Dear Shaded Viewers,
Late summer weather soothes our minds like no medicine ever could. It’s the perfect occasion to discover a singular character: Isadora Gamberetti, nightlife legend after dark, exacting corsetmaker by day. For more than twenty years, she has been a beacon of excess in this corseted capital, bringing order and decadence to otherwise beige times.
Isadora came into being twenty years ago. The man behind her, François, never quite recognized himself as a man. Then this thoroughly bourgeois, campy, hilariously hyperactive creature lifted both his spirit and his work. He sees himself less as a man in a dress than as a kabuki actor: a Japanese performer impersonating women.
He opened a shop in the north of Paris, overflowing with costumes from every corner of the imagination. For eighteen years, it has been a charming refuge where Venice, the city of his dreams, is endlessly celebrated. There, he chose to push femininity further, and beyond. By night, he haunts some of the capital’s most decadent spots: La Coupole among his favorites. Nowadays, Isadora is the confirmed campy woman who emboldened a shy François. He became part of the scenery, much like drag DJ Solange. Today, he stands as a fixture of the Parisian landscape, a paradoxical figure of camp and gravity.
What Isadora does best is give a character room to exist beyond categories. Considering himself both a travesti and a Japanese-inspired figure, he threw the doors of imagination wide open. “Once I was at the Ran restaurant with two geishas, and we all looked united,” he continues candidly. “Both halves of my personality are like a kaleidoscope: countless men and countless women.” He explored this recently, in February, with his Chevalier d’Éon costume.
As his sense of camp expanded, he grew ever more sought after. Brides, comedians, and people with scoliosis all came to him. One client said she never wore her official corset again. François recently returned from a Tartuffe staging in Switzerland, where he had to reinforce corsets, seemingly still as focused and playful as ever.
Drag Race has taken its toll over the last decade, so drag queens naturally started commissioning him. But with Mami Watta, it became something closer to a vision. The moment Mami stepped into the boutique, inspiration struck. His supersonic instinct saw her win with a classic French Peau d’Âne dress, reimagined with eight-meter-wide shoulders. “The night I stitched, I saw her win,” François says, brimming with confidence. “I hadn’t slept in a night.” Beyond Mami’s natural supermodel presence, François praised her ability to carry such heavy, architectural pieces as those shoulders. Rarely so dressed up, Mami Watta delivered an unexpected aesthetic that embraced her natural height.
Yet wearing a François Tamarin creation is easier than it looks. Corbeilles and boning shaped the towering ensembles. Striking aesthetics have now become democratic, and that, above all, is what matters most about him: fierceness first. “I wanted to wear the whole of Marché Saint-Pierre” Francois exulted. Nicky Doll even said Mami was more dressed than any other candidate. A François Tamarin piece is more than a corset: it’s a piece of empowering history, built to be remembered.
Cover image by Mathilde Marc 
