Fashion designer Sonia Rykiel has died aged 86.

President Francois Hollande’s office announced the French Jewish designer’s death in a statement on Thursday, describing her as a “pioneer”.

Known as “the queen of knitwear”, Mrs Rykiel started out by designing maternity dresses for herself, before opening her first ready-to-wear shop on Paris’ Left Bank in 1968.

Despite her worldwide success, she still suffered doubts about her ability.

“When I started in fashion, for the first 10 years, I said to myself every day, ‘I’m going to quit tomorrow. People are going to figure out that I don’t know anything,'” she told the Le Nouvel Observateur in 2005. “I always thought I’d be discredited in the end.”

The daughter of a Jewish Polish mother and Romanian father, she also wrote several novels — including one about a dress— and was mentioned in director Robert Altman’s satirical film about the fashion industry, “Pret-a-Porter”, in 1994.

Mrs Rykiel was born in Paris in 1930. She married Sam Rykiel, the owner of a Paris boutique, and had two children, Nathalie and Jean-Phillippe.