François Catroux, Decorator of Choice for Aristocrats, Dies at 83

François Catroux, a glamorous designer for the Rothschild family, Russian oligarchs, Greek and Arab princesses, fashion designers, media moguls and South American billionaires — what used to be known as the jet set — died on Nov. 8 in a hospital in Paris. He was 83.

The cause was a brain tumor, said his wife, Betty Catroux.

Mr. Catroux was movie-star handsome with a perennial tan and a taste for expensive sports cars, the grandson of a noted French general and a Spanish heiress, and a high school friend of Yves Saint Laurent. Along with his wife, Ms. Catroux, the lanky androgyne beauty who was Mr. Saint Laurent’s muse and playmate, the Algerian-born Mr. Catroux was at the center of Paris’s glittering 1970s-era social scene, a complicated fantasia at which art, fashion and money collided.

Mr. Catroux was self-taught, with a sophisticated eye, and his first design job, when he was 30, was for Mila Schön, a stalwart of Italian fashion, who in 1967 asked him to design her showroom in a Milanese palazzo.

He turned it into a white laminate spaceship, Stanley Kubrick by way of Eero Saarinen, “a futuristic, minimalistic theater in the round for fashion — exactly right for the times,” wrote David Netto, the interior designer and writer, in his 2016 monograph about Mr. Catroux, “delivered by an ingénue and it caused a sensation in the design world.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/obituaries/francois-catroux-dead.html