You will have understood, Cléo de Mérode intrigues me...Muse of the belle époque, she is in the news for her supposed escapades with King Leopold II of Belgium whom she fascinates with her beauty. Cocteau wrote on this subject “this virgin who is not, this Pre-Raphaelite lady who walks with downcast eyes through the groups. […] Another ghost escorts him, a royal ghost with a beautiful fan of white beard. Cléo's profile is so graceful, so divine that caricaturists are overcome by it. I refer you to Margaux Vanwetswinkel 's article in Vanity Fair which depicts the rumors and scandals surrounding the beautiful Cléo.
Influenced by her mother who teaches her the art of knowing how to play on her capital of seduction and her image, Cléo seems to retain her share of freedom and seeks to fight against the label of demi-mondaine which will stick to her all her life , due to her media exposure (She is the first woman whose photographs will be broadcast on a global scale) and her singular, delicate and divergent beauty from the codes of the time. In 1949, she won a lawsuit against Simone de Beauvoir, who spoke of her as a “cocotte” in the “second sex”.
It therefore often comes back in the design of my collections and induces colors, graphics, sharp contrasts. We find it in the unique details of the Cléo blouse: the high ruffled collar which defies the severity of the cut with a discreet ruched around the neck, emphasizing the face, the rounded cuffs having the same ruched border and which can go down the hand to the base of the fingers or wear it like a musketeer, folded over the wrist.
