Simple, but sophisticated. That’s the A.P.C. source code and it’s how Jean and Judith Touitou described their new Spring Summer 2022 collection. Eighteen months of Covid had designers whiffling and waffling every which way, but you aren’t going to hear the Touitous talking about Roaring Twenties fashion or Y2K dressing.
A.P.C.’s new spring lookbook was photographed in Le Havre, a town in Normandy that, having been badly bombed during World War II by the Allies (it was occupied by the Germans), was later rebuilt by the architect Auguste Perret using the first examples of molded concrete. What you did hear at the company’s Left Bank headquarters was Jean and Judith talking about the connection between Le Havre’s architecture and A.P.C.’s aesthetic. “It looks boring and a bit neurotic, with its repetitive building fronts,” Jean said of the city. “But when you look in detail, all the buildings are different even if they look all the same. This is why I see total similarity with our own work.”
On the racks, the denim, shirt dresses, and raincoats looked familiar enough, but the details are worth noticing. The stripes on a button-down, for example, are imperfect, in the manner of Daniel Buren’s painted stripes. Other pleasures are more personal: like the plaid lining of a trench, or the silky lining of a wool plaid shirt. The silhouettes for both women and men are subtly oversized; the Touitous were after a post-pandemic slouch. On the accessories front, the infamous Douche bag, a meta critique of the luxury handbag market in the form of a drawstring leather sack, has been remade in vegan leather for the first time—sophisticated, but simple.
