A week after Adriano Goldschmied’s passing, a huge wave of tributes and memories took hold of our hearts. Asking for a comment on the jeans’ Godfather contribution to jeans history, the Girbauds revive their memories and draw their picture of how revolutionary Adriano had been in making an unmistakable piece of fashion out of denim and how they gave their impulse too, having taken that same direction in France earlier than him. It was also thanks to Elio Fiorucci, the Italian fashion system industry, and the Veneto region’s blue district that five-pockets became the blue “gold” that changed modern fashion history.
This is Marithé and François Girbaud’s comment.
There’s no doubt that Adriano Goldschmied’s passing marks the end of a chapter in the history that justifies our presence in the United States.
The story of the Klondike miners has been told thousands of times—but is it true? The fire in San Francisco destroyed so many documents, and the archives have been lost.
What do we really know and from which “reliable sources”?
Denim is said to come from Nîmes–or “de Nîmes” in French–hence the word ‘“denim”. For others, it originated in Genoa, “Gênes” in French, which explains the word “jeans”.
I never believed that version. Adriano was sailing the oceans with Tabarly and Kersauson, and I was a hero at the Golf Drouot in Paris, with Long Chris and the Daltons.
We could tell the story with a European version of Little Big Man’s memoirs, beginning back in the early 1960s when we took control of the narrative, bringing these work pants back to life and helping to create a world in which jeans would become the most important fashion item in the history of modern clothing.
Along with Elio Fiorucci, I can confirm that Adriano was responsible for inventing five-pocket jeans in Italy, taking ownership of this particularly American story that had lost momentum in a market deprived of all glamour.
Adriano and I first met as exhibitors at a trade show and had both been put in a corner that didn’t receive much traffic. Adriano was already wearing hickory-stripe bib overalls and a Hawaiian shirt, a mix that wasn’t yet a familiar look.
Marithé and I went on to sell Adriano’s exuberant, colorful jeans from his first label, King’s, at our first store in Paris, Halles Capone. The jeans were made of upholstery fabrics and brocade, not denim (this was the period of New Man). After the success of this line, Adriano was spurred on to create bigger ideas and went on to found a prolific number of brands, including Goldie, Daily Blue, Americanino, Replay, Tree Alberti Liberi, Bobo Kaminski, Via Vaï, and, above all, Diesel (cheaper than petrol!).
Adriano’s Genius Group was at the forefront of a movement that we, on the other side of the Alps, had not known how to pursue. It was instrumental in bringing to the heart of Veneto those who would go on to become the most important players in the history of Italian jeans and the European market. Meanwhile in France, the textile industry was on its last legs.
Marithé, Olivier, and I landed in Rimini in the 1970s, closing the door on what we’d built in France with brands such as ça…, Matricule 11342, Maillaparty, Compagnie des Montagnes et des Forêts, and many others. The textile industry in France was shrinking, and no one understood us there. It had been made clear to us that denim wasn’t a (high) couture fabric. In short, there was no future for us! Italian industry, on the other hand, was coming into its own, and there was an exodus of many young French designers towards the “Made in Italy.” It was in Italy that we would hone our stonewash techniques and where we would spend over 40 years of our career.
We all set our sights on conquering the United States—obviously, we wanted to give those American cowboys a run for their money. Marithé and I were the first to set foot in the Americas, under Carl Rosen’s protection. Our focus in the US was the “baggy”: our loose-fitting “Pépère” (grandfather) style transformed a garment originally designed for men to create a new silhouette to flatter the female form. Marvin Traub from Bloomingdale’s decided to stock these quirky pants, and they proved a huge success. A connection was created with Bloomingdale’s brown “Paper Bag”—the first name given to these pants—forging an important link between Marithé + François Girbaud and this iconic New York department store.
With Adriano, it was Mickey Drexler who brought him in to make five-pocket jeans for Gap. The resulting 1969 denim in 1984 line possessed all the codes that us Europeans had invented decades earlier in Italy, where this chapter of our story began and ends.
—Marithé and François Girbaud