Of all the fashion capitals, Paris isn’t as well-known for incubating newer, emerging designers. As the historical centre of the fashion industry, it’s often viewed as a benchmark for young designers to show in the city: if you’re at Paris Fashion Week, you’ve made it – and you’ve probably got some kind of financial backing too. One soon-to-be École des Beaux-Arts graduate, however, is bucking that trend with a refreshingly community-centred, DIY brand. In fact, the label technically doesn’t produce new clothes.
FRANCEKISS, the brainchild of Andréas F., is part performance, part operational brand. His Dadaist approach to clothes ‘making’ adapts discarded clothing – sometimes found on the street, sometimes deadstock – into avant-garde ensembles for the terminally online. Their first project titled ‘BRIGHT FUTURE’, initiated in January 2023, involved Andréas dumping 100 T-shirts screen printed with the iconic ‘I <3’ motif on the streets of New York, in what he described as an homage to Vivienne Westwood and her recycling ethos. Their second collection was a refined and somewhat glossy runway show in December 2023 called ‘NEW FUTURE’ that presented garments found on the streets of Paris, modelled by a coterie of friends and collaborators.
Pushing the idea of the guerilla fashion show to an extreme, the brand’s most recent project was a durational performance titled ‘Princes de la Ville’ on June 23rd, international Olympic day. Over the course of nine hours, five models dressed in the colours of the Olympic logo traversed the outer borders of Paris in a 35 km circular walk from and to Les Parc des Princes football stadium. Andréas took part wearing all white, which he explains in characteristically lyrical form as “symbolic of the seventh continent, the Antarctic – or simply the water.” Did anyone actually see this guerilla fashion experiment? “I didn’t really let people know,” Andréas explains. But yes, there’s a video.
“Fashion came pretty naturally to me,” Andréas tells me of his pivot from oil painting into his sartorial experiments. Since childhood, he has been enamoured by fashion and he cites clothing as the source of his interest in colour and shape which prompted him to apply to art school. In late 2022, leaving Paris for a few months to visit New York and having access to a silkscreening studio catalysed this underlying interest into a full-blown practice.
“Coming to it through an artistic perspective made me reconsider what I really wanted to say,” he explains, “and choosing fashion as a medium is choosing a form of expression that includes people.” The community aspect of the brand is apparent in sweetly-captioned Instagram posts which highlight how Andréas and the models know each other, as in one photograph of Yanma who he met through sharing a painting studio. ‘I always thought her timidity gave her a certain aura,’ the caption reads. ‘The aura of a great soldier that would lead countries to peace.’ (Andréas recently deleted his Instagram account.) Rather than a top-down approach to styling his own vision, the emphasis is on promoting the personality of each of his models. “I’m interested in how some people don’t really care about fashion and just get dressed in a certain way because of the social environment,” he says.
FRANCEKISS doesn’t technically produce new clothing. And that’s the whole point. Andréas only works with pieces that are destined for landfill. To create his last collection of printed T-shirts, he “called all the clothing printing studios in Paris looking for cancelled orders, missed productions and tees that were to be abandoned or never used.” Andréas models himself as a bit of a fashion anarchist – or, dare I say, fashion revolutionary. A pair of jeans is printed with the phrase “RÉVOLUTION TERRORISE LE PRÉSIDENT”; a T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘riot’. To fashion savants, these slogans might sound like a Raf Simons reference, but Andréas is more focused on changing things in the here and now. “I see lots of people fighting for new standards for how we treat our spirits and bodies,” he explains, “I see revolution!”