From Romanian Fabric to Haute Couture

Victoria Darolți has come up with unique creations for major fashion houses such as Chanel, Dior, Armani, Valentino

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 07.10.2025, 13:00

She has lived in France for 30 years and is a well-known name in the field of artistic embroidery and haute couture embroidery, but her origins are in Sălaj County, where she learned weaving and knitting from her own mother, as many children raised in the village did. Victoria Darolți has come up with unique creations for major fashion houses such as Chanel, Dior, Armani, Valentino, and now she has her own workshop and is expanding her personal collection, as she plans to open a small museum.

She left the country at the age of 27, 5 years after the anti-communist Revolution. Although her professional path has not been easy, in 2019, Victoria Darolți received the distinction “Le Meilleur Ouvrier de France” (“Knight of the National Order of Merit”, an order created by General Charles de Gaulle in 1963), the most prestigious award given to artisans and which has a century-old tradition, about which the creator told us:

“I am very proud to have received this distinction, which is given by the French government, by the President of France, I am not sure how I got it. In order to have this distinction, someone in the shadows, from behind, followed me, for a long time, in what I do, how I present my work, how I do it to stay on the market. That person created a file about me, which they submitted to the government, and they decided that I deserve this distinction.”

And since her story begins in childhood, Victoria Darolți took us through memories:

“I am proud to go back to my childhood! I grew up in Ineu, Sălaj County. When I was little, I learned a lot from my mother: embroidery, weaving, knitting, making lace. My sister is 16 years older than me, her husband is a famous tailor in Sighetu Marmației, she was very elegant and I was very jealous of her, when she came to my mother, I would cut her dresses to make my own dresses. My mother insisted that I play, I stayed more with her, with her friends, with my grandmother, to learn needlework. I loved needlework. I remember that when I was 12 years old, I started the last flax and hemp crop in the village. I remember how I gathered the hemp from the field, took it to Someș, put it in water, and every two days I would go and I would turn the bundle of hemp to soften it, bring it home, process it, until the final product. My mother wove sheets, tablecloths, and I learned all this from her.”

We learned that Victoria Darolți always wanted to go to the fashion capital, Paris. But here she had to find a school to attest to her craftsmanship.

“When I was at the Embroidery School, my teachers asked, Victoria, what are you doing here at school, now that you know how to work everything. I needed a diploma to be able to enter the workshops that worked for fashion houses. It was no use knowing the trade if I didn’t have a diploma. I finished school, two weeks later I managed to find a job in a workshop. What is very different from what I learned in Romania, needle embroidery, is a technique in France, which is called croquette de Lunéville embroidery, it is a needle that is very similar to a lace needle. The techniques with this croquette allow us to pin down the beadwork, the sequins. With this croquette we can make perfection, quality, because we can embroider pearls with a needle too, but we will never achieve that quality.”

In 2008, she opened her own workshop, and in 2011, she founded her own embroidery school to further this craft. The Darolți workshop, located on the outskirts of Paris, specializes in embroidered accessories (gloves, shoes, handbags), evening dresses, theater costumes, and interior decorations for luxury hotels, yachts, and private jets. Victoria Darolți:

“When I was creating, there was also a part of my village there. I combined what I learned from my mother and what I learned from France and that’s why I was different from the others. I added sheep’s wool to the creation, which was colored, I added pearls, I added jewelry, certain threads that I found in France were similar to the threads that I found in Romania, the colors that I matched in the creations I liked a lot. The lace that I added to my creations, the macrame, I used macrame very often in my creations. I worked for Switzerland, for Africa, for Italy, with famous, rich people, I personalized the backrest of their private plane.”

Beyond orders, Victoria Darolți also creates pieces for her personal collection, intending to open a small museum. One of our favorite pieces of clothing is titled “Earth Doll”: a dress with a macrame skirt and an upper part embroidered with multicolored stones, collected from nature, using the Lunéville technique, learned at the school in Paris.