Fashion shows are about so much more than clothes today. In front of a crowd of thousands or in a showroom with barely enough room for a hundred, they're instant branding campaigns in our social media age. Karl Lagerfeld had bullhorns and protest posters at Chanel this morning. It was a classic case of co-optation, but cleverly done. A.P.C.'s Jean Touitou, who went up an hour later, had a placard of his own: "Fashion changes, being itself begotten of the desire for change," it read. Touitou has never been short on words, but he didn't say that first. Marcel Proust did. And Touitou's point wasn't that this season's A.P.C. collection would be so very different from last season's; that's not the business A.P.C. is in.
What Touitou was getting at with that little line from Swann's Way, we suspect, is that A.P.C. is the thinking woman's and man's fashion brand. A maker of essential clothes, rather than frivolous ones. Just don't call them basics—Touitou hates that. A.P.C.'s Spring essentials are just about what you'd expect, then: khaki trenches and red ones, LBSDs (i.e., little black smock dresses), shirtdresses in prints by the artist Pierre Marie (back for a return engagement), a great-looking fatigue green jumpsuit, and of course, denim—but soft and washed, not the raw, dark rinses we're all familiar with from A.P.C.'s stores. Touitou brought Vanessa Seward up in front of the crowd. Spring '15 will be her last capsule offering for the brand, but she's not going far. She'll launch a collection of her own with A.P.C.'s help in March. Another thinking woman's fashion brand? We'll take it.
