An email went out on Saturday morning: A.P.C. would be canceling its Monday afternoon show due to the spread of the coronavirus. That makes the brand an outlier among many others that have proceeded with business as usual even if it is anything but. Small designers are suffering as retailers cancel buying appointments to refocus their budgets on the bigger, surer things, and some fear that they may have to write off the whole season—or even the year. With its global store network that’s not this brand’s issue, and while the company’s caution is understandable, it does look like we missed an interesting A.P.C. show.
At a photo studio deep in the 10th arrondissement, Jean and Judith Touitou presided over a look-book shoot. The ingredients were more or less unchanged from a year ago when they presented their collection in their Left Bank headquarters, but the styling had changed. The model in look 1 wore a pair of size 35 jeans—Jean’s own size, he said—in which the button and button hole were moved off center to accommodate for the extra fabric. She’s probably more like a 25. Boys got the same oversized treatment. On a back pocket, a white cardboard information label peeked out with washing instructions.
For the record, Jean advises against putting the brand’s famous dark-rinse jeans in the freezer. If a cleaning is required, he’ll fill up a tub with water and use Savon de Marseille, which he calls a good, non-aggressive soap. (Hermès apparently does the same for its silk.) Most of the time the jeans were accompanied by a wool sweater, humble by elsewhere-in-Paris standards, but standard fare here. These were occasionally swapped out for a denim jacket or a denim shirt tucked into the jeans’ generous waistbands.
Additionally, there was a smattering of printed midi-dresses and minis, which were accessorized with sweaters that were wrapped around necks like prodigious scarves. Where typically the Touitous show boots for fall, the shoe here was a strappy brown-leather flat sandal with a transparent rubber sole, worn with ankle socks. Jean remembered walking into the Café de Flore while sporting a similar footwear situation once upon a time and being looked at like “a desperate case.” The memory gives him particular satisfaction now, as does the fact that the rumor mill has Jean selling A.P.C. “I don’t want to, I don’t need to,” he said. “I have total freedom, I have a good life. I’m not 14 hours in the studio. No, no. I’m okay.” There you have it.
