Sonia Rykiel

Spring/Summer 2012 made the internal succession public at Halle Freyssinet. Nathalie Rykiel and April Crichton took the closing bow together, acknowledging Crichton’s long studio career as it moved into the formal Creative Director role announced on 30 September 2011.

The runway is less a solitary debut than a shared handover: family artistic authority, diffusion-line experience and the mainline studio appeared together immediately before the company’s majority sale.