FRANÇOIS GIRBAUD (01) CO-FOUNDER AND OWNER, MARITHÉ + FRANÇOIS GIRBAUD

I’ve lost count of the stories I’ve told over the years, but they’re often reformulated and pronounced by the fashion gurus of the moment. In a world where ‘everyone is beautiful and everyone is nice’, there is ‘traceability’ for counterfeiters and ‘transparency’ that allows international patents to be shared with the giants of the chemical industry.

At the risk of repeating what I’ve already said, we only have to look at what happened on Easter Island. Dugout canoes were made to go fishing, until one day there were no more trees, and the inhabitants of the island could no longer feed themselves. We cannot continue to plunder natural resources for end consumption without considering the destruction we are wreaking on our ecosystem. In our eternal youth, we want it all, and we want it now.

It’s important to tell stories. The work we do today on jeans is nothing more than the sequel to the (more or less) real stories of the journey of miners, cinema and music. We have to find a way to face and survive the reactions of our planet Earth. After all the floods, movements of tectonic plates, displacement and disappearance of continents, there is only one garment that can help us survive the aftermath – solid, practical, comfortable and organic: jeans.