Business of Fashion has called him the PR prince of Paris. Lucien Pagès would rather say he was lucky. There is no royal blood in Lucien Pagès’s story, and nothing that smoothed his way to the top. He grew up in his parents’ hotel-restaurant in the Cévennes, in a village of 300 people, and he never imagined himself in PR until someone else saw it in him. From there he built his own agency, starting in an 80-square-metre office. Yet he is always quick to credit the people he met along the way. “Everything that has happened to me was destiny,” he says. “You can work as hard as you want; if you don’t meet the right people at the right moment, it doesn’t happen. So when I say I was lucky, it’s not to reduce everything to chance. It’s to celebrate the chances life gives you, and to stay humble about them.”
Today brands are eager to be represented by him, and some of the great success stories of the past two decades carry the signature of his storytelling (Jacquemus, Schiaparelli, Sacai and JW Anderson, just to name a few). With offices in Paris, New York and London, his agency now works with more than 150 clients across fashion, beauty, lifestyle, art and design.
That humility may be his real talent. It is the same one he recognizes in his father, a Michelin-starred chef who could persuade a president to fly to the mountains for lunch. In this conversation, he reflects on the loneliness of running a business and on designers’ fragile relationship with criticism. He talks about the lost naivety of nineties fashion, and about why, in an age of constant visibility, a brand can still choose silence, as long as it is very, very good.
MS: You grew up in a hotel-restaurant run by your parents, and you saw many important guests come and go. What did that teach you about people and about business that you still use in your work today?
LP: It’s something I only understood later. I grew up in a hotel; my father was a Michelin-starred chef, and I realised he was also an excellent PR. We were in a very remote place, so why did people come? Because he knew how to seduce them. President Mitterrand once flew by military helicopter from the 8th of May parade on the Champs-Élysées to the Cévennes, three or four hours away, just to have lunch at my dad’s restaurant. His role as a chef overshadowed that talent. We never had a house: we lived in the hotel, among strangers. Coming home from school, I’d pass people I didn’t know in the corridors. That forces you to be open to others. It also taught me about service. My parents served people, and I serve my clients and the press. Not in a servile way, but in the sense of making people happy and proud. I was lucky. If I had only been from the village, up in the mountains with 300 inhabitants, I wouldn’t have had that open door to the world. It’s what gave me the courage to come to Paris.
MS: Let’s talk about your arrival in Paris. You said you wanted to be like Yves Saint Laurent.
LP: Yes, because I loved him. I used to see him on TV, and for me he was the ultimate couturier. I wanted to work in fashion, and if you wanted to work in fashion, you wanted to work for him.
MS: You also presented your ‘Disco’ collection to the maison, and it was something of a rejection.
LP: It was a school project, and it was not their taste at all (laughs). Madame Muñoz told me it was everything they hated. And she was right: I loved Yves Saint Laurent, and I showed up with disco references mixed with Missoni prints. I had even drawn all the little lozenges myself! Maybe I was already a provocateur, or just disconnected, but you can’t say your dream is Saint Laurent and then bring something so far from the codes of the maison. I think they gave me the appointment very quickly, and I just took what I had. At the time I still wanted to be a designer. I was doing internships in the studios, with Gianfranco Ferré at Dior and at Saint Laurent, depending on the season. But that day taught me that you learn from your mistakes. And I was lucky: they kept me anyway. Madame Muñoz told me, “You can stay, because you are discreet.”
MS: I read that Vincent Darré was the first person to tell you that you should go into PR.
LP: He put a light on me. I had never thought I could be one. The PRs I saw at Saint Laurent or Dior were chic ladies. At that time PRs came from very good families, bourgeois or aristocratic, so I couldn’t project myself into that role. He just observed me and thought I could be a good PR. He switched that light on in me, and I said: why not? It has always happened like that in my life. Sometimes people see things in you that you don’t see yourself.
MS: When you meet a young designer or a brand, what is the spark that makes you decide to represent them?
LP: I need to feel that I can tell their story. Sometimes I meet brands that perform very well, but I can’t tell their story: I don’t understand it, or I don’t find it interesting enough. That’s not a judgement. I just don’t see how I can be the medium for it. Everyone has a story to tell, but some stories look like something we’ve already seen 10,000 times, and that doesn’t interest me. I’m quite pure about this. Even though I run a business, I try to stay pure in my decisions.
