From time to time over the years, Jean Touitou has presided over A.P.C.’s fashion week presentations, waxing philosophical about the appeal of the brand’s simple, well-made clothes, poking fun at Paris’s super-sized mega brands, occasionally spouting poetry. If he seemed comfortable with the mic, this may be the reason. For 30 years—not quite as long as A.P.C. has been around, but almost—Touitou has been recording music, sometimes releasing it on CD and vinyl, sometimes not. Only recently, he put it all on Spotify and Apple Music, as well as Soundcloud. Type in Jean Touitou in the search bar and you can hear him channeling the Velvet Underground with fashion journo Tim Blanks on “Sister Ray,” and sha-la-la-ing about models on a cover of Kraftwerk’s “Das Model” with Mr. Ashley Olsen, Louis Eisner.
“The reason I’m dropping 25 albums—it’s the truth, I didn’t have time before,” Touitou says. “Remember, it’s my own company built with my own hands; I had to do so many different things: production, finance, not only finding ideas about clothes.” Having sold a majority stake in A.P.C. to L Catterton in 2023, he’s now freer to focus on other projects. Late last year he was in New York promoting his new natural wine, made from muscat grapes grown in his native Tunis. Now, he has a new song, “Psychiatrie,” which he wrote and produced with his friend Mirwais Ahmadzaï, who’s known for having worked with Madonna.
“People ask, ‘do music and fashion feed each other?’ And I say no, except there is a relation,” Touitou says. “With A.P.C., I wanted to keep my total freedom, without being told by anybody what to do, and it’s the same thing with music. The relationship between the two is the low-pressure thing. If it makes sense to me and the people around me, it’s always been: let’s do it, even when it’s absurd.”
Touitou made his first record in 1995. “With only 10,000 Francs we took a flight to New York, and I think it’s the most beautiful piece of music I ever did: just guitar feedback in E minor with four guitars; it sounds crazy, but it’s a beautiful piece of art.” What makes it so beautiful? “It’s totally abstract, there’s no structure. Usually, to make a good song, you need a gimmick, you need a hook. Here, you have nothing but guitar feedback. This is why I like it, because it creates emotions, just like a sculpture. It’s like a sculpture you can hear.”
It was around that time, maybe a few years later, that I bought a Columbia GP-3 portable record player from A.P.C.’s Mercer Street store in SoHo. At $150 or so, it fit the budget of a young fashion writer who spent most of her money on clothes she couldn’t afford. “A lot of DJs bought that tool for when they go to record stores to play the records to check them out,” Touitou recalls. “We had that store Magasin General next to the headquarters, where we used to sell random things like that.” The little plastic record player, he points out, is a good example of his absurdist streak.
Here’s another: Around about 1997 he was hanging out with Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola, and Anna Sui. “I had an instrumental song that was ready and I decided to have all those people read a story from Women’s Wear Daily in parallel with a poem by William Blake. It’s on the record called Unreleasable Tape.”
Dropping all these records is a full-circle moment for Touitou. Long before he launched A.P.C., he had a “mail order punk psychedelic business” selling cut-outs. Cut-outs are “records that are cut at the top with a saw. It means they’re not for sale, or shouldn’t be sold for more than 25 cents. And we were like gold diggers going to American record shops, basically trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.” He credits Lenny Kaye’s compilation album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, for setting him off on this path, searching for “collector pieces that nobody knew about.”
The Velvet Underground were influenced by Nuggets, and Touitou in turn became a lifelong fan of the band. “They seem simple to copy, but they’re one of the toughest. You have to be so sincere, and you’ve got to know a few things about sound.” Touitou learned those things from one of his best friends, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers. “He’s the guy who saw the Velvets 100 times, that’s his reputation, and he gave me some tips, you know, about how to set up the amps and how to use a wah-wah pedal without doing the wah-wah effect.” Kraftwerk is another longtime favorite, hence the “Das Model” cover. Touitou says his taste has expanded as he’s gotten older. “I’m not a teenager anymore. I used to spraypaint on the walls of Paris in the mid-’70s something totally silly, like ‘Death to Disco.’ Now, I can find the treasures in disco, not only the energy and the dancing, but the music itself.”
Not that he spends much time or energy on streaming new music, Touitou is too busy devoting that to his guitar. “Recently, I had a very, very good teacher, he was the guitar player of a famous French act, Johnny Hallyday. He has exactly all the references I love: Bob Dylan, the New York Dolls. He obliged me to play “Love Me Tender” by Elvis 100 times, which is like doing tai chi almost.”
As passionate as he is about his own preferences, does Touitou care what people make of his music? “The most important thing was to get the things out of my system,” he says. “But once it was out, maybe I’m not the best seller in the world. Maybe it bothers me to say, ‘hey, look, it’s beautiful.’ It’s been a bit like that at A.P.C. too. But I’m going to try to make some noise. Yeah, I have time to make some noise now, so I believe I will.”
