Shopping bag.

Amélie Pichard is undeniably one of the subversive minds of fashion: unclassifiable, avant-garde, she is also a true utopian. The creator of her eponymous brand of bags and shoes, Amélie Pichard, founded back in 2011, she has always believed in the need for a paradigm shift: from collaborating with Pamela Anderson to launch a vegan leather collection to fabricating UFO handbags made from a Brazilian Elephant Ear leaf. With its ironic tone and its political vision, Amélie has transformed minds and even the way we buy. For years, she tried to align her values ​​in a fashion environment that often forgets common sense, on the altar of overproduction and money. It was a crazy and difficult bet to keep: and if she stopped her label today, she would have injected fashion with a rare sense of ethics. In these past months she has decided to gradually turn the page on her brand to think about other concepts. Located in le Perche, two hours from Paris, she is now on a mission to reinvent our way of conceiving rurality, housing and creation.

It started with a real crush on le Perche, in the Eure-et-Loire region, an enigmatic countryside where Parisians in search of nature now congregate. Amélie and her partner tried to buy an entire ruin there, and in the meantime, rented a house on a stud farm. The sale did not go through, but Amélie came across another property: an old hunting lodge in the shape of a cube, lost in the forest. In the 70s, a Parisian doctor came to spend his weekends there, without electricity, and then, this curious habitat saw many lives. “Every time someone lived there, they enlarged it, transformed it.” These successive metamorphoses fascinated Amélie who loves distortion and mutations. The house is open to the outside, sober, and neutral. Amélie and her partner are making their house as environmentally responsible as possible. “There was a pink plaster, we dyed it green to respect the fauna. Today, tiger spiders are settling there, they think they are at home.”

Amélie wanted to create a “box” in the middle of nature, totally open to the outside. She put cork on the floor, and left certain raw materials visible, she likes the finishes to be visible, the imperfections reassure her. After the 50s and rattan style that she once cherished, she now prefers the aesthetic of the 80s, a minimalistic approach, with its wood, metal, resins and Plexiglas. She evokes the industrial design of Ettore Sottsass. More than housing, it’s a reflection. It’s a space that takes her somewhere else: professionally and intimately. When she moved there, she had just gone through a difficult time after giving birth, and she needed shelter. Thanks to it, she keeps the system at a certain distance. She only goes to Paris one day a week, and it redraws her relationship with the city, but also with the creative world. She’s now a passenger, and she appreciates it. “I’ve always been a homebody; I didn’t like networking. When I was an entrepreneur, people thought I was snobbish, but the truth was I was in trouble and just trying to get out of it.” Amélie is always honest, which gives her projects a raw and beautiful truth. There is always a meeting of the raw and the sensitive, in Amélie – both concerning the materials she uses, as well as in her very aesthetic, her vision of art: we will remember the pink satin bed that she had installed in her first Parisian shop, which met the somewhat brutalist plastic of its walls. In Amelie Pichard’s universe, cheesy humor also meets slightly gory and David Lynch-like cinematic references, forming a free and erudite, complex universe, with tender, and slightly grating accents.