Introduction
Paul Larisch (1870–1934) was a German master furrier, technical author and atelier leader who spent a major part of his early career in Paris. Born in Frankenstein in Silesia, he completed a four-year furrier’s apprenticeship and travelled through southern Germany and Switzerland before reaching Paris, then a central destination for ambitious practitioners of the trade.
At Revillon Frères, Larisch rose to the position of chef des ateliers. The title placed him at the head of a large technical workshop and linked him to the training of younger furriers in Paris. His authority was rooted in construction and production expertise; surviving accounts do not identify him as the sole designer of Revillon’s garments. His French career ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, when the German-born Larisch and his family left France.
Larisch also became an influential writer on fur craft. With Joseph Schmid he launched Das Kürschner-Handwerk in 1902, followed by books on handling skins, fur mosaic and the history and signs of the furrier’s trade. After leaving France he continued his professional career in Germany, eventually establishing his own Berlin atelier and publishing further specialist work before his death in 1934.
Design ethos
Larisch approached fur through the disciplined logic of the workshop. Cutting, matching, joining and controlling the direction of pile were technical decisions capable of changing weight, surface and silhouette. At Revillon, this knowledge sat inside a large atelier where specialist labour had to remain consistent across ambitious garments and a growing volume of production.
Teaching was central to his professional identity. His writing translated workshop knowledge into diagrams, terminology and repeatable principles for other furriers, giving a changing trade a more systematic technical literature. The same precision informed his interest in the historical signs, tools and conventions of the craft.
His Revillon role is best understood as senior atelier authority. He helped shape the technical conditions under which the house’s fur fashion was made and helped train the labour that executed it, while individual model authorship remains attached to the house and its wider workshop structure.
Disclaimer
Career history
1914
Later trade-biographical material reports that Paul Larisch left France at the beginning of the First World War, ending his Revillon atelier tenure. The circumstance is less securely documented than his position itself and remains qualified.
Paul Larisch served as chef des ateliers at Revillon Frères in Paris, holding senior technical authority within the fur workshops and training younger practitioners. The surviving evidence supports workshop leadership and does not assign him sole authorship of the house’s garments.
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