Suitsupply, APC open in S.F.
Founded in 1987, French brand APC found its footing during the ’90s grunge years. It has long cultivated a serious cult among fashionphiles years before the advent of minimalist luxe and the rise of so-called French girl chic. Timeless classics, sexily slim tailoring and effortless cool are the elements of style that built this brand, which quietly opened its third U.S. retail store (outside of N.Y.C. and L.A.) in San Francisco in May.
Count off the components behind those three innocuous initials, standing for Atelier de Production et de Création: Japanese raw denim? Check. Refined mod parkas? Check. Hip, austere androgyny for both boys and girls? Check. An in-house music imprint, pre-Maison Kitsuné and Colette? Check. Collaborations ranging from Nike and Carhartt to Vanessa Seward and Kanye West? Check.
APC founder and designer Jean Touitou hinted via email that the Bay Area played a
part in APC’s backstory. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Tunisian French designer fondly remembers making his way by motorbike from Los Angeles to Berkeley and seeing Muddy Waters perform. “I loved it so much,” recalls Touitou, who still designs APC’s collections alongside
Judith Touitou and Louis Wong. “A lot of music ties there that I wouldn’t mention, since they are only mythical for a small group of people. Oh, and it has nothing to do with flower power — just music.”
Located in a Jackson Square neighborhood that’s quickly turning its storied face toward style — witness neighbors Isabel Marant, Jake, Iron & Resin, Shinola and Eden & Eden — the new store is tucked into the former site of the North Point Gallery in a circa-1873 San Francisco landmark building that has housed carriage painters, Ghirardelli chocolate, the Petri Italian American Cigar Co. and a paper warehouse.
Fashion folk frolicked over cocktails and pretzels as DJ Oscar Cash of Metronomy spun at the recent opening party for APC San Francisco. Longtime Touitou collaborators Laurent Deroo Architecte gave the building’s industrial history a playful spin, lightly evoking a recording studio with zinc plate partitions and soundproofingesque padded gray display tiers and loungeable zones. Patchwork quilts made of salvaged textiles from past collections, designed by Jean Touitou and Jessica Ogden, dangle in back. LPs from current APC faves Paradis, Étienne Daho and Nicolas Godin of Air hang out nonchalantly in front, by the checkout counter. Beneath white, slightly ragged exposed brick walls and orb-like speakers is a beautifully cut, covetable khaki trench that a ’60s-era Anna Karina or Catherine Deneuve might don. The on-trend Last Days of Disco shoulder bag — tawny, whiskey brown and half-moon shaped — sports a discreet and petite logo, almost imperceptible and therefore perfectly, perceptibly cool.
So, in the town historically awash with minimalist avatars like Levi’s, the Gap and Everlane, why APC, why now? “It was about time after such a long presence in N.Y.C. and L.A. that we go to what could have been our West Coast home base from the beginning,” Touitou says.
APC San Francisco, 407 Jackson St., S.F. (415) 236-7999. http://usonline.apc.fr.