Its Competitors Make Noise, but A.P.C. Is Happy to Make Clothes

Its Competitors Make Noise, but A.P.C. Is Happy to Make Clothes

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“It very easily became part of my uniform,” said the actor Waris Ahluwalia, who went from being a fan of the label to becoming a friend of Mr. Touitou’s, and who collaborated with him one season on a collection of lapel pins and jewelry. “It’s always the stuff you underestimate that you should watch out for.”

A.P.C. is easy to underestimate. Its scale remains relatively small: The company is on track to reach 62 million euros in sales (about $73 million) for the year 2017, said François-Cyrille de Rendinger, its chief executive. It eschews big shows, red carpet dressings, overweening ad campaigns and hysterical logomania.

But it does have celebrity placements, and big ones. Mr. Touitou struck up a friendship with Kanye West, and worked with him to put out two capsule collections. Catherine Deneuve, an icon of Mr. Touitou’s youth (“‘Belle de Jour’ when you’re a young boy is a big discovery”), is now a private client, with clothes made to order.

Many of fashion’s biggest names have had a hand in A.P.C. ad campaigns: Carine Roitfeld (who styled her daughter, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, in the label’s campaigns before she ever gained fame at Paris Vogue), Bruce Weber, Stella Tennant.

A.P.C. does stage shows, mostly in the label’s Rue Madame headquarters, with Mr. Touitou providing viva voce musings on Balzac, Proust and how badly most people dress, a symptom of a wry, incurable frankness that has occasionally gotten him into trouble.

Long before she was a fashion star, Carine Roitfeld styled her daughter, Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, for an A.P.C. ad campaign.

“You should never take him too seriously,” said Arnaud Faeh, the former creative director of Carhartt, who worked with Mr. Touitou on a series of A.P.C./Carhartt collaborations. “You know he doesn’t take himself too seriously, either. A lot of things he says may be really misunderstood, but if you know him, you smile.” (It must be said that there were very few smiles when Mr. Touitou used a racial slur at a men’s wear presentation in 2015, adapting a song title by Mr. West and Jay-Z, resulting in a public outcry and subsequent apology.)

Yet A.P.C. struggled to be taken seriously as fashion, despite Mr. Touitou’s protestations that it has been from the very beginning. The fashion establishment tends to elevate those designers who play up the artistry and high-minded theatrics of what is, on some level, the rag trade. Creating clothes to make and sell is thought to be vulgar, Mr. Touitou said: “You’re a merchant. You’re dealing with merchandise. You sell. Whereas you should be a genius, creating concepts.”

Here enters the class consciousness that runs through the A.P.C. story. “Karl Marx was milk,” Mr. Touitou said. He did not set out to be basic, or to be a merchant. He set out to foment the revolution.

Born in Tunisia, Mr. Touitou immigrated to Paris at 9, in 1960. At the Sorbonne, he grew obsessed with Trotskyist politics, becoming a practicing member of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste. “In those days, my point was, ‘Man, we have to redesign everything, we have to destroy the whole city,’” he said. He was a firebrand in American surplus-store corduroys and Shetland sweaters, peddling revolution door to door.

“When you come from politics, you want to change the world totally,” he said. “Then you can realize this is not going to happen. You go at 5 o’clock in the morning to factories to try to sell your ideas, they don’t want that. You’re just a romantic. They don’t want revolution. Period. Communism was maybe just a good idea for books.”

A party A.P.C. hosted during Paris Fashion Week in June.

Credit
Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Instead, Mr. Touitou turned to rock music (he idolized ’60s garage rock bands) and, eventually, found a job with the fashion label Kenzo, in Paris. He began in shipping, worked his way up to overseeing the department, decamped for Agnès B. and, finally, began A.P.C. (Atelier de Production et de Création) in a tiny studio on Rue Princesse in 1987, as a new outlet for the same fixations.

