Who says your couch can’t match your sweater?
Clare Vivier, founder of Clare V., a Los Angeles handbag and apparel company with a playful Francophile twist, is no stranger to collaborations.
Among her first was with Mike D of the Beastie Boys, a mutual friend with whom she made her first men’s capsule collection, in 2016, inspired by his need for a simple card wallet (to replace his makeshift rubber band). Vivier has since expanded beyond leather and soft goods to create eyewear with Caddis and Garrett Leight; bicycles with Linus; limited-edition drops with Mother Denim, Tracksmith, Westerlind and Racquet magazine; and graphic prints with Framebridge, to name just a few. Clare V.’s team approximates the brand has produced nearly 100 collaborations to date. Most recently, the brand created apparel for the Carlyle hotel and a set of tees in support of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, both of which promptly sold out.
“I’ve always loved doing collabs,” Vivier said. “It’s also a way for us to test new categories.”
Now Vivier, 53, is releasing her first furniture and lighting design collection with the home goods company Schoolhouse, featuring a familiar set of patterns, textures and colors drawn from her signature palette.
There are 20 pieces in all, making the collection the largest collaborative release for Schoolhouse to date. It’s also something of a departure from the American heritage look Schoolhouse has embodied since its 2003 start as a purveyor of deadstock lighting and, in following years, a broad range of home goods largely manufactured on site in Portland, Oregon. Clare V.’s collection is also the brand’s first with a fashion designer.
Items in the collaboration include a cotton-twill upholstered sofa in bold, oversized camel and black stripes, and another in emerald, cream or navy velvet. Cylindrical floor and table lamps feature a perforated sheet metal exterior, and shaded steel sconces are coated in a palette of persimmon, ecru and deep forest green acrylics. There are also patterned rugs and pillows featuring checkerboard and the enlarged two-tone jaguar spots that Vivier has revisited season after season.
The commingling between fashion and interior design is nothing new, but the industries have increasingly become close bedfellows. For its spring 2023 show, Bottega Veneta commissioned its candy-colored cast-resin runway set from the legendary furniture designer Gaetano Pesce. Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Loewe and Prada carry established presences with splashy presentations and events at Milan Design Week, a leading event in the interior industry. Rick Owens and Virgil Abloh have produced furniture collections, and the luxury mega-retailer Ssense carries a mix of furniture, glassware, home decor and more under the catchall category of “everything else.”
“Everything we sell has a function, and you can’t find anything in our assortment that’s just purely decorative,” said Melissa Miller, general manager of Schoolhouse and a self-avowed fan who owns eight Clare V. handbags.
Vivier’s team had reached out to Schoolhouse to start a conversation, Miller said, and was met with enthusiasm, even as the designer pushed the brand beyond its usual comfort zone for cozy, vintage-inflected Americana in muted, neutral tones. “I don’t know if I would have felt the permission to offer an animal-print rug,” she said. “It came together in a way I didn’t expect.”
Vivier, who began her company as a new mother and a blogger in 2008, has long cultivated a dedicated fan base with an accessible online presence, which has since evolved into a robust following on Instagram, TikTok and a Substack newsletter, La Vie de Clare V.
But Vivier, ultimately in the business of creating items worn on the body, stresses her love of print and all things tactile. “There’s always this ‘high-touch’ aspect to Clare V.,” Vivier said.
Her team often creates custom fonts redrawn from snapshots of old signs from her frequent trips to France, where her husband is from, and evokes the typography of French New Wave cinema of the 1960s and ’70s. She is a flea market hound, a lover of ’70s decor and a collector of deadstock textiles and trimmings, some of which make their way into her designs and at her brick-and-mortar stores, such as her location in Amagansett, New York – one of the brand’s 14 shops – where she upholstered a plywood daybed herself.
Preparing for the Clare V. sample sale in downtown Los Angeles – an annual event since 2014 that her dedicated following considers an event on the level of the Super Bowl, drawing thousands from all over, and a sweepstakes contest for airfare and a two-night stay to attend – Vivier has transformed her West Hollywood store into a living room furnished with her Schoolhouse designs.
“I love home decor,” Vivier said. Fashion is “my language, my self-expression, but I love that interiors can be an extension of that and how you want to live.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
