By Matthew Schneier
Touitou spoke first. He has embraced his role as a kind of grizzled professeur of style, and his address, illustrated by a few rounds of models in A.P.C.’s Fall collection, was a disquisition on elegance. He summoned the spirits of four men he considers paragons of the form: Yves Saint Laurent (for his own style in this case, not his collections), Marcel Proust, Kurt Cobain, and Marc Jacobs (pre-mid-career gymnification). Saint Laurentian elegance had a proper, shirt-and-tie expression, though one tunic look suggested his North African adventures. Touitou even commissioned the makers of YSL’s iconic glasses, Maison Bonnet, to produce a few similar rectangular styles for A.P.C. Proust was represented by fur-trimmed coats, and Jacobs and Cobain, twin pillars of grunge, inspired ripped jeans and flannel overshirts worn loose. “Marc had his own style before he became a yoga star,” Touitou said. “I have this nostalgia for Marc. He looked like a teacher of semiology in Princeton, New Jersey.” Despite the jeans here, one of the key takeaways of the presentation was Touitou’s injunction to not wear denim more than one day out of every two. “I call this the fight for your right not to wear jeans.”
When West arrived to speak, wearing a Thom Browne shirt he’d customized by cutting off the sleeves and collar, he assumed the role of humble student to Touitou’s prof. “I have a really poor fashion education, because when I went to Louise Wilson and asked to go to Central Saint Martins, she told me I couldn’t go to the school,” he told the crowd. Professor Wilson apparently felt he was too famous to enroll. “So basically,” West continued, “I had to learn about clothes through Style.com and Tommy Ton and shit like that.”
