-white embroidery and beading destined for Chanel's couture collection, which will be revealed on Tuesday at the Grand Palais, is a tiny, fragile 31-year-old from Colchester, Essex, in the UK, dressed in severe black, hair neatly twisted into a chignon - but she's no mouse. In fact, she is the source of the weird and wonderful techniques that garner superlatives for Lesage - who, by his own admission, "cannot sew a button".
("There is no good wind for a ship who has no harbour," he muses. "I tell them where is the harbour and how to go there. That's it. Exactly like that.") Still marvelling that she works at the peak of her chosen profession, Barrell found herself in Paris after baffling Lesage with her innovative techniques. "I used to work in London and bring him a collection, but he was having problems knowing how I did it, because it's very, very technique-based, so I would just kind of do something bizarre and use paint or something, and he'd want to know how it was done, so I came here," she explains. It is, very clearly, a dream come true for a textiles graduate (she did her MA at Central Saint Martins), but one to which she is able to bring a rather un-Parisian dose of reality.
"For me I have to keep it at arm's length and try to consider that I'm not in this house, because if you consider that it's your everyday life it's too sad," she says. "For every English girl, couture is mysterious. It's like a bubble that doesn't exist, then you realise it does, but it's nicer to keep the bubble, I think. Here they all care when something's not the same, whereas I grew up believing that every single piece was individual. I embrace that, but everyone here thinks, 'It must be the same'."
"She's just like a wild horse, sometimes," chuckles Lesage. "Entirely English from the toes to the end of the chignon - and thank you to your hairdresser today, I'm happy for you like that." Here the pair burst into a flurry of French, Barrell updating Lesage on the progress of an urgent change Chanel has demanded in a piece of stitching. "They want it the same, but on a different fabric, and they want the flower in pink varnished leather. So we've had to go out this morning in a panic to buy varnished leather, but the leather is a bit too 'lipstick'," Barrel explain.
Panic over, Lesage wanders over and introduces himself. "Bonjour; enchanté," he purrs, his eyes wandering to a vintage brooch on my lapel. "Ah, this reminds me of one of the first samples I made for Schiaparelli," he exclaims. "It was just a chestnut, a nut in diamanté, with a green chenille velvet thread, and it was on a jacket with a tuxedo tail - c'etait très mignon [it was very sweet]." I silently offer up thanks to the fates and to eBay.
We follow Lesage into his office. What, I ask, are all the photographs and notes pinned up on every inch of the wall? "Bof," he shrugs. "The gatherings of the job, the work, the past, the love, the pain..." (He is a lyrical soul. "I used to be a good writer," he claims.) He gestures towards the pictures. "I live in this house here, where I was born - I sleep in the bed I was born - it's between Ville d'Avray, where Corot was painting, and Chaville. This one is in Russia; this is my dog in Corsica; this is India; my son; Karl; a nice photo with Yves Saint Laurent; the minister of culture; Ralph Lauren; letters from my godson, Christian Lacroix?"
It is impossible to forget just how much of the history of haute couture and fashion François Lesage has seen since being "born in this mountain of beads and paillettes" in 1929. As a child, when his mother was working as an assistant to Madame Vionnet, he recalls the great couturier sending seasonal gifts to the house. "Every Christmas she was sending a chauffeur, in a fabulous Voisin car - that was the time when you could buy cars like you buy couture; you could go in and say, I want that shape - bringing a gift to my sister: a complete garment for her doll, a big celluloid baby, made in the atelier of Vionnet. Happily I found them in the cellar of my house, and the museum wanted to borrow them for the [Vionnet] exhibition [at Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris]."
For an overview of the progression of the 20th century's styles, Lesage's memory is unbeatable, as is his archive of 40,000 embroidery samples, which sit in the countless cardboard boxes that line one of the atelier's smallest rooms, ready to be rifled through by lucky designers seeking inspiration. In one of the rooms, several embroidery frames are set up, with patterns attached, lace or tulle stretched across, beads sitting ready for threading. Each frame has a piece of tracing paper, studded with holes, through which the embroidery patterns are transferred to the fabric using a fine powder in a technique called "pouncing" - very similar, in fact, to the technique used to transfer images onto plaster in fresco painting. Each piece is embroidered, according to the key prepared by one of the sketchers downstairs (each time a couture dress is made the embroidery is reconfigured to fit the measurements of the customer) and then sent back to the fashion house to be constructed into the final garment.
I spot a beautiful piece of work that looks like it could have come straight from an early Sixties evening dress: turquoise beads bordered with gold ones. Sure enough, next to it is a delicate old piece from the archive, almost identical but for the slightly darker turquoise and the smaller gold beads. Surely that's cheating? Well, no. While for Barrell, his assistant, the search for something new and innovative is the driving force, for Lesage himself there is no shame in recycling ideas.
"I had the chance to know Monsieur Givenchy at Schiaparelli; I knew Karl at Patou, and later Chanel. Christian Lacroix is my godson. I had the chance to be at the birth of couture with talent like Pierre Cardin. It's something very funny: when you look in our archives, when you look at the samples made for Madame Vionnet after 1929, you see that Schiaparelli's there. When you look at Schiaparelli in 1952, you see that Dior is there. If Monsieur Saint Laurent had not done the famous Mondrian dress, Monsieur Courrèges would not have been there. It's funny the influence in the others."
That old question that returns again and again - does couture have a future - seems to bother Lesage not one bit. It is simply, he says, that fashion has changed. "Journalists have made a kind of Olympic games of fashion, with gold, bronze and silver. The difficulty is, ladies open the magazines and they see what will be in the shop in three months, but by then they have the impression that it's old. That's the reason that a smart house like - oh, what's the name? I start with Schiaparelli and finish with Alzheimer's, bon! - Zara. Every month Zara brings something new and they just chase. It's the reason that haute couture, now, is a conservatory of elegance and everything we would not be able to do in ready-to-wear.
"In real money, in 1952, in Dior the first price in haute couture was 1,000 euros. Now, try to find even in a pret-a-porter de luxe at 1,000 euros. I remember Karl one day saying, 'But why don't the wives of the doctors and the wives of the lawyers buy dresses in haute couture?' Mais, the prices are completely different." As Lesage walks us out of his office we pass an ornately embroidered jacket in a glass case. It's by Yves Saint Laurent. "I bought two Yves Saint Laurent jackets at the auction," he says. "Eighty per cent of Yves Saint Laurent is Lesage, 100 per cent of Vionnet was Lesage, 100 per cent of Schiaparelli was Lesage. I love to see in another house something that I would have loved to do. But it's rare."