I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Tuesday October 13th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Tuesday October 13th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Tuesday October 13th — —

Club Pétanque

In recent years a growing number of brands, institutions and (digital) platforms have seen the potential of engaging its community beyond their core activities – with fashion being the ultimate tool to turn following into ambassadors. Magazines, museums and galleries, to name a few – whether with help or alone – have successfully moved into the world of global (street)fashion, which has become a greedy monster searching for new brands to lend its temporarily hype to. Next to these somewhat foreign players on the market, there is no limit on new ‚traditional’ fashion brands coming to life either, making it rather hard to (continue to) stand out – with an overal lack of creativity/lending of ideas being the other evident reason.. A new name which in our eyes has succeeded in creating a brand with a durable potential – based on Parisian cool translated into on-point graphic design-based collections for males and females – is Club Pétanque, which was founded last year, inspired by the elegant all-French sport of Pétanque.

We feel Club Pétanque’s brand starting point, approach in translating this into the elegant graphic designs for their products and subsequent communication shows clear excellence.

The designs for both sexes evoke an air of stylish France, at times reminding of the modern kings of Parisian cool; Maison Kitsuné, yet due to the unique angle of the sport of Pétanque the brand has created a personal lane – giving the sport most popular with French seniors an unheard-of new impulse of cool.

For those who don’t know: Pétanque is a form of boules where the goal is to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball called a cochonnet, while standing inside a circle with both feet on the ground. According to a document in the Musée Ciotaden in La Ciotat, pétanque in its present form was first played in 1910 in what is now called the Jules Lenoir Boulodrome in the town of La Ciotat near Marseilles. It was invented by Ernest Pitiot, a local café owner, to accommodate a French jeu provençal player named Jules Lenoir, whose rheumatism prevented him from running before he threw the ball, and therefore introduced the current set of rules. Over the decades it has been a popular sport, being played in public spaces, mostly by seniors due to these specific rules introduced by the handicapped Ernest Pitiot.

The first three images included above were shot by our favorite Katja Kremenić, who was giving some CP shirts a while back and created these wonderful images with model Lily. The other images are from Club Pétanque’s most recent Autumn/Winter 2015 lookbook. 

To order both Club Petanque collections online see here.