About
Storyteller. Crafting and weaving words, images and culture.
Career path
“Her multifaceted approach captures, transcribes and chisels the trends and forms that inform the spirit of our times.”
Trained in the daily press and magazines, notably at the daily Le Temps, where Valérie Fromont became a writer for the Culture and Society section as well as the lifestyle special editions, her practice unfolding across a vast diversity of subjects and editorial genres. From social movements to consumer trends, from investigative journalism to major interviews and columns, the various facets of her work involve capturing, transcribing, and chiselling what trends and the life of forms tell us about the spirit of the times. She then went on to specialise in design, architecture, fashion, watchmaking, and jewellery, all of which she approaches sensitively and poetically, while adopting a socio-cultural perspective that has earned her coverage in Le Courrier International. She was also responsible for several Architecture & Design special issues of Le Temps. For her, dance and literature remain as much a source of inspiration as the subjects she devotes herself to on a regular basis.
For five years, Valérie Fromont wrote a column for the Swiss edition of the international magazine L’Officiel, with eclectic references ranging from Carrie Bradshaw to Plato, while producing interviews, portraits and reports on Swiss artists and designers for the magazine’s pages.
Her editorial expertise has been sought-after by brands, for whom she transposes the singularity of her voice, set in journalistic writing, to produce high value-added content and corporate information design.
When she took over as editor-in-chief of the magazines for luxury retailer Bongénie Grieder, alongside her long-time professional partner Stéphane Bonvin, she spent almost ten years developing a vast array of communication tools to define the company’s editorial and iconographic identity across different media, primarily print, but also digital. From the reinvention of the graphic charter to the redefinition of all magazine content (In the Mood, Fashion Gallery, G Point, Christmas catalog), she showcased, in the spirit of the times, the new collections of the luxury brands represented in Switzerland (Saint Laurent, Alaïa, Balenciaga, Valentino, Chloé, Alexander McQueen, Jacquemus…). By uniting photographers, stylists, illustrators, writers and artists around their editorial project, Valérie Fromont and Stéphane Bonvin turned these magazines into true objects of style, portraying the looks and codes of an era.
“Magazines conceived as true objects of style, portraying the looks and codes of an era.”
In addition to the editorial ecosystem she set up, Valérie Fromont took on the creative direction of iconographic productions, whose images have fuelled Bongénie Grieder‘s magazines and corporate campaigns for almost ten years. Bringing in talent from all horizons, she set up and coordinated teams of 15 to 30 people to carry out high-end and large-scale productions in Switzerland, Spain, Paris and New York. The result is a platform of images perfectly attuned to the semantic system of the luxury industry. Interweaving the symbolic codes of Bongénie with those of the luxury brands it represents in Switzerland, she has also developed a distinctive visual direction for the specific needs of print and digital.
In the watchmaking and jewellery sector, Chopard, Richemont and Adler have called on Valérie Clerc Fromont to strategically shape and position their press releases over the past fifteen years.
Defining a style, tone and lexical field, storytelling, narrative architecture and dramaturgy: she writes press kits covering international campaigns, highlighting craftsmanship, major events in the watchmaking calendar, new product launches and portraits of the various muses and ambassadors.
For Chopard, she also worked on several communications around “The Journey” project, which traces Chopard’s development towards sustainable luxury, and adapted into French a book on the history and heritage of the House, Une vie dédiée à Chopard.
A few words about me
“Take a lover who looks at you like maybe, you are magic” advised Frida Kahlo. The kaleidoscopic tenderness of the way we look at existence is all that matters. It’s what shapes our perception of the world, far more than reality itself. What light do we choose to bathe people or objects in? Adopting the right lighting to transform an ordinary life into a François Truffaut film is my life’s commitment. It’s this light that I’ve chosen to weave the threads of my daily life, build my relationships and orchestrate my professional choices. Ballet dancer, philosophy graduate, journalist, creative director, mother, friend, lover, I’ve delicately paid attention and funnelled this energy into each of these sequences, and so many more. Everywhere I go, I carry with me a bag of ruffled words and tightrope-walking landscapes, of facetious stars to transfigure the banal, the prosaic and the gloomy into a radiant constellation, alive and blinking like a street in Shibuya-ku in Lost in Translation. And that’s exactly the position I hold in my profession.
