JEAN TOUITOU ON THE FUTURE OF A.P.C.
AND WHY HE WANTS TO LEAVE FRANCE
“I was totally ignorant in choosing some wording that to me was pretty natural, since I thought I was quoting a piece of popular music.”
New York, N.Y. — “My fault is my ignorance. Period. And this is why I apologize after, because I think I’m ignorant of a certain code,” A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou tells GQ’s Zach Baron of his remarks at his annual fashion week presentation. Touitou is under fire for quoting Kanye’s “Ni**as in Paris” at the event where he showed a collaboration with the American bootmaker Timberland. He said the look represented “the sweet spot when the hood—the ’hood—meets Bertolucci’s movie Last Tango in Paris.” He went on: “The Timberland here is a very strong ghetto signifier.”
Baron travels to France to meet with Touitou eleven days after the show, and he couldn’t help but mention instances of other people doing the same thing and getting away with it: “By the way, John Lennon, in ’72, he was ignorant, too—” Touitou has always been outspoken and never one to self-censor. “Fraternité has one big enemy,” he says. “It’s called ‘politically correct.’ I’m a freedom fighter. I think nothing else. And I understand that today’s word is caught into some contradictions that I should have been more aware of.” Although Touitou says that A.P.C.’s business was unchanged after his Fashion Week implosion—“on the retail, didn’t move anything”—he is eager to prove himself going forward: “I can only answer with creativity, since with your own brain you cannot answer. It’s like fighting a storm.”
Touitou currently lives with his wife, Judith, in Saint-Germain but tells Baron he’s thinking about leaving. It’s a surreal time in Paris—even before the January attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Touitou and his wife are Jewish, though he admits: “I didn’t know what a Jew was until I came to France. It’s so strange, like all your life, your identity is just being French, and all of a sudden you feel like you’re threatened as a Jew. But it made us realize, we’ve been scared for a few years.” Since the French Revolution, the country has venerated liberty, equality, and fraternity over religion, he says. “There’s something that went wrong, and we have generations now of kids who say, ‘No, first it’s God, and then it’s the republic,’ ” rather than the other way around. “But that has never been told to them, and now there’s a huge clash.” A clash that Touitou feels he and his family are on the wrong side of. “And this is why I’m thinking about moving out of the country, because I really love this country, but this is a civil-war situation.” Even after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, he says, the country did not exactly pull together. “If no cartoonist was shot and if it was only Jews in the kosher supermarket who got shot, I bet you there would be no demonstrations. And that is the truth.”
Recently, Touitou has started writing music. “I’m writing now a song called ‘Dead Fish Blues,’ ” Touitou says. It is a song, he says, about judgment—deserved and otherwise. “It’s symbolic, because it’s a fish that got stupid enough with his ignorance of what the hook could be. The fish, ignorant, he goes after the hook. He can’t swim anymore. He’s not in the sea anymore. You get it? And then he’s delivered in a restaurant. So he’s dead one time, all right. He’s delivered in a very good fish restaurant, where the chef cooks the sea bass in the exquisite way. He steams it, but on a bed of seaweed. So far, one could say that’s a dignified end to that fish, who was ignorant enough. He’s sort of okay. But then comes in the restaurant a fashion-editor woman. She can’t use the knife, really. So she takes the fork in the right hand and takes the flesh, like this—” he mimes laying waste to a fish—“and it looks like a mess on the plate. And the maître d’ comes and says, ‘Madame, you just killed him a second time.’ So I’m writing this, because that’s the mood I’m in right now. ‘Dead Fish Blues.’ This is how I make things. And then this will be over.”
The April issue of GQ is available on newsstands nationwide now.
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