“To be frank, I wanted to be the continuation of what I always did: radicalism,” he said. “A very strong statement against almost everything.”

These days, Mr. Touitou is not exactly the picture of the grizzled radical. He and Ms. Touitou live with their daughter, Lily, 12, in the Seventh Arrondissement, among the haute bourgeoisie. (He has two children, Haydée, 28, and Pierre, 24, from his previous relationship.) He is spending his summer vacation cruising the Peloponnese on his boat. Still, he said, A.P.C. makes the same kind of corduroys and sweaters he used to rabble-roused in. His cousin, the novelist Guillaume Dustan, who died in 2005, once joked to him that he had more influence on the French than the Socialist Party.

“It’s a funny thing to say,” Mr. Touitou said. “But I think it’s true.”

What hasn’t changed is A.P.C.’s independence. Mr. Touitou owns the entire company, and there is a family spirit that pervades, mentioned by many who come into its orbit. Invitations to the Touitou home are frequent for collaborators and friends — including not only Mr. West and Mr. Ahluwalia, but also the gathered fashion press who descend for fashion week — and A.P.C.’s board meetings are held around the dining room table. (One or the other of the Touitous cooks.)

Around A.P.C., luxury groups have bloomed, buying up labels and consolidating power. A.P.C.’s price point is not technically luxury by industry standards — it benefits from hitting at an attainable sweet spot above the likes of J. Crew but below much of designer fashion — but Mr. Touitou and Mr. de Rendinger said there has been interest from investors in coming on board. “They let us know, gently,” Mr. Touitou said. “It’s nice to be desired.”

But the Touitous do not, on the whole, have much interest in corporatized fashion. Labels show extravagant clothes, but many are never produced for sale, or produced in quantities so small as to be impossible to find.

“We say ‘fashion industry,’ but it’s the bag industry,” Mr. Touitou said. A.P.C., unusually, makes only 25 percent of its revenues in accessories (though it did recently open its first all-accessories shop in Paris).

What clothes there are on the luxury racks are not often the clothes Mr. Touitou prefers.

“The bourgeois don’t know how to dress anymore,” he said. “With women, it’s just a disaster. I think the group luxury brands have a huge responsibility into that culture of vulgarity.” He recalled a recent visit to Cannes: “You’re seated by the pool, and everybody looks like he’s just found a hooker.”

Under the Touitous, A.P.C. seeks to offer a lesson and a corrective; in its way, it is even budding into a small group of its own. Mr. Touitou finds little latitudes to extend to talented employees: His co-designer, Louis Wong, has a small line of high-end jackets, Louis W., under the A.P.C. umbrella; and when Vanessa Seward, a veteran of the Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel studios, joined A.P.C. in 2012, she was given first a capsule collection, and then eventually her own women’s wear line, which has grown to support four stand-alone stores in Paris and London.

Mr. de Rendinger didn’t rule out other labels being developed in the A.P.C. laboratory, though he did caution that they would go slowly.

So the revolution, such as it is, continues. A.P.C.’s basics are edging toward the less basic. Ms. Touitou has enlisted Charlotte Chesnais, the jeweler and longtime Balenciaga designer, to consult on the A.P.C. women’s collection. “It’s a moment where we want to be different from ourselves,” she said, “which is strange.”

Nevertheless, the cardinal rules still apply. Your clothes should make you feel like you. A little bad taste can be good. A touch of ugliness can be nice. The clothes A.P.C. makes will never be other than what its stewards would wear themselves.

“It’s nice to be loved when —— ” Ms. Touitou began.

“ when you’re not lovable,” her husband supplied.

But that wasn’t quite it.

“When you’re not trying too hard,” she said.

A.P.C. isn’t luxury fashion. It’s probably closer to the Atelier de Laissez-Faire. “I think it’s really hard on people,” Ms. Touitou said. “At a dinner party, they will look perfect, but if it’s a promise they can’t fulfill in everyday life, it’s really sad.”

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