“My life’s calling is to apply lighting that transfigures an ordinary existence into a François Truffaut film”
As a woman disposed to lights and fragrances, who rejoices in speaking to everyone without distinction, and who makes everything a territory of inspiration, sowing seeds ready to reinvent spring, beauty – or the idea of it that I’ve alternately thought I had – has occupied a large part of my life. As a child, I took the stand in arid dance halls, where the piano accompanying the arabesques promised skies that would make you believe you’d never die. As if the only way to bring out beauty, a Promethean promise, lay in the sculpture born of effort. Then, at the Faculty of Philosophy, I was interested in questions of aesthetics, Aristotle, Plato, Danto, Genette; Bourdieu above all. Then fashion became a big part of my life, and thanks to it, a dress – a few dresses – befell through my life, like the sovereign whisper of Cyrano de Bergerac’s last moments at the feet of Roxane. I’ve sought beauty in the crumpling of faces and silhouettes, glimpsed in the reflection of pricked mirrors, in words that feel as soft as down, in fevers more than promises, in the texture of gestures that seem to brush against you with adoration, in a few renunciations more valiant than some courage. I’ve also found beauty in the poetry of children’s dirty socks in a mess, in their laughter after having been taken care of, in the necessarily failed but always renewed attempt to see, in the tedious and implacable repetition of everyday life, something as vast as an evening at a ball with the Prince of Lampedusa.
“Beauty is the most common thing in the world, when you make the effort to seek it or paint it on all life’s windows.”
Beauty is the most common thing in the world, when you make the effort to seek it or paint it on all life’s windows. It can be found in the care we take in preparing an extraordinarily ordinary meal, or an ordinarily extraordinary one, in unassuming permaculture gardens cultivated with stainless patience, in the constellations that defy sky maps and normative models alike, and that we arrange to our hearts’ content in our visionary dreams. It can also be found in the passage we seek in the heart of winter, in the asymmetry of our faces, in the attention we pay when we see a loved one stretching out – in a way that is unlike any other. In our tears and in the voices that save us from all, in this breath that meticulously chisels and settles our minds. In the summer evenings when our aspirations rest somewhere between the mauve and orange of the clouds, in a hand that reaches for yours under the table while pretending to follow the conversation about Glenn Gould’s virtuosity in the comparative 1955 and 1981 versions of the Goldberg Variations. In the silence that stands between words, in the origami of our lives that we strive to unfold and reinvent, in the ordinary miracles as well as the works of art that spectators recreate indefinitely thanks to their points of view and their imaginations. In side-steps, chassés, chassés-croisés, fan-shaped fault lines. In expanding bodies. Those who dance are deserving of the world laid at their feet.
“Fred Astaire’s incomparable elegance, because it alone can persuade you, casually, that life is as much a stage as a party.”
And since this portrait wouldn’t be complete without a list of some of my most beloved whims, I’d like to tell you that above all else, I love to start reading a novel, novels, lots of novels at once, and almost never finish them, as if all my future lives depended on this frenzy, as if I wanted to live them all simultaneously. I love stormy evenings when you find arms to cuddle up in, flying to Italy on a whim, the hypnotic dreams of the mosaic floors of Palermo’s palaces, embracing, feeling, and dancing rather than showing or, worse, demonstrating, Klezmer Orchestras, the imperial beauty of Eritrean women, the curve of a beloved neck. Fred Astaire’s incomparable elegance, because it alone can persuade you, casually, that life is as much a stage as a party. Those who get bored after three days in the country, the front pages of Libération, the improbable fig trees of Thurgau and their perfume in the early morning, the improvised pasta late at night, the odysseys of Albert Cohen’s celestial tramps, drinking liqueur-like wine in very fine crystal glasses, country picnics, the smell of resin, the taste of Yuzu, Kintsugi. Everything, everything that comes from Japan, and in particular Sei Shonagon, poetess born around 965 and lady-in-waiting to the Empress Teishi, who herself was fond of lists, and from whom I reproduce this one:
Things that make one’s heart beat fast
« A sparrow with nestlings. Going past a place where toddlers are playing. Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep.
Looking into a Chinese mirror that’s a little clouded.
A fine gentleman pulls up in his carriage and sends in some request.
To wash your hair, apply your makeup and put on clothes that are well-scented with incense. Even if you’re somewhere where no one special will see you, you still feel a heady sense of pleasure inside.
On a night when you’re waiting for someone to come, there’s a sudden
gust of rain and something rattles in the wind, making your heart suddenly beat faster. »
Sei Shônagon