You Don't Have to Care About Clothes to Love Arpenteur (EXCLUSIVE)
When model-turned-photographer Khalil Ghani walked into Arpenteur’s Paris Fashion Week showroom and saw the details ingrained into its sober French-made menswear, like the shimmer of the mother-of-pearl buttons and the deep color of the naturally-dyed cloth, he was gripped. Naturally, he immediately had the urge to photograph his new favorite label, even though that’s easier said than done. “The best way to discover our brand is in real life because I think on pictures it can look plain,” Marc Asseily, one half of the self-taught duo behind Arpenteur, says.
Ghani, fresh from shooting Arpenteur’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign, unveiled here exclusively by Highsnobiety, smiles back slightly nervously when Asseily says this during our video call. But the designer assures the photographer that he met this difficult brief. “What we really like about Khalil’s work is that there is a softness,” says Asseily. “We thought that it was nice to have his point of view on our clothes — which can look a bit tough or utilitarian — to show more of a soft beauty.”
“Hopefully the photos can give a little bit of a feeling of what it's like to touch the clothes,” adds Ghani. The American photographer zoomed in on the delicate nuances of Arpenteur’s designs, highlighting how Asseily, together with his cousin and co-founder, Laurent Bourven, is taking a gentler tact as Arpenteur turns 15.
The cousins, who had no previous fashion experience, started Arpenteur in 2011 as a line of refined everyday clothing informed by classic workwear. “We had the same passion for movies, music, and clothes, and at some point we wanted to do something together,” says Asseily. “But making movies was difficult and costly, and we are not musicians, so we couldn't do music. Clothes, at the time, seemed more accessible. We didn't know it was going to be this hard.” “It was kind of naive of us,” adds a chuckling Bourven.
To be fair, the inexperienced duo didn’t take the easy route. They decided early to exclusively use small manufacturers from their hometown, Lyon — “most of the factories aren’t used to making a product like ours, so we have to work with them to adapt,” says Asseily — and to cut-and-sew every sample in-house to their specifications.
“When you travel somewhere and buy a souvenir, you want it to be made in that place. You want it to be a real local product, right?” says Asseily. “Our idea was to make products here, so it carries a kind of authenticity.” That mindset hasn’t changed, with Arpenteur’s Lyon base growing to encompass an in-house workshop where its small specialized team creates and develops and tests every product. The collections, also, have remained rooted in utilitarian menswear distilled into a plainly wearable wardrobe. That’s not to say its patient fashion hasn’t slowly evolved, though.
“With experience, our clothes have become more sophisticated when they used to be more utilitarian,” says Asseily. This season is marked by an expansion into leather outerwear where the suppleness of lambskin, typically used for high-end handbags, gently drapes and folds, creating layering pieces that’re, according to Asseily, “intended to be worn like sportswear: easy, flexible.”
But while Arpenteur’s leather is surprisingly soft, its newly developed linen is uncharacteristically rigid. Tightly twisted linen yarns make a lightweight yet dense fabric that’s utilized on loose pants, shorts that hit just below the knee, and a big-pocketed boxy shirt-jacket. Asseily says he’s most excited to wear this full set, while Bourven has his eyes on the T-shirts knitted on old looms to achieve the soft handfeel of vintage French Navy uniform shirts, then hand-soaked in a woad-dye bath derived from a cabbage plant to attain a rich blue hue. “This dye reflects light in a very peculiar way, which cannot be reproduced with a chemical dye,” says Bourven.
As Arpenteur expands its mainline offering for FW26, its longstanding collaboration with French shoemaker Paraboot, whose factory is conveniently only an hour away from Arpenteur’s, is also growing. Originally a line of custom colorways, Arpenteur’s Paraboot line now consists of exclusive models where Arpenteur strips Paraboot classics down to the essentials, getting to what Asseily calls “the essence of the shoe.” This season subtly simplifies the construction of Paraboots Apprieu derby, adding a slightly more defined toe and dressing it in grained leather.
That’s the kind of minutia Arpenteur’s founders obsess over, which creates a perceptible character in Arpenteur’s difficult-to-photograph clothing. But even after 15 years, this consistent approach continues creating new fans. “I don't know so much about clothes, but I remember the dyes stood out as being different from what's on a regular shirt,” says Khalil Ghani. “When I saw the colors in person, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is interesting.’”
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