Sonia Rykiel, the late, great French fashion designer, once said: “My color is black. And black, if it’s worn right, is a scandal.”
Her granddaughter Lola Rykiel also has a signature motif. It’s pink. And marabou feathers, sequins and rhinestones, deployed with irony and earnestness at Pompom Paris, the label Ms. Rykiel started in 2019.
Scandalizing is not the point of the clothes Ms. Rykiel, 40, designs for Pompom Paris. Nor is the point to imitate her grandmother’s signatures, like the “poor boy” knits that made Sonia Rykiel a French national hero in the late 1960s. Pompom’s through line is its devotion to women.
“I want to sell pleasure,” Ms. Rykiel said, standing in her sliver of a shop on Rue de Grenelle on an afternoon in early March. “It’s about pleasure, the woman and making women feel good about themselves.”
Paris Fashion Week was just getting underway, yet Pompom exists in a separate dimension. Fashion is in Ms. Rykiel’s blood, but she rejects just about everything associated with the traditional system. Pompom does not participate in runway shows or seasonal collections. Ms. Rykiel’s designs are joyfully oblivious to trends. She was wearing a teal Pompom velour sweatshirt designed to fall off one shoulder as a minidress with a pair of tights and clunky brown Celine derbies.
“Fashion, for me, is like what’s in and what’s out, what’s good and what’s bad,” she said. “It’s something so much about power and hierarchy. I’ve always hated that. What is interesting is to try to know yourself and to observe yourself and to be like, ‘OK, this looks great on me, so I’m going to wear it.’”
Ms. Rykiel describes her designs as “dramatic and comfortable.” A leopard-print sequined dress that fits like an oversize off-the-shoulder T-shirt is lined in satin to be soft against the skin. The Cruella jumpsuit is a black velour halter with a trompe l’oeil manicured hand traced in rhinestones on the backside.
“It’s very clear that it’s a woman’s hand because I wanted it to be like I’m grabbing my own butt,” Ms. Rykiel said. Her dream is to design everything without zippers because “the zipper is something that stresses people,” she said
Ms. Rykiel’s approach to Pompom is so charmingly independent and anti-algorithmic that it borders on radical. She runs the business with little concern for commerciality, social media and influencer marketing, and scale. Pompom is not sold online, and Ms. Rykiel carries hardly any stock. Almost everything is made by her small team of seamstresses working in Pompom’s atelier around the corner on Rue des Saints-Pères. Much of the collection is customizable — longer, shorter, more narrow at the waist. If a client has an idea, Ms. Rykiel is listening.
“Yes, I have my idea of design,” she said. “If you don’t like rhinestones, satin and sequins, you might not be happy here. But if you do like that, you are the goddess, and we are going to create around you.”
If a potential goddess wants to buy a piece, she has to go to the store. Asked how people find Pompom, Ms. Rykiel deadpans: “They don’t.”
Rue de Grenelle is steeped in history for the Rykiel family. Sonia Rykiel opened her first store at 6 Rue de Grenelle in May 1968, during the Sorbonne student protests. A self-taught, iconoclastic designer, she made a name for herself in France by going against trend, first with maternity wear that flattered the body instead of hiding it in embarrassment. Her collections included reversible garments, slinky knitwear with extra-long arms favored by Anouk Aimée and Audrey Hepburn, and trousers that liberated women from the staid bourgeois fashions of the time.
The brand eventually expanded to three storefronts along Rue de Grenelle as well as its famous flagship at 175 Boulevard Saint-Germain, now rented by Saint Laurent. The cluster of Sonia Rykiel stores made the brand and its flame-haired namesake synonymous with Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the neighborhood’s bohemian attitude. From the 1970s onward, it was to the Sixth Arrondissement what Marc Jacobs was to Bleecker Street in New York in the 2000s.
In the early ’90s, Sonia Rykiel was a thriving $75 million business sold by 250 retailers in 40 countries. In 2009, Sonia Rykiel, who had Parkinson’s disease, retired. Three years later, the Rykiels sold 80 percent of the business to a Hong Kong investment group. In 2016, just after Sonia Rykiel died at age 86, the family sold the remaining 20 percent stake while retaining the real estate holdings, including its Boulevard Saint-Germain flagship and the Rue de Grenelle properties.
Over the next several years, despite critically acclaimed collections by Julie de Libran, the company ended up in receivership and, ultimately, in liquidation in 2019. G-III Apparel Group bought Sonia Rykiel in 2021.
But Pompom still flies the family flag. The shop is set up as a fantasy boudoir, with a neon pink sign in the window framed by a black velvet curtain scattered with Swarovski crystals like stars in the night sky. Inside, velvet furnishings are set with satin pillows with crystal-embroidered words and phrases like “Blonde,” “Spiritual Bimbo” and “I Love Men But They Don’t Make Me Happy.”
