Andreotti & Baribeaud for Drake's

On a spring trip to Biarritz, on France's Basque coast, Sophia Andreotti and Edouard Baribeaud found inspiration while sat at a small plastic table facing out towards the town’s port. With watercolours in-hand, the couple began to emulate the shades of the small nautical scene playing out ahead of them. The faded blue of a fishing net, the salt-exposed hull of a boat, a rope left to dry in the French sunshine. 

SHOP THE COLLECTION

“You never have a tube with the exact colour,” says Edouard Baribeaud who, along with his partner and collaborator, Sophia Andreotti, lives and works in Berlin. “You have to mix it yourself. A photo will never capture the true colour, and for this collection we wanted to start with those very French, genuine colours. A mixture of warm and cold. The seaside as we remember it.” 

Andreotti & Baribeaud for Drake’s is a limited edition capsule that features the couple’s original artwork, starting out as hand-painted watercolours on their Berlin studio wall, drawn from trips like the Biarritz one, as well as childhood holidays and regular visits to the rugged West Coast of France and Normandy. 

“I wanted to do something inspired by the French seashore,” says Andreotti, who previously worked as a journalist before joining Baribeaud’s practice a few years ago. The pair have now hosted exhibitions in London and designed a previous scarf for us here at Drake’s, as well as Hermès. “It wasn’t super precise, but it came from our shared past, and some from the nature books that I read as a child. Those clear, simple illustrations that are actually very difficult to achieve.”

After a long, cold winter, their studio, on the site of an old factory, is bathed in sunlight. French wildflowers are scattered across the table and the walls are brimming with colour charts and works in progress. “It all starts with a scribble,” jokes Baribeaud. “A house, a mermaid. What works? There’s lots of trying new things, and failing sometimes.” 

The collection, featuring t-shirts, caps, shirts, a printed scarf and a market tote bag, is informed by those research trips and family histories, as well as a few more fantastical elements taken from French folklore and the artists’ imaginations. "They’re motifs that come alive when they’re on clothing,” says Baribeaud. “It’s very different from a painting, where you can add more and more detail, it needs to work with creasing and movement.”

“For the bag, I wanted to create a design that featured the things you might buy on your weekend shopping trip in France,” says Andreotti, “Langoustines, flowers, seafood and fruit and vegetables. The second are things you can find on the beach, like when you’re a kid. Algae, a flower that grows on the dunes in Normandy, swallows and seashells. Happy memories for us.”

“We wanted to do something simple, with a vintage feel,” adds Baribeaud. “It can take some months to find some new inspiration. We’ve found a good balance of working together. 

“You might call it a breakthrough.”