Girbaud Men's Fashion Brand

Marithé + François Girbaud is an international clothing company based in France and founded by stylists François Girbaud and Marithé Bachellerie in 1972. The founders are named as stylists, which matters for how the rest reads: this is a company created by the people who styled the clothes, not by a manufacturer who later hired design in. The company they founded in 1972 went on to create several brands of its own: Compagnie des montagnes et des forêts, Ça, Closed, Matricule 11342, etc. - a family of labels under the Girbaud roof.

They are world-known especially for industrialization of the Stonewash, baggy trousers and skin-tight jeans. That is the brand's claim on fashion history, and it is a maker's claim rather than a stylist's one: not the invention of a look, but the industrialization of a process - Stonewash - together with two silhouette signatures at opposite poles, baggy trousers at the loose end and skin-tight jeans at the close end. A company remembered for taking a wash from experiment to industry, and for both extremes of the trouser fit, is a company that should be read through denim first.

Stonewash, Baggy Trousers and Skin-Tight Jeans

Take the three signatures in turn. The industrialization of the Stonewash means the wash stopped being a hand finish and became a repeatable production process - the step that let stonewashed denim reach ordinary wardrobes at scale. Baggy trousers are the loose silhouette: volume through the leg, the opposite of the tailored line the same decade's dress clothing pursued. Skin-tight jeans are the close silhouette: denim cut to the leg. That one house is credited with both extremes is the point worth keeping - Girbaud's fame is not a single fit but a range, with a production innovation underneath it.

For a man researching Girbaud today, the identification test is this. A period Girbaud piece should declare which part of the story it belongs to: the stonewashed denim that shows the industrialized wash, the baggy trouser that shows the loose silhouette, or the skin-tight jean that shows the close one - or it should carry one of the house's other labels, Compagnie des montagnes et des forêts, Ça, Closed or Matricule 11342, the brands the founders created. The official Girbaud site is in References below; the gallery below shows the brand's 2018 image.

Reading This Girbaud Record

Read as a buying guide, Girbaud gives a man the process test and the silhouette test. The process test is the Stonewash: Girbaud is credited with its industrialization, so a Girbaud stonewashed garment should be judged as an example of that process done by the house that scaled it - evenness and hand of the wash before styling details. The silhouette test is the fit: baggy or skin-tight, the two extremes, each worn deliberately. Between those tests sits the founders' fact - stylists François Girbaud and Marithé Bachellerie, France, 1972 - which explains why a clothing company's fame rests on how garments are finished and how they fall.

Girbaud, under G in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: Marithé + François Girbaud, an international clothing company based in France, founded by stylists François Girbaud and Marithé Bachellerie in 1972, creators of the brands Compagnie des montagnes et des forêts, Ça, Closed and Matricule 11342, world-known especially for the industrialization of the Stonewash, baggy trousers and skin-tight jeans.

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