Les Filles en Fleur
Alexandra Cronan
London-born, Vogue-trained, vintage-obsessed. A stylist who can make decadence look like an accident, and who built her own labels twice.
I came up in this world, the magazine cupboards, the borrowed samples, the vintage habit that is really an addiction. So I recognize Alexandra Cronan on sight. She is London-born and Vogue-trained, the kind of stylist who can make a forty-year-old dress look like the only thing worth wearing and decadence look like something that just happened. A fashion insider in the truest sense, who learned the craft from the inside and then went and built her own thing. Twice.
Intern to Vogue
Her path is the classic one, done properly. She interned at Vogue and Teen Vogue while still a student, with early stints at Gucci and Nicole Farhi, then assisted Phyllis Posnick, one of American Vogue's most respected editors, producing shoots and working on set. She passed through American Vogue twice, as an intern and as a fashion market coordinator, and freelanced between London and New York. That is where the eye gets trained, not in theory but in cupboards and on sets.
The Seventies and Nineties Dream
Her own aesthetic is eclectic and unmistakably vintage. She cites the free-spirited glamour of the seventies, Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall, set against the gritty chic of nineties Kate Moss, and mixes archival finds with contemporary designer pieces. The love of vintage is not professional posturing, it is personal. She still tells the story of a perfect find at Ritual Vintage that she could not leave behind, rescued by that dangerous American invention, layaway.
Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall combined with Kate Moss in the nineties? That is the dream.Alexandra Cronan
Les Filles en Fleur
In 2011 she co-founded Les Filles en Fleur with the designer Alessandra Mariotti, who had trained in Florence and in the studios of Christopher Kane, Nicole Farhi, Pauric Sweeney, and Jil Sander. The label began almost by accident, when the young actress Gabriella Wilde, a friend, asked Cronan to dress her for a first red-carpet premiere. Cronan called Mariotti, the dress got made, the requests started, and a company followed. Their idea was to revive the old Parisian couturier philosophy of made-to-measure for their own generation, each dress by hand, the client folded into the whole process, a cup of tea in a relaxed London atelier. They presented at London Fashion Week to a room that included ELLE's Kate Lamphear and buyers from Opening Ceremony, with moody, cinematic imagery shot by Pedro Koechlin. The ethos was the best part: where the old meets the new, and the doomed romantic has swagger.
That tension, between decadence and nonchalance, is what makes fashion exciting.Alexandra Cronan
Studio &, and After
Les Filles en Fleur was short-lived, 2011 into 2012, but it proved she could build a brand and not only style one. She went on to co-found Studio & with the stylist Kate Foley, a creative-direction and image consultancy that shapes visual identities for brands and talent, dressing the likes of Adwoa Aboah, Alexa Demie, and Mette Towley. Today she is a working fashion editor and stylist whose name still turns up on shoots, covers, and campaigns, in Cultured and in Vogue. The throughline never changed. Vintage as a worldview, decadence with nonchalance, the doomed romantic who somehow has swagger.
From the Les Filles en Fleur Interview
With co-founders Alexandra Cronan and Alessandra Mariotti
Greatest inspirations or influences?
Our love of beautiful, timeless vintage clothing, our friends, and each other.
Fashion icons, in your opinion?
Erin Wasson's fresh bohemian style. The timelessness of Jane Birkin and Francoise Hardy. The cheekiness of the Australian Alexandra Spencer. The incredible beauty of Charlotte Kemp Muhl. They all have no fear when it comes to dressing and expressing themselves.
Who do you have in mind when you create?
Us, and our beautifully inspiring friends and family. Because each piece is bespoke, we do not really have a collection as such, though in a year or so we hope to launch a small edit of our favourite pieces.
Favorite sites, blogs, or publications?
Garance Dore, 4th and Bleeker, Jak and Jil, and Purple Diary.
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