Early on weekday mornings, Louise Trotter begins the 20-minute cycle from her home on Paris’s Left Bank to Carven’s headquarters just off the Champs-Élysées. By now, she knows the commute by heart: In February of last year, Trotter took up the role of creative director at the 79-year-old maison, reawakening it from a five-year slumber, and a chauffeur—customary for an artistic director at the helm of a Parisian fashion house—simply doesn’t fly with her bluff Sunderland upbringing.
“As a designer, you have to remain part of society,” she explains. “How do you feel the world if you’re not in the middle of it?”
Cycling through the streets of the French capital lets her observe at close range the “busy women” who inspire her work—she’ll often count how many are wearing sneakers, or make a mental note of the bags they carry. It’s also an opportunity to road test her designs in the wild: On the day we meet, Trotter is wearing a long black dress from her fall 2024 collection, cut from a high-twist wool tailoring fabric imbued with a delicate sheen; on its B-side, you catch a glimpse of a bare back. Unlike her predecessors at Carven, Trotter isn’t interested in dressing an ingenue—she wants us to marvel at the beauty of clothes seemingly undone, as though their wearer is gradually undressing—even while on a bike, or riding the subway.
“We also make this dress in a slightly padded nylon, which is like [wearing] a duvet,” she says. “I’m going to keep that one for winter.” Behind her, the window of her office studio frames a view of the Eiffel Tower, backlit by spring sunshine, the gold tint of the lenses of her prescription Ray-Ban aviators matching the city’s afternoon glow. On her feet: the chisel-toe Vendôme mules, which double as house slippers.
It’s hard not to fangirl over Trotter. Now in her mid-50s, she inhabits the youthfulness of a Love Story–era Ali MacGraw in the way she rests her chestnut brown hair behind her shoulders, and she’s wearing barely any makeup, if at all. Trotter jokes that, according to the tenets of Parisian style, it’s incredibly gauche to look like you’ve tried too hard, but her nonchalance feels punk, not prescriptive, especially when she hugs you with the reassurance of
an older sister.
Now in her second season at Carven, she seems very much at home. During frequent visits to the maison’s archive, Trotter discovered a kindred spirit in the late Marie-Louise Carven, who launched her namesake label in 1945, lived to 105, flew planes in her downtime, and was still designing clothes in her 80s. “Madame Carven wanted women to live their best lives,” Trotter says. “She had a utopian view of life, and was really quite radical.”
Both Louise and Marie-Louise cut a petite figure, both of them practical women who have focused their work around a kind of deceptively simple construction. “The most fascinating part for me is often inside [the garment],” Trotter says of her own forensic gaze. “I like to look at how [Marie-Louise] built clothes, and the consideration of the interior more than the exterior, actually.”
An early adopter of the plastic zip, Marie-Louise used her talents to help women get dressed—and undressed—with ease. Her designs celebrated women’s curves—most notably with the push-up bra, which she patented in 1950—and while she was among the designers who pioneered ready-to-wear, her atelier was a place for playfulness too. Likewise, when you spend time with Trotter, you quickly realize she’s perennially teetering on the edge of rapturous laughter—and she loves that Marie-Louise referred to one of her designs as “the lucky dress.”
“She was a woman creating clothes for women,” Trotter says. “She wanted to inspire confidence in them. There was an amen for me in that.”
After stints at Gap and Calvin Klein in New York during the 2000s, Trotter spent nine years at the helm of Joseph, establishing a fuss-free uniform for working women informed by menswear. (The trousers she designed at Joseph still enjoy cult status. Modeled on workout pants, they preempted the rise of the clean-girl aesthetic.) In 2018 she moved to Paris to become the first female creative director at Lacoste, departing in 2023.
When preparing her first Carven collection, for spring 2024, Trotter gave herself a mantra. “It’s just a first chapter. Let’s not say too much. Let’s not try to overimpress.”
Her debut did impress, though: Trotter ushered in sheer calico pencil skirts, pressed silk shirts with padded collars, slouchy bustiers that conceal smart corsetry, and a relaxed-
fit black hourglass minidress—an homage to the padded-waist Esperanto suit that Marie-Louise showed in 1951—which Trotter repeated on the fall 2024 runway in terra-cotta. There was also a black tabard, which isn’t a million miles away from the first piece Trotter ever made: a tank top to wear to a Madonna concert with a rah-rah skirt. (Her grandmother donated her tablecloth for the occasion and showed a teenage Louise how to pin in the shoulder slope. “My imagination exploded,” she says.)
Trotter didn’t read her glowing show reviews—phone calls and messages from friends asking if they could wear the clothes was all the feedback she needed, with her 14-year-old daughter Coco, the eldest of her three children with husband Yuske Tanaka, first in line. “She’s my size, so we share everything. I brought one of our bags home the other day, and that was quickly on her arm,” Trotter says proudly.
Day to day, Trotter likens her job to a home renovation. “You start with the foundations, what you want to say: What’s the feeling? Most importantly: Who is the woman? What’s her silhouette? And then you slowly build.”
Her decision to shift the creative center of the brand back to Madame Carven’s original building has brought the analogy to life. Upon her arrival last February, Trotter oversaw a light restoration of the vaulted rooms that make up her creative studio. The ground floor boutique occupies the site of Marie-Louise Carven’s first store, and a neighboring apartment—untouched in decades—has become an atmospheric showroom, complete with trompe l’oeil marble paint effects. It’s here that her runway looks will be styled and fitted on to models.
We embark on a kind of sensory-laden house tour. “[The idea for] my padding comes from here,” she says, pressing her fingertips into the faded velour wall coverings. Sometimes, she’ll drape the stainless-steel kitchen table in a large tablecloth so that she and her team can dine together, and there are other trappings of domesticity that role-play the intimacy of family life: Trotter’s toiles hang in the closet, and the jewelry vitrines in the butter yellow bathroom look like vanities.
“I like clothes that feel like you are staying in bed,” she says, handing me a black cotton-satin coat off a rack, which I slip on with the ease of my morning dressing gown. As I hug myself, the curved shoulders take on the grandeur of an opera coat. “When I came here, I wanted the house to be a home, not just a maison,” she says. “I like things to be practical and useful and beautiful at the same time.”
In the ground floor boutique at Carven HQ, I pull on a pillowy silk T-shirt. The sales assistant suggests I team it with a pencil skirt, but I’m thinking about accessorizing with bare skin to give the impression that I’m swaddled in a marshmallow white comforter—and nothing else. It is, after all, just about long enough to pass as a dress. What would the Louises do? I tie a peplum belt around my hips, fastening the ribbons in a loose bow at my waist, my silhouette forming a cushioned hourglass. It is now evening in Paris. I snap a mirror selfie and begin drafting an email.
To: Louise Trotter.
Re: Lucky dress?