Meet the Kooples
The French hipster-meets-English aristo-meets-Brit rocker clothing brand opened its first boutique in the autumn of 2008. Months before, le tout Paris was buzzing about the ubiquitous, couples-based ad campaign with the mysterious tagline: “The Kooples are coming.”
“Today, you need not only to be a designer,” says Alexandre Elicha, the CEO and men’s wear designer. “You need to think about a lot of things. There is a lot of competition, there’s the economic crisis... you need something extra special. It is very important to have your style, your personality, your identity. We work a lot on this.”
His younger brother Laurent designs the women’s line. Raphael, another talented sibling, does brand communication, taking photos of six new “Kooples” each season and adding captions that name the (real-life) lovers and say how long they’ve been together. He also makes the much-viewed digital shorts that let Kooples “fans” learn a bit more about them.
The couple pictured here are Londoner Jamie Burke, a model/actor/singer, and his girlfriend Mila de Witt, a French model and girl-about-town. In their short, they wander around Paris wearing this season’s collection as they recall how they met. The brothers cast friends and couples they find through Facebook and MySpace in the ads. They are almost exclusively models with second careers in art, music or something equally creative. Not objectionable, really: models fall in love as well as looking great in clothes. Moreover, their relationships are just as important to the campaign as their appearance. The Kooples most interesting “something extra” is not so much hot ads as a human connection: real-life love that make the models vulnerable, just like anyone who’s had a girlfriend/boyfriend. By association, the clothes appear easier to assimilate into the customer’s reality. This approach is not just unique but arguably more effective than using a celebrity “face” whose reality is even further divorced from the customer’s than a model’s.
The brothers learned a lot from their parents. Toulouse-based Tony and Georgette Elicha are the founders of Comptoir des Cotonniers, an internationally successful ready-to-wear brand that targets mothers and daughters. The formula has changed since the brand was sold in 2005 but Comptoir’s original campaigns showed mothers and teenage girls in similar but age-appropriate clothes. They didn’t look like anyone you’d see around the school gates but they were recognisably related. The Kooples goes a step further by giving the models names, heartbeats and online videos. After studying business at university, Alexandre and Laurent worked at Comptoir until it was taken over.
The Kooples is a manufactured clothing brand that cultivates the image of a luxury brand. Alexandre describes their clothes as “affordable luxury”. Kooples premises are in the most expensive shopping districts of London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Brown Thomas is the only stockist here. In previous seasons, the brand has created a perfume (with Ramdane Touhami, former artistic director to Liberty’s of London) and a jewellery collection (with New York body jeweller Bliss Lau). Swiss-made Kooples watches are currently available.
Much thought and money has been invested in highlighting the company’s rock and roll aesthetic. Alexandre suggests that “The Kooples” (the Elicha's own neologism, derived from the phonetic spelling of how a French-speaker would pronounce “couples”), would make a great name for a band. The brand has an eponymous record label and has so far released The Kooples Vol 1, a compilation of tracks by musical couples that applied to their website. They are still open to submissions for Vol. 2.
Then there was last year’s controversial design collaboration with Pete Doherty. The collection’s release was delayed until March 2012 after Doherty was imprisoned for cocaine possession and use. Alexandre is philosophical about any negative associations his image carries. “You need to leave people to their lives... the private life, we don’t need to judge it. We like his music and we like his style. He is part of what we like in fashion: our style is a mix between the dandy and something more rock and roll. You can mix Oscar Wilde and Keith Richards.”
Very successfully, it seems, as company turnover hit e100 million in 2010 and was e80 million last year, when they also entered the US market.
There are 100 boutiques, 316 points of sale in Europe and North America and plans to expand. When I visit the beautiful Place Vendôme headquarters, I half expect to find the brothers bent over a map, planting flags bearing their signature deadhead icon in major cities. The offices have similar interiors to the boutiques, where furniture is white, black leather or aubergine and fitting rooms are designed for two. Huge black and white portraits of iconic, creative lovers — Taylor and Burton, Vadim and Fonda — line the corridors. There are lots of startling antiques in corners, like an ebony tree with stuffed crows in the branches and a big, black stag’s head on a mount. The brothers like to vintage shop for inspiration and recommend hitting the Saint Ouen flea market in the 18th arrondissement on a Sunday.
The clothes themselves are made in Vietnam, Romania, China and India, though Alexandre stresses that the fabrics are mainly English and French. Kooples clothes are often described as unisex but each line is quite distinct, though they complement one another. The women’s wear is quite prim with subtly sexy details like broderie anglaise panels, zipped necklines and asymmetric miniskirts. The women’s blazers are boyfriend-cut but made for feminine frames. The suit patterns are developed with a long-established Savile Row tailors. “Patrick Grant of Norton & Sons has been a good friend of ours for a long time and when we started the label we asked him to work on the patterns with us,” says Alexandre. “We liked the [traditional] Savile Row cut but always want to impose our vision. We think it is modern to have shorter jackets with higher arm-holes and a sharper look in general.” This season, men’s wool suit jackets are priced from e380, trousers from e175.
What about the synthetic garments? How do you price a 100% rayon blouse at e145? “The manufacturer has a real cost today. There are a lot of design details you don’t see which make the Kooples clothes more considered and superior to cheaper styles. We try not to price things too high but we can’t keep them too low if we want the clothes to look elegant and well done.”
The Kooples signature skinny look may not be your style but the brand is changing to accommodate its growing customer base. “Today we have many different cuts so that really, anyone can wear Kooples. At the beginning, it was more of a radical, fitted cut in order to distinguish the look as [quintessentially] Kooples. Since then we’ve opened up to classic cuts with a more relaxed fit.”
Kooples Sport, an urban sportswear line developed in response to customer demand for the few polo shirts and jogging bottoms in the main collections, launched this spring with another pervasive marketing campaign featuring Eric Cantona and wife Rachida, the oldest Koople to date. The children’s line the brothers recently revealed would launch in January 2013, has been postponed indefinitely, due to the volume of work imposed by the US expansion. First comes love, then comes revenue.
The Kooples is available from Brown Thomas and thekooples.com. Kooples Sport is available exclusively online.
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