FRENCH CONNECTION

Marc Jacobs and A.P.C.'s Jean Touitou have long admired each other's work. Now, reports Olivia Singer, they're working together on a capsule collection that celebrates their shared tastes.

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RIGHT AS RAIN "I would see us as two grown-up teachers," Touitou says of his friendship with Jacobs, "but we're always students."

There was a period in the early '90s when Marc Jacobs's wardrobe was almost completely defined by A.P.C. During the years when he upended the industry, transforming grunge plaids into silk shirts at Perry Ellis and rendering normcore zip-up hoodies in the finest cashmere for his eponymous label, fashion's architect of downtown insouciance was shopping with abandon in the brand's newly opened SoHo store. “It was just so cool,” he remembers now. “It was so kind of normal and nothing—but the perfect kind of normal and nothing.”