de Castelbajac, Issey Miyake, Ossie Clark, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler. It is at that moment that she went into interior design as she converted the former SNCF premises into a showroom and offices for the company. Ecart (1978–1995) In the late 1970s, Créateurs & Industriels went bankrupt; Putman got divorced. She tried to materialise her intense feeling of emptiness: at the time she lived in a room furnished with only a bed and two lamps "in total austerity, because I no longer knew what I liked." Taking her friend Michel Guy's advice, she decided to found Ecart (which backwards is Trace). It is therefore at the age of 53 that Andrée Putman really started the career which made her famous from Hong Kong to New York. She started by giving life again to forgotten designers from the 1930s: René Herbst, Jean-Michel Frank, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Gaudi, Eileen Gray... "My only concern was to interest at least ten persons and I would have accomplished something which would carry me for all my life." These pieces of furniture won over not ten, but thousands of people. From releasing furniture to designing interiors, the evolution of activity came quite naturally. took the next logical step: "I loathe pompous luxury. I take interest in the essential, the framework, the basic elements of things." The interior design of the Morgans Hotel in New York in 1984 marked a turning point in Andrée Putman's career: she managed to make a high-standard hotel with a small budget and asserted her style with sober rooms and visual effects. "Because I started working in New York, the French suddenly asked for me." From the 1980s, she led more and more interior design projects: hotels such as Le Lac in Japan, Im Wasserturm in Germany and the Sheraton in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; stores for Azzedine Alaia, Balenciaga, Bally and Lagerfeld; offices, particularly the one for French Minister of Culture Jack Lang in 1984; and museums like the CAPC, Bordeaux's contemporary art museum. Designed private VIP rouge "Orchid Club" at Orchid Court, Premium resident with architect Charles Moore in Japan Kobe city. The Andrée Putman Studio (1997–present) In 1997, Andrée Putman created her eponymous Studio, specialising in interior design, product design and scenography. When she imagined objects, she refused the excess of striving to re-design pieces which were perfectly designed by others in the past. "We