Words, Sounds, Colours & Shapes is a silly name for a shop, not least because you can never remember it. I’ve been thinking about this article for a couple of weeks now, and I still never get all the right words in the right order.
However the shop itself, which opened earlier this year in Paris, is just as cool as the name is silly, and has some really nice, interesting menswear. The name is also par for the course for the founder, Ramdane Touhani.
Touhani is a serial entrepreneur better known for rebranding and launching the candlemaker Cire Trudon, then doing the same with cosmetic brand Buly 1803 (selling it to LVMH seven years later). Everything he does is both beautiful and eccentric.
The genesis for Words, Sounds, Colours & Shapes (WSCS) lies in two previous projects: A Young Hiker, which encapsulated the best of hiking-associated brands into a little shop off the Palais Royale, and Die Drei Berge, a coffee shop which itself took its name from the hotel Touhani owns in the Alps.
The two have now been combined into this new, larger store on the Square du Temple in Paris’s third arrondissement. With the addition – obviously – of an exhibition and bookshop looking at countercultural media and graphic culture.
WSCS is a great space – light, colourful, busy – and it’s worth going in just to get a coffee and have a wander. The exhibition downstairs is genuinely good, and there’s even a well-curated vintage section with things like Eddie Bauer and Kapital, all keeping to the outdoors theme.
When Alex Natt and I went two weeks ago, we ended up chatting to some of the staff, a couple of whom used to work at 45R or work with Yuketen. They recommended a few pieces, and I ended up buying a cowichan sweater from the Japanese brand Nonnative – a substantial but not rough wool, more functional and wearable than a lot of the Canadian originals – while Alex bought some technical gloves.
The most interesting menswear, though, was probably the own-brand pieces – under the Die Drei Berge name.
The Pull Marin, for example, is modelled off a British commando jumper, with its tough wool and reinforced elbows (below). But the high-twist yarn used here is dry without being scratchy, and the elbow reinforcement is done using a switch in the knitting pattern rather than a patch.
The dark green (below) is lovely, and the integrated collar works well.
Also unusual but very wearable are the sweats – hoodies, crewnecks, bottoms. There are two varieties, one of which uses an unusually fine cotton and one a cashmere yarn on the inside, cotton on the outside.
The cashmere version feels luxurious, and much warmer than a regular cotton. This can be a significant issue with sweats when the weather’s cold, and having cashmere on the inside is a good solution. The drape and body still isn’t quite the same as pure cotton, and I wouldn’t get it for that reason, but I can see the attraction.
The fine-cotton version is more me, with the fineness adding a slightly luxurious touch without any other obvious changes. Some of them are heavily washed and worn as well, creating some beautiful colours in shades like purple and pale blue. As good as the Real McCoy’s versions or someone like A.Presse.
The make is very good – loopwheel in Japan – and the fit a little tapered, slim in the waist.
There’s more regular outdoor gear from brands like And Wander, knits from Batoner, and wellies from the Japanese maker Daiichi (very soft and flexible – above).
I’d never heard of the brand F/CE, and to be honest wouldn’t have considered them if I only saw it online, but there was a great reversible gilet I was tempted by – warm grey on one side, sunburst yellow on the other – with a double-snap system so you could wear it more or less fitted.
That’s not available on the WSCS website, but if anything that’s symptomatic of WSCS as whole. Good as the website is, this is a shop I’d recommend as a place to visit – a destination store, where half of the appeal is the ability to wander slightly aimlessly, and suddenly get deep into specialist carabiners or types of typography.
We’ll include WSCS in the Paris shopping guide in the next issue of the magazine, as the guide will be updated then. We’re learning how valuable it is to plan ahead with the mag, even if it is only twice a year.
Oh and while you’re in the area, I’d recommend popping into Brut on the other side of the square. It’s expanded considerably since we last covered the brand for PS, with an impressive range of own-brand merchandise and a vintage store next door (‘Universal Surplus’).
The Brut clothing isn’t quite at the quality level we’d normally cover on PS, but the speed at which they’ve gone to a full collection – with branded hardware, and every category from band tees to clip jackets – is really impressive.
After you’ve done that, go have a soup and sandwich at Chez Elo. Great people watching.
For more on the philosophy behind WSCS, see the About on their site here. The name, by the way, comes from the jazz album of the same name by Donald Byrd.
