The authentic centimetre of love

On a rainy Sunday afternoon: while he is doing his bookkeeping, she is doing her favourite sewing… needles, cross-stitch, tissue paper patterns… and suddenly my eye is drawn to a little box: “The authentic centimetre of love”. We’re writhing with laughter.

It’s a dressmaker’s tape measure, dating from around the 1930s, and must have belonged to the mother of the grandmother of the dressmaker who lives next door to my Sunday accountant’s desk… On the front, one hundred and fifty centimetres harmoniously arranged in ascending order… on the back, ‘we twist, we laugh’, jokes and slurred allusions are the order of the day… “Your tongue works well… too small, swell up… too big to cut… a sign of fertility”… Or even crudely colonialist and racist ‘a nigger turns you on’…

An inventory à la Prévert

This inventory reminds me of a greetings card we made in 2000, when we were still young students at ESAA Duperré. We had to come up with a greetings card for this public institution, and when you say ‘public institution’ you say ‘dry finances’… So we had to come up with a greetings card that was cheap to produce.
We came up with a cash register receipt with a Prévert-style inventory… with the total saying ‘Happy New Year 2000’.

This card was certainly Graphéine’s first project… Supervised by our teacher*, we took care to draw up this listing. This greetings card was voted ‘Card of the Year 2000’ by Étapes magazine (‘Étapes graphiques’ at the time)… We had won an Adobe CS1 suite, which was very useful for getting our business off the ground!

(* Hervé, our admirable teacher at the time, now a friend and forever an honorary member of Graphéine, for having given us the name we have borne since 2002. For the anecdote, we had organised a weekend in Grenoble to visit the Graphic Design Month in Échirolles and more particularly the exhibition of Hervé’s lover (Suzanna L.). In the evening, after a few glasses of a very pleasant local spirit… Hervé revealed the ultimate name, which we were to adopt unanimously in the seconds that followed… in short: thank you!)