Laurence Charnay takes care of women thanks to her profession and her passions

Françoise / Laurence Charnay creates inclusive fashion for women with disabling illnesses.

Who is Laurence Charnay?

Originally from Dordogne, Laurence Charnay grew up in the medical field, father as a doctor and mother as a nurse. Besides that, she has been immersed in the artistic world since her childhood. His grandfather was a painter and his grandmother taught drawing, pottery and ceramics, after having studied at the Beaux-Arts. On the maternal side, her grandmother, a seamstress, gave her a taste for sewing. Being very attached to fashion, all the women in the family liked to get together to sew and make pretty toilets. They were fond of tailors from the house of Dior, Lanvin or Balenciaga, whom her great aunt, a maid in a Polish aristocratic family used to bring back.

Françoise grew up in the Yvelines, in Versailles. The castle, its gardens, Trianon and the hamlet of Marie-Antoinette will inspire his collection.

Having learned to draw and paint from her grandmother during her adolescence, she was predestined to enter the Decorative Arts but she is advised against it. She then decides to turn to foreign languages ​​and goes to Germany to study German, English and Spanish.

Back to medicine while keeping the seam in his heart

After her marriage to a doctor and the birth of her children, she decides to resume her studies in the medical field, perhaps also to be closer to her parents. Having become a nurse, she works in Germany, where she studied (in Heidelberg). She and her husband then decide to settle in Alsace, in Strasbourg. She then joined the field of cancerology in university hospitals as a nurse. She was then offered a position as a health manager in a center for the fight against cancer, the Strauss Center.

Still in the field of cancer, she holds a position in the educational field in a continuing vocational training school in Paris.
At the same time, she does not give up her passion for sewing, painting and drawing. She makes curtains, dresses and pants.
In 2017, when the school threatened to close, a new direction offered to her following the reading of Bettina Ballard’s book, « In my Fashion ».

This figure of fashion was a correspondent for Vogue in Paris in the 1920s before the war and then at the Liberation. She was then a fashion editor in New York in the 1950s. During her life, she met artists, women of the world, designers, photographers and models. In her stories, we discover the sets of the back of the parades as well as the portraits of Schiaparelli, Chanel, Balenciaga, Lanvin or Dior.

A new path to specialized sewing for women with disabilities

It is all these details that prompted Laurence Charnay to take stock of skills to highlight her creativity and her admiration for the fashion world. She thinks about what she wants to orient herself. When we asked her the question, she immediately thought of answering seamstress. She first thinks of joining the house of Chanel, given her teaching skills. But it is by thinking of the women she had met when she was a cancer nurse, that she seeks a solution so that these women regain their self-esteem, very disturbed by what they have gone through.
How to appear vis-à-vis others is their problem So for women with a gastric pouch, it was necessary to find suitable clothes that do not compress, that are pretty and practical In 2018, she said to herself that a great fashion house could take care of this problem. Little by little, she meets people, including Tony Para, who advises her to embark on the adventure. She learns professional drawing on her own, begins to make her own sketches.

Her dream becomes reality and that’s how she creates LC Laurence Charnay, Laurence being her middle name and that of one of her grandmothers. Its goal is to combine aesthetics, creativity and harmony, while not forgetting women who have undergone disabling surgery. The LC Inclusive Fashion line is above all a range of beautiful clothes for all women. The slogan will be: « An inclusive sartorial lineage: » Be fabulous in LC « .

Fashion Night Couture 2019

After showing her very promising sketches, she was invited to attend the Fashion Nignt Couture 2019 show in April. Things will then go very quickly. She gets in touch with a model maker and a seamstress through a friend who had worked for 15 years at Chanel.
Not having enough to finance a parade, she then turned to Philippe Noël, designer of the FNC parades, but also a writer, computer scientist and filmmaker in the service of humanitarian causes. After 3 years of parades at the Ile de Ré , he organized his first show in Paris at the Salon des Miroirs in 2014.