MS: This one is a bit tough. Designers are said to be sensitive to criticism. How do they react to a negative review, and how do you manage that moment between the brand and the press?
LP: Everyone is sensitive to criticism. Put yourself in their place: designers work so hard on a collection, with pressure from management to hit the numbers, to sell, to be creative and innovative, to charm the press. So when criticism comes, they suffer, because they put so much of themselves into it. And it is getting harder to handle, because criticism now comes from everywhere - Instagram commenters, people who weren’t even at the show. Before, criticism came from people who were invited, experienced, entitled to judge. All we can do is live with criticism, embrace it, take what is constructive and protect ourselves from what isn’t. I can only help them do that, but it’s complex. Sometimes they ask: “Can you do something?” But calling a journalist to complain about a review usually makes things worse. You can only do it if the review is totally unfair or factually wrong, or if it’s a personal attack. As for opinions about the collection, there’s nothing to do. It’s a bit unfair, but the world is like that now. People love to criticize. Fashion is like an arena, and people want a show.
MS: You’ve spoken about the loneliness of being an entrepreneur.
LP: The loneliness comes from making so many decisions on your own, and from not being able to complain, because you need everyone to be happy working with you. You carry a lot yourself. Sometimes you shield the team: you don’t share bad news straight away, you keep it to yourself. And you have to keep the business financially stable, pay every salary and the rent, and still make decisions with a long-term vision. We’ve moved three times. The first office was tiny, just 80 square metres. Then 100, then 200. When that became too small, we moved here, to 800 square metres. Going from 200 to 800 was a huge investment, and we made it in July 2019. Then Covid hit, right after. It had been a big leap for me, because I needed more clients to pay for all of it. At 200 square metres the rent was very low; suddenly it was high. And then Covid. That’s when you feel lonely.
MS: You said that Margiela and Kawakubo were masters of communicating through absence. Could that still happen today? Would you ever suggest it to a brand?
LP: Yes. If a designer told me, “I’m very shy,” I’d say: okay, let’s build the communication around that, around shyness and mystery. Why not? But you have to be very good, because the product has to speak for itself. Today I’d point to Phoebe Philo, who is doing a fantastic job on her own terms. It was brave to launch her own brand without being out there: no shows, very few interviews. So yes, you can still stay anonymous as a designer today, but you have to be extremely good.
MS: What do you miss about the fashion of the past?
LP: I miss the naivety, the freshness. When I started in the nineties, we were naive, because fashion wasn’t an industry yet. People earned money, of course, but reasonable money. When I watch old fashion shows - and I’m obsessed with them - it’s not because I prefer the past. It’s because everything felt so real, so spontaneous. Now everything is so controlled. Can you imagine a designer creating to suit KPIs? Numbers of sales, numbers of reach, numbers, numbers. I like numbers, I like to perform, and I love it when we do an event and get one, two, three million views. But it has changed the landscape. So the past of fashion is a kind of lost paradise for me. I wouldn’t go back, but I feel I have to stay connected to the past to remind myself why I love fashion so much, because every day can give me reasons to hate it.
MS: And what still excites your imagination today?
LP: New designers with vision. Every year I find someone with a new vision doing great work. And I’m excited to see whether the young will change the world. We worked on the CFDA’s Americans in Paris showroom, and all the designers there were very conscious about recycling and natural fabrics. It was really interesting. If those designers succeed, will that bring change? Can fashion finally align with better behavior - producing less, for example? I’m curious to see if the young will do that. I don’t think the old can. My generation comes from a very compromised world. I’m curious to see if the young will manage to change that.
MS: What would you say to a young person like you, from a small town or another country, who dreams of Paris?
LP: Today there are so many tools I didn’t have - almost too many. The problem is that when everything is there, you don’t dig. My generation was forced to dig, to buy magazines - and even magazines weren’t accessible. I had to ask someone to bring me magazines from the city. And for a young boy, asking for women’s magazines from the city… why? So I took whatever was around me. Having everything available is a blessing and a curse: it also makes you lazier. I’ve learned so much, because a designer’s inspiration always comes from many places. With every collection we did with Jonathan Anderson, we discovered new artists. I always say I learned Proust through Yves Saint Laurent. Fashion is a vehicle for culture, and a pleasant one, because everything looks glamorous and fun. Then, if you go further, you discover what’s behind it.