A.P.C. stands for a kind of fashion that his understated, simple (sometimes deceptively so), and anti-trend. Jean Touitou, its founder, has often railed against the other kind of fashion: the runway kind that’s disconnected from the streets by chauffeured cars, eight figure salaries, and proverbial ivory towers. Suddenly, maybe because of the challenging global market, maybe because of the overdoneness of fashion the last couple of years, those brands he used to poke at are doing simple clothes. There’s lots of cottons on the runway, and some pieces are being designed with built-in wear-and-tear.
“Everybody’s decided to be realistic,” Touitiou said at a showroom appointment. “The thing is, how to be different when everybody’s doing ‘normal’ clothes again. Maybe when you have so much past, [like us], you do it in a different way.” With his wife Judith, Touitou’s way is to focus on the details: the elastic waistband they put on “suits” because we all want to look dressed up again but aren’t willing to be uncomfortable. Little touches like that are what gets noticed in stores, which are crowded again, he reports. Their denim expertise was obvious in the shredding on the front pockets of skater shorts and in the authentic double pleats on a classic jean jacket.
There’s upwards of 35 years of past at A.P.C.; 1987 was the year the company was founded and if you could scroll that far back on Instagram, you’d see the kind of pastel colors, easy-beachy vibes, and familiar staples—button-downs and baggy jeans—in this collection. In that way it was sort of a full-circle moment and a rebirth. Earlier this year, the Touitous sold a majority stake in the company to the investment firm L Catterton. The big thing that’s changed in the wake of that deal, Judith said, is that they’re both spending more time in the atelier.