The signature rich colours and baroque designs of Christian Lacroix will soon be relegated to fashion history, after a Paris bankruptcy court approved a plan to shut down the firm's clothes design activities and axe nearly all its 124 staff.
No more items from the fashion label's haute couture and ready-to-wear lines will be made as any potential buyers have now missed a deadline to take over the company.
Lacroix, famous to many as being the label of choice for Eddy in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, has a 22-year history of design and its ranges have graced catwalks worldwide.
The designer label, which gained fame for its flamboyant dresses and outrageous designs, blamed its problems on "the consequences of the global financial crisis which has sharply hurt the luxury goods industry".
In his halcyon days of the late 1980s and 1990s, Lacroix was the designer du moment whose opulent designs wowed wealthy fashionistas all over the world and came to embody French haute couture at its most splendid and extravagant.
His clothes, beloved of celebrities, socialites, were not celebrated for their wearability but for their raucous colours, pouf skirts and magnificent fairytale wedding dresses. On his website, Lacroix wrote that couture was "crazy, contradictory, unpredictable and, above all, stronger than me".
