The Zimmermann sisters take on a famed Paris institution
Nicky and Simone Zimmermann embark on a major project with landmark Parisian department store, Le Bon Marché.
There is, to be sure, a certain feeling that comes with holiday clothes. The ones worn when lazing by an azure body of water, cocktail in hand. Or for meandering down cobblestone paths with the sole and focused goal of finding the place with the perfect pistachio gelato that someone with impeccable taste told you about.
It’s a feeling that sisters Nicky and Simone Zimmermann want to capture in a major new project with the famed Parisian department store, Le Bon Marché. Actually it’s something their clothes – all those frills and flounces and florals – have always captured. The ones that turned them into Australia’s first billion-dollar fashion brand.
For Nicky and Simone, co-founders and creative director and chief operating officer respectively, the four month-long “experiential” activation in Paris is a sunny-side-up invitation to experience the brand in a new way.
This story is from the April issue of WISH to be published in The Australian on Friday, April 5.
“I think it’s another extension of what we do. It shows another part of our brand’s personality and the breadth of things that we do. And I guess how we think about that summertime and that summer spirit,” says Nicky.
It’s the kind of months-long, juicily creative, all-hands-on-deck project that the creative director loves.
“I really love having a very specific brief and making sure I answer it. It’s really fun. It’s coming from a different design perspective than when I do a collection in a normal format … and I know that my team also loves to do it. Everyone always wants to jump in and have a go because for us it’s something different and it’s extremely focused and you have a definite mission,” she says.
Upon entering the Zimmermann space in Le Bon Marché (all 300 square metres of it), a soundscape of shells being scrunched underfoot and waves lapping at the shore transports shoppers far from the madding crowds. So, too, digital artscapes of fish zipping underwater and birds flying into the sunset. The colour palette is soothing – hazy pinks and yellows – with textural combinations of plush cactus-like objects and rock sculpture walls.
Zimmermann has also created an exclusive capsule collection for the Paris space. Nicky and the team rifled through the archives for inspiration to create easy-breezy tiered skirts, sarongs, swimsuits and tailored linen sets in muted tropical prints that can only be purchased at Le Bon Marché.
“The main thing was to be able to recreate those garments in different ways that have that appeal to people when they’re wearing them on their summer holidays or they can wear it in Paris to an amazing event, but then they can go to Saint-Tropez … they’re pieces [that] become a part of their memories and they’re actually going to be unique to them,” says Nicky.
A favourite element for the sisters was their collaboration with the centuries-old French candlemakers Trudon.
It too smells like an escape.
“Florally … something that felt very summery and fresh,” says Nicky.
Other curiosities and treasures will include the brand’s first foray into pieces for the home and souvenirs such as napkins, fans and playing cards.
For Simone Zimmermann, of the many different kinds of projects, activations and collaborations that happen with a brand in possession of some 62 stores and counting (including a second boutique that opened in Paris in December), this one is particularly momentous.
“Particularly with the timing, being in Paris, in what I count as one of the best department stores in the world, during the Olympics. It’s pretty amazing timing for us to be given an enormous space to do what we feel sort of expresses what our brand is,” she says.
“And it’s such an iconic department store that is so special to locals in Paris.”
The City of Light is a particularly special place for the Zimmermann sisters. They have a headquarters there (along with Sydney and New York City) which is currently bursting at the seams. Soon they’ll move to a new one in the Marais.
“Paris is another fashion home for us in line with our office in New York … doing this type of collaboration with Le Bon Marché, a quintessential French store, helps build that whole relationship,” says Simone.
The sisters first launched the brand in 1991, and Zimmermann made its debut on the official schedule at Paris Fashion Week in 2022. When WISH caught up with Nicky and Simone, they were about to fly to Paris for their autumn/winter 2024 show.
For the record, they don’t always fly together but this time had quite accidentally, and happily, booked the same flight.
“Sometimes we’re on the plane together, sometimes we’re not. Sometimes it’s the three of us [Nicky’s husband Chris Olliver is Zimmermann’s chief executive], which is hilarious. Simone and I sometimes sort of just go, ‘How did we luck out with this?’. We get to be sisters, hang out, travel the world, do all this stuff and work together. It’s kind of hard to explain. You’re thankful, like, ‘God, this has really worked out well’,” says Nicky.
“It doesn’t stop being enjoyable. We’re doing lots of different [kinds of] work … for us to be able to share the times together, with each other, with our wider family, with really good friends … we have been really fortunate to include each other, that we get to spend the amount of time we do together,” adds Simone.
That first show in the French capital remains a favourite memory for them both.
“The first time we showed in Paris, Simone went, ‘Oh, have you seen where we’re showing?’. And
I went, ‘Well, no, I know Petit Palais, but I haven’t seen it’. And she went, ‘Right, let’s go for a walk this morning.’ And we went for a walk and then the two of us are just standing at the stairs at the Petite Palais and I’m going, ‘I wasn’t nervous before’,” laughs Nicky. “Simone and I there in our tights getting run over by all the pushbikes together and laughing. And then it’s standing there going, ‘Oh my god, OK, this is this is where we are. And then you’ve got to forget about it,” she says.
“Let’s get it done. The best way that we can,” adds Simone.
As for what’s on the horizon, always more – more stores, the next collection, the idea, too, that it’s always summer somewhere.
European summer, during which the Le Bon Marché project so neatly falls, is something Nicky sees as having an “entanglement of fashion, particularly in France”. “You definitely have outfits to wear to beautiful restaurants. You definitely have outfits to wear to lunch. The whole idea that everything is an occasion and everything is about making great memories. Every time you’re at a restaurant, it’s large family groups and big groups of friends. And to me it’s that everybody wants to feel good and I think for me, it’s connected to what you are wearing and how that makes you feel,” she says
It’s something that only the most perfect and beloved sundresses can truly capture. Especially the kind you find in Paris, never able to be purchased again.
