Ref: article by Anna Topaloff, L’Observateur, February 2022
“Enough with right angles!” the decorator Wiatscheslav Vassiliev, known as Slavik, used to repeat. A heartfelt cry that would become the visual signature of this design pioneer, born in Tallinn in 1920, whose fascination with “the sensuality of the curve” would stand as the symbol of a certain Parisian spirit.
The Drugstore des Champs-Elysées, inaugurated in 1958, the restaurant Jules Verne, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, L’Assiette au boeuf, the Brasserie Lutetia, Le Zeyer, l’Européen, le Dôme… Two hundred establishments in the capital bore—and sometimes still bear today—the stamp of this very particular aesthetic, which reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s.
To the “Slavikian” curves—bars that snake, staircases that ripple…—is added an unabashed use of stained cedar wood, brass, stainless steel, leather.
This unique atmosphere—somewhere between an English pub, a Viennese brasserie and an American diner, and yet madly Parisian—extends to the smallest details: in the all-rounded seats, the plush carpets, the lamps inspired by gaming rooms or car headlights—as with the Renault pub created in 1963—the ashtrays…
A “total design” that lays the foundations of a profession not yet called art director. And that shapes an entire sensory universe. Thus, the beautiful book devoted to Slavik’s work is brimming with glacé chestnut-brown colour images from which, if you lean in a little, a scent of eau de Cologne, whisky and dark tobacco seems to rise.
Slavik, the Drugstore years, Norma Editions, €55
