Martine Sitbon

Martine Sitbon is a French fashion designer.

After spending her childhood in Morocco and a short stay at the Lycée Chateaubriand in Rome (Chateaubriand High School in Rome), the young Martine Sitbon returned to Paris in the early 1960s with her family. In the early 1970s, Sitbon entered the Studio Berçot in Paris where she studied until 1974. Her appeal for traveling made her work as a freelance designer for various fashion houses around the world. She designed collections in India and Hong-Kong from 1976 to 1980.

In the early 1980s until 1985, Sitbon mainly worked between New York and Paris. Between 1984 and 1986, she designed collections in Milan as a freelance designer for Italian fashion houses. In Milan, Italian investors that had already launched the designer Romeo Gigli and who were scouting new designers to financially aid noticed her. This allowed Sitbon to present her very first fashion show in 1986 in Paris. In 1987, she was invited to present her first collection within the Cour Carrée du Louvre in Paris during Fashion Week. That same season, she was invited to present a fashion show at the Palladium in New York City. That same year, Sitbon collaborated with the photographer Javier Vallhonrat and the artistic director Marc Ascoli in order to create catalogues, the visual identity and advertising campaigns for her brand. This collaboration lasted five seasons.

In 1988, she was appointed Creative Director in the luxury ready-to-wear French fashion house Chloé. She designed the collections during nine seasons in parallel to working for her own brand, Martine Sitbon. Sitbon's arrival happened during a time when Chloé was declining and smelled of dust. With Sitbon, the Chloé fashion house got a breath of fresh air: a strong visual identity incarnated by the supermodels of the time: Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen... "Chloé had this thing where they began to pick up young designers and they carried on. I think it's really become part of the Chloé heritage…I was the first young girl to be a named designer for the house. And for me it was an incredible experience." (Martine Sitbon, interview with Sarah Mower, November 2012)

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