Your key to the city's hidden doors

Photos by Fabrice Fortin and Nicholas Calcott for Paris By Appointment Only™

It’s funny how a deep childhood frustration can become a creative manifesto later in life. Case in point: Maïa, the Paris-based porcelain painter. As a kid, she tried every night to decorate the table with her family’s finest, only to be told to return it to the cupboard for the everyday stuff.

Now, not only does Maïa set the table with beautiful, eye-popping designs whenever she likes, she’s made it her business to make sure that others do too!

“It’s a democratic way of bringing art into the home and a touch of fantasy to the table,” says the first-name-only artist who found a way to bridge the dishware divide between fabulous and functional by fusing the two in one.

Maïa started ten years ago with a teacup, and now hand paints everything from jars and dishes to bowls, vases and tea sets on porcelain made by one of the last remaining artisanal factories in Limoges, France.

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Over the last ten years hundreds of French fashion artisans have been given the ax at venerable houses by number crunching executives sending production overseas. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure…especially when centuries-old savoir-faire is heaped high in the bin!

Taking advantage of luxury industry’s shortsighted greed and indifference towards its own heritage, Chavernet, a new Paris-based couture house, is putting Paris’ forgotten couturiers back to work.

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When Oprah got snubbed by Hermès a few years ago she should have immediately rung Chanel. Not Chanel, as in Coco Chanel, but Guy Chanel (yes, you heard me right).

Guy Chanel is a lone ranger on the high plains of fashion and home accessories. Working alone out of his atelier on the outskirts of Paris, he handcrafts a variety of one-of-a-kind designs using leather, crocodile, ostrich and other fine skins.

From saddles, handbags and wallets to belts, briefcases and even lamps, every Chanel creation is made-to-measure and constructed by hand using artisanal tools and techniques (ask him to show you the giant wooden tweezer he uses to hold small things in place when he sews).

By keeping production slow and steady, his solo operation turns out discreet, logo-less products of unparalleled quality and detail that are built to last several lifetimes.

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Since all of Paris closes shop in August, I’ll be posting “by appointment” discoveries made during my summertime travels back home in the USA this month.  Hope you enjoy this special summer edition with content from New York and Los Angeles.

Custom. Handmade. Shoes. Say those three words aloud and your mind hops a plane to the fashion capitals of Europe where couture cobbling has been celebrated for centuries. But don’t buy your brain’s tickets just so fast… The special new stomping ground for original, handcrafted shoes is neither in Paris, London or Milan, but in a back alley, by appointment shop in none other than Los Angeles!

Over the last fifteen years Southern California native Georges Esquivel—whose men’s and women’s shoe brand Esquivel Shoes was recently announced as one of the 2009 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalists—has built a mini shoe empire to rival Europe’s leading luxury labels. The best part of all, it happened entirely by chance (ahh, you gotta love America!).

Years before “artisanal” became a marketing buzzword, Esquivel was reworking vintage clothes for his SoCal musician friends. An unexpected jaunt to a cobbler in Mexico spawned his first pair of custom shoes. His friends went wild and started clamoring for their own pairs. Before long Esquivel found a seasoned shoemaker in L.A. to build his designs. To cut costs, Esquivel offered to help out around the shop. “He said, ‘sure, take out the trash,’” recalls Esquivel with a chuckle. “So I went from taking out the trash to organizing the shop and cutting leather. Two-and-a-half years later I knew how to make a pair of shoes.”

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