Her alien-looking glasses, usually inscribed with poems or playful phrases and impressed by celestial our bodies, normally had a convex miroir sorcière within the center, rendering them ineffective for checking one’s make-up. As a substitute, they mirror the atmosphere of the piece with a surreal, fish-eye look. As AD100 fan Julie Hillman explains, they’re “extra like positive jewellery.” The Paris socialite liked the mirrors, which ranged from pocket dimension to a few ft in diameter, and had been embraced by designer Jean Royère, who positioned them in his interiors.
Since then, like the celebrities that impressed them, they’ve come out and in of sight, making tastemakers’ houses sparkle. AD100 designer Giancarlo Valle hung one in his Brooklyn loft, whereas Reed Krakoff put collectively a constellation in his manse in Manhattan. “There is a witchcraft to it,” says supplier Liz O’Brien, who’s owned a number of through the years — she prefers the super-rare coloured variations — and says, “When you get one, you need one other.”
Julien Lombrail, co-founder of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which held an exhibition of mirrors in November, estimates Vautrin sculpted some 70 shapes. Some, just like the pointy solar, had been mass-produced, whereas solely two copies of the Monaco mirror, proven, are identified to exist. For Lombrail, all of them have a French sense of artwork de vivre: “Elegant, refined, creative and astonishing, they evoke pleasure and fantasy.”
