Stephane Ashpool: The Tailor of Rebellion

From Pigalle’s backstreets to the Paris 2024 Olympics, Ashpool is tailoring a new vision of menswear—intimate, political, and unapologetically street.

Stephane Ashpool doesn’t walk into the fashion system. He cuts across it.

Founder of Pigalle, the Parisian label that fuses streetwear with couture craftsmanship, Ashpool has never played by the rules. Born in the 9th arrondissement to a French father and a Vietnamese mother, he grew up surrounded by jazz, basketball, and Paris’s banlieue countercultures. That mix—urgent, rich, and restless—still defines his work.

At Pigalle’s flagship on Rue Henry Monnier, you don’t find fashion—it finds you. Satin tracksuits sit beside hand-dyed suits. Woven robes inspired by the 1970s Saigon elite hang next to custom Nike Dunk sneakers. Every piece is a memory, filtered through a prism of performance and identity.

Ashpool is perhaps best known today for designing the official uniforms for the French athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics. But the real story is what he refused to do: no corporate logos, no clichéd tricolore. Instead, he designed unisex pieces with pleated volumes, soft color palettes and subtle embroidery. “It had to feel like freedom, not nationalism,” he said in a rare interview with i D.

He continues to run the Pigalle Basketball Court—an open-air playground painted like a Kandinsky canvas in the middle of Paris. It’s part public artwork, part social hub. For Ashpool, fashion is not an industry. It’s a platform.

ULM Insight:

Ashpool dismantles the binary between streetwear and tailoring, between art and activism. He reminds us that luxury isn’t just silk and savoir-faire—it’s relevance. In his hands, clothes aren’t about aspiration, but declaration. The future of style may not speak French. But it will speak Pigalle.

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