A.P.C.’s collaborators have been a starry bunch. Catherine Deneuve, Kid Cudi, and the late Jane Birkin, as well as international brands including GOOP and BAPE have all participated in the French brand’s “Interactions.” This time around they’re keeping it in the family. Natacha Ramsay-Levi, who came to the fashion world’s attention as a deputy to Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga and who designed Chloé from 2017 to 2020, started her career in fashion as an intern at A.P.C.’s Rue Madame headquarters in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement.
“I sat over there,” she says, pointing over her shoulder at a wall desk on the busy office’s second floor, reminiscing about the short stint she did at the company while a student at the Paris fashion school Studio Berçot. “What was amazing—and this is why I connect with A.P.C—was what we were working on, but more of it was the spirits invoked, the people. I see fashion as a community; it’s a way to convene and work with people you love, and I think this is something generous that Jean and Judith have created here.”
Jean Touitou, the brand’s founder, credits A.P.C.’s collective approach to his own early days in Kenzo Takada’s studio. “It was an open place too, even if you were in the shipping department you could meet photographers. I had a dream to recreate this atmosphere,” he remembers. Judith, Jean’s wife, was the one who brought Natacha back into the fold for this one-off collection. “People see me as a super high-end fashion person, but if you know me, like Judith does,” says Ramsay-Levi, “you also know that I have a very human, grounded background, and that I love basics and how much they can give space to the wearer.”
On the day we meet, in the tail end of Paris Fashion Week, Ramsay-Levi’s outfit aligns with her self-description. She wears a barn jacket with wear-and-tear marks that suggest she acquired it and learned to love it long before fashionized versions started turning up on the Loewe and Prada runways. Her jeans are A.P.C., naturally, a new pair though she still has her first pair that she bought as a teenager and “repaired many times.” Her glossy boots highly recognizable treasures from her Chloé days.
The idea behind the collection, Ramsay-Levi says, was “to design clothes but not make them designed. You can make it as a uniform for yourself—loud enough to hold you but anonymous enough to not eat you.” She started with denim, changing the brand’s familiar proportions or adding a drawstring to a waistband, and moved on to brand icons like the trench, swapping out the buttons for a moto jacket zipper or slicing it at the waist. The biggest interruptions in the interaction, where you can see Ramsay-Levi’s hand most clearly, are the studded and grommeted sandals and belts, t-shirts bearing photo prints of her own torso, like a self-portrait, and a nuts-and-bolts pendant necklace in the shape of a woman’s sign that recalls some of the collectible jewelry she made at Chloé. Jean is pleased with the results. “I’m always frustrated at A.P.C. to do what I’m supposed to do,” he says, “and Natacha comes from a more edgy, conceptual area, so I’m happy to have somebody come in and mess around a little bit.”
The Natacha Ramsay-Levi Interaction will arrive in A.P.C.’s stores around the world on March 14, and to celebrate the Touitous will gather their other friends and family at Jean’s son Pierre’s about-to-open restaurant on Paris’s rue Saint-Roch. Says Ramsay-Levi: “I wanted it to be super-personal and direct, without filters, because we know each other very well and I feel at home.”
