Lanvin’s Peter Copping Celebrated by French Heritage Society

Lanvin’s artistic director Peter Copping was honored at the French Heritage Society’s Art Deco Ball Wednesday night in New York, which marked the house’s latest cultural touchstone.

Guests first heard from the organization’s special events chairman CeCe Black, chairman Elizabeth F. Stribling, president Denis de Kergorlay, incoming chairman Timothy Corrigan and the incoming president Jean-Guillaume de Tocqueville d’Hérouville at the seated dinner at the Metropolitan Club. Copping received the award from WWD’s and Fairchild Media’s chief content officer James Fallon. Heritage Auctions’ Nick Dawes led a live auction that helped to raise more than $500,000 for the society’s efforts and the Alex Donner Orchestra performed.

Raised in Oxfordshire, the designer first studied at Central Saint Martins and later earned an MA at the Royal College of Art in London. After an internship with Christian Lacroix, he worked at Iceberg, Sonia Rykiel, Louis Vuitton in the Marc Jacobs years, Nina Ricci, Oscar de la Renta, and Balenciaga before joining Lanvin last fall (de la Renta had once worked at Lanvin, during his storied career.)

Copping said, “France is my adopted home. I’ve been there for almost 30 years. As much as I always will be a Brit, I do love it and did straightaway. The French Heritage Society is using such great work to preserve and maintain some historic and beautiful places, and they are places that I love as well.”

To date, the French Heritage Society has awarded more than $16 million in grants to 701-plus châteaux, historic properties and gardens. Lanvin’s deputy chief executive officer Siddhartha Shukla noted how this week’s event is in sync with Lanvin’s plan to use real-time events to relay some of the house’s key values such as its cultural narrative, which is a key part of its heritage. The recognition coincides with the trajectory of how Lanvin is repositioning the house.

“As an American leader of the house, there is something quite interesting about the French-American bond,” said Shukla, a board member of the French American Foundation. “The French Heritage Society has a very noble desire to support the preservation of great architectural icons, and is committed to the French ’savoir-faire.’ In that aspect, Lanvin is a very interesting intersection for them as a global brand that is still deeply French.”

Last in New York City about a year ago for an event that Lanvin did with Cate Blanchett, Copping said the demands of collections dominate his schedule. In January, Lanvin returned to the runway in Paris with Copping’s first collection, which channeled what Jeanne Lanvin called “le Chic Ultime.” That vision was first introduced three years ago with a Steven Meisel campaign and it remains the house’s ethos.

Having spent part of Monday meeting with clients in Lanvin’s Madison Avenue store, Copping said that connecting with shoppers on the sales floor and in fitting rooms is a practice that he picked up at de la Renta and Nina Ricci. He said, “That is just so important to do — to speak with clients and get their feedback about things, and to speak with the sales teams. What I love about New York and America is that the women who buy the clothes are just so happy. They have such energy, love clothes, and appreciate what we all do.”

While there are several different ways now to connect with clients, Copping said that one-on-one conversations enable him to highlight certain features on a garment including its interior, which helps to highlight what makes a “truly luxurious product.” Well aware that many news-sharp clients are also well-informed from years of shopping, Copping said further dialogue is always helpful. During Monday’s store visit, a client pointed out to her husband a topstitch and other detailed elements of a Lanvin piece, which also helped explain why it was expensive, the designer said. 

As Copping helps to cast the house in a new light, Lanvin unveiled a new signature blue in September that was inspired by Jeanne Lanvin’s fascination and obsession with perfecting the shade. Inspired by the skies in Fra Angelico frescoes, Lanvin developed 23 shades of blue in her Nanterre dye factory. The world of Lanvin blue was explored in depth in Copping’s September show and it can also be found on its Instagram and in packaging.

Guests at Copping’s first runway show earlier this year received archival postcards from the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris that Jeanne Lanvin presided over that occurred in the year that marked the start of Art Deco. In addition, Lanvin designs are featured in “1925–2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco” at The Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is another indication of how the house is advancing its cultural heritage.

The luxury label’s efforts in the U.S. included its first Stateside exhibition — “Jeanne Lanvin: Haute Couture Heritage,” which was held at the SCAD Museum of Fashion + Film earlier this year. Copping, who was honored with a SCAD Étoile award, said the exhibition introduced the house to a new generation, including many students. 

Known to cull the Lanvin archives for inspiration, Copping cited 1920s dresses with intricate embroidery and beautiful stones as some of his favorite discoveries. The vast archives include clothing, sketches, ads and travelogues, among other items. Referring to the French Heritage Society honor, and the SCAD-backed show, Shukla said, “There are so many ways that the house exists in the cultural space” and “the cultural expression is as important as the fashion expression.”

When Shukla arrived at the company in December 2021, Lanvin was generating just over 30 million euros annually. Nothing how “houses are not revived just because you hire a designer, and do fashion shows and ad campaigns,” he said the revival has come from “rethinking the mechanics of the house, professionalizing the organization, instituting processes and considering the identity, vision and direction of what a house that was rather lost should be, and where the opportunities were.”

While that transformation has taken place in a global context “that is certainly challenged in the luxury sector and other sectors,” Lanvin remains very optimistic about the opportunities that the house has in the marketplace, Shukla said. The U.S. market’s importance is twofold — not only for the significant revenue it generates, but also due to the affinity that needs to be developed with U.S.-based shoppers to achieve success, he added.

Shukla said, “Peter and I are very committed to forwarding the Lanvin story as one of a very deep and rich heritage, as the oldest still operating couture house in France.”

And it turns out that Copping was somewhat prescient about his own future. At Central Saint Martins, he and a few friends suggested a group show for graduation that had French undercurrents and even lined up sponsorship from a French tech company, which was an anomaly at that time.