Thorsun and Charvet Are Back At It
George Sotelo launched his first capsule range of Thorsun swimwear featuring prints from the archive of legendary French shirtmaker Charvet back in 2021. The first ever collab in the near-200-year-old Parisian brand’s history, it was the result of a long and painstaking research process, that as well as delving into the archives, meant finding a suitably quick-drying man-made cloth that would function for swim and critically also do justice to the bold colors and unique in-house patterns the brand has been using for cottons and silks for decades.
“There’s an amazing mill in Lyon in Southern France,” says George, “where they weave what they call a French Polyester. The material feels almost like cotton, but it performs well for swim, and softens with wear over time”. The shorts are also subtly longer than his main line shorts, another detail worked out with the Colbans.
Swim Short Paisley/Olive
$475.00
thorsun.com
Yesterday, a new batch of colorways in two distinct designs—stylized paisleys and geometric floating squares—went up on Thorsun’s own website. They are also available at Charvet’s Paris store, should you be on the Grand Tour right now.
Charvet is perceived in Paris as something of a national treasure, so much so that it was blocked by the French government from being sold to an American buyer in the mid-sixties and then bought by one of its chief fabric suppliers, Denis Colban. His son and daughter, Jean-Pierre and Anne-Marie Colban, preside over the company to this day in a store that should be on every stylehound’s itinerary when in Paris.
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