Samuel Vartan didn’t look for fashion.
Fashion found him.
Samuel Vartan was born in Athens, Greece. A few years later, his family moved to Beirut, Lebanon and finally to Montreal, Canada where he has lived for most of his life before coming to the United States in 2003. Having studied illustration and communications in college, Vartan did not set his sights on fashion at first.
As a teenager, Vartan already had a strong sense of style and spent most of his money on clothing—pushing the closet space in his family home to the limits. Always playing music as part of a band and passionate about illustration and film, the idea of fashion design did not begin to creep into Vartan’s consciousness until his first job working on window displays at a retail-clothing store. Putting things together and experimenting with different combinations became his favorite responsibility.
Around the same time, Vartan made the connection between music and fashion when he tagged along with a musician friend who was being fitted for stage clothes. Vartan became enraptured by what the designer was doing and tried sketching his own designs.
He smoothly translated his skills as an illustrator into fashion design and quickly began running a business out of his parent’s home: working on sketches in his bedroom and bringing designs to reality at his mother’s kitchen table. Friends, musicians and even the model/waitresses from his favorite café were soon wearing his designs. By 1998 Vartan had earned tremendous accolades and won the support of the fashion community at his first official show.
Vartan’s designs are highly personal. His history as a musician, illustrator, animator, film lover, and world traveler culminate in each and every piece he creates. He debuts his collections twice a year as Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer.
His Fall/Winter collection, known as “dark city,” is about being a musician, growing up in the 1980’s, living and breathing rock and roll and city night life. It’s as gothic and cool as Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London after dark. Nestled into his choices of leather, suede, cashmere, tweed, satin and velvet are whispers of the art deco movement, film noir and the classic architecture of Europe’s oldest cities.