Jean Touitou is the picture of refinement. He saunters in to his flagship London boutique (suitably perched opposite Dover Street Market) surrounded by his press team and PA. Holding his specs in one hand and quirkily, a shiny red apple in the other, he greets me politely. Totally relaxed, he is dressed smart-casually in that famous APC way and looks like the cool music teacher from your school days or your best friend’s cool dad. He leads Ponystep’s photographer upstairs and takes a seat amongst the label’s womenswear collection and instructs them to begin snapping with a masculine ease that gives the impression that this is the way he spends everyday. But what else would you expect from the man behind one of fashion’s most popular brands? Known as the go-to label for quality staple pieces, APC has gathered a large following of loyal fans over the years and it’s about to gain even more sales as it launches its first fragrance, Sustain.
‘At first, I didn’t want to do a perfume’ Touitou admits as we take a seat in the shop window ‘I found the idea of it quite vulgar because it’s become such a gimmick of the fashion industry’. All negative opinions on launching a staple scent for APC were forgotten two years ago though, in LA, when he met Hayley Alexander Van Oosten ‘She blended all her own oils and then displayed them in these little wooden boxes and gave them to her friends. It was so personal’ Touitou explains ‘At first I thought it was all a bit feminine. This way of doing things is purely for girls, you know. But then I sampled one of her oils and I got hooked. The smell was so intense and it lasted for hours and then I thought that something like this could work for APC’
Collaborating with Van Oosten (on the scent) and famous Parisian design house M+M (on the packaging), Sustain is set to complete APC’s brand diversity and with the Dover Street boutique merely a month old, the word powerhouse springs to mind when looking at where the fashion house is at today. ‘When I think about APC’s success, I think of it as an impossible dream’ Touitou says ‘It’s a eutopia for me. I had the idea for the label all these years ago and I did it. I’m also happy that we are still an independent company and there’s a liberty and freedom within my company that doesn’t exist in many fashion businesses’
Not that it was ever Touitou’s aim to become a fashion sensation; after all, this is a man who is interested in personal style not in-your-face, seasonal trends. ‘I just wanted to make decent clothes for men’ he tells me, as the boutique staff begin setting up for the Sustain launch party that’ll take place in store in just a couple of hours ‘I wasn’t involved in fashion. I just wanted to make perfect shirts, trousers and jackets. In the end, it turned out half of the customers were actually women so we started doing womenswear but we kept it minimal- as with the menswear- and we grew’.
Known for his honest, straight-up opinions (in one recent interview, he declared that he didn’t think we were living in a creative era and slammed label hungry, finance workers as tasteless), I can’t help but dig for a controversial statement or two before the party begins. But I seem to have caught Jean on a calm day where, if anything, he seems inspired. He’s observant of the crowd of press, fashionable party-goers and APC fans that is beginning to gather outside the boutique and he’s consistently clocking that his staff are tickking off the first faces that are let through the door. With that, my time with him is over and he glides in to his party, meeting and greeting various members of the fashion press. Its clearly evident that Paris fever is defiantly in the air- there’s queue to get in to the party- and even some of London fashion’s most established names are happy to wait. But why wouldn’t they? I’m not French but after a couple of hours spent in APC’s delightfully calm, collected and effortlessly cool world, there’s no doubt that I’d like to be.