Ref: article written by Massimiliano Mocchia di Coggiola, published in Dandy Magazine, March 2023
There are places one goes to be seen, and others where one goes to hide. We pay (sometimes dearly!) to hide, but clearly the most luxurious places are those made to put us on display. Since the end of the Ancien Régime, the theater has ceased to be a fashionable meeting place, a showcase: today we go there to watch a performance, which is often rather tiresome. I’m even told that most aficionados of the Deauville races go there to bet—really. So if we exclude the Debutantes’ Ball, we’re left with the restaurant, a valid theater for staging our boredom—and sometimes our company. Slavik was probably not the first to have understood this, but he was certainly in the modern era the first to make it a modus operandi. And to conceive a restaurant décor as one imagines a theater, where one would be both actor and spectator. We should stop telling ourselves that we don’t judge a book by its cover: this intellectualization of cuisine is very French, pretending that the best books are those sporting a yellowish cover. Slavik was therefore much more than a decorator: his restaurants, his pubs, his drugstores and his boutiques aimed to arouse the customer’s wonder, to stimulate their sense of beauty, to tickle their snobbery too. Creator of microcosms for bon vivants, he said of himself and his team:
“We are not decorators: we are boulevard theater people. We want something to happen.” That was in the 1970s-80s, the apex of his glory, rewarded by the 1987 Trophy for the Creation of the Most Beautiful Contemporary Restaurant for the décor of Jules Verne, a grandiose staging with Cubist accents on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. Strangely the most minimalist of his interiors!
It must be said that revival was in vogue; the trend in fashion circles, very strong in Paris, was toward reclaiming an Art Deco and Art Nouveau aesthetic. But let’s be honest: Slavik didn’t follow trends, he dictated trends. We need only look at some portrait of the man, born Wiatscheslav Vassiliev on January 6, 1920 in Tallinn (to parents exiled from Saint Petersburg). From the 1950s onward, the era of his first successes as an interior and decorative object designer, we find ourselves before the image of a well-built man, very tall, short-haired, bearded, blue-eyed with an aristocratic bearing, sporting an English three-piece suit, white shirt, dark tie and carnation in his buttonhole. Nothing like the style of his contemporaries. This was the era of the first Publicis drugstore on the Champs-Élysées, which would earn him his eternal prestige. Let’s add that he had been a student and collaborator of the poster artist Cassandre, a promising path. His sartorial taste for dandyism in the old English manner is found in his early work of the 1960s: the Lanvin 2 boutique transported customers from rue Cambon to London, among oversized chandeliers and dozens of trunk-wardrobes, displaying the house’s ties and other products like the immense cabin of an early-century ocean liner. This English flirtation found its apex in the Winston Churchill pub (still partially in place), an inspired blend of wood paneling and exotic skins with colonial accents. Slavik had thought of everything: small numbered compartments allowed the most loyal customers to store their already-opened bottle of whisky.
A portion of his creations has now disappeared. But what remains has become part of the legend of the City of Light. Some of his restaurants have become eternal: Le Dôme and its Poissonnerie, L’Européen, L’Entracte, Le Zeyer, Le Victoria Station (where one eats quite badly, I grant you, but the unchanged atmosphere is worth the visit)… Isn’t it extraordinary that some of these places are less than forty years old and yet already part of the History of Parisian nightlife? A feat that doesn’t rest solely on the designer’s obsessive attention to detail: Slavik was a baroque director, but also profoundly democratic because every customer, once seated in one of his settings, had to feel at the center of the stage and on a pedestal. The blend of traditional décor and whimsical inventions is perfect, finding its balance in new volumes and objects of antique appearance, adapted to new demands. The curved banquettes (one of his inventions) make the atmosphere convivial and allow the endearing Parisian snobbery to exercise itself more easily. The mirrors, omnipresent in his creations, are as wide and generous as his tables: they’re very often found on the ceiling, as if Slavik amused himself by placing us in the décor of a 1900s brothel. In fact, his love for the Belle Époque is tangible in his interventions at Bouillon Chartier Montparnasse, at Relais de Suède (much missed), but also in the décor of L’Assiette au Boeuf (now gone), where he amused himself drawing chandeliers, glass canopies and wood paneling in the most exquisite Liberty style. “I wanted to create nostalgia, comfort and bourgeois happiness. I didn’t do it for the yé-yé crowd or the millionaires,” he affirmed. Slavik belonged to that blessed race, described by Oscar Wilde, of those who know how to see beauty in all things, and ignore ugliness. In his maturity he claimed to no longer care much about his appearance and took to declaring in his interviews that he could dress more than respectably for less than 150 francs. His wardrobe is in fact a mix of famous brands and secondhand clothes, the latter containing some marvels, silent witnesses to their owner’s exquisite taste. Forgetting Savile Row suits, he fell in love with the Abercrombie & Fitch safari jacket (and its imitations) and dressed himself summer and winter like an (urban) explorer, wearing jackets studded with patch pockets, Missoni sweaters, sporting spectator shoes without socks, Scottish ghillies or shoes created especially for him by Olga Berluti. His “tsar and Cossack” side (as Jean Feldman called him) was not diminished for all that.
Despite the progressive simplification of his wardrobe, Slavik let himself be courted by the fashion world for a short period, and posed for a Helmut Newton photoshoot dressed by Lagerfeld. Fashion means vanity, and when one thinks of Narcissus one comes to reflections, leitmotif of the disco years: Slavik launched bronzed aluminum, more discreet than mirror, a warm and reflective surface “where all women are pretty” (sic). He made it a battle horse, notably at Bistrot 121, a modernist response to critics who wanted him a passéist. He declined this flattering surface for the Ted Lapidus boutique (opened in 1961 and now gone, like every principle of beauty in the Lapidus catalogue), entirely covered in polished brass, with a spiral staircase whose railing was enhanced with burr walnut veneer. A flowering of mirrors took place in 1969 when he took charge of decorating the Club House, the Rochefort golf club: like the corridor of a Florentine mansion, the club’s mirrored lockers are framed by small colonnades in arches, following the round design of the private mansion. Golf men, as we know, like to look at “who’s there” as much as to reassure themselves before a mirror of their real presence in such an exclusive place.
Times have changed. Fashion, in restaurants, is no longer about luxury, excess, or mirrored ceilings. We believe in simple, minimalist, austere decors, and we are told that the best food is found on a white (and square) plate, rather than in a setting of polished brass, velvet, and wood paneling. The new snobs find beautiful interiors suspicious. The sets have been removed from the opera stage since people no longer go there to see who is there. Do singers sing better once stripped of ornamentation? Our era seems to have forgotten the meaning of traveling while seated, and even of being surprised by a beautiful setting. Our contemporaries seem to only appreciate beauty if it is museified, “ancient,” as if this artifice gives it an excuse to exist. Slavik left us in 2014, leaving Paris a legacy of luxury, calm, and voluptuousness. He proved to be the most French of Russians, and the most Parisian of foreigners. The type of beauty he was able to create was and remains, however, contemporary: one more proof, if one were needed, of a timeless genius and art that should earn him a place in a museum.
Norma Editions published Slavik, les années drugstore in 2021. A wonderful opportunity to (re)discover his creations in a beautiful book that probably constitutes his catalogue raisonné, but also an infinite act of love from his partner, Géraldine Cerf de Dudzeele, whom I wish to warmly thank here for the time she granted me, and for the beautiful photos that adorn this article.
