Creative directors and cool go mad for the Paris store’s reinterpreted workwear, but its secret formula isn’t easy to replicate – and it sets the brand apart from the pack.
You might have spotted BRUT on Callum Turner. He’s a big fan of the Parisian archive-turned-brand. In New York in July, the actor wore a sport coat in that artfully faded kind of navy, with cotton kissed by the sun, a T-bar zipper, and general vibe that indicates this could have been a piece pulled from the wardrobe of a well-dressed old head and veteran menswear guru. But here’s the thing, the coat wasn’t vintage.
The jacket is the type of new-old-looking menswear BRUT has become synonymous with. On Turner, it wasn’t screaming for attention, or overly flashy. It was perfectly boxy, cropped, and unfussy, out the Hollywood heartthrob energy in abundance. But where does a brand of the now cook up heaters like that?
“BRUT began as an archive in 2012, and that order matters. A brand that starts from an archive is building on something. Most start from an idea about a customer. A website [came] first, then a showroom in Paris, then a cellar near Place des Vosges in 2015,” says founder Paul Ben Chemhoun. “Designers came down there because I had material nobody else had. I was a junior architect during the week and out sourcing at weekends.
“I grew up in it: my father had a store in Lyon, he'd take me round the wholesalers on rue Pierre Corneille, the Sentier of Lyon, when I was seven or eight, and later he was importing bales of American clothing out of Texas that all had to be sorted. Thousands of pieces a week while I was still at school. What we're building now is the same project at a different scale. An archive, a brand, stores in Paris and New York, and a way of working that starts with research rather than with a trend.”
The archive, still going strong, has served as a reference point for major fashion labels, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste, Uniqlo, The Row, Maison Margiela, and Lemaire. And it booted down the closed doors of the capital F Fashion game for Chemhoun, at the time was still in his 20s, and meeting with high-profile menswear professionals and shaping their influences.
This research-led approach sets the brand apart. But it isn’t just a case of Chemhoun reproducing vintage clothes. It’s a case of taking the high standards of high quality vintage garments’ and setting the bar from there. “Vintage is the guide that tells you when you've got it. The exact wash, the exact colour, the weight of a fleece: get those right and you've earned the freedom to do what you want with everything else. Nobody designs from nothing anyway. You always work with references, whether you admit it or not. I like to think I'm part of a line of designers who work from archives,” says Chemhoun. At BRUT, we get this via garments that span striped sports jackets, sun-kissed tees, and high-waisted selvedge denim plucked from these historical designs.
The first products that landed in 2019 were a high-waisted, double-seated trouser, a double-breasted jacket, and a bucket hat made in France from French fabrics. His country’s own take on workwear (that favoured supple moleskin over the USA’s hardy canvas and denim) chimes nicely with what guys are wearing right now. Harry Styles has been indulging in The Row’s interpretation of a French chore jacket, and on the Autumn/Winter 2026 runway shows, Auralee and sacai interpreted workwear styles, too.
Now, guys being down for workwear is nothing new. It’s designed to last, it’s comfortable, and because its origins are in work, you never look like you’re trying too hard. In short, men are (still) down for wearable pieces that look good without trying overly hard. BRUT’s offering, stacked with those kinds of pieces, is a go-to for busy guys looking for easy-wearing heaters, like Turner, and Joe Alwyn. But don’t mistake the string of high-profile wearers as something Chemhoun is pursuing. Instead, he’s setting himself apart with well-informed products.
“We make a lot of essentials, THE BEST, and plenty of well-known people wear them. We like knowing it without it being known,” he says. “I come from design and architecture rather than from business school, and that shapes how I run this. A creative director has to be relevant continuously, season after season, and that's the only thing that compounds. Product, an archive nobody else has, and a point of view that still holds in twenty years.”
