Yves Vidal, Charles Sévigny and Knoll’s “New Look”

While the influence of Knoll, the New York-based furniture manufacturer, on postwar furniture design in France has been considered, a closer look at Knoll’s French subsidiary reveals surprising connections with and mutations within the world of French decoration. In the mid 1950s, the director of Knoll International France, Yves Vidal, and his partner, the interior decorator Charles Sévigny, began crafting a distinct look that moved Knoll away from the International Style towards much more complex images of luxury and pleasure. Whereas the first “Knoll look” was conceived to relate to the coolness, austerity, and efficiency of modern architecture, the “new look” brought a sensuous and sophisticated cachet to Knoll furniture in the 1960s and ‘70s. The re-conceptualization of Knoll’s image was the result of two decades of work. While Vidal is recognized as an incontournable figure within French design culture, Sévigny has received less attention. The direct heir to such influential American expatriate decorators as Elsie de Wolfe and Van Day Truex, Sévigny made significant contributions to the postwar definition of haute décoration française by combining historical styles and Knoll’s clean lines. In Sévigny’s hands, Knoll furniture brought a sophisticated modern touch to a highly personalized space; a Barcelona Chair complementing rather than competing with a Louis XV bergère, its formal homologue. These design strategies are no more present than in the couple’s two homes, a former mill on the Marne River and a castle in Tangier, which were regularly used for Knoll publicity campaigns. Diffused in fashion, decoration and lifestyle magazines as well as Knoll sales brochures, these scenes of afternoon lunches in the French countryside and exotic dinners in Morocco proved effective marketing devices. It was through this complex process, in which interior decoration and the decorator were central, that Knoll’s “new look” was created.status: accepte