Guillaume Erner: “I come from a family of extremely traumatized people, who are only apparently normal”

A luminous and twisting path, although haunted by the memory of the Shoah: this is the Parisian biotope described by the host of the France Culture morning show in Schmattès. Who would have believed it? The journalist was for a decade the development director of a flagship brand of the Sentier, La City. The affair collapsed, the Sentier is dead, and Erner, author in 2025 of Judéobsession, establishes himself as a tragicomic “schmattologist” and specialist in low fashion! One was needed.

Madame Figaro. – Is your story a yizkor book a book of remembrance?

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William Erner. – It’s a book about my memories, and those of my parents, Albert and Annette, because the schmattès, the frisque, the candy, it was a family tradition, spanning four generations. So, we have all the coats of arms…

What interests you is not high fashion, but low fashion, and that’s not pejorative?

In Le Sentier and La City, we had a concept of couture which consisted of making low-end brands, popular brands which showed that everyone could have their totems, whatever the segmentations. It’s something that’s dead. Fast fashion has killed the Trail.

You summon your dibbouks, your dead, parents and ancestors who all spoke Yiddish?

Yiddish is the language in which I was immersed, the language that came from shtetls, and which will disappear. That’s what Jean Ziegler says, it’s not a dead language, it’s a language of people who are dead.

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You show the complementarity and the difference between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. Are you stitching these two worlds together, in short?

Working on the Path gave me a shock, it was the first time I discovered happiness. I left that to others, I come from a family of extremely traumatized people, who are only seemingly normal, people haunted by death and loss, and who enjoyed nothing. Starting postulate. And in 1990 I came across these Sephardim who were blazing, showing off, and joking, even though they too had been uprooted and traumatized. And I think that the “low fashion” of the Sentier was born from that, from a jubilation, from a joy, while we were not taking responsibility for life at all.

I was an honestly dishonest guy. Yes, it is, frankly dishonest.

William Erner

You reveal that La City was managed in a fanciful way with 250 million euros in debt, and you were its corporate officer.

I was an honestly dishonest guy. Yes, that’s it, frankly dishonest. There is a sort of original sin in my existence which means that I am now much more vigilant, because I know how one can allow oneself to be lured into crossing red lines. In my case, unfortunately, I regret it every day, but there was no fraudulent personal enrichment.

Have you definitely left this world? no nostalgia?

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Unless you think I need to create a brand.

What would you call it?

I think Airner would be a nice name for an airline, but since I haven’t had the opportunity to buy my first plane yet…