Claude Lalanne was a French sculptor and designer who was best known as part of the artistic duo Les Lalanne, a collaboration with her husband François-Xavier Lalanne, although she was also a successful artist in her own right.

Claude Lalanne was born in Paris in 1924 and grew up in a family devoted to the arts. She attended the École des Arts Décoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where she studied architecture, while also attending drawing classes and learning the basics of sculpture. In 1952 she met the artist and her future husband François-Xavier Lalanne, with whom she established an artistic collaboration that would last a lifetime. 

The pair first exhibited together at the Galerie J in Paris in 1964, where they showed their unique hybrid creations, fusing sculpture, decorative arts, and everyday objects. Their works built upon traditional French techniques of craftsmanship - including moulding and impression - combined with humour and surrealism. Their co-creations often took inspiration from the natural world but, while her husband favoured the animal kingdom, Claude looked more towards botanical species. In her practice, she transposed these ideas into functional furniture, sculpture and jewellery. In the mid-1960s they began attracting the attention of luxury designers from the world of fashion, including commissions from Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. 

Claude was also pivotal in the development of the electroplating technique, which she refined alongside American artists Jimmy Metcalf and Larry Rivers, whom she befriended through the artistic community in Montparnasse, Paris. Claude achieved wider recognition in 1976 when the French singer Serge Gainsbourg selected her artwork, L'Homme à tête de chou (The Man with a Cabbage for a Head), as the title and cover for his latest album.

As well as smaller scale sculptures for domestic environments, Les Lalanne also created larger works for public display, including Pomme de Londres and Pomme de New York, both installed in the respective cities in 2007.

Claude Lalanne outlived her husband by over ten years, and she kept creating her works until her death at the age of ninety-three, in 2019. Throughout the artistic partnership with her husband, she exhibited widely, including at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and the Palace of Versailles, France. Her works are featured in numerous collections such as the Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.