Fashion finds firm footing in Marseille

Would a luxury brand have paraded down a catwalk in Marseille 10 years ago? Chanel, which held its “cruise” show on the roof of the Cité Radieuse on May 2, would probably not have targeted the city, as it lacked the fashion realm that exists today. “For some years now, the city has been perceived as a fertile creative ground,” said Mélanie Gomis, founder of the ready-to-wear brand Gomis, which also offers a small bespoke range, made entirely in Marseille, using Italian fabrics. “In 2019, I was looking to settle down and chose Marseille, because I felt something was happening, like in Berlin in the 1990s.”

“There’s been a creative buzz since the city was designated European Capital of Culture in 2013,” said Alix de Moussac, a Paris-born entrepreneur who moved to Marseille in 2014 to found La Nouvelle, a “comfortable and sexy” lingerie brand. “Jacquemus has also helped change Marseille’s image,” said the entrepreneur. The Provençal designer with a dazzling international career presented his “Les Santons de Provence” collection in 2017 in Marseille, followed by the publication of a book with the evocative title, Marseille Je t’Aime. In 2018, Christelle Kocher, designer of the Parisian fashion house Koché, organized a fashion show on the Danielle-Casanova ferry, which links Marseille to Corsica, Algeria and Tunisia.

Alongside these pop-up events, sustainable fashion initiatives have flourished, such as the Jogging concept store, inaugurated in 2015, which offers fashion items and beauty products. “We did things with very little,” said co-founder Olivier Amsellem. “We set up shop in a butcher’s shop that we’d barely refurbished, with the desire to enhance the strata of the past.”

Maison Mode Méditerranée Fund

“Marseille is now fashionable, but it’s always been a city of fashion,” said Maryline Bellieud-Vigouroux, a local entrepreneur who, as early as 1986, set herself the goal of developing training in fashion professions and supporting emerging brands. “There’s been a textile tradition here ever since Colbert made it a free port in 1669,” she said. “It’s a city that has absorbed many waves of immigration, from Armenian embroiderers in the 1920s to Italian tailors fleeing the rise of fascism.”

Bellieud-Vigouroux is the founder of the Maison Mode Méditerranée endowment fund, which has provided financial support to fashion professionals since 1988; she also laid the foundation stone for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, de la Faïence et de la Mode at Château Borély, inaugurated in 2013. And she launched the OpenMyMed fashion festival, which promotes new talent from Marseille. Marseille is also home to a number of fashion and design schools, including Studio Lausié, which has been teaching environmentally responsible fashion techniques since 2021. Gomis, who teaches at the school, is delighted that “young students are now projecting themselves into the city.”

“Marseille offers an alternative to Paris, London and New York, with a more modest, less luxury fashion vision. Small runs, but seductive pieces,” said Bellieud-Vigouroux. “In Marseille, we found a gentle way of life that enabled us to develop our project with limited means,” said De Moussac. “Rent is more affordable than in Paris, and the network is smaller, so connections are made faster.” “Being a shopkeeper [in the digital age] is hard, I don’t really earn a living,” said Amsellem. “But I’m fine with it. With Jogging, I’m introducing people to a place, a way of life. I’m telling a story, the story of Marseille.”