Picasso used it in his workshop, Ellen MacArthur and Eric Tabarly took it out to sea. From a blacksmith’s forge in France’s Savoie region, the simple Opinel knife has come a long way.
Today Opinel is a household name and style icon, with its own entry in the main French dictionary and New York’s Museum of Modern Art catalogue.
Each year, from a single factory in Chambery, 3 million of the knives are sold worldwide.
The story of how the wooden-handled folding knife eventually helped Picasso carve his sculptures starts with Joseph Opinel in 1890, “a simple man who had his eye on the future,” grandson Maurice Opinel said.
Joseph Opinel had wanted to assert his “independence from his father, a very authoritarian edge-tool maker,” the 82-year-old grandson and company president said.
In 1909 he registered the trademark — bearing the emblem of a crown and a hand — “at a time when this was not common practice” and began exporting the tool to northern Italy and Switzerland using a network of wholesalers.
A fire completely destroyed the factory in 1926 but a new one was built a year later and son Maurice quickly developed the knife into an industrial tool. Before World War II, 20 million knives had been sold.
From artists and mariners to mushroom pickers, all are loyal users of the sharp and solid tool.
“It has saved the lives of seamen and mountaineers,” one of whom told Maurice Opinel how he managed to escape a sinking vessel by carving steps in the ice with his knife.
There are many pearls in Opinel’s proud history of use, but a few black spots, too.
“Unfortunately there are some criminal uses which we are not happy about,” Maurice Opinel said, recalling French serial killers Guy Georges and Francis Heaulme in whose hands it became a murder weapon.
The absence of a serious competitor and a policy since the 1950s of protecting the trademark around the world have both been key to Opinel’s success.
Opinel retrieved the trademark that had been registered illegitimately by the firm importing the knives in Japan.
A present challenge is the battle against cheap replicas being sold in countries including China and Pakistan.
Maurice Opinel also worries about a “resurgence” of what he calls “the anti-knife spirit” that began in the 1990s and was symbolized by knife detectors being installed at the entrance of some buildings such as schools.
“Today we do not give a knife to a seven-year-old, but we would do better to offer him one and teach him how to use it properly” said Opinel, who has founded a national federation to protect the profession.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS