Agnès b.: The Shop That Changed What We Wear

Paris is a place for revolutions: the sci-fi fantasies of Cardin and Courrèges, Jean Paul Gaultier’s skirts pour homme and the inflated gothic rituals of Rick Owens. All wild, memorable and museum-worthy. But it may be Agnès Troublé who has changed what we wear today, more so than any fierce iconoclast.

When she introduced Agnès b. in 1975 (the b is for Bourgois, Ms. Troublé’s married surname), many women, including the designer’s mother, were still having their clothes made to order. It was not always haute, but it was still couture. Yves Saint Laurent had introduced prêt-à-porter in 1966, but it was Ms. Troublé who moved the needle in the next decade, making cult clothes that were bon chic, bon genre, easy to wear and off the rack.

“I always just wanted to create for every man, woman and child,” Ms. Troublé said via a video call from her studio in Paris. “My philosophy comes from what happened on the streets of Paris in 1968. And I still design everything myself.”

When Agnès b. began, 50 years ago, it was fresh, cool and totally Parisian. Inspired by Ms. Troublé’s flea market finds, it was aligned with the art world and 1960s cinema and sold at a more accessible price than Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche. It was where you went for the perfect striped top, white shirt or black pants, and it created the model for dozens of midrange French fashion labels.

Without the 83-year-old Ms. Troublé, there would most likely be no A.P.C., Comptoir des Cotonniers, Maje, Sandro or Sézane. Fifty years after she founded it, her business remains family owned, with 242 stores globally. She has sold more than two million snap-button cardigans and opened her own contemporary art gallery, La Fab, in Paris in 2022, showcasing pieces from her personal collection of more than 5,000 works.

The designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac worked with Ms. Troublé in 1971 as a stylist at the Pierre d’Alby label, before they introduced their own brands. They remain close friends.

“She was my godmother in fashion,” Mr. de Castelbajac said. “I remember when she opened her first shop on Rue du Jour. The area was quite underground, like SoHo before it became trendy. Agnès had a very good education and came from Versailles, but she was curious about politics, concerned about society and Catholic.”

“She was full of dualities and wanted her shop to be a cabinet of curiosities,” he continued. “She would put images from Godard films on the wall and invite performance artists in. She created functional clothes with a touch of rock ’n’ roll. The snap cardigan is her manifesto.”

Jean Touitou, who founded A.P.C. in 1987, was working at Agnès b. when Ms. Troublé designed the first cardigan in 1979. “I was playing my electric guitar in her studio above the store one evening,” Mr. Touitou said. “I remember seeing her come back from dinner, put a black round-neck sweatshirt on a desk, grab a pair of scissors and cut the piece right down the middle. Then, she took snap buttons and put them on the front. It became a worldwide hit.”

“I learned two big lessons that night,” he said. “Follow your instincts and do things yourself, literally with your own hands. What I also learned from working with her was the virtue of using a small and smart group of people to run a company.”

For many young Parisians, Agnès b. became an experience as well as a capsule wardrobe. “We used to love the giant fitting room in her boutique on Rue Pierre Charron,” Barbara Boccara and Sharon Krief, who founded the label ba&sh together in 2003, wrote in an email. “We would all change together. It was such a unique way to shop with friends or family.”

Then there are the design classics that people have kept for years and buy repeatedly. “Her legacy is real,” Pierre Mahéo, the founder of Officine Générale, said. “I always have in mind my friends, and myself, wearing the striped tees and snap cardigans. It was part of our daily uniform 30 years ago, and I am so glad I still see it today on a younger generation. I’m not sure anyone else in France has been able to master a style for so long.”

The clothing at Agnès b. was always conservative, but it was also a blank canvas for Ms. Troublé to project ideas onto. The Artist’s Collection of T-shirts was introduced in 1994 with a simple slogan by Félix González-Torres that read, “Nobody owns me.” Work by Kenneth Anger, Louise Bourgeois, David Lynch and Agnès Varda followed. A recent edition featured Harmony Korine’s Twitchy character, produced to coincide with an exhibition of his work at La Fab.

The marriage of casual French fashion and contemporary art is something Ms. Troublé officiated. In recent years, we’ve seen the hip Paris label Études Studio collaborate with the Kitchen, the downtown Manhattan arts center that opened in 1971, and publish its own series of artist monographs.

“Agnès is a true inspiration for us,” Aurélien Arbet, the co-founder and creative director of Études Studio, said. “She opened a path that no other fashion house had, collaborating with graffiti artists, running a gallery and supporting cinema and art with her magazine, Le Point d’Ironie.”

While a lot of labels buy into the art world through branding — see Dior’s sponsorship of Judy Chicago’s recent shows — Ms. Troublé has a personal relationship with the artists she supports. The current Korine exhibition features work from her own collection, the largest by the artist in private hands. When she opened her first New York shop in 1980, it was on Prince Street in pre-gentrification SoHo, when Donald Judd was still living around the corner.

“I had an instinct,” Ms. Troublé said. “It was where Andy Warhol and all the artists were. That’s how I met Basquiat. Andy bought him a white shirt from the shop, and then when Jean-Michel had a show in Paris, he came to my shop there. I had a call from him at the Crillon at 4 a.m., asking me to go over, but I said … no.”

Ms. Troublé’s inner circle has included David Bowie, John Giorno and Jonas Mekas, and her history is entwined with downtown New York as much as it is with Paris. “Shortly after we opened the SoHo store, I had a call from the manager saying there was a girl who really wanted our little pork pie hat, without paying,” Ms. Troublé said. “I asked who it was. It was Madonna. We let her have it.”

On the day I talked to Ms. Troublé, she was wearing the latest version of the snap cardigan. She looked as she has since the 1970s — the same tousled blond curls, smiling, relaxed, open. Around her neck was a scarf printed with one of her own photographs of graffiti art on a wall in Paris.

“I am always looking at the walls in cities,” she said. “Walls can talk. I love graffiti art. I have three beautiful pieces by Basquiat, but he called himself a street poet, not street artist.”

Behind Ms. Troublé was a mood board with photographs of Chiaki Kuriyama in a scene from “Battle Royale” and Jean Seberg in a striped top in “Breathless.” “I met her a long time ago,” Ms. Troublé said. “I was good friends with her and her husband, Romain Gary. I loved the Nouvelle Vague.” It’s unlikely that Agnès b. would be what it is today without the monochrome edge of the French New Wave auteurs.

“The label has a special place in French fashion,” Xavier Romatet, the dean of Institut Français de la Mode, France’s foremost fashion school, wrote via email. “She combined simple, durable clothes with a strong brand identity. Simply hand-signing her first name on the label was a brilliant idea that inspired closeness and trust, creating a community of style and thought.”

“It was accessible fashion, long before the avalanche of fast fashion,” Mr. Romatet added.

When I asked Ms. Troublé what she thought the legacy of her label would be, she assured me it would remain independent and in the hands of her family. She has never considered selling, she said. And why would she? The shop has never gone out of fashion, because it was never really “in.”