In 1954, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Paris, Marie-Louise Carven — the founder of the eponymous fashion and perfume house who was better known as Madame Carven — took to the sky to release hundreds of miniature parachutes bearing sample bottles of her flagship fragrance over the city.

Nearly 70 years later, Carven heralded its latest incarnation with a quieter statement: a blank page. The invitation to the house’s spring/summer 2024 show last September featured a reproduction of Alison Watt’s Warrender, a trompe l’oeil painting of a twice-folded, then unfolded, piece of A4 printer paper.

“I was drawn to that painting because it was a blank page with creases. To me, the creases suggested a memory,” says Louise Trotter, who was appointed as Carven’s creative director last February. “It’s a blank page, but with a past.”

Much like Carven itself. The brand has cycled through numerous iterations since Madame Carven presented her first collection in 1945. Its last heyday was over a decade ago, when Emma Stone and Alexa Chung brought then-designer Guillaume Henry’s coquettish, romantic designs to life. Then came a period of instability, ownership changes and near-bankruptcy, and several years away from the runway. Now Carven is making a comeback, with Trotter, a soft-spoken Brit known for her pared-back sensibilities, as the architect of the house’s new era.

On Saturday, she’ll show her second collection. Trotter is reluctant to give too much away, but describes it as a range of “misplaced classics” for the “free, joyful, outward-looking and independent” Carven woman. “I’m very much looking at the archetypes that are the building blocks for the house and putting them into a context that I believe is unique to us,” she shares over Zoom from her office in Paris.

For the designer, it marks a “continuation” of a debut that began with her SS24 show. That collection featured menswear shapes given a Parisienne spin: strong-shouldered blazers over sheer organza skirts and sculpted tops over shirts. Trotter took the shape of the Esperanto jacket, one of Madame Carven’s signatures, and reversed it into a minidress that closed with a single fastening. Every look was styled with squared-off mules or flat slippers.

Trotter was born in Sunderland, the northeastern English port city. As a child she whipped up tiny outfits for her dolls, instructed and encouraged by her grandmother. “She was a seamstress who taught me how to cut a pattern and allowed me to use her old tablecloths and curtains. She was the first to feed my imagination in that way.”

When she graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic with a fashion design degree in 1991, there was no clear pathway into a fashion career. “I grew up in the north-east of England at a time when saying you wanted to be a fashion designer was akin to saying you wanted to fly a rocket to the moon. It was certainly not the norm. But I was really determined — there was nothing else.”

She spent her early career at Whistles before moving to the US to join Calvin Klein. Roles at Gap and Tommy Hilfiger followed before she returned to the UK for the creative director job at Jigsaw. She then spent nine years at Joseph, splitting her time between Paris and London, before Lacoste came calling in 2018, bringing with it a full-time move to Paris with her husband and three children. Their flat in the seventh arrondissement is filled with the vintage wooden bowls and Brutalist ceramics Trotter collects — collections her husband, Yuske Tanaka, tries to streamline whenever Trotter is away (“We’re going to London this weekend and he’s started to box things already”).

She says she approaches every project, high-street or high-end, with “exactly the same process” of research and reflection. But after decades devoted to boosting the design credibility of household-name brands, the offer to take on Carven, now owned by Franco-Chinese ICCF Group, felt invigorating. “The fact that it was a blank page and a new beginning was very, very attractive to me.” Carven wasn’t exactly a start-up — more a sleeping beauty. “I liked that the house had a rich history, but at the same time wasn’t tied to any particular product or logo or icon. That allowed me full creative freedom to be able to bring a new vision to the house.”

Her thinking about what Carven could be began with a study of its founder, Madame Carven, born Carmen de Tommaso, who launched her house in a time when “young women had nothing to wear and even less to eat.” She is credited with having patented the first push-up bra in France. She dressed Édith Piaf and Leslie Caron, as well as Parisian traffic wardens and Eurostar staffers, whose uniforms she designed. She died in 2015, aged 105. 

“She was a very dynamic woman,” Trotter says. “I feel that to do her justice, I have to create clothes for a strong woman with character, who lives a real life, who dresses to please herself and not others.”

Trotter’s status as a female creative director in Paris makes her an outlier. FT analysis of 33 major luxury fashion brands last year showed that the proportion of female creative directors at luxury fashion houses has fallen since 2018, slipping to 27.6 per cent in 2023 from a peak of 34.5 per cent five years before. Trotter is the first woman to lead Carven since its namesake. Does that feel significant?

“Yes and no. I prefer not to be drawn into the female discussion. I hope I’ve come to the house as the right person, not just because I’m a woman,” she says. “But as a feminist, I think we have a lot to do.”

Starting with a new logo. The brand tapped Peter Miles, the art director behind logos for Marc Jacobs and Céline (before it dropped the accent) for the revamp, a switch from a spare, all-caps san serif to a lower case logo in a bold Latin typeface with sharp serifs and retro curves. A new website and redesigned flagship store at 6 Rond Point des Champs-Elysées will follow.

“This is a journey for us,” she says. “The collections, the store concept, the logo, the headquarters — we want to redo everything mindfully and carefully, with a pragmatic approach.”

Part of that is keeping the collection small and considering wardrobe buildability. “I want the customer to invest and build with us. It’s a long-term point of view.” To that end, black and navy tones will remain consistent across collections, so that a client who buys a blazer one season can come back for a coordinating trouser the next. She says pricing will be “mindful” as well, with prices for knitwear and shoes starting at €500 and €600, topping out at €2,500 for coats.

The idea of evolving a wardrobe is familiar from Joseph, and from Trotter’s own life, although every season will bring a dash of the zingy and new. “As women, we love that excitement, but we all have a uniform,” she says, indicating her own grey cashmere roll-neck jumper and Céline eyeglasses. “I like nothing more than to dress real women and see them feeling and looking good in my clothes, and the clothes being a service to their lives.” Parachutes optional.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram — and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen