Isabel Marant

Isabel Marant was born on 12 April 1967 in Boulogne-Billancourt to a French father and German mother. Her parents divorced when Marant was six and she lived with her father who had remarried. In childhood, Marant didn't want to be a designer, she dreamt of becoming a veterinarian when she grew up. She was raised in the Hauts-de-Seine suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine, refusing to wear dresses and carrying alternative outfits to school in plastic bags. At the age of 14, Marant had a haircut like Patti Smith's and wore customised menswear. In 1982, she asked her father to buy her a sewing machine and she started making clothes out of discarded clothing and fabric, and very soon, her friends asked her to design clothing for them. At 15, Marant was crazy about Vivienne Westwood and she did babysitting to be able to buy something at Westwood's Paris shop.

She pursued her studies at the Saint-James high school in Neuilly, then at HEC, before quickly changing direction following the success of the brand "Aller Simple," which she co-founded in 1984 with her friend Christophe Lemaire, a young student (later artistic director of Lacoste and Hermès). They dropped it off to a Le Depot shop in Paris that paid when clothes were sold. The clothing sold well enough to make her reconsider her plans to study economics. From 1985 to 1987, Marant studied fashion at Studio Berçot, a Paris fashion college.

Early career

In 1987, after her studies, Marant worked with Parisian designer Michel Klein. Later she also collaborated with Bridget Yorke working on two collections and assisted art director Marc Ascoli on different projects for Chloé, Martine Sitbon, and Yohji Yamamoto. However, working in other houses was a frustrating experience for her, and soon Marant decided to continue alone. In 1989, she launched a collection of belts and rings, followed by a line of belts for Claude Montana, a line of buttons and necklaces for Étienne Brunel, and a line of shoe buckles for Michel Perry.

In 1990 with her mother, she launched a knitwear and jersey label "Twen".

Marant is married to designer Jérôme Dreyfuss. Their son, Tal, was born in 2003. The family lives in Belleville, Paris. They spend most of their weekends in a countryside cabin with no electricity or hot water in Fontainebleau, 50 km away from Paris.

In 2008, Marant won a claim against French fashion chain Naf Naf that was ordered to pay her 75,000 Euros damages for copying a puff-sleeved dress from her autumn-winter 2006 collection.

In 2015, the indigenous Mixe community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, in Oaxaca, Mexico, denounced Marant for the plagiarism of the collectively owned traditional design embroidered in their Mixe blouses. A Twitter storm followed under the hashtag #miBlusadeTlahui, which pointed out the uncanny similarity of some of Marant's recent designs to those of indigenous designers from Tlahuitoltepec, who have been designing and making their original hand-sewn shirts for over 600 years in the style of the Mixe indigenous people. Marant's uncredited appropriation of the designs, virtually stitch-for-stitch, aroused the anger of the Mixe people for whom the handmade manufacture of the shirts, and their sale, is an important economic and cultural factor.

The plagiarism issue continued to dog Marant, being taken up by the UK Guardian newspaper in June 2015 by journalist Naomi Larsson, who reported that yet another design company named Antik Batik had claimed copyright on the disputed garment, and quoted Marant's office as admitting the design was from Tlahuitoltepec as a defence against the claim. The Mixe people had received no communication of this acknowledgement, according to the report. In 2016, the community again demanded an apology from Marant and Antik Batik at a press conference in Mexico City.