« Minets : fake beatniks, dandy hating everything that is french – the Bande du drugstore is first and foremost anti-yéyé. » Jean Monod, Les Barjots, 1968. The term “minets” appears in 1965 and designated young Parisians smitten with English culture. Janson de Sailly Schoolboys or SciencesPo students who listened the Who and Animals. At […]

“Dressed from head to toe with a consciousness close to obsession and a luxury of details, mods were work of arts wrapped in mohair.” Paolo Hewitt Born in the 50s, the mod subculture has nerve centre the Carnaby Street district in London. Mods, apocope of ‘modernist’, often son of workers who aspired to more ease […]

Jean-Pierre Melville movies are dominated by loneliness, failure and death. Movies that are said « films noirs » : Le Doulos, Le Deuxième Souffle (Second Breath), Le Samouraï, Un Flic, Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) all witness for a particular style, a precise and recurring mecanism. Betrayal is omnipresent, the movie is focused on […]

James Tissot is a XIXth century painter, often introduced as the fashion and elegance painter. Son of a textile shop owner and a milliner mother, the artist took a particular care for fabrics and colours rendering or garment details. A thoroughness betraying the influence of Flemish Primitives on his work. The artist paints the Second […]

NAGG. – (…) An Englishman – (he takes an english face, then takes back his own) – needing a pair of striped trousers in a hurry for the New Year festivities, goes to his tailor who takes his measurements. (Tailor’s voice.) “That’s the lot, come back in four days, I’ll have it ready.” Good. Four […]

« In september 1958, I posted an ad in France-Soir to find a thirteen year old boy who would be The 400 Blows’ hero. (…) about sixty children came, and I tried each one of them on sixteen millimeters (…) Jean-Pierre Léaud was clearly standing out from the rest and, after several play-offs, I decided […]

“To begin with, there are the easy things to do, things I could do today, for instance: 1. Cruising on a river boat in Paris (…). Then there are the things that are a little more important, things that require decisions from me, things that I think if I did them, they would maybe make […]

One can’t talk about Tommy Nutter without mentioning two London streets : Savile Row and Abbey Road. Nutter and Edward Sexton’s shop, « Nutters of Savile Row » is, in 1969, the first new shop to open in over a century on this historic street of English tailoring. In the shop were displayed, among other […]

At the beginning of The Glorious Thirties, the Baby Boomer generation is eager for consumption, and with regard to the Parisian golden youth, especially for clothes. However, by the end of the fifties, the supply for clothes destined for youth is nonexistent. Teenagers have no other choice but to dress in adults’ suits : grey, […]

Jean-Michel Basquiat is the one artist who brought street art to New York’s art galleries. But the artist also paid attention to clothes and style. For Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, « the way he dressed was an integral part of his art. » Just as he had reconciled two artistic worlds that, until then, had only […]