Ref: Le Causeur, article by Julien San Frax – April 29, 2022
By imagining the world of drugstores and dozens of Parisian brasseries and restaurants, Slavik created the settings that housed one of the most brilliant chapters in the capital’s history: life in the 1960s–1980s.
A jack-of-all-trades, Slavik (1920–2014)? Wiatscheslav Vassiliev, his real name, certainly hit Paris full force. Subtitled “the Drugstore Years,” a handsome book finally pays tribute to this great forgotten figure in the history of design. Disappearing behind the brands of his patrons, Slavik never became an icon like Claude Parent, Jean Prouvé, or Charlotte Perriand. And yet thanks to him, the capital, back when it was still a moveable feast, was enriched with countless “living spaces,” most of them now vanished, that marked the last third of the twentieth century. The inventory of his creations is staggering, equal to the nostalgia it inspires.
Born in Tallinn, Estonia, to a father who was a former officer of the tsar and a White Russian mother who fled Petrograd—the former Saint Petersburg turned Bolshevik—the child arrived with his mother in Paris at the age of 8. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Estonia: Slavik became stateless and would wait until 1956 to be naturalized French.
He designed furniture, bottles, radios, a Shell station, and even a record player shaped like a fried egg! Then the invention of the drugstore came along and turned his life upside down
The man who called himself that from adolescence onward was nonetheless, on our soil, an extraordinarily precocious creator. In the middle of the war, Arts-Déco diploma in hand, he sat the entrance exam for Idhec, set design section. Slavik could do anything. The Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier entrusted him with the scenography of a Jupiter that has since fallen into oblivion, and choreographer Serge Lifar hired him for several of his creations at the Paris Opera—sets and costumes. Working alongside Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, alias Cassandre, he became an advertising man. Yet Slavik thought of himself as a painter: signing gouache seascapes distracted him from the hardships of the Occupation. He also decorated folding screens, inspired by Dalí, Chirico and Magritte. Even more astonishing are his tapestry cartoons: commissions made just after the war under the patronage of Jean Lurçat, by the Aubusson and Gobelins manufactories when he was barely 24 years old. The book reproduces several in double-page spreads: one is titled “Paris ma fête.” Spotted by milliner Claude Saint-Cyr, hatter to crowned heads, he designed overcoats. Identified as a decorator, he went on to create costumes and sets for ballets at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, under the auspices of Roland Petit. His career was launched: hired by Galeries Lafayette, he would design their window displays until 1954. That year was a turning point. Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet appointed Slavik
“head of the industrial aesthetics department” and artistic adviser to the Publicis agency. He designed storage furniture, bottles, radios, a Shell station, and even… a record player shaped like a fried egg!
Then the brilliant invention of the drugstore came along and turned his life upside down. In 1958, Bleustein-Blanchet bought the Astoria, an old-fashioned hotel perched at the top of the Champs-Élysées. He decided to tear it all down and handed the project to Slavik. “Among those who, by the thousands, enter this Drugstore, who even knows the name Slavik? Not many. […] He’s the one who, down to the smallest details, conceived everything, he’s the one who distributed the spaces, designed the furniture, arranged the circulation, which constantly holds surprises, because as in a conversation one can jump from one thing to another,” say the book’s authors.
The thunderous success was not merely commercial: the Drugstore, an upscale meeting place, became a pickup spot where pretty boys showed off. In 1963, still on the “Champs,” Slavik designed the Pub Renault, a hymn to the automobile: tufted banquettes, grilles, and waitresses you hailed… with a honk of the horn! Riding this wave, the Drugstore Publicis in Saint-Germain-des-Prés opened in 1965, across from the legendary Café de Flore. Again the Slavik touch, all curves and noble materials: Lebanese cedar, leathers, bronzes. A chic English side that stood out against the invasion of plastic. The building’s architect, Guillaume Gillet, Grand Prix de Rome, holds forth, fumes, loses his bearings before this flamboyant décor! No matter: open 7 days a week until 2 a.m., it housed a pharmacy, tobacconist, bookshop, perfumery, gift shop, cinema, picnic store—what more could the people want? Jacques Dutronc made it his haunt, Gainsbourg stocked up on Gitanes there, gay men on boys for sale… Worth noting that while the text of this Slavik opus lingers over the opening of the place, it says nothing of what made it, for a whole generation, the emblem of a joyful Paris. The tone of an era can be read in its signs: in 1995, the Drugstore gave way to an Armani boutique. Enough said.
The mature Slavik is inseparable from the capital’s emblem: the Eiffel Tower. In 1983 he turned Jules Verne, its Michelin-starred restaurant, into an alcove in shades of grey and black open to the city. Twelve years later, it was again to Slavik that the Elitair Maxim’s group entrusted the design, on the first floor of the Iron Lady, of another restaurant christened Altitude 95. So many trees hiding the forest: Paris has no idea that the tireless Estonian émigré designed more than 200 restaurant, bistro, and brasserie interiors. Not to mention the slew of boutiques on which Slavik left his signature. The list proves staggering: from Bistrot de Paris, rue de Lille (1965) to Berkeley, avenue Matignon (1970); from L’Assiette au bœuf (1974) to Petit Mâchon (1976) and Bistro 121 (1972) in the 15th arrondissement; from the brasserie at the Lute- tia (1979) to that of the Dôme (1980)—O Montparnasse! One could go on forever evoking the London Tavern (1968), the Winston Churchill (1965), the American Dream (1995) on rue Daunou… Addresses that make Paris not some banal world city but THE capital toward which the world aspires. Elegant and discreet, Slavik was its conduit.
