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Business of Fashion

Lucien Pagès Merges with AIPR

LONDON — The glow has scarcely faded from the monumental party Lucien Pagès threw for his 50th birthday and he's already celebrating another watershed with Wednesday morning's announcement that his public relations agency Lucien Pagès Communication is forming a joint venture with Adam Iezzi's London-based agency AIPR. Backing the union is The Independents, the global design, production and PR giant, which acquired LPC last December. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. For the UK, Pagès' original Scrabble-lettered logo has been re-configured by M/M Paris to incorporate AIPR ('You can make more words now,' says Lucien), because he thought it was important for Iezzi to maintain his identity in the local market. Elsewhere, the venture will be under the Pagès umbrella. Pagès and Iezzi first encountered each other in 2010, in an article in 10Men, '10 PR Gurus You Should Meet.' They were on facing pages. 'I was trying to be funny,' Iezzi recalls, 'and I just sounded stupid, and Lucien's answers sounded really intelligent. I thought I have to raise my game.' He was already working with Jonathan Anderson and APC at that point. Iezzi helped APC become a new client for Pagès, and Anderson would later join the LPC roster in Paris when the designer signed up with Loewe. The two agencies eventually shared nine clients, including APC, Loewe and Zara. 'If Adam wasn't in London, I would have opened there a long time ago,' Pagès concedes. 'It's strategically important. The best magazines in English speak to the world. But I never thought to do anything in London because Adam was there. It can be competitive working with other agencies, but never with Adam. It was always a good match of personalities.' Iezzi agrees. 'I always felt Lucien had my back.' It may have even got to the point, Iezzi conjectures, where people thought they were the same person. Not for a moment, says anyone who knows them both well. Still, the confusion makes sense when he adds that 'the merger is formalising something that already exists.' The fallout from Brexit surely helped catalyse the alliance. They opened up their businesses to each other. Pagès had to sort out his own acquisition first, but once that was done, he wasted no time in persuading The Independents CEO Isabelle Chouvet that AIPR would be an asset. Pagès and Iezzi share an old-school faith in the power of public relations. 'It's all gone a bit clickbait-y now, but Lucien and I are still excited to place a beautiful magazine piece.' Pagès adds that a shared dry-as-a-bone sense of humour is a big help. When the finance and legal people needed a codename to keep negotiations confidential, Lucien came up with 'Project Confide in Me.' More than a favourite Kylie Minogue track, it was also a camp little tip of the cap to Adam's Melbourne roots. So it will simply have to be on the karaoke when LPC and AIPR's team, all 100 of them, meet during men's fashion week in June to celebrate their union.