MORALE IN THE SOCKS
Summer is coming, it's time to dress up your flip-flops and ankles. No more Droopy patterns, new players are dusting off the sector. Even Stromae has gotten in on the act
Summer time is shortening your sleep, you've lost the Euro Millions again, you don't understand Brexit and you still don't know who to vote for in the European elections (May 26). In short, you're feeling down. And it shows. You treat your smoking shoes very badly. At work, you pull on them like a madman to avoid a whirlwind of synthetic mesh from cluttering your ankles in the middle of the 5 p.m. meeting. When you're resting, you bury them in your international sneakers like a teenager excited by the idea of the caress of the cool wind on his ankles. You're a pitiful sight. In terms of your color palette, you oscillate between plain gray when you're performing and all-white when you're lying fallow. It's not great. But this foot depression is far from being inevitable.
You could take inspiration from, among others, Alice Delambre, 20, a film student. She says: "Putting on my socks is one of the reasons I get up in the morning. They all have patterns, geometric or figurative. They are very colorful and even glittery. When I get to school, I shine my phone on them. They shine. People are usually amazed." It seems that they are more and more so. The fancy sock is popular. Has the invisible foot of the market been there? Yes. And not just a little. Demand is exploding, supply too and vice versa. The historic players - Doré Doré, aka DD, Labonal, Bleuforêt, Achile, Kindy - are revising their ranges and newcomers - Berthe Aux Grands Pieds , Mes Chaussettes Rouges, Royalties, Archiduchesse, Tites chaussettes, Beck Söndergaard, Bonne Maison, etc. – are deployed on the Web.
The French are not, however, the biggest consumers on the planet (7 pairs per year compared to 17 for an Italian), nor the biggest spenders (beyond 15 euros per pair, they sulk), and remain largely resistant to the high version, popular, even darned, everywhere else (20% market share, compared to 80% in the United Kingdom). Finally, if 420 million pairs of socks are sold each year in France, only 8% are manufactured on national soil. The rest comes from where you know. Moral: the "startup nation" can do better. For that, nothing beats a good old product repositioning. Life is too short to wear charcoal socks, you say? Have you thought about patterns? Patterns are cool! Hokusai, do you know him? And there you are with a Japanese wave on each foot. You could just as easily have opted for Van Gogh-style sunflowers, a Warhol-style Marilyn Monroe or, while you were at it, The Taking of AbdelKader's Smalah by the Duke of Aumale at Taguin (Horace Vernet, 1845).
At 54, Dominique Milon, a distinguished educator living in Thouars (Deux-Sèvres), has long since cracked: "I was 21. I had just bought some brown Michael Paraboots. They were the first shoes I chose on my own. I paired them with a pair of Burlington with prairie green diamonds. Since then, I have always selected my socks with the same care." In his drawers, we find Union Flags galore (he is an Anglophile), small bikes in a peloton (he is a cyclist), a few Bugattis and, since he loves cars, an orange and blue model that is reminiscent of "the livery of the Porsche 917 LH entered at Le Mans in 1971". "Socks are a small product that reveals personality. They can allow you to get noticed in a subtle way.
For a designer, it is easy to design, to manufacture and, now, to distribute. You can take risks. The stakes are not colossal,” explains Régis Gautreau , 48, who invented Berthe Aux Grands Pieds , one of the success stories of the sector, in 1998. His sources of inspiration? Klimt, the Bauhaus, the Japanese painters of the ukiyoe movement. His marketing tool? The markets of Angers, Nantes or Piriac sur Mer (Loire Atlantique), which he travels to at the wheel of his van.
At Mes Chaussettes Rouges (20% to 30% annual growth), the proposition is more traditional. "Our customers could not find a satisfactory answer to the question of the ankle," explains Jacques Tiberghien, 34, who launched the brand in 2009 with Vincent Metzger, 33. We started by distributing the red models of Gammarelli, which dresses the popes [as well as Edouard Balladur, François Fillon and Michel Sapin]. Today, we are developing caviar, chevron and houndstooth patterns. The fashion for sneakers has freed the expression of tastes. But we are far from the fluorescent specimens and Mickey Mouse of the 1980s, which did not leave a very good memory." To Zinédine Zidane, for example. In 2013, the icon of French football revealed to the monthly So Foot the circumstances of his arrival at Juventus Turin: "I wore low and flashy socks. After training, I found them cut into strips and taped to my locker. I was told that socks were plain and mid-calf.” Let’s not exaggerate. I was recently told that an archbishop from Nouvelle Aquitaine was sprucing up his evangelical tours by showing off sniffers bearing the image of Droopy, while Stromae, the Belgian hip-hop dandy, is marketing his under the anagram Mosaert. The devil is no longer alone in hiding in the details.
ALTHOUGH 420 MILLION PAIRS OF SOCKS ARE SOLD EACH YEAR IN FRANCE, ONLY 8% ARE MANUFACTURED NATIONALLY
The fancy sock is not, however, a newcomer. Experts claim that it appeared between the two wars. An induced effect of Art Deco? Who knows. A decisive contribution from the Burlington house, founded in 1923? Not at all. The famous diamond dates from 1977. At the same time, a young Englishman named Paul Smith launched his ready-to-wear label and decorated the socks in his collection with multiple stripes, like bayadere but finer. It doesn't make anyone any younger. Apart from Olivier Ranson. At 59, the cartoonist for the daily newspapers Le Parisien and Aujourd'hui en France has been accumulating Burlington socks in all colors since the beginning. "Socks are the only underwear that sticks out, so I might as well make the most of it," he says. "Since I'm an obsessive neurotic, it's impossible for them not to match my checked shirts." " He has a hundred pairs, displayed as they should be (on foot) on his Facebook account.
But the concern for assembly has its limits. What to do in the case of sock sandals, a fashion imported to our latitudes by way of northern European tourists and recently recycled into a sock-swim trend? According to one of my daughters, Louise, 25, this bold alliance, of which she is a fan, does not support the pattern. "We have already fought too hard to be recognized. If we now have to add a painting by Renoir or a portrait of SpongeBob, it's over." There you go. By the way, please note that in Swedish "sock" is said strumpa. While we use sokk in Norwegian, sok in Danish and sukka in Finnish. In German, pronounce it strumpf. After that, it's up to you. Even if it means getting pulled up.
