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.”
