SKY BLUE Review Massimiliano Mocchia di Coggiola 2022
Massimiliano Mocchia di Coggiola
There are places one goes to be seen, others one goes to hide. One pays (sometimes dearly!) to hide, but it is evident that the most luxurious places are those designed to expose us. Since the end of the Ancien Régime, the theater has ceased to be a social gathering place, a showcase: today, one goes there to watch a show, which is often quite bothersome. I am even told that most aficionados of the Deauville races go there to bet – really. So, if we exclude the Debutante’s Ball, we are left with the restaurant, a valid stage for staging our boredom – and sometimes our company. Slavik was probably not the first to understand this, but he was certainly the first in the modern era to make it a modus operandi. And to conceive a restaurant decor as one would imagine 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, claiming that the best books are those with a yellowish cover. Slavik was therefore much more than a decorator: his restaurants, his pubs, his drugstores, and his boutiques aimed to spark the client’s wonder, to stimulate their sense of beauty, and to titillate their snobbery too. A creator of microcosms for bon vivants, he said, speaking of himself and his team:
“We are not decorators: we are boulevard theater people. We want something to happen.” This was in the 1970s-80s, the peak of his glory, rewarded with the 1987 Creation Trophy for the most beautiful contemporary restaurant for the decor of the 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 the revival was in vogue; the trend in the fashion world, very strong in Paris, was to reclaim an Art Deco and Art Nouveau aesthetic. But let’s be honest: Slavik did not caress trends, he dictated them. We only need to look at a portrait of the man, born Wiatscheslav Vassiliev on January 6, 1920, in Tallinn (to parents exiled from Saint Petersburg). From the 1950s, the era of his first successes as an interior and object designer, we see the image of a well-built, very tall man, with short hair, bearded, with blue eyes and an aristocratic demeanor, sporting a three-piece English suit, white shirt, dark tie, and a boutonnière. Nothing like the style of his contemporaries. This was the time of the first Publicis drugstore on the Champs-Elysées, which earned him his eternal prestige. Let’s add that he had been a student and collaborator of the publicist Cassandre, a promising path.
His dandy-like English sartorial taste is reflected in his early works of the 1960s: the Lanvin 2 boutique transported clients from Rue Cambon to London, amidst oversized chandeliers and dozens of trunk-wardrobes, displaying ties and other house products like the immense cabin of an early 20th-century ocean liner. This English flirtation found its peak in the Winston Churchill pub (partially still in place), an inspired blend of wood paneling and exotic skins with colonial accents. Slavik had thought of everything: small numbered lockers allowed the most loyal customers to keep their already opened bottle of whisky.
Some of his creations have disappeared today. But what remains is now part of the legend of the City of Light. Some of his restaurants have become timeless: Le Dôme and its Poissonnerie, L’Européen, L’Entracte, Le Zeyer, Le Victoria Station (where the food is quite bad, 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 are already part of the history of Parisian nightlife? A feat that is not only due to the designer’s obsessive attention to detail: Slavik was a baroque stage director, but also profoundly democratic because every client, once seated in one of his settings, had to feel like they were at the center of the stage and on a pedestal. The blend of traditional decor and whimsical inventions is perfect, finding its balance in new volumes and objects of ancient appearance, adapted to new requirements. The curved banquettes (one of his inventions) create a convivial atmosphere and allow Parisian snobbery to be exercised more easily. The mirrors, omnipresent in his creations, are as large and generous as his tables: they are very often found on the ceiling, as if Slavik enjoyed placing us in the decor of a 1900 brothel. In fact, his love for the Belle Époque is tangible in his interventions at Bouillon Chartier Montparnasse, at the much-missed Relais de Suède, but also in the decor of L’Assiette au Boeuf (now gone), where he enjoyed designing chandeliers, glass roofs, 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 or the millionaires,” he asserted. Slavik was part of that blessed race, described by Oscar Wilde, of those who know how to see beauty in everything and ignore ugliness. In his maturity, he claimed to care little for his appearance and began to declare in his interviews that he could dress more than adequately for less than 150 francs. His wardrobe was indeed a mix of famous brands and second-hand 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 winter and summer like an (urban) explorer, wearing jackets studded with patch pockets, Missoni sweaters, sporting spectator shoes without socks, Scottish ghillies, or shoes specially created for him by Olga Berluti. His “tsar and Cossack” side (as Jean Feldman called it) was not diminished by this.
Despite the gradual simplification of his wardrobe, Slavik allowed himself to be courted by the fashion world for a short period, and posed for a Helmut Newton photoshoot, dressed by Lagerfeld. Who says fashion says vanity, and when one thinks of Narcissus, one comes to reflections, a leitmotif of the disco years: Slavik launched bronzed aluminum, more discreet than a mirror, a warm and reflective surface “where all women are beautiful” (sic). He made it a battle horse, notably at Bistrot 121, a modernist response to critics who considered him old-fashioned. He adapted this flattering surface for the Ted Lapidus boutique (opened in 1961 and now gone, like any principle of beauty in the Lapidus catalog), entirely covered in polished brass, with a spiral staircase whose railing was enhanced with burr walnut veneer. A blossoming of mirrors occurred in 1969 when he took charge of the decoration of the Club House, the Rochefort golf course: like the corridor of a Florentine house, the club’s shimmering lockers are framed by small arched colonnades, following the round design of the private mansion. Golf men, as we know, enjoy looking at “who is there” as much as reassuring themselves in 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.
