Marc Jacobs and A.P.C.’s Jean Touitou Launch A Capsule Collection

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.”

What A.P.C. founder and creative director Jean Touitou had begun to institute was a kind of anti-fashion: The Paris-based label rejected flamboyance in favor of meticulously formed essentials and elevated basics, dismissing the excess of the ’80s and instead p