A Sweatshirt in Search of Perfection: A.P.C. Debuts New Modern Essentials With JJJJound
“It looks like nothing, but it’s everything,” says Jean Touitou.
“It does look like nothing,” finishes Justin Saunders.
Last night, Touitou, the founder of A.P.C., and Saunders, the mastermind behind JJJJound, the Montreal-based design collective, came together in A.P.C.’s balmy Mercer Street store to discuss their new “interaction”—read: collaboration—which consists of pure, simple, minimal pieces like a sweatshirt, sweatpants, jeans, a tee, a tote, a candle, a notebook, and a hat. The products were released online and in A.P.C. stores yesterday, and almost everything has already sold out, thanks in part to the hoards of people that gathered, rapt, to hear Touitou and Saunders in conversation.
The ivory sweatshirt Touitou and Saunders were talking about—the one that looks like nothing—is the result of almost two years of intense study. Saunders is a research obsessive who can recite on a dime the weights of his fabrics, the precise color of a dye, and the exact length of a seam. It’s his furious hunt for perfection in design that put him on Kanye West’s radar during the early pre-Yeezy years, around the same time Touitou and West were collaborating on collections, and it was through West that Touitou and Saunders met.
In Saunders, Touitou says he sees a bit of himself. “At some point I proposed to him to do an interaction because he shares so many aesthetically and even moral and political values with us,” the A.P.C. founder said the day before the event. There’s also the fact that as A.P.C. has grown from being a label-free collection of essentials into a more global brand serving up everything from daisy-print dresses to leather brogues, Touitou has become just slightly envious of Saunders’s smaller scale and freedom.
“I’m envious in a good way,” he clarified. “My vision of A.P.C. has not changed at all, it’s just that we grew up. When one has 78 stores and maybe 350 wholesale accounts, one cannot spend three weeks focusing on an off-white sweatshirt for it to be perfect. This is why I said I was envious, because at the beginning of A.P.C., obviously, I would spend hours and hours and hours to understand what the twist of a yarn was, the proportion, the structure, the length, the molecules of the cotton. This is where I get envious because I can see he does all that. I can feel it.”
There’s irony in Touitou and Saunders joining forces to create these perfect pieces. “The perfect tee” has become a direct-to-consumer buzzword to justify the existence of zillions of brands taking shots in the dark at what makes a good crewneck. Since 1987, A.P.C. has been selling just that, even if Touitou won’t admit that his collection of basics is probably as close to platonically perfect as a jean or tee or knit could get. “One thing is perfect, though: The quality of the denim we use. The fabric,” he finally conceded.
Saunders referenced much of the brand’s extant designs for the project. “We gave him carte blanche, and the thing was that he went über A.P.C. He wanted to go to the core of A.P.C., and so I was very happy that he came to the roots of the original design. It’s a good refreshment, a good reboot,” said Touitou.
Back in the A.P.C. store, the audience was asking philosophical questions: “How do you know when something is done?” And do Touitou and Saunders see themselves as reformists or radicals? Big stuff for a talk about a sweatshirt about nothing, but that’s just how Touitou likes it. One-on-one he explained, “There are only one or two mediums that can reflect the complexity and the contradiction of our world: that is literature and philosophy. What we do in fashion and what I try to do at A.P.C. is to give some sort of dignity, some sort of an attitude. You know, one has to have clothes anyway. One has to live under a roof anyway, so you might as well design the clothes and you might as well design the house. I’m not going to say we are going to change the politics of the world, going wild, but we are doing our part in trying to be as good as we can.”
A.P.C. Interaction #4 JJJJOUND is available at A.P.C. stores and online, Mr. Porter, and End.
Photo: Courtesy of A.P.C.1/5
Photo: Courtesy of A.P.C.2/5