Back in high school, when my love for fashion was blossoming, I would spend hours on Style.com educating myself on the latest runways and designers. I studied all of this like it was an important school assignment—often skipping my actual homework. My hometown of Nipissing, Canada is hardly a fashion capital, so I took great interest in what was happening on the scene over in Europe; The clothes in London, Milan and Paris all seemed so glamorous and luxurious.
Being a teen in the 2000s, during the time of indie sleaze, Myspace, and Scene kids, I was particularly smitten by anything studded or emblazoned with skulls. As such, it didn’t take me long to discover the work of Lucien Pellat-Finet. The French designer, who died this week at 78, was known for his (very expensive) cashmere skull sweaters, which came in a rainbow of colors. I was instantly obsessed.
Pellat-Finet—who started his career in fashion as a model, after being discovered by designer Pierre Cardin—founded his label in 1994, but it really took off during the Y2K style era. At a time when edgy Alexander McQueen skull scarves and bedazzled Ed Hardy graphic tees were trending, Pellat-Finet’s luxurious skull knits stood out from the pack. Not only were his pieces extremely of-the-moment, they were also amazing quality—extremely soft, and made with double-ply yarn and an intarsia technique, where knitters from Scotland would sew individual panels, then ensemble each sweater by hand.
Pellat-Finet’s sweaters could cost upwards of $2,000—a staggering amount back then (and still now). But they warranted the price tag: The designer only made a couple thousand styles a year. They were a real status item, and very much out of a 16-year-old like myself’s budget. But that just made me covet them more. In fact, I wanted one so bad that, on a vacation to New York City with my whole family, I dragged my parents and my sister to the now-shuttered boutique Jeffrey just so I could touch one of the sweaters and try it on. (Despite hinting at how much I loved it, my parents did not, in fact, shell out two grand for the knit. “That’s crazy,” my mom said. She didn’t get it.)