St. Tropez. Summer time 1971. The lengthy, off-white tassels that hold from the fringes of the canary-yellow parasols ripple, coquettishly, within the breeze. Amid the tall glasses of pastis and ashtrays brimming with the butts of languorously-smoked Gitanes, lunchtime diners, in flowing, printed clothes and shirt lapels that appear to be getting wider by the hour, look out on the vanilla-soft sands of the seaside in entrance.
Attempt as they could, they’ll’t avert their gaze from one man standing within the shallows, wearing nothing greater than a pair of thigh-high shorts, the sample of which is a fiesta of thick vertical stripes in hanging blue, yellow, inexperienced and purple, a sample that appears to flicker within the early-afternoon solar.
Who is that this man? May or not it’s Alain Delon, recent from the bruising travails of his newest Parisian heist film, Le Cercle Rouge? The one particular person within the café that is aware of for sure is the photographer and motorsports journalist, Fred Prysquel. The lone swimmer isn’t well-known. He simply seems to be well-known. It’s the shorts, Prysquel likes to suppose, the sample of which he sketched on a paper tablecloth on this very café the earlier summer time.
Vilebrequin is the French phrase for ‘crankshaft’, an indirect and recherché noun for a swimwear model that, half a century on from its debut on the seashores of St. Tropez, continues to fuse a glance that’s each exotically modern and ineffably routed in an extended misplaced France of lengthy Françoise Hardy hair, Serge Gainsbourg-smoked cigarettes and Ricard-soaked afternoons on the Côte d’Azur.
Fred Prysquel together with his spouse, designer and boutique proprietor, Yvette
Color blind from start, for his first assortment of swim shorts Prysquel used materials he’d introduced again from African markets he’d visited the earlier decade whereas finishing navy service on the continent. “In Dakar [Senegal], swim shorts have been made of materials referred to as ‘boubou’ or ‘wax’,” recalled Prysquel. “I beloved them. Once I left the military, I introduced some house with me.”
Prysquel’s swimwear, or ‘bathing fits’ as he and the corporate’s successive homeowners most popular to name them, are clothes that males from Good to Newcastle ought to be grateful for in 2023 – even when they’ve by no means really owned a pair. The cooler, looser form of Prysquel’s tyro designs would, in spite of everything, be pivotal in attaining his grand ambition: to redefine the male swimming transient from an Antipodean assault on our eyes – and crotches –
to one thing way more enjoyable, frivolous and flattering.
The earlier decade, you see, had seen the ‘Speedo’ – a garment that continues to be a byword for each compelling argument for by no means visiting a seaside – achieve a worldwide momentum past its native Australia. Prysquel’s serviette doodle reimagined the longer board shorts worn by surfers on the time, made them shorter, extra fitted and extra sartorial. His sketch turned an antidote to the ‘budgie smuggler’ – that low-cost, uncomfortable al fresco vogue assertion that’s invariably worn by males whose physiques recommend a lifetime of Huge Macs reasonably than breaststroke. This was to be a Battle of the Bulge that had nothing to do with Panzer divisions within the Ardennes.
Persuading his spouse, Yvette, herself a designer, to inventory his new designs in her St. Tropez boutique, Prysquel’s brazenly-colourful designs (Yvette would assist decide the colors) had a surprisingly chimeric high quality on their wearers that long-gone summer time, his nascent model rapidly establishing a high-spirited and well-heeled viewers within the south of France. Quickly, the erstwhile motoring journalist was cajoling each feminine acquaintance within the possession of a stitching machine to show their fingers to creating his dazzling bathing fits.
Prysquel would finally promote Vilebrequin in 1991 to fellow Tropezian textile employee, Loïc Berthet. It was Berthet that added the now-signature Velcro again pocket and silver eyelet holes. He additionally launched a cotton internal lining to the shorts. In 2012, the corporate was acquired by the G-III Attire Group, the US clothes firm that owns licenses to DKNY, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Karl Lagerfeld. But the daring designs have continued; shorts with sea-turtle motifs, Portuguese azulejo tile mosaics, and crocodiles crawling by way of pink and yellow mangroves attracting new generations of males whose data of Alain Delon is, you would possibly assume, all however non-existent.
In keeping with the expertise of veteran, London-based private stylist, Nick Hems, Vilebrequin appears to be extra common as we speak than it’s ever been. “It’s superb simply what number of of my feminine prospects attain for a pair of Vilebrequin’s for his or her companions,” says Hems, “usually with out really understanding the model they’re selecting. They’re simply the right ‘transition’ shorts, within the sense that you could put on them in pool bars and on café terraces they usually’re not only for swimming or sunbathing. Plus, they’re form-fitting shorts – they actually get the form proper.”
We could now look again on the smoke-fogged, sun-broiled days of Seventies St. Tropez by way of a sepiafilter, however you’ll be able to chalk Vilebrequin’s success to the actual fact it stays grounded within the legacy of that bohemian period. In 2015, the model collaborated with the Rolling Stones on a spread of shorts coated by a collage of a few of the group’s most well-known album sleeves (although, fortunately, the gathering excluded the notorious ‘bathroom bowl’ cowl of 1968’s Beggars Banquet LP).
Vilebrequin x Deux Femmes capsule assortment Vilebrequin x Deux Femmes capsule assortment
It was in the summertime of 1971, the identical yr that Prysquel’s shorts debuted, that the tax-dodging Stones fled to Villefranche-sur-Mer, a small fishing village a number of miles alongside the Côte d’Azur from St. Tropez. Holed up in a crumbling mansion that was as soon as occupied by Nazi officers, the band festered in a makeshift studio situated within the villa’s sweltering basement, recording a few of the tracks that would seem on the next yr’s Exile on Major St., their swampy, bluesy, nefarious masterpiece.
It was a collaboration that in the first place look won’t have screamed symbiosis. But, you would possibly moderately argue, what’s extra rock ‘n’ roll than having a screwball concept and pursuing it full-leather? What’s extra maverick than a motoring hack taking a punt on some retina-rattling swim shorts named after a crankshaft?
Trendy as its swim shorts could look as we speak, the triumph of Vilebrequin has all the pieces to do with the gateway the model unlocks to these dreamy, anything-could-happen ’70s summers. Even now, Vilebrequin transports us to a less complicated, extra elegant time when males would hit the seaside, in Prysquel’s phrases, with little greater than “a comb, a lighter and a pack of Gauloises.”
Go to vilebrequin.com
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