Paris, 6th district. In the shop APC 38 rue Madame the atmosphere is relaxed and family. Waiters come and go with, on their tray, glasses of white wine and bottles of Demory. Yes, even the beer is Parisian.
APC followers form an open community gathered for the dedication session by Jean Touitou of the Transmission book celebrating 30 years of creation and production. This legacy, condensed in a perennial book, scrolls, projected on the shop window. There is something anarchist in its layout where black and white polaroids of Laetitia Casta by Marianne Chemetov, annotations and scribbles - "art, religion, philosophy, action" - collide, reflecting the personality of a Jean Touitou who, seated on his high chair near the box, chained the signatures seriously and concentrated.
In the announcement announcing the event he said: " I imagine that everyone will call it the book 'APC' and that suits me. But I will insist personally to call it Transmission. The tone is given.
Written by Jean Touitou, the preface sounds like a manual. If the book is called "Transmission" it is because it wants above all to convey information and feelings durably. Transmission is a remedy for the contemporary world, the digital world aspiring like a black hole all past. Before being a book Transmission is a material object. An antidote against forgetting a memory that would be easy to bury if it was not there in this book.
This book, Jean Touitou methodically constructed it, with the rigor and pragmatism known to it, inherent in the DNA of APC Respecting the traditional rules of rhetoric, the book is divided into 3 parts: Percept "," Concept "and" Catalog raisonné ".
"Percept" first brings together collages witnessing a past life and its atmosphere. This life is that of the pre-APC The life of a student of Philosophy of the Sorbonne and active member of the Trotskyist International Communist Organization, as evidenced by a page of the book confronting his student card with the cover of a book on the economic bases of Marxism. Neither plastic artist nor writer, Jean Touitou uses collage to " try to express ideas . This way of expressing myself seemed to me more direct than to try my hand at literature. " 
After the images, "Concept" gathered this time his texts (speeches presentation of collections in particular) to better convey the meaning given to clothes. To explain the abstract ideas they embody, the stories they tell. " I was just trying to evoke the clothes in them. ". "Concept" sketches the portrait of APC, defines its essence. Thinker of fashion, Jean Touitou transforms the garment into standard-bearer. On the patch pocket of a sand-colored cotton jacket we read: "Economy is the continuation of the war by other means". Behind its rational, practical and utilitarian aspect, APC clothing - whose stylistic rigor has sometimes Soviet accents - reflects a commitment. Protestants by their normality and contempt for useless ornament, APC clothes nevertheless appear to have become the urban uniform of the bourgeoisie on the left bank. That of a Catherine Deneuve who says willingly that she gardens in denim APC
A book with a didactic vocation, this book of art and archives closes with an exhaustive catalog retracing the 30 years of creation of the brand. " When I try to define my profession, what I do, I think I have developed a structure that is also my own expression tool. This tool is called APC We worked as archivists, digging into our own history. "Constructed with" a lot of heart ", he says, despite his qualifier, this" catalog raisonné "resonates with" Percept "and" Concept ".
With this book, Jean Touitou makes transmission a mission. Certainly not a testament book, Transmission transcends the epochs, traverses them fluently to summarize them in one and the same object. More than a book, Transmission is a memory. She turns him into an heir.
Transmission , 536 pages, 800 illustrations, 65 €, Éditions Phaidon
