[April 13 2009]
We recently received the second issue of this The Kooples magazine. The first one, we turned a blind eye but now it’s getting to be too much. In Berlin and New York, men have been developing personal style, but this brand single-handedly reveals the uninspiring emptiness in the predictable style of young French men today. For the first time in quite a while, there is a new, emerging nightlife scene that is gaining worldwide notoriety but this parasite brand has jumped on the bandwagon, commercially exploiting this new terrain in the worst possible way. The problem with the French boys’s look? It’s clean, brainless, too self-conscious and made to “please” girls. This irritating campaign forces us to realize how the “Frenchies” are so directly influenced and overloaded by fashion information that they can no longer make their own sartorial decisions without looking like fake New Yorkers or quite simply taken right out of a The Kooples advertisement. Guys — it could be more interesting to rediscover Agnes b! Or just stick with A.P.C.! Text and photo Olivier Zahm