Charvet Of Paris: Interview With Jean-Claude Colban - Head Of One Of The Most Revered Menswear Institutions In The World

When I managed to get through to Jean-Claude Colban on the phone he was as quiet as a church mouse. The snow filled wind around me was howling which made it even more difficult to hear him. But I did not dare ask him to speak up. He was a God of the world of menswear, especially of silk, and with these types you show nothing but deference. When he was finished he put down the receiver and was gone. And now I needed to get myself to Paris by Friday.

The glory of entering the Place Vendome

The famed Charvet window display

Charvet is diagonally opposite the Ritz Carlton

Charvet is located at 28 Place Vendôme, diagonally opposite the Ritz Carlton (where Princess Diana was last seen alive) and next to the jeweller Boucheron. It is an institution of menswear or what I like to call the ‘Mecca of shirts and ties’. It has been referenced in so many great novels that I stopped counting the number of pages I’d dog-eared over time. Its clients were also so famous that they had their own Wikipedia page divided into categories like ‘heads of state’, ‘royalty’ and ‘film stars’.
So, what is Charvet? In its most basic analysis it is a menswear store skewed towards shirts and neck ties. But, for the enthusiast menswear devotee, it is the most comprehensive arrangement of cotton shirting for bespoke shirts in the world along with one of the most exclusive and vibrant collection of woven and printed silks which are predominantly expressed as both long neck ties and bow ties. And whilst Charvet offers a wide range of other products, this remains their core.
The Charvet brand has a long and rich lineage, tracing back to the curator of Napoleon Bonaparte’s wardrobe, Jean-Pierre Charvet. Then came Louise Charvet, a relative who was Napoleon’s linen keeper at the château de Malmaison. It was her first cousin, Christofle Charvet, who would eventually start the first shirt shop in Paris in the year 1838, coining the term ‘chemisier’ in the process. Until then, shirt making was often the dominion of the linen keeper or customers would take their own fabric to a tailor or seamstress. Charvet changed all that by assembling the cloth and the makers in one house and performing a complete bespoke service for their customers. In doing so they perfected the art of shirt making and to this day some of their fabrication techniques are still considered the best in the world.

Jean-Claude's office and meeting room which was once occupied by his father

‘Probably our reputation as a shirt maker was bolstered in the 1800’s by the association with the Jockey Club, a group of wealthy Parisians and their aspirational friends who were known as ‘lions’ or what we these days call ‘dandies’. Basically, it was young men who perhaps had too much of their parent’s money and those people that hung on to them or wanted to be like them" says Jean-Claude. And those that wanted to hang on the periphery were the painters, writers and poets of that time. Eventually this would create the ultimate cache in menswear kudos over time. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s first introduction to Lord Sebastian Flyte has him in a Charvet neck tie with a print of stamps. In Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Razor’s Edge’ the aspirational aristocrat Elliot Templeton had Charvet embroider a count’s crest into his underwear. The list of literary references is long, but my personal favourite is that of Jean Cocteau who said that Charvet ‘is where the rainbow find’s ideas’. ‘But’ says Colban, ‘there does exist a bunch of nasty English writers that would like to put us down. They can be so, how shall I say “Queen Victoria” ‘.

Archive fabrics often used for bespoke orders. 

And this last literary quote I mention humours Jean-Claude Colban, and he responds with “we at Charvet are always impressed with how knowledgeable our customers are about our history”. He sits lightly reclined in a somewhat worn red leather timber framed chair with a coffee table of books and baubles between us. He is dressed in a navy suit, a paisley green silk neck tie, a white shirt with Windsor collar, horn rimmed glasses that belong to another period. One eyebrow is bushier than the other and flicks out and over the rim of his left frame. He goes without a pocket square, a surprise for me. He’s corpulent and has a light stubble and thin lips. When we begin talking he is again very softly spoken. “These long-term customers of ours, they register each time we make a new silk, that we make a wink and to what it is we make a wink at, because our customers know back to front the Charvet silks. There is an immediate fraternity that is developed with the Charvet customer once he purchases from us”.

The office we sit in belonged to his father, Dennis Colban. It is timber panelled in a light honey oak colour. There are statues of jaguars, books on chairs, gold framed photos still leaning against the wall unhung. Colban bought the business from the Charvet family in the 70’s. He was their chief supplier. Jean-Claude had studied political science and had thought of another career but then began working with his father and picked up skills in Photoshop. He explains that he still uses this programme today to design silks as he opens a book with all his last collection of silks. It is at this point that I realise the level of commitment he has to his craft. Every silk he designs goes through multiple iterations before it is realised, and each change is carefully documented in his artisan styled notebook with meticulous and tiny hand-writing. But perhaps this Old-World way of doing things has hampered the brand and I ask him why they never went online. ‘Around 2007 I thought seriously about the online world – is this screen able to well enough render colour. And, can people be stupid enough to spend a lot of money on something they cannot touch and feel. And so, I decided not to proceed in this manner. I am more obsessed with doing well what we are supposed to do well.’
And what they do well is to make predominantly neckwear made of silk and to make shirts for both off-the-rack and bespoke customers. Where possible they wholesale to other retailers who then place their ties on their websites, but they stay well clear of this sphere and their website is and has always been merely a placement holder page with their address and phone number. ‘My job is to remain focussed on running our own warps, our own patterns and our own colour combinations’. All this, and might I add that running your own warp with a silk loom is prohibitively expensive, is to protect the product from being replicated in the 21st Century.

I ask him what goes through his mind when he begins designing a new silk collection. “Firstly” he says, “I have to consider that every silk must work across a variety of products from a silk neck tie to a bow tie, to a cummerbund and a vest”. He tells me that he often studies primitive tribes to better understand repeat patterns and that it was as important that the silk should look attractive on the bias (how you cut a silk neck tie so that it has spring in the silk when tying) as it should on the warp or selvedge of the fabric roll.  ‘And really, unlike the English, we do not seek out these animal prints and designs. We find this to be less than masculine’. Colban also works directly with luxury shirt cloth companies in England, Italy and Switzerland to deliver possibly the most comprehensive range of shirting bolts assembled anywhere in the world. There are over 400 whites on their ‘Mur Des Blancs’ (wall of whites) with over 104 varying shades of it. In solid blues they carry over 200 shades from the babiest of blues to the inkiest of them that you cannot tell the difference between it and black.
Jean-Claude Colban is interrupted by his sister, Anne-Marie, momentarily. She is the other half of the business as it stands today. Although the designing of fabrics remains the exclusive dominion of Jean-Claude, it is clear Anne-Marie is an integral part of their daily operations. I ask Jean-Claude if he intends to bring his own sons into the business. He softly responds, ‘if they show and interest in the business then yes, otherwise I would never force them to work in a job they did not want to do’.
As I peep out of the room onto the Place Vendôme through the half floor window (this building has a traditional Mansard façade creating half floors internally) I am struck by a thought about progression and succession.

The wholesale division of Charvet makes for some of the most reputable menswear and department stores in the world. 

“How does an institution like this survive in the 21st Century?” I asked, given all the traffic that is now digital and less human.
“Our customers best respond to creativity and quality and we have built up a good rapport with our customers over time. This is what we concentrate on”.
And for them to make you a bespoke shirt, you had to turn up too. Charvet was, is and probably will remain, very much a hands-on experience.

Jean-Claude Colban in front of his cutting table. The seamstresses collect sheets of silk and finish them off site before dropping them back as finished ties.