“A lot of people come in and ask, ‘Is this a sex toy store?’” Ms. Rykiel said. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m not selling vibrators.’ I could, but I’m not going to.”
Ms. Rykiel’s mother, Nathalie Rykiel, has been there, done that. In the early 2000s, she opened Rykiel Woman, a store that did in fact sell sex toys, along with fur blankets and candles, just down the street. “It was introducing pleasure in a luxurious way because, before that, all the sex toys were gross and in Pigalle,” Ms. Rykiel said. She found a few boxes of old Rykiel Woman vibrator stock in what’s now the Pompom atelier.
“They were huge, like a walkie-talkie,” she said. “Probably because they were all made by men who were thinking, This is what they need.”
Ms. Rykiel grew up at fashion shows and playing in Sonia Rykiel’s atelier. She loved clothes, but when it came to her own career, she avoided the family business for years. “It was impossible to live up to,” she said.
Dance is where Ms. Rykiel put her focus, moving to New York to study at the Martha Graham School. When she realized she wouldn’t be a professional dancer, she told her mother she wanted to join Sonia Rykiel, heading up the public relations office in New York. By 2019, she had grown increasingly frustrated with the state of the business and how far it had strayed from her grandmother’s vision.
The idea for Pompom started percolating less as a serious fashion brand than an expression of Ms. Rykiel’s background in dance — athletics and comfort sprinkled with rhinestones and humor. Early pieces included T-shirts with rhinestones like headlights on the boobs and satin pants inspired by boxing attire. “It was a way for me to show a few things but not take myself too seriously, like a real artistic director, because the pressure was too high,” Ms. Rykiel said.
Ms. de Libran witnessed the strong, creative spirit in Ms. Rykiel. “Lola has a lot of sides,” said Ms. de Libran, who started her own collection after she left Rykiel in 2019. “She reads a lot. She’s interested in what’s going on in the world. Pompom is an expression of her. It’s completely its own thing.”
Ms. Rykiel began working with top-of-the-line sporty fabrics, including the velour her grandmother used in the ’80s when Sonia Rykiel velour tracksuits were the company’s bread and butter, a precursor to the Juicy Couture frenzy of the aughts. Searching Nona Source, the LVMH deadstock fabric platform, led Ms. Rykiel to fabulous sequins, satin and feathers unused by the luxury houses. She couldn’t resist.
Nathalie Rykiel said that her daughter had always had very determined personal taste. “She used to like brands that my mother and I didn’t really understand,” Nathalie said. “She loved Gianni Versace — very shiny, very gold, very strass. It’s not Barbie, it’s not Lolita. It’s very girlie but not stupidly girlie because she’s too strong.”
One night, Ms. Rykiel and her mother were going through boxes of her grandmother’s old clothes. They found a cropped black bomber that she had made for herself, sewn with personalized patches.
“It was so cool,” Ms. Rykiel said. “It was cropped and oversize, and the sleeves were super-long like her sweaters. I was like, Wow, imagine if I could do that but in satin and with crystals on the back.” She made a limited collection of pink and black styles in collaboration with Café de Flore, the Left Bank cafe where Sonia Rykiel had lunch every day. The bombers sold out, and Ms. Rykiel expanded the concept.
The Pompom bombers are available in red vinyl, faux leopard fur, denim cascading with crystals, camouflage or satin in a multitude of colors — green, hot pink, black. Any word or phrase a client desires can be emblazoned across the back or the heart, or on the lining as a hidden message. They range from 990 to 2,000 euros (about $1,146 to $2,315). Ms. Rykiel envisions the bomber as an emotional object more than a piece of clothing. She collaborates with her clients to come up with the perfect word or phrase.
“They always say, ‘I want something, but I don’t want it to be too much,’” Ms. Rykiel said. “And I say, ‘Yes, let’s do it too much.’” A few years ago, she wrote the Jean-Paul Sartre quote “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (hell is other people) in rhinestones across a black satin style. The fashion journalist Peggy Frey had her green and black satin style embroidered with “Mother of Nazes,” a private joke that loosely translates to “Mother of Losers.”
“It’s the nickname my two lovely children gave me,” Ms. Frey said. “I wear it when I feel a little bit down.” Ms. Rykiel’s dream is to make a bomber for her favorite author, Virginie Despentes. It would say “Baise-Moi,” the title of her first novel and film, a controversial rape-revenge story.
Ms. Rykiel envisions the bombers as a source of magical powers. She imagines her client being spotted in the street by an admirer who looks back and is struck by the provocative message written across her back.
“I like the idea of stamping someone,” she said. “He’s going to remember you for all his life, or maybe just for the day, and just be like, ‘Wow, that girl is cool.’”
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