PARIS — Violette Serrat will grow to be the brand new creative director of makeup for Guerlain, WWD has learned.

The news confirms a WWD report on July 16.

On Aug. 1, Serrat, who goes by her first name professionally, will step into the position held for the past 21 years by Olivier Echaudemaison on the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned house.

For Serrat, accepting the role at Guerlain was obvious.

“It’s just like the history of our country,” she said, of the practically 200-year-old house, during an exclusive interview with WWD. “It’s really deep within the roots of my story. I grew up [in Paris] this brand. The ladies around me — everybody had some products from Guerlain. So I assumed: ‘After I grow up, I’ll use these products, too.’

“Today, with the ability to impact this historical brand is the most important honor — it’s incredible,” she said.

Serrat lauded Echaudemaison’s creation of the home’s “library of products.”

“It’s definitely very inspiring,” she continued.

Serrat — a self-taught makeup artist who studied fashion design and art before stints at Dior and the Estée Lauder Cos. — will toggle between Paris and Latest York, where she’s lived for six years and runs her cosmetics brand Violette_FR, which launched in April.

“For me, what’s Guerlain? It’s an high fashion house of beauty,” Serrat said. “My number-one priority without delay is to revise your complete library, modernize the formula, possibly stop some products and launch recent ones. We want to work on the essentials — the classic wardrobe of makeup must be impeccable. Then we’re working on the image. After all, my goal is to inform the story of this maison.”

This can not occur overnight.

“I really need to place my nose within the archives for days and discover who’s Guerlain at its core,” she continued. “That’s the heartbeat I’m going to offer in a creative approach to the brand.”

Serrat views the role of makeup today as twofold. One is to rework a face and provides someone confidence.

“And I see the opposite way, where it’s about celebrating, having fun and accepting who we’re in a more natural way,” she explained. “That’s what I’m leaning toward. I don’t want makeup to be your support system. I would like it to be your best friend, [like] any person with whom you’ll be able to rejoice.”

Within the U.S., Serrat is widely known through social media, whereas in her native France, that’s not the case. There, she made her name more at Dior and thru editorial work.

Within the U.S., she began a YouTube channel to not ride the wave of social media but as a consequence of her love of the windows it creates to the wide world.

“I’m a people person,” Serrat said. “That is what I enjoy a lot.”

Her idea was to show people the way to apply makeup to have fun themselves.

“It was a really therapeutic sort of tool I used to be attempting to put in place, and that’s how I began constructing a community,” she said.

Serrat prefers to make use of social media as a approach to connect. “But this just isn’t the fact of a relationship,” she said. “Let’s meet up.”

Véronique Courtois, chief executive officer of Guerlain, said she selected Serrat partly because she and the brand are quintessential Parisians.

“Violette is for me probably the most Parisian makeup artist on the earth,” Courtois said.

The chief had been watching Serrat’s profession and knew her talent.

Together with bringing the Parisian spirit back to Guerlain, Serrat can inject it with youth, Courtois continued.

“She has the likelihood and creativity to put in writing this recent chapter of Guerlain — in an especially feminine way…and with a free spirit,” Courtois said. “Violette is the one who will give you the option to pass on this heritage to the brand new generations. She’s the translator of this.”

Courtois said Echaudemaison helped forge Guerlain’s heritage.

He was probably the primary makeup artist in France to grow to be a society-page fixture in his own right.

Since Echaudemaison’s apprenticeship to hair maestro Alexandre de Paris on the age of 16, he has primped — and befriended — women in the general public eye, from the young Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Wallis Simpson to Marella Agnelli, Josephine Baker and various royals.

A WWD article published on Jan. 14, 1972, said Echaudemaison did Baroness Guy de Rothschild’s evening makeup for her family’s “Proust” ball.

In that very same article, Echaudemaison said what he tries to do “is to show [women] to be more daring. To maintain their very own personality, but to make use of makeup because the indispensable accessory.”

He worked on fashion shoots for Vogue’s Diana Vreeland in the corporate of legendary talents resembling Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and David Bailey.

That was before Echaudemaison landed at Givenchy, where he served as artistic director for makeup for 10 years, starting in 1988, after work at Harriet Hubbard Ayer and another brands.

Echaudemaison created the primary makeup line for Givenchy.

In a WWD article dating from Dec. 9, 1988, that makeup collection was described as including a good choice of products: three foundations, two tinted moisturizers, nine lipsticks, two mascaras, five single eye shadows, two blushes, one pressed powder and a “powder prism.”

“The prism, probably the most unusual item in the road, is comprised of 4 raised pans of salmon, apricot, pink and mauve powder held in a single unit,” the article said.

It was an revolutionary idea, which allowed people to combine their very own color.

That prism is iconic today.

“I all the time think makeup is lots like cooking,” Echaudemaison said on the time.

Also recent was leaving it as much as the buyer to make your mind up whether Givenchy would alter its collection with recent products, quite than sticking to the normal two color stories a yr.

Then in 2000, Echaudemaison boldly requested an audience with LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault.

“I asked him to offer me sleeping beauty,” said Echaudemaison, referring to Guerlain, in an interview with WWD published on Nov. 29, 2004. “He wasn’t sure what I used to be talking about.”

But Echaudemaison walked out of the meeting because the house’s artistic director of makeup.

He subsequently introduced more modern colours and textures into Guerlain’s mix, resembling expanding the Terracotta line of bronzing products and introducing “bubble blush,” applied with the fingers.

“It needed to be more fun,” he said during that interview. “Makeup is about fun and freedom — about reconnecting, if just for just a few minutes, with the delight of just a little girl twiddling with her mom’s makeup.”

Echaudemaison modernized Terracotta, Rouge Automatique and Météorites, and created top sellers for Guerlain — especially lipsticks — including Kiss Kiss, the long-lasting lipstick in modern, metallic packaging that got here out in 2005.

In 2009, his brainchild Rouge G — a lipstick in metal packaging nodding to minaudière purses from the Nineteen Thirties — was launched. Cracking the normal codes of lipstick packaging, it lays on its side and flips open to disclose two mirrors.

Today, two Terracotta products remain the highest two bestselling makeup products in France. Guerlain’s strongest geographic markets are Europe and Asia.

Echaudemaison published his life story, “Les Couleurs de Ma Vie” (or “The Colours of My Life”) in 2004. It traces his path from an unhappy childhood within the Périgord region of France to his triumph in Paris as style consultant to probably the most glamorous women within the twentieth century.

Echaudemaison was promoted to the grade of Officer of Arts and Letters in France in March 2019.

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