Getting Dressed

Getting Dressed Beauty – and the brains – behind agnes b.

Designer Agnès Troublé has changed women’s clothes – and Paris brigid keenan

What’s the story behind agnès b. – the brand name?

It’s all thanks to Agnès Troublé, the company’s 81-year-old designer and founder.

Her married name was Agnès Bourgois – hence agnès b. – but when she and her husband Christian Bourgois separated, she reduced the B to the lower-case b.

Her most recent enterprise is a collaboration with the Mayor of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. They decided to do something more useful with a large, empty site than open another supermarket. Instead, they commissioned a brave new building in which social housing and a nursery for local kids sit side by side with a gallery housing the vast agnès b. collection of modern art, including David Hockney and Basquiat. There’s also a library, artist’s studio, shop and the offices of her charitable foundation La Fab – short for Fondation agnès b.

The charity funds myriad projects in France and overseas. Tara, its ship, sails the oceans, collecting data on climate change. The charity also supports medical services in Africa – all driven, she says, by her communism and Catholic faith: ‘Like the Pope: look at how he cares about people; he loves people. If we don’t share, it is impossible.’

She married at 17, had twin boys, left her husband a year later, lived with various partners and had more children. You could say that trouble is her middle name – except that, weirdly, it is her surname: Troublé with an accent. Nominative determinism.

Not that she is trouble: just restless and creative. She’s always moving on to the next thing: from women’s clothes to men’s and children’s, to shoes and bags, to art, to films … and now to La Fab, her ‘dream come true’.

It was back in the sixties, before hippies had been invented, that an editor from Elle magazine spotted her hippie style at a dinner party: flowery skirt from the cheap store Monoprix, worn with an army surplus jacket and cowboy boots. The editor recruited her as a junior fashion editor.

She soon switched to design, working first for Dorothée Bis, the ready-to-wear house. She then became a freelance until, in 1975, she opened her own place in an old butcher’s shop in Les Halles.

She now has more than 200 shops around the world, employs 1,432 people and has dressed a very long list of people, including David Bowie.

Is President Macron one of her customers? ‘Unfortunately not, but I would LOVE to dress him – different colours, slightly looser jackets.’

Troublé has always been ahead of her time. At this moment, ‘fast fashion’ – the idea that clothes are ‘in’ or ‘out’ – is démodé, but she never believed in that anyway. Her clothes are stylish but classic. They make you look good, and last for years.

She says that she designs for people who have better things to do than shopping. She has been making her chic snap cardigan for more than 40 years and it is still a bestseller.

This month, at the request of some of her curvier employees, she launches a new range of clothes for larger women, La Belle Ronde, with sizes up to 20.

Growing up in the fifties in a house only a few yards from the palace at Versailles gave her unusual heroes and heroines: ‘Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry … and the statues in the gardens where I played, and the frescoes on the walls inspired by the discovery of Pompeii. I was steeped in another world. It made me who I am.’

She still lives nearby, in Marly-le-Roi. ‘It is where Louis XIV went for weekends – he invented the weekend – leaving the palais on Friday and returning on Monday.’

Her five children have given her 16 grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren, whom she adores. ‘I have a very special relationship with them. They call me Mamour, a name invented by one of them when he was very little and got confused between Maman and amour.’

Her eldest son, now in his 60s, runs her business.

She has been a frequent visitor to England – first as a young teenager sent to stay with various families to learn English, which she speaks fluently; later, because she loved shopping at Mary Quant and Biba.

But she has not been into a clothes shop, anywhere, since she opened her own.

Troublé is her last name. Left: Agnès today. Above: In her first shop in Les Halles, Paris, 1975