A silhouette artist at Mémé's 100th birthday: the privilege of a family celebration

For thirty years, my working life has mostly meant corporate events: product launches, galas, trade shows, parties for big brands. A world where everything happens between two speeches and a cocktail.

In October 2026, a family called me for something quite different: Mémé's 100th birthday, in a garden in the Loir Valley, in the heart of France.

Far from corporate events

At a corporate evening, the guests are colleagues, clients, partners. Here there were grandparents, children, grandchildren and lifelong friends. Several generations gathered around one person, for a birthday that very few families are lucky enough to celebrate.

For someone who spends his life moving from one event to the next, that is rare. You don't often work at a hundredth birthday. And it doesn't feel like the middle of a product launch: the pace is gentler, the laughter more familiar, and every portrait goes home to a house rather than to an office desk.

A hundred years

A celebration like this belongs to those who live it. All I brought were my scissors.

But on the way back to Barcelona, one number stayed with me: a hundred. A hundred years is a century of mornings, of seasons, of faces passing by. We rarely stop to think about it. And you catch yourself thinking that at sixty you sometimes already feel tired, while she, that evening, was turning a hundred, surrounded by her family.

Perhaps that is what you bring home from an evening like that: not one more silhouette, but another measure of time.

“I wanted to thank you for your performance, which delighted and amazed all our guests.”
— Christophe, who organised the party
Original in French: « Je souhaitais te remercier pour ta prestation qui a ravi et épaté tous nos invités. »

Photos: Guigsart.