Fabric remnant, Bicchieri,

1958

Andrée Brossin de Méré’s creative energy was nurtured by a huge store of visual impressions, for she was an avid collector of every conceivable kind of art and craft as well as natural objects and also roved through major museums absorbing a wide variety of imagery. “Brossinette,” as she was affectionately known in Paris, demonstrated her passion for design in a multifaceted range of textiles. She found fitting subjects in black-and-white photographs, for example, cutting out the motifs and then combining them into groups. After tracing the motifs by hand using tracing paper, she tested various color schemes and had her employees convert her images into a repeating pattern, the indispensable starting point for every printed textile. In her fabric designs, Brossin de Méré created multiple variations on a single theme, as illustrated by her series showing historical drinking glasses. Brossin de Méré’s fabrics became known to the public through the creations of the great Parisian fashion houses. Her butterflies and begonias for Dior and animal prints and tulips for Givenchy caused a sensation. The unusual motifs at first went too far for the conservative French bourgeoisie. Undeterred, Brossin de Méré founded her own company in Paris in 1967 called Les tisseurs B de M, along with a large branch on Nüschelerstrasse 24 in Zurich under the name Tissus Brossin de Méré. In the early sixties, she also began to collaborate with the consortium of the five major textile makers in Como, as well as with the silk industry in Lyon. In 1969 Brossin de Méré came up with a new form of expression by assembling samples of her own prints to create patchwork pictures and fabrics—which were gladly taken up by Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint Laurent, and Nina Ricci. (Sabine Flaschberger)