Sonia Rykiel, the French fashion designer known as the Queen of Knitwear, died on Thursday at the age of 86 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
“My mother died at 5:00 this morning at her home in Paris from the effects of Parkinson’s,” her daughter Nathalie Rykiel says.
Rykiel, the eldest of five daughters of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, was a fixture in the industry for half a century, launching her own fashion house in 1968 buoyed by the Swinging Sixties craze in London and the emerging feminist movement. Her easy-to-wear “chic,” iconic stripes and bright colors quickly came to typify a new generation of liberated women.
French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel posing for photographs in Paris, on the eve of the start of an exhibition of 200 of her drawings, June 3, 2010. (AFP PHOTO/FRANCOIS GUILLOT)
“She invented not just a style but an attitude, a way of living and being, and offered a freedom of movement,” President Francois Hollande says in a tribute.
She had made her breakthrough in 1962 with the so-called Poor Boy Sweater, a garment designed for women that had long sleeves and a shorter, fitted shape. Over the decades, she branched out into other branches of fashion, but always remained true to knitwear, with fluid, innovative shapes.
— AFP
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