"Fashion is everything," says Armand Hadida, owner of Parisian boutique chain L'Eclaireur. "It's how you wake up, how you walk, how you eat and, of course, how you dress."
Hadida was in Tokyo for the opening of a store in the upscale Minami-Aoyama district. With his wife, Martine, he has spent the last 26 years building a cutting-edge fashion retail business, which has grown from a single 28-sq.-meter store in the basement of a building on the Champs Elysees into a mini-empire including four boutiques and a restaurant in Paris, as well as the new two-story, 200-sq.-meter Tokyo location just across from the new Cartier building.
To this congenial Frenchman, fashion represents more than just a personal style statement. For him, working on the sales floor was a cure for chronic shyness. In the early 1970s, the cash-strapped Hadida reluctantly agreed to stand in for a sick employee at a friend's Paris boutique. When Bridget Bardot walked into the store and approached him for assistance, he turned bright pink while embarking on his pitch, only to find that the superstar actress was hanging on his every word.