Monoprix, Clare Vivier Collab Brings L.A. to Paris
Clare Vivier is coming full circle for her 15th anniversary year, launching a collaboration that brings her Los Angeles-Francais style back to where it all began.
On Oct. 25, she will launch a collection with affordable French retail chain Monoprix. Comprised of clothing for women and children, accessories, homewares and tabletop, the range demonstrates how far the L.A. designer’s accessible fashion brand has come since it started 15 years ago with one simple tote, Le Tropézienne — and how much room it still has to grow.
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Vivier is also marking her 15th anniversary with a new Rizzoli book, “La Vie de Clare V.,” which will be feted on Sunday at Paris’ Ofr bookstore.
Clare V. x Monoprix will be available in France at Monoprix stores, and in the U.S. on the designer’s website and in her NoLIta, San Francisco and West Hollywood stores (the first time Monoprix has ever been sold in the U.S.). Prices range from about $6 for a pair of lip-print children’s socks to $60 for a checkerboard canvas tote to $80 for a green leopard spot khaki bomber.
It’s her first big push into the international market, and to celebrate, she’s opening a pop-up shop in the Marais in Paris on Monday. The boutique will carry Clare V. and Monoprix product, and be open through December.
“Maybe to some American designers, they wouldn’t be so excited about it, but Monoprix and what it means to the French public, I immediately responded, ‘oh my god, yes!'” Vivier said in an interview at her studio in L.A.’s Frogtown, explaining that the retailer reached out to her via DM on Instagram.
“When I moved to Paris when I was 24 years old, that’s when I discovered Monoprix. And to me it felt like a higher-end Target. Because I would go there all the time for beautiful lingerie. And that was a very big cultural difference. In the U.S., there is not a big emphasis on pretty lingerie and the matching set. It made me feel very much like a lady. And they’re very good quality, but stuff that I could actually afford. So of course, I’ve been going back ever since.”
“It was during a stay in Los Angeles that we fell in love with the brand Clare V. Her insolent French touch, tinged with American coolness literally got us on board. It was the ideal collab for us. This is a fresh and offbeat American vision of a French lifestyle with a humorous wink so close to the DNA of Monoprix,” said Cécile Coquelet, creative director of Monoprix.
In 15 years, Vivier has turned her love of French chic and American prep into a made-in-L.A. success story, creating a distinct and colorful, fun-loving brand of bags, small accessories, apparel and jewelry selling at Nordstrom, Anthropologie and Shopbop, as well as her 15 boutiques in the U.S.
“There’s the French language aspect, and then the French culture aspect in that there’s a real classic style to French people,” Vivier said of the genesis of her brand, recalling how she borrowed her French sister-in-law’s belt bag for a market outing 20 years ago, wore it with a shirtdress, and was later inspired to design Grande Fanny, one of her bestselling handbag styles.
Vivier is creative director, chief executive officer, and majority investor in her brand, which doesn’t have any private equity or venture capital money behind it, but does have Bedrock Apparel as its largest minority investor. She runs a profitable, debt-free business with more than 110 employees, and a 30 percent growth trajectory over the past three years.
Her fan base is so dedicated that the brand’s annual sample sale, held last weekend, drew 3,800 people who started lining up at The Row in downtown L.A. before 5 a.m. Described as the “Super Bowl” by fashionable attendees — and covered by The New York Times Style section — the two-day event has generated more than $1 million in sales.
“I’m very grateful. And I still love coming to work every day,” the designer said in her sunny showroom, filled with books on everyone from Ed Ruscha to Joan Miro, as well as her fall collection of red lip-print shirtdresses, chocolate-brown cotton fleece snap-front ruffle jackets, black suede-and-napa checkerboard clutches, and colorful T-shirts, sweatshirts and hats emblazoned with words and phrases such as “discotheque” and “liberez les sardines.”
Vivier’s obsession with bags started in childhood with her father’s Lands’ End briefcase. “It was a canvas briefcase that zipped all the way around and had his initials on it, my first monogram experience,” she says.
She grew up in a family of six kids in Minnesota; mom Patty Guerrero was a teacher, and dad Manuel Guerrero a lawyer who did pro bono work on behalf of Mexican American laborers in the Twin Cities, a cause that has inspired Vivier to make products that give profits to social justice causes such as Everytown for Gun Safety and The Center for Reproductive Rights.
She moved to Paris because she wanted to learn about fashion, and began working at a documentary film production company and waiting tables on the side. After marrying journalist Thierry Vivier, they relocated to L.A.
She brought her admiration of French chic with her, and launched a blog, where she would document her wardrobe, including thrift-store finds. When friends and coworkers admired a one-off “non-boring” commuter bag Vivier made for herself, she started to think bigger.
Her brand grew to include minimalist yet warm designs — flat leather pouches with bold-stripe details or animal patterns, fold-over clutches, totes and duffels that can be monogrammed, all priced less than $600. Then, two years ago, she launched apparel, followed by jewelry.
Color, typefaces and hand-painted signs have been design influences. For example, she was inspired to create a ribbon typeface in her jewelry collection after playing with pieces of torn ribbon and making them into letters.
It’s no wonder Rizzoli approached her about writing a book.
“It’s a fun way to mark this anniversary, and it was such an amazing exercise of going through all of our imagery for the past 15 years. What I discovered is there’s so much about this brand that is perfectly imperfect. There’s gorgeous materials and gorgeous design, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And there is a hand touched element to it,” she said.
The book’s forward was written by Christy Turlington, whom Vivier has partnered with in raising awareness and more than $250,000 for maternal health through nonprofit Every Mother Counts. And the afterward is by Jimmy Kimmel, who discovered the brand in 2010 and has made it his go-to for gifts and accessories, including the tongue-in-cheek “Airport Dad” Passport Case, which he and Vivier designed together.
In the book, the designer includes some of the mirror selfies she posted on her blog and Instagram account over the years, and one can see her clothing also turn up on models and friends in photo shoots, like a sisterhood of Clare’s closet.
“If we’re talking about the history of the brand, that’s really how I started — with a blog and the whole idea was documenting my life to try to get people to see behind the scenes of how a handbag company is being built. Now with Instagram and TikTok, everyone’s lives are completely exposed. But if you can think back to 2006 it wasn’t like that. But I was reading a daily blog about a young woman who lived in Paris, and I realized if I’m curious about her life, someone else is probably curious about my life. I live in Los Angeles. I have a young son, I’m married to a French person, I’m starting a company.”
Vivier still loves to play with fashion, including lots of vintage, clothing from other female-led brands such as Isabel Marant, Ulla Johnson and Rachel Comey, as well as a great pair of Celine or Chanel shoes, or even cowboy boots. “I don’t only wear Clare V. We want people to express themselves,” she said.
“We’ve experimented with some stylists in the past and it’s been fun and a luxury, but we realized that there’s kind of nothing better than just having the model wear our own clothes and it’s mostly my clothes. And what we’ve figured out is that way the brand feels much more personal, like an extension of the founder.”
The designer became a French citizen this year. “My husband and I bought a house in 2020 in his hometown, Saint-Calais. Now he’s an American and French citizen and I’m an American and French citizen,” she said.
Once the house is restored, the dream is to turn it into a showroom for the growing brand, and have a few rooms that would be available for guests to rent.
“I think we have so much room to grow. I would love to have Clare V. boutiques in all the great cities in this country and then around the world. I would love to get into furniture and home accessories.”
What keeps her going is creating. “I love being able to dream of something and see it into fruition. I love that it brings other people joy.…And I love being in fashion in Los Angeles, because we’re kind of outliers.”
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