Profile

Karen Grigorian is one of the very few master pleaters still practicing in France. Heir to a demanding, often overlooked expertise, he is today one of its most committed guardians. Arriving from Armenia in the 1990s, he settled in Paris and began his career at the Gérard Lognon workshop, a leading authority on haute couture pleating. He honed his skills there for over fourteen years, collaborating with the greatest fashion houses. But when the workshop was acquired by Chanel, he chose to leave, keen to preserve his independence and the freedom of his work. In 2014, he founded La Maison du Pli, a family workshop where he gave new impetus to his craft. Using hand-shaped cardboard molds, he creates complex pleats—sunflower, accordion, fan, and floral—which he applies to materials as varied as textiles, leather, and metal. Precision work, between technique and poetry, requiring perfect mastery of gesture, time, and warmth.
Karen Grigorian embodies a vision of the profession based on rigor, transmission, and research. He collaborates with the worlds of luxury, fashion, design, stage, and leather goods, while remaining faithful to artisanal tradition.
Discreet, he favors working in the shadows over media exposure. Yet, behind this restraint, we discover a passionate craftsman, for whom pleating is much more than a skill: a language, an art of mastered repetition, a link between memory and creation.
Since 2017, he has also shared his expertise, particularly in Denmark, where he trains costume designers and stylists for the royal theaters. Many designers now entrust him with new materials to experiment with: wax, seaweed, plastic, animal intestines… Nothing escapes his curiosity or the rigor of his vision.