27 December 2022 |
The name Lucien Pagès is as synonymous with Parisian fashion as the biggest brands that reside in the city. Yet, the PR supremo’s adolescence wasn’t spent beneath the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, but in a tiny town buried in the French mountains.
Today, Pagès’ eponymous communications agency has a knack for moulding bright, young talent into widely adored names. And he does it all with such a distinct charm that those working in the industry regard him as one of its kindest figureheads.
Under his wing are the likes of Schiaparelli, Courrèges and Jacquemus, along with a soup of emerging brands who’ve rapidly become some of Paris Fashion Week’s hottest tickets – from Ludovic de Saint Sernin through to Coperni and Botter.
When it comes to French fashion, Pagès, who is 47, is part of the furniture. So much so that leaving the city for a decent chunk of the summer is always a welcome escape. He likes to go home to visit his mum, Christiane, in the remote village he’s from. In the south-east of France, Pagès was raised in a tiny rural town called Vialas buried in the Cévennes mountain range. It’s part of a Unesco-protected national park, overrun by wild boars which keep having babies. “There are so many little piggies running around,” says Pagès.
He takes his two pugs – Marius and Sartre – there each summer and uses the house as an “operational base”, usually venturing to Greece for a short period while mum looks after the mischievous pair. In 2019, Vialas was recorded as having a mere 424 inhabitants, which Pagès suspects is even less now. Its detachment from the hustle and bustle of a major town or city means there’s little tourist traffic, apart from hikers who stumble upon the hidden rustic enclave on their adventures through the mountains.
Vialas hasn’t always been so sleepy, though. The house Pagès calls home was once a hotel and Michelin-starred restaurant run by his parents and grandparents. The story actually began with his great-grandmother, Pagès tells me over a dodgy countryside wi-fi connection from one of its 16 bedrooms. After running a booming café facing Gare du Nord at the turn of the century, she eventually left Paris and headed to the mountains to seek a life of fresh air after she was stricken with illness. It was here she bought Hotel de la Gare in Génolhac, a neighbouring town to Vialas, and raised a family. It was where Pagès’ grandmother would give birth to his father.
Once she became a mother herself, Pagès’ grandmother became fascinated by a rundown hotel in the quiet town of Vialas. In 1962, she saw it was on sale and bought it for herself – rechristening it Hotel Chantoiseau, which translates to birdsong. Specialising in simple local cuisine, it wasn’t until Pagès father, Patrick, inherited the business in the 1980s that things quickly became elevated.
“My father was very ambitious,” says Pagès. “His cooking journey was experimental.” After living in Japan for two months, where he would teach French cuisine to the Japanese, he came back and adapted elements of Japanese cooking into his own dishes.
The hotel’s fresh, fine-dining experience meant that, throughout Pagès’ childhood, his home was inhabited by an influx of “fabulous people”. Yves Saint Laurent’s mother, Lucienne Mathieu-Saint- Laurent, would visit, regularly sending Pagès books about her son in the post. There was also French President François Mitterrand, who flew in by helicopter from Paris on May 8th, 1987, to see for himself what all the fuss was about. “My father offered him a bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1973, a special edition in tribute to Picasso that they drunk during the lunch,” says Pagès. “[My dad] gave a lot to his guests. People liked him a lot because he was charismatic.”
Despite the hotel attracting a slew of notable guests throughout his adolescence, coming from a village up in the mountains meant pursuing a career in fashion was difficult for Pagès. “It was challenging because of course my father was focused on his job and didn’t know anything about fashion, so I started from scratch,” he says. “Nobody helped me, I went on this journey myself.” His father’s charm with the guests also led to some resentment: “My father was such a character I had to escape from him. Not in a bad way, but just to do my own thing. I rejected what he cooked. I regret it because now he’s gone, and I didn’t embrace his talent.”
Pagès stayed in Vialas until he was 15, moving to Nîmes for college before making the final leap to Paris in 1993, aged 18. As the world constantly evolves, Pagès says his hometown feels frozen in time. “There are fewer stores than when I lived here; there used to be a butcher’s shop and a place where you could buy magazines. Now there’s just a café and a boulangerie, which is closing this year.” While there’s a steady flow of Parisians holidaying in the town through summer, the lack of commerce in the area and tough weather conditions make the winter months tough.
It was when Pagès’ father passed away in 2011 that the family made the decision to turn the hotel into a guesthouse for lodgers. It was run by Pagès’ mother alone, but closed six years later after he began worrying about her safety. “Things weren’t working out. I didn’t like the idea of having a stranger in the house with my mum,” he says. “When it was a hotel, there were staff, there were high-level clientele – it was a different vibe. When it became a guesthouse, it was a very lost place.”
Pagès has disconnected himself emotionally from the once lively home he grew up in. “My father passed, my grandmother died – there are only ghosts here. As soon as we lost my dad, I quickly renovated the place, redoing the garden and things like that, just to bring some life back into it.
“It’s not like I’ve buried my feelings towards the house,” he continues, “but I prefer to focus on the present. Being nostalgic is always about people that are no longer here.” He built an apartment within the hotel for his mum to live in and has transformed the basement into two separate libraries for the fashion magazines he’s been collecting since 1989 – which includes a pretty impressive archive of 10 and 10 Men. “It’s something which nourishes itself thanks to my job,” says Pagès, who once a year sends a truck from Paris to the house to deliver all the magazines he has collated in his office.
Since the guesthouse closed, with empty rooms at his disposal, Pagès invites a gaggle of his closest friends over each summer for a well-needed decamp from Paris. One such friend is the actress, author and filmmaker Joana Preiss, who always stays in room 11.
When he visits, Pagès and his mother sit over a cup of coffee each morning and discuss what they’ll cook of an evening. One of her specialties is pot-au-feu (beef and vegetables), which goes down a treat when Pagès friends visit. “She likes to do her own thing, she’s a very independent woman,” he says. She also, he says, likes napping, foraging for mushrooms and binging Netflix. “I gave her a subscription and she’s become an addict! She’s got a routine, even when people are here. She loves to see my friends and has her favourites. At the end of the summer, she likes to rate which of them she likes the best.”
Although he says he would never want to permanently move back to Vialas, Pagès would love to spend more time there – once he stops being the busiest man in Paris, that is. “I have a strange relationship [with the house]. Sometimes I am attached and sometimes I detach. It’s not another house, it’s a hotel, it’s huge! It’s difficult to embrace, it’s too big, too absurd.” Could he see himself doing up the place and opening a hotel of his own? “I will have to see where my life brings me.”
Photography by Vianney Le Caer. Taken from 10+ Issue 5 – WORLD IN MOTION – order your copy here.
