Feature : Creative arts very much alive

Before him, florists made bouquets of flowers. When he came along, at the end of the 1980s, in a world that clung, perhaps too much, to customs and tradition, the revolution began!

Christian Tortu will try anything - as likely to combine fruit and vegetables in his bouquets as flowers and branches; producing monochrome arrangements; selling dried flowers (it is to him we owe the universal vogue for bouquets held together by stems of plants) ; designing things other than bouquets, vases for example, which is logical, but also table linen and bed linen, china, candles and small furniture; and finally, entering the very trendy world of fashion, luxury goods and advertising as a florist, where he quickly became ab-sol-ute-ly e-ssen-tial.

Fashion shows with Dior, Chanel and Balmain, the Cannes Festival, there is not a smart event, trendy exhibition or trade show that does not call on his talents. He is the darling of fashion and lifestyle magazines, in which he is described as a floral artist, the "great couturier of the petal" or the Mozart of flowers.

---

---

He has fans all over the world, among the famous, for example Catherine Deneuve, and not so famous, especially the British and Americans, who call in at his Odéon shop whenever they’re in Paris - which endeavours to make up bouquets individually.

So is Christian Tortu a florist? Definitely. At six years old, this Angevin, proud of his peasant origins, had his own little garden and by the age of twelve he was cultivating flowers, even then, for flower arranging. He is also a very astute businessman who has opened shops from Paris to New York by way of Singapore, making his name a brand recognized world-wide.

But above all he is an iconoclastic and impassioned artist who has managed to harness the modern city dweller’s need for nature and respond to it brilliantly. Giving his arrangements just the right amount of wildness and originality, humour and nostalgia, Christian Tortu aims to help people better appreciate the beauty of the world. For him, "mixing elements of nature is part of life," because "when you look at a garden or a landscape you see a whole, of which flowers are only one part".