François Auguste GAMICHON

The story

Born in 1844, François Auguste Gamichon married Louise Chauvin (1850-1940). In 1876 he set up a firm making abdominal belts and elastic fabrics. Everything rested on a recent discovery, the vulcanisation of rubber: until then natural rubber grew sticky in heat, cracked in cold and broke down within months, so that no garment could be made to live with it. Elastic that lasts changes everything you can hold on a body.

The business prospered and exported as far as Latin America — a notable feat for a Paris workshop in technical textiles, which mail order carried across France and out to the colonies. The product had nothing seductive about it: medical belts and support bandages, sold from a catalogue. But the know-how piled up on elastic cloth was exactly what the whole women's clothing industry would soon be missing. Nobody in that workshop was thinking yet of dressing anything but the sick.

In 1898 he took in his nephew Paul Maurice Kretz; the firm became “Gamichon-Kretz”, then “Établissements Kretz”. In 1902 that nephew's son, Maurice, began making corsets cut from the elastic fabrics Gamichon had developed. The elastic corset put an end to the rigid whalebone corset and turned women's underwear into an industry of technical cloth. Out of that house came Chantelle, which took the name only in 1949 and remains one of the great French lingerie labels.

Gamichon died in 1909, before his name vanished from the sign. The paradox is complete: the label still exists, everyone knows it, and the man whose invention made it possible no longer appears on it. His stone, in Division 2, carries his name, his dates and those of his widow, who died in 1940 — thirty-one years after him — and not a word of what he invented. He made belts for sick bodies; it was his nephew who understood what else could be done with them.