Jean-Louis Scherrer was a Parisian fashion designer and couturier active between the 1960s and the early 1990s.

Scherrer was born in Paris. He first trained as a dancer at the Conservatoire de Paris, but after an injury he decided to turn to fashion design. In 1956 he became one of the assistant designer to Christian Dior. He then worked with Saint Laurent at the maison Dior, and afterwards moved to Louis Feraud. Finally in 1962 he opened the doors of his own maison on Rue du Fauburg Saint-Honoré.

From 1971, his fashion house moved to the number 51 of Avenue Montaigne, where some of the most well-known women – Farah Diba, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Isabelle Adjani and Françoise Sagan – used to go shopping for Scherrer’s sumptuous ‘idea’ of fashion that he turned into clothes.

In 1992 he was sacked from his own label by former business partner: this fact was openly criticised by designers on the press, since it was the first time something like this happened.

When he died in 2013, French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti said: “an important chapter of the history of French haute couture has closed (…) his famous leopard-print cocktail dresses and polka-dot skirts were emblems of a new feminine silhouette.”