Touitou, Jean

views updated

Touitou, Jean

Founder of A.P.C. and fashion designer

B orn c. 1952, in Tunisia; son of Odette; married Judith; children: Lily. Education: Studied linguistics and history at the University of Paris (Sorbonne).

Addresses: Home—Paris, France. Office—A.P.C., 45 Rue Madame, 75006 Paris, France.

Career

W orked as a teacher and as a chef before taking a job with a leather manufacturer; with the fashion designer and retailer Kenzo, c. late 1970s, and another fashion company called Irie; held then key position in the menswear design department of Agnès B; founded Atelier de Production et de Creation (A.P.C.), 1986; opened first store, 1988; founder of a private preschool in Paris, 2008.

Sidelights

J ean Touitou conceived his French clothing label, A.P.C., back in the mid1980s as a kind of anti-fashion statement. Determined to design and sell well-made items of apparel that would last their wearer at least five years, Touitou launched the company, whose French-language acronym stands for Atelier de Production et de Création or “Studio of Production and Creation,” as a design collective that drew upon past as well as current trends. “The thing about fashion that bothers me is that it’s not about clothes, but more about image and noise, which is nonsense,” the characteristically outspoken Touitou told WWD writer Eric Wilson. “At the end of the day, it’s only scarves for tourists at the airport.”

Touitou was in his mid-thirties when he founded A.P.C. in 1986 with a menswear line. He was born in Tunisia into a family of Tunisian Jews—a religious community whose presence in the North African country dates back to Roman times—but the Touitous emigrated to France—Tunisia’s colonial ruler until 1956—when he was nine years old. He went on to study linguistics and history at the Sor-bonne, and became involved in leftist political causes as a young man. With his varied ambitions, Touitou had a difficult time settling on one career: He taught school for a time, tried out life as a chef, and then worked for a leather manufacturer. He finally found his calling when he took a job in the stockroom of the Paris fashion emporium Kenzo. Named after the Japanese-born designer whose wares had a strong following among fashion cog-noscenti in the 1970s, Kenzo was an exciting place to work, Touitou recalled in an interview with Christy de Raimond of the Daily News Record. “There was an international feeling. A lot was going on, the punk movement, the music and art scene. We worked hard at Kenzo but we had a great time.”

After Kenzo, Touitou went on to other jobs in the French fashion industry, including a key position in the menswear department of designer Agnès B. He founded A.P.C. in 1986 with a collection of mens-wear, but realized that women were buying the well-fitted shirts for themselves and launched a separate women’s line in 1990. He opened the first A.P.C. store in Paris in 1988, locating it on the less fashionable side of the Latin Quarter, which is the traditional students’ neighborhood near the Sorbonne. It was a family-run operation, and re mained so years later: Touitou’s father assumed responsibility for the finances, and his sister handled the occasional public relations task.

Touitou was adamant, however, that his company could succeed without spending precious resources on advertising or, as many startup labels do, by giving clothes away to celebrities. A.P.C. declined to participate in Paris’s twice-yearly Fashion Week ex-travaganzas, at which store buyers and journalists assemble to preview the new collections. Instead he simply hired two models and presented the new lines to a select group in an informal party atmosphere; however, fashion writers were among some of A.P.C.’s most devoted customers, with the Independent’s Lucy Ryder Richardson noting that “A.P.C.’s product is fairly priced and looks both unisex and anonymous. What seems quite ordinary hanging from the rails, however, has something about it that pulls the aficionado closer . There’s the perfect pair of needlecords, the kind you designed in your mind but could never quite find, the V-neck jumper with that little bit of extra volume at the cuffs, or the neat plastic mac that comes cut like a duffel coat.”

Keenly interested in other forms of creative expression besides fashion, Touitou began branching out into art and music in the 1990s. He built a recording studio inside A.P.C.’s Paris headquarters, which all employees are free to use on the weekends, and also created an in-house record label. Its releases include Abstract Depressionism, for which several musicians contributed what they considered the saddest song ever. He has also collaborated on various projects with filmmakers Wes Anderson and Zoe Cassevetes, and told several journalists about a plan to import coca leaves from South America to make what he liked to call “cocaine tea,” but quickly asserted “it has nothing to do with the drug,” as he told W’s Venessa Lau. “It’s legal to buy coca leaves in South America, and it’s legal to have tea made of it. It’s very energizing and not as bad as coffee.”

A.P.C. sells its wares through a well-designed catalog, a few select store accounts such as Barneys New York, and in 29 separate A.P.C. stores. Occasionally the collections feature limited-edition pieces by well-known designers such as Martin Margiela. For the most part, however, Touitou steers clear of those in the fashion world who do not share his interests in music, art, and philosophy, dismissing what he described as those who “have nothing to say except ‘this embroidery took Mr. Schmuck and his atelier 1,328 hours of insane work,’” as he told Richardson in the Independent. In 2007, he bought out his business partner because the other wanted to move forward with A.P.C., but Touitou was firmly opposed to adding non-apparel items like fragrance under A.P.C.’s name. “If it’s overexposed, it just dies,” he asserted in an interview with Christine Muhlke in the New York Times Magazine.

In January of 2008, Touitou ventured into distinctly non-fashion territory when he and his wife founded a private preschool in Paris called A.P.E., or Ateliers de la Petite Enfance. They launched it after Touitou was dissatisfied with the regimented style of learning that state-run schools offer preschoolers and the corresponding lack of any imagination-developing curricula at expensive private nursery schools. Students, who include his young daughter Lily, wear stylish little smocks and sit in child-sized chairs based on a design by Alvar Aalto, the Finnish architect often hailed as the father of modernism. Touitou hopes to replicate the A.P.E. schools elsewhere in Paris, telling W’s Christopher Bagley that he had finally seized upon the “way to build something solid that might last longer than fashion.”