From Hermès Runways to Stained Glass: Sophie Toporkoff's Second Act

Sophie Toporkoff spent two decades at luxury houses including Hermès and Maison Margiela. In 2023, at 47, she enrolled as a student again — this time in stained glass.

Today she runs her own stained glass studio in Paris, applying the design sensibilities she honed in fashion to a craft that predates any maison by several centuries. On a recent fall day, she moved swiftly between workstations while French rap — La Rvfleuze — played in the background. She rarely sits. She draws, paints and kilns standing up.

Why leave fashion at the top?

The answer, apparently, was meetings. In fashion, her days consisted of "meetings all the time," she said. After 15 years in the industry, she wanted work she could do on her feet.

"I needed more physicality in my job," Ms. Toporkoff said.

She chose stained glass. "I genuinely think there's nothing more beautiful," she said. "I love all the arts and all the crafts, but stained glass has an extra dimension."

The move reads less like a retreat than a consolidation. Before Hermès, she was creative director at Maison Margiela. Before fashion, there was graphic design training in her youth. She says working with stained glass brought that training, her creative direction experience and what she calls her "inner nerd" into a single practice.

What does mastery require?

The craft has a formal bar. The year after she began studying, in 2024, she passed an exam certifying mastery of the core aspects of the discipline:

• Drawing and designing patterns
• Cutting glass
• Painting glass
• Assembling the finished panes

That's the full pipeline, from sketch to window, and the exam demands competence at every stage. Think of it as a couture atelier's worth of skills compressed into one pair of hands.

A studio built on contrast

The daily texture of her new life inverts the old one. Where fashion meant conference rooms and calendars, the studio means standing work — moving from drawing board to paint to kiln, usually with French rap on the speakers. Her preference for the genre is a small detail, but a telling one: this is a working space, not a boardroom with better lighting.

The career pivot also says something about transferable skills at the top of the luxury trade. Pattern design, color judgment and composition translate from silk scarves to glass panels more directly than one might assume. Toporkoff's wager is that a century-old craft benefits from a fashion-trained eye, and her studio is now the test case — one standing, moving, kiln-warmed day at a time.