Ref: Le Canard Enchaîné, December 2021
A book to resurrect a body of work. That of the decorator and designer Slavik, the darling of the 60s, revealed by the Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées, but also the creator of numerous objects symbolizing the modernity of the post-war boom.
Wiatscheslav Vassilieff, born in 1920 in Tallinn (Estonia) and who quickly emigrated to France, trained at the Arts-Déco before designing window displays for Galeries Lafayette, creating tapestries for the Gobelins manufactory, or theater sets with a surrealist flair.
Fame arrived with the Drugstores, commissioned by the head of Publicis, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, who wanted a symbol of the wind of renewal blowing from across the Atlantic. The venue quickly became the meeting place for the trendy youth, the “mods” mocked by Jacques Dutronc. Building on this success, Slavik, who died in 2014, would decorate hundreds of restaurants around the world. Most often in a revisited Belle Epoque style: varnished wood curves, glittering copper and chrome, and mirrors galore.
A style in contrast to his early career as a designer adept at a functional and stripped-back Bauhaus aesthetic. As head of the industrial design department at Publicis, he had then produced numerous everyday objects: a futuristic television set, a portable plastic radio (a material that was revolutionary at the time), an egg-shaped record player, and a white touch-tone telephone with soft curves, prefiguring the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He also designed modernist service stations for Shell and a pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
It is the merit of this “coffee-table book” — very well illustrated — to bring back to life these gleaming restaurant dining rooms, of which very few have survived, and these objects that are now scattered.
