How to master the latest look from Paris: East Coast trad crossed with Left Bank tradition.
Guillaume Henry, the very French designer who revived the venerable Parisian fashion house Carven, worships Brooks Brothers and that Ivy League look. At his last spring men’s presentation, he said that the collection, replete with penny loafers, was inspired by “John-John Kennedy” and a “weekend at the Hamptons.” He was recently spotted wearing Ralph Lauren pants.
Henry is among a coterie of young French designers who, like the Japanese before them, have fallen under the spell of American preppy style. But what Japan long ago canonized — Teruyoshi Hayashida’s “Take Ivy,” published in the 1960s, is the fashion world’s prep bible — France now sees fit to fiddle with.
This new, Gallicized version of prep ditches all those sporty collegiate references, along with duck boots (awkward in most cities, absurd in Paris) and rugged fantasies dressed up in words like “heritage” and “distressed.” What remains are just classic schoolboy signifiers: collars peeking out of crew-neck sweaters, trench coats paired with cropped pants, backpacks and baseball caps. The cut is slimmer. There’s a touch of the drawing-room fop in the use of rich fabrics — astrakhan scarves and silk polka-dot trousers. And the palette hints at terroir: merlot, mustard yellow and bottle green.
Masaya Kuroki, a co-founder of the Paris-based Maison Kitsuné label, which makes preppy blue oxfords with a quirky fox logo, has said these clothes speak to the fascination of a previous generation of Frenchmen “who traveled around the U.S.A. in the 1960s and fell in love with the unique American elegance of the East Coast.” If the fashions channel older enthusiasms, they skew young in terms of fit, making them perfect for your regular Left Bank layabout, like the members of the jaunty jazz band Sweet Swing Trio shown in these pictures above.
Foreign Legion
The brands behind the French new wave.
Discreet Charm
A bourgie touch gives the preppy look a Parisian Accent.
