How Agnes Trouble built her label Agnes B into a fashion empire using modern Parisian style
‘I always wear my own clothes,” says Agnès Troublé, with a shrug. “What else would I wear? I never go shopping. Except perhaps to the flea market. When I design, I think of what I want.” And so today, on a squashy hotel sofa in London’s Covent Garden, the French fashion designer more commonly known as Agnès B is wearing what she wants: a white woven, midlength skirt from last year’s collection, white ankle socks, black nunnish shoes and one of her signature snap-button cardigans in black over a black T-shirt scrawled with the legend “Malversation”. This translates into English as “corrupt behaviour in a position of trust, particularly public office”. Because, as she points out in her whispered tones, “I am very radical.”
The T-shirt and a faint smell of cigarettes aside, you might not suspect this. The sweet-faced blonde fashion designer, gallerist, art collector — a woman who has dressed David Bowie, Madonna, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and is “best friends” with the enfant terrible American film director Harmony Korine — is a devout Catholic, a mother of five, grandmother of 16 and a great-grandmother of two. And her ways — like her style, like the design of her boutiques — are quiet.
But Agnès Troublé, name, which she has her maiden reverted to, has had an extraordinary life. Hailing from an old French family, she grew up in a house in the park of Versailles, which gave her an obsession with the history of art and with the court itself, and a dream to be a museum curator. But the idyll was cut short by a sexually abusive uncle, whom she has said in the past “robbed her of her adolescence”, an experience which she channeled into a feature film she directed in 2014. By the age of 17 she was married to publisher Christian Bourgois (the origin of the B). She had twin boys at 19 and was divorced by the age of 21. Then she began her career. A new book called
celebrates the 40-plus years that this has so far spanned, which has resulted in her heading up a fashion empire with a turnover of €300 million and hundreds of international stores — 141 of them in Japan, where she is so famous that they chase her down the street.
But she began as a stylist at French Elle magazine, a job she won because of her unique style of dressing in flea market finds and clothes by a supermarket chain (the French were decades ahead of Sainsbury’s Tu). “I dressed like this because I had no money,” she says. “My mother and father didn’t want to know what I was doing because I had left my husband. So I was on my own and I had the twins. It was hard, but I felt free.”
For anyone who first fell in love she has. with fashion in the Eighties, this part-memoir, part-scrapbook is a delight. Troublé has rarely had a camera out of her hands in the last four decades and every moment has been archived through her lens. It took her six months of evenings to get the book together.
She tried to use the many editorial pictures that have appeared in glossy international editions of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire, but she found that there was always something she didn’t like about their shot — “the handbag wasn’t mine, I didn’t like the model”. Designers are perfectionists and control freaks by nature. So she ended up using mostly her own photographyandtheresultisanintimate