Feature: One hundred creative artists who have chosen France

With around 800 buyers, 2,000 journalists and 400 photographers from all over the world coming to its ready-to-wear and haute couture fashion shows, Paris continues to stand out as the international crossroads of fashion design. French, Japanese, Belgian, Brazilian, English, American, Italian, Dutch... Over fifteen nationalities are represented on the Paris podiums every six months. Close-up on some couturiers and fashion designers who, quite apart from these essential fashion events, have a special link with the capital.

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Since 1983, the name Karl Lagerfeld has been associated with that of Chanel, for which he has designed all the lines. Also responsible for the collections of the Roman label Fendi and at the head of the Lagerfeld Gallery brand, this passionate hard-working man has managed to adapt to his own times all the codes of elegance dear to Coco Chanel.

Son of a large German manufacturing family, the fashion designer, born in 1938, came to Paris over half a century ago to pursue his secondary studies. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, he won the competition organised by the wool secretariat, jointly with Yves Saint Laurent. A man with over two hundred thousand books and his own publishing house, 7L, he was already reading French as a child, in the Letters from Elisabeth, Palatine Princess.

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Fifth in a family of seven children, Kenzo Takada was born in Japan in 1939 and spent his childhood in the village of Hyogo. After attending the Bunka fashion school and spending several years working in Japan, the young designer landed in Marseille in 1965. France was then experiencing the early days of ready-to-wear fashion, with Sonia Rykiel, Dorothée Bis and Cacharel. Having come for a few weeks, he decided to settle in Paris, that city where "all is harmony". For his first collection, in April 1970, he used Japanese cottons and remnants bought in the Saint-Pierre fabric market at the foot of Montmartre in Paris. The image has remained: "Kenzo, most Parisian of Japanese".

After thirty years of a fashion filled with colours borrowed from folk traditions around the world, the designer chose, in 1999, to leave his brand, owned by the LVMH group. In his loft in Bastille, in which teahouse and 18th-century French furniture live side by side, Kenzo has just launched, at the age of sixty five, a line of scarves under the label Gokan Kobo.

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When the French luggage manufacturer Louis Vuitton decided, in 1997, to move into the ready-to-wear fashion venture, it was to New Yorker Marc Jacobs that this leading brand of the LVMH group entrusted artistic direction of all lines. A gamble that has more than paid off for the American fashion prodigy, born in 1963 and a graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York, also at the head of a label with his own name since 1986.

"I feel good in Paris and in New York. But the energy is different here. In Paris, I never have that feeling of urgency, of pressure," asserts Marc Jacobs who now lives in France. With this designer, who is surfing the fashion wave whilst respecting the heritage of the brand, Louis Vuitton can lie back and enjoy the celebrations of its hundred and fifty years.

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Born in Tunis (Tunisia), Azzedine Alaïa arrived in Paris in 1957. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in the sculpture department, he started out in the capital by making designs for private clients and friends, such as writer Louise de Vilmorin. The actress Arletty, that "Popular and royal Parisienne", inspired him to make one of his first zipped black dresses. Discovered by the press in the late 1970s, this most oriental of Parisian fashion designers has a great fondness for materials that naturally hug the lines of the body. His clothes are breathtaking in their beautiful proportions. Supported, since 1999, by the Italian group Prada, Azzedine Alaïa fiercely cultivates his independence from the fashion institutions, by organising his own fashion shows under the luminous glass roof of his Parisian premises.