The moulds hang from the ceiling like strange paper lanterns. There are more than three thousand of them at Atelier Sorel-Brunet, each made from two sheets of heavy card folded into a precise pattern of ridges, sunrays, accordions or crystal pleats. Some date from the nineteen-thirties and are soft with handling. To pleat a skirt, the fabric is laid between two matching moulds, rolled tight, tied with string and baked in a steam oven until the folds become permanent memory.
The atelier occupies two floors of a narrow building in the Sentier, the old garment district of the second arrondissement, where wholesale textile shops still line the streets below. In the years after the Second World War, Paris supported several dozen workshops of this kind. Today, by the reckoning of those who work in the trade, there are three. Sorel-Brunet is the oldest, and the only one that still makes its own moulds.
Mireille Casteran has worked here for twenty-seven years and runs the atelier with her nephew, Bastien. She folds the moulds herself, by eye and by hand, working from drawings that designers sometimes sketch on napkins. A single complex mould can take her three days. Once made, it can be used for decades, which is why the ceiling is crowded with pleats commissioned by houses that no longer exist, waiting for someone to ask for them again.
Heat, steam and patience
The process has barely changed in a century. Silk, chiffon or wool crepe is cut slightly oversize, dampened and sandwiched between the moulds. The bundle goes into an oven that resembles an old bread oven and emerges an hour or two later, depending on the fibre, to rest overnight. Only then is it unrolled, a moment Casteran still calls the best part of the job, because there is no way to check the result before that.
The fabric decides if it wants to remember. My job is only to ask it properly. — Mireille Casteran
The couture calendar keeps the workshop busy for eight months of the year. In the weeks before the January and July shows, Casteran and her four assistants work late into the night on skirts, sleeves and entire gowns, often receiving fabric only days before it must appear on the runway. Several of the most admired pleated looks of recent seasons passed through this building, though its name never appears in the show notes.
That anonymity is both a point of pride and a source of worry. The skills are passed on informally, by watching, and Bastien is the only person under forty who can fold a mould from scratch. The atelier has taken on two apprentices through a city scheme for endangered crafts, and one of them, a former architecture student, shows real promise. The geometry comes easily, Casteran says. What takes years is learning how each fabric will behave.
There is reason for cautious optimism. Younger designers, tired of digital prints and synthetic finishes, have begun to seek out the atelier for small runs, and a ready-to-wear label recently ordered pleated linen for the first time in the workshop's history. Casteran has started to photograph and catalogue the old moulds, a project she expects to occupy the rest of her career. Above her head, the paper lanterns turn slowly in the warm air.
