Lanvin

Lanvin was founded in Paris in 1889 when milliner Jeanne Lanvin opened her first hat shop at 16 Rue Boissy d’Anglas. After moving to Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the maison expanded beyond millinery, prompted in part by Lanvin making clothes for her daughter, Marguerite. A dedicated children’s department opened in 1908, followed by a young ladies’ and women’s department in 1909, the year Lanvin joined the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture and formally entered the couture system.

During the interwar period the house grew into a broader proposition spanning couture, menswear and fragrance; Lanvin Perfumes launched in 1924, with Arpège introduced in 1927. After Jeanne Lanvin’s death in 1946, her daughter Marie-Blanche led the company before successive designers steered the brand through later decades.

In the modern era, Alber Elbaz’s tenure as artistic director (2001–2015) reshaped the house’s contemporary identity, while recent strategy under Lanvin Group has emphasised craft and collaboration, including Lanvin Lab projects that invite external creative voices to engage with the archive.

Lanvin’s house language is rooted in Jeanne Lanvin’s model of couture as an ecosystem: craftsmanship, a coherent world of dress, and a business built through expansion into adjacent categories. The maison’s enduring codes—refined femininity, decorative intelligence and the mother-and-child emblem—stem from a founder who treated fashion as both intimate and entrepreneurial, balancing intimacy of purpose with disciplined atelier practice.

In current corporate framing, Lanvin Group positions its maisons around heritage, craftsmanship, creativity and technology, paired with a collaborative and inclusive approach. For Lanvin, this is expressed through an archive treated as a working resource rather than a museum piece, with initiatives such as Lanvin Lab built to create dialogue with artists and cultural figures.

The intent is continuity through method: preserving atelier standards and symbolic codes while allowing new interpretations to emerge through collaboration, keeping the house legible in the present without relying on nostalgia as a design strategy.