A.P.C. turned 30 this year. Founder Jean Touitou acknowledged the milestone by publishing a book. Transmission is one part brand history, one part personal scrapbook; he’s headed to Tokyo and New York City next month to sign copies. Beyond that there was a T-shirt and a scarf that quietly declared Hiver ’87 (A.P.C.’s name before it had one) on the runway last season. As anniversary celebrations go, this is about as low-key as it gets in fashion, not that you’d expect much different. Touitou has railed against the ostentations of the French luxury labels on more than one occasion.
Today’s presentation at the company’s Rue Madame headquarters was a reset. Not because customers demanded it—APC doesn’t stop opening stores—but because Touitou felt like it. Having specialized for decades in stiff (punishingly so, but the payoff is big) dark rinse denim, Touitou was now talking stonewashing and stretch. Not your prototypical skinny jeans though. Rather, he said, when he uses stretch it's “for the fall of the fabric and comfort.” Two examples: a belted safari jacket and a slim knee-length skirt. The bigger news here was what he called “de-couture jeans,” in which he deconstructed APC’s traditional dark rinse denim into a long wrap skirt, a shrunken vest, an ankle-skimming coat, and a cape printed with “The Flamin’ Grooves” on its back. As for this development, it’s so ubiquitous elsewhere that it’s probably an oversight that A.P.C. hasn’t done it before.
The Flamin’ Grooves were ’70s San Francisco rockers who Touitou admired for their anti-hippie stance. “I stole a lot from them in the beginning,” he admitted. Here’s something that you can’t get anywhere else: the house founder performing a Velvet Underground tune mid-presentation.
