The Kyiv-born Svita Sobol left Ukraine at six years old to go to school in Switzerland; from almost that age, she dreamed of being in the world of fashion. In time, after business school in London, she decided to see her ambition through, enrolling at the Parsons School of Design. Fast-forward to today and, located variously in Paris, New York and Kyiv, the night owl works at the industry’s cutting edge, most lately creating La Collection Particulière, a platform dedicated to fashion’s ‘extreme’ side: to ‘the progressive, the bizarre and the erotic’.
Svita met Vincent Darré through the fashion magazine Purple. The interior designer’s star was already rising; he’d worked with Lagerfeld, Moschino and Ungaro and decorated the nightclubs Le Baron in New York and Hotel Montana in Paris. She shared his surreal sensibility and adored the fabrics he’d created with Pierre Le-Tan, but above all Svita saw him as a real man about Paris – one who’d made the rounds through the city’s chicest clubs, soaking up the best in outlandish décor.
When it came to her own place, of course – a 60-square-metre flat near Les Halles, in the centre of Paris – she wasn’t going to settle for anything ordinary. Svita was determined it would be an erotic, intimate and theatrical space; one room would be all black, just like in Gainsbourg’s house, and the heart of the home: pink.
Vincent was taken aback. Pink?! That ultra-feminine colour had never featured before on his palette. Nevertheless, an avid musical fan, he suddenly recalled the scene in Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn in which Kay Thompson sings ‘Think Pink!’, with her memorable call to ‘burn the blue and bury the beige’. That’s it, he thought: that’s what I’ll base my design on!
Svita had plenty of her own ideas too, and worked with Vincent to look for the pieces to match the daring rosy colour scheme they would thread through the living and bedrooms. In the former, for instance, she knew she wanted some very comfortable sofas and armchairs to chat on and room for her books. On one flea-market trip, the pair perused a set of white busts of Greek goddesses, which would go perfectly with Le-Tan’s 1940s-style fabrics. In the end, however, they found the room’s signature style by coupling a faux 1970s fireplace with an 18th-century mirror. Set a little apart is the open-plan all-black kitchen, lined in a theatrical trompe l’oeil wallpaper mimicking sculptural panelling.
For her bedroom, Svita took inspiration from the room her mother, a ballerina, had made for her in Kyiv. It was a pink fairytale, with a cushioned headboard and a long, ruched canopy. She loved the Baroque furniture she had found around Paris, which put her in mind of the gilded headboard she’d seen at Vincent’s own house in the capital (WoI March 2021). To recreate that fantastical feel, Svita asked him to cover the room in an exotic pink wallpaper patterned with birds and branches. ‘The birds are my friends,’ she says. ‘The first thing I see when I wake up, they’re with me during that sensitive transition of night to day.’
The entrance hall sets an altogether different tone. The designer decided to do his own ‘take on pink’, as he puts it, with a shade of vibrant purple; rather than baroque curlicues, on these walls he reproduced surreal and erotic illustrations in black and white, as suggested by Svita. Here, with a free interpretation and a real sense of humour, Vincent eschews realism; we see multiple references to Dalí, including his melting clock, and to the 1950s designer Slavik. Amid the beautiful chaos are a BDSM-inspired bust pierced with an arrow, a pipe in a nod to Magritte, symbols of the Egyptian goddess of love and sexuality, and two hands holding an eyeball – a reference to Surrealist lesbian photographer Claude Cahun. Svita was adamant on the banderole, whose Latin phrase she translates for me herself: ‘When light is gone, darkness reclaims what is hers’. ‘I’ve always wanted to immerse myself in the occult,’ the owner explains. ‘I love secrets, I love magic. I believe in intuition.’
With words like these, so in line with her reputation as a fashionable figure of Paris’s nightlife scene, you’d expect to meet some wild, formidable creature. Instead, I found myself talking to a reserved and courteous young woman, a poodle curled up against her chest... One might mistake her for a lawyer or a translator at the Council of Europe on a weekend break back home. This discretion paired with her bold taste brings to mind a certain Anaïs Nin, a comparison Svita doesn’t half mind. Very close to Henry Miller, Anaïs was one of the first women to publish a steamy erotic journal.
‘I like Svita a lot,’ says Lucien Pagès, a big name in fashion communication. ‘She’s not an influencer or a queen of the night – she’s just a modern girl who works and travels. But she is inspiring and mysterious, with an incredible flair for fashion and a wardrobe to make your head spin. Svita influences many young creatives, and she’s even said to be the muse of Rick Owens. The image she’s created does a fantastic job of promoting her work.’
‘I’ve invited you to an apartment that’s still a work in progress,’ Svita tells me confidentially. ‘It’s empty right now, but I’m going to put all my illustrations and erotic photos up on the wall; I want it to look quite busy. This flat will be a very private space – only a select few will be invited in. I think that people from the nightlife scene who always see me in black will be surprised to discover my secret little world, my Alice in Wonderland-type vibe’.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
