Jean Touitou shared A.P.C.’s origin story at the brand’s presentation in its Left Bank headquarters this morning. It involves a 1987 trip to Barcelona, lost luggage, and a futile search for good jeans and nicely proportioned sweaters to wear on his vacation. Twenty-eight years later, he’s got Kanye West sitting on the studio’s vintage Pierre Paulin couch. To develop the new Fall collection, Touitou and his team went back to the vault to rediscover what the label stands for. A PR rep today was handing out visual aids: key rings full of postcards featuring advertising images dating from 1992 (Stella Tennant) to 2013 (Edie Campbell).
The A.P.C. aesthetic has always been an honest, straightforward one. Jeans, of course, are essential. Touitou showed the raw denim he introduced back in ’87, and since what goes around comes around, it looked as relevant now as it did then. What looked even better were the faded and fraying skinny jeans the company sells through its Butler program, wherein it washes and rehabs pre-owned A.P.C. raw denim, and resells it back to customers willing to pay extra to let somebody else do the hard work. Worth every penny. This being a Fall collection, there was a fair amount of coats, all paired with the brand’s new sneakers: double- and single-breasted in classic shades of camel, charcoal, and red; herringbone and check; a faultless raincoat. “We will never be done working on the trench,” Touitou said. “Minimalism is not simple.” Maybe not for the design studio, but to A.P.C. shoppers, the just-a-bit-tight black sweater and the above-the-knee A-line skirt shown with it will look like a sexy no-brainer of an outfit when the pieces arrive in stores.
