Michèle Rosier

Michèle Lazareff Rosier (3 June 1930 – 2 April 2017) was a French fashion journalist and designer who founded the V de V sportswear label. In addition to this, she worked as a film director and screenwriter since 1973.

Born Michèle Lazareff in 1930, her parents were the journalists Pierre Lazareff (1907–1972) and Hélène Gordon-Lazareff (1909–1988), who between them founded Elle magazine. Aged 10, she was the first ever child to read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a close friend of her parents.

She studied at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York.

Lazareff Rosier started out as a journalist for her father's daily paper, France Soir before becoming chief editor of the magazine Le Nouveau Femina.

In the early 1960s Rosier founded V de V (which stands for Vêtements de Vacance, or 'Holiday Wear'). She also designed for at least two other lines: dresses for Chloe D'Alby, and a line of affordable furs called Monsieur Z which included pink and blue dyed rabbit fur coats. However, her V de V designs, including both fashionable sportswear and activewear such as swimwear and ski-wear, were very successful. She was noted as an early adopter of vinyl and stretch fabrics, with one New York reporter commenting in 1965 on the close similarity between her two-colour jersey dresses and Yves Saint Laurent's subsequent Mondrian dresses. Due to her love of plastics, she was nicknamed the "Vinyl Girl," and has been credited with introducing vinyl to Paris fashion before André Courrèges, to whom she was compared by the International Herald Tribune for her "style without nostalgia." She has also been credited with being the first designer to deliberately use outsize industrial zippers. A contemporary press piece in 1968 ranked Rosier alongside Emmanuelle Khanh and Christiane Bailly as part of a "new race" of innovative and exciting young French designers, described as "stylists who work for ready-to-wear."

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