After focusing on architecture, music, cookery books, Laurence Touitou decided it was now time to go back to her origins to create a collection which links his culture, viewpoint and her country. For the first collection of La Liste Tunisienne, she chose traditional Tunisian objects, that were simple, ordinary objects to say the very least. Tunisian basics like a straw hat, a floor mat, bathroom fabric - a cotton scarf…

"I have wanted to do this for the last two years, ever since deciding to live in Tunisia. This is the country where I was born, and where my family lived. Above all it’s a country I dearly love. One extremity of Africa, where, to my eyes, the Mediterranean Sea and the modern world walk hand in hand. And it faces the sea. Light is both hard and soft. A country where you can find one of the first villas built by Le Corbusier, and where beauty and simplicity match perfectly.

My sister discovered this country as she was there to visit me. She took an interest in Craft over there. I told her about my wish to create with Tunisian craftsmen... One hears all the time about ecological disasters, but not enough is said about the risk of seeing traditional crafts disappear, and this means a multitude of highly sophisticated techniques. Behind every gesture there is cultural background, a gesture that has been performed hundreds of times, a person who learnt it and carries on the torch to others, habits, manners, acitivites specific to a village. I am sad to see this knowledge withering away when it is such a pleasure to share this creative work with these craftsmen without having to bother about the constraints of profitability."
Jean Touitou

The collection includes a straw hat which is traditionally made in Gabes and is worn all over Tunisia. Made of tapered palm tree leaflets plaited together, Touitou calls it the Tunisian Stetson. Local agricultural workers and fishermen buy such hats near the beaches and countryside in the north east of Tunisia. Also in the collection is a printed scarf which could be Russian or from the Swedish Marimekko workshops. Often worn during the sixties, it was fashionable for young women to reroute Tunisian classics such as this scarf or a striped Tunisian T-shirt that was also worn by both Brigitte Bardot and Anita Pallenberg at the same period.

Whilst flowers and fragrances are part of Tunisia’s DNA, especially jasmine, orange tree, rose, and wild geranium. Geranium, rose and orange leaves are bought in the spring, with which Tunisian women make their own flower scents that inspired the A.P.C. soaps.

Sold exclusively in A.P.C. shops, from May 20 to June 15th 2010.