FASHION Magazine

Paris’s longtime queen of knitwear Sonia Rykiel revealed today that she has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for the past 15 years. The reveal comes direct from Rykiel’s just-released-in-France book N’Oubliez Pas Que Je Joue (translation: Don’t Forget It’s a Game) co-authored by French journalist Judith Perrignon. Rykiel had decided to speak out because she could no longer mask the symptoms of the degenerative disorder.

In the book, Rykiel assigns the code ”P de P” (“Putain de Parkinson” or “bitch of Parkinson’s” in English) to the disease, amidst frank writing about living with it. She reveals that for years, her colleagues at her fashion house (which her daughter Nathalie took helm of in 1995) helped keep the secret by attempting to prevent photographs from being taken of her using her walking cane. “I don’t want to show my pain. I resisted, I hesitated, I tried to be invisible, to pretend that nothing was wrong. It’s impossible; it’s not like me,” she writes.

Whether it was done to hide her pain or an attempt to protect her resilient image, the sad secret couldn’t have been easy to keep. We applaud Rykiel’s bravery and hope her story will help raise awareness to the importance of finding a cure to make Parkinson’s a thing of the past.