In 2019, she presented a few looks at Ile de Ré, presented her adaptable clothing project to Philippe Noël, who immediately found the idea great. He offered to support her and ordered 7 looks for August 15th. She then crowdfunded to finance her project. The 7 models are very popular, especially when you discover that the seams allow gastric pockets to be hidden thanks to invisible closures.

Thanks to this parade, Laurence Charnay became known following a report presented by the Poitou-Charentes region. We discover 33 models.

Towards the end of 2019, she enrolled in Fashion Style for a distance training as a stylist and to refine her knowledge of fashion. She then prepares the parade which was to take place in April 2020 but which will only take place at the end of September …

2020, consecration parade

In the meantime, she applied for the EIDM school parade and was selected among the top 15 out of 290 with congratulations from the teachers. She decides to create an association rather than a society and does the FNC 2020 parade in September as well as the school parade postponed to February 2021.
Before stopping her career to devote herself entirely to her brand, having taken her retirement rights, she had written a book with a Swiss colleague, Anne E. Murphy, in 2018/2019 in English on scientific research and care. Principal of Nursing in Oncology. This book ends her nursing career but she continues as a coordinator / training until 2021 where she devotes herself definitively to her fashion house by creating beautiful clothes with quality fabrics, while adapting them for women. with an ostomy. On this occasion, a patent is filed. in September 2021. Concerning women who have undergone a mastectomy but have not yet had a reconstruction, the LC Couture house is working on dresses with the insertion of a bra in the necklines. For this, she refines her technique for better support. the side openings allow the prosthesis to be added.

Inspirations of Laurence Charnay

We find 3 people at the base of the inspiration of Laurence Charnay:

Mademoiselle Chanel, "for her refined and simple chic, her character, her strength to live and her enormous potential for resilience".
Audrey Hepburn for "her elegance, grace and empathy".
Karl Lagerfeld for "his personality, his culture, his genius and his great sensitivity".

However, she creates according to her inspiration and her intuition, always in the same vein: pantsuit, jacket, skirt suit, light dresses for summer, short-jacket set, tops, blouses, finally, a cocktail dress and a long dress. The spring-summer collection is linked to Syracuse and Sicily.
The qualities of fabrics used are cotton, silk, tweed, lace, mesh from Mahlia Kent Paris, linen or jacquard.
Regarding silk, it is the most suitable textile for painting. It is inspired by « the Mediterranean landscapes, their climate, their luminosity, the smell of flowers, lavender fields, citrus fruits and aromatic herbs, but also Grasse and Maison Fragonard ». We also find the themes of Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso or Renoir on his creations.

There are 8 looks and 14 pieces. The principle of made-to-measure is always present and the models can be adapted according to the customer’s choices: change the fabric, the braid or the buttons, etc.

The future

If the collections are aimed at all women, it also affects those with a « difference ». It makes it possible to obtain equality in terms of clothing. The clothes help to make « different » women « reappropriate their bodies and to esteem themselves.

Although the clientele is a category of people that Laurence Charnay knows well, thanks to her training as a nurse in oncology, this does not prevent her from wanting to extend the process to a male clientele or those suffering from other pathologies such as paraplegics. or quadriplegics, if requested.

For LC Laurence Charnay, cancer does not prevent you from being beautiful. We can thus take again its slogan: SHE, It is « LC »: She knows « LC » To create, She knows « LC » To adapt, She knows « LC » To seduce!

Thanks to « LC », Made-to-measure clothing and Ready-to-wear, 100% French made, women have found daring fashion, ready-to-wear without complex. She Knows « LC » to personalize your appearance, to adapt her creations following a disabling surgery. The conclusion is as follows:

« GOOD IN HIS BODY », « GOOD IN HIS SOUL », IN THE RULES OF ART. « LC », THE STYLE FOR EVERYONE.

LC Laurence Charnay
www.laurence-charnay.com
[email protected]
06 62 88 16 34
67170 Geudertheim

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