This Lafayette artist brought her claw clip empire to New York Fashion Week with ‘CLAWDIA’

It has been a busy year for the Lafayette artist who captured lightning in a bottle with “career claws” — the accessories beloved by dentists, doctors, baristas, writers and other professions represented by Colette Bernard’s vibrant hair clips. 

Through years spent building an audience on social media sites like Instagram, the entrepreneur has seen her work go viral. Over the past several months, Bernard used her success to open two brick-and-mortar shops on Jefferson Street in Lafayette — Retreaux, a vintage clothing boutique, and Cocodrie by Colette, a retail shop where customers can purchase her original designs. 

Louisiana’s largest international music festival took notice, and this year, Bernard designed the official claw clip of Festival International, based on the festival’s distinctive blue spiral design. And she hasn’t slowed down since — Bernard recently returned from a trip to New York Fashion Week as an accessory designer, an experience that gave birth to an outside-the-box idea: CLAWDIA, a pop-up merchandising vehicle that the designer hopes will help her brand to spread throughout the country.

Bernard says that she connected with apparel designer Zoe Grinfeld over social media during the pandemic, and after years of messaging, the artist reached out about collaborating on a runway show that would feature her looks, with Bernard’s accessories. On Sept. 5, the fashion world saw Bernard’s hair clips in a show called “Working Through It,” held at the Brooklyn Museum. 

Apparel and accessory designers often use New York Fashion Week as an opportunity to host brand pop-ups, going to the expense of renting a temporary space in New York City to promote and sell their products. Bernard wanted to do something similar, but realized that she had an opportunity to invest in something that wouldn’t disappear in a few days — a van. 

“I was like, well, I guess we have to go to fashion week, because I can’t miss out on seeing my work on the runway,” Bernard said. “We were doing a cost-benefit analysis, and I considered maybe doing a flagship for the event, but I’m still a very new startup. Instead of spending $5,000 on one day of renting a storefront in Manhattan, I felt like a better financial decision would be to invest in the future of the business — something that would allow us to do pop ups in many different cities.

CLAWDIA, the van, took Bernard and her team all the way to New York and back. Over the holiday season, they plan to travel to markets in Houston and Dallas. And beyond that, the designer says she is excited about not knowing where her business will take her next.

“For the first time in my career, I don’t really know where this is taking me,” she says. “I feel very satisfied right now, and that’s such a weird thing to say as an artist. We’re never satisfied. There’s always something we can do better, another project to work on.”

The future seems wide open, and for the first time in years, Bernard plans to approach art like a student again, using play as inspiration. 

“I got here in the first place because I was able to explore and fall in love with product design,” Bernard says. “You have to have that element of playing around, it’s the only way to get anywhere. I haven’t had that in a long time, since the business has taken off, but now I finally have the ability to do that more.”