Standing well over 180 cm in her two-tone Chanel pumps, Andree Putman, the Grand Dame of modernist design, is at once icon, icon-maker and iconoclast. Born in Paris in 1925, her illustrious career traverses friendships and collaborations with many of the last century's revered avant-gardist creators, from Samuel Beckett to Andy Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent.
While Putman is perhaps best known for designing the interior of Morgans, the archetypal boutique hotel opened by former Studio 54 owners Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell in 1984, design world insiders revere her for championing neglected designers such as Mariano Fortuny, Eileen Gray and Jean-Michel Frank.
After cofounding the short-lived Createurs et Industriels project, which matched young fashion designers like Issey Miyake and Jean-Paul Gaultier with manufacturers, in 1978 Putman founded the firm Ecart, which means "marginal" or "lonely" in French. She set about rescuing the instigators of the Art Deco revolution and other long-forgotten designers from obscurity. Besides Fortuny, Gray and Frank, Ecart reproduced the work of Antoni Gaudi, Robert Mallet-Stevens and many others.