Many designers aspire to the label polymath, but no one polymaths as hard and relentlessly as Ramdane Touhami, whose latest pursuit meshes merchandising, marketing and selling his favorite thing: hiking.

Mr. Touhami is known for acting on impulse, and with intensity. He has lived in New York and Tokyo and owns 51 bicycles, including one of the three made by the French architect-designer Jean Prouvé that are known to still exist.

The 49-year-old French-Moroccan was once the owner of a donkey polo club in Tangier, Morocco; went on to become men’s wear director at the department store Liberty in London; and spent years reshaping the beauty business, reviving the fortunes of the scented-candle maker Trudon as its creative director and then the heritage apothecary brand Buly 1803, which he sold to LVMH in 2021.

Mr. Touhami bought, restyled and reopened Hotel Drei Berge in the Swiss Alps last year, and opened the mountaineering boutique A Young Hiker in Paris in January.

It has been a long climb to the top. At school, he introduced a successful T-shirt line that corrupted the Timberland logo and made a fortune, but then he was kidnapped and relieved of a lot of money. He then became a homeless skateboard obsessive, navigating the streets of Paris having no fixed abode.

But recently, from the headquarters of his agency Art Recherche Industrie, shaped out of a decadent 19th-century ballroom in the 10th Arrondissement, he masterminded the restyling of the silverwear maker Christofle and the leather goods house Moynat, as well as his own podcasts, publishing projects and housewares.

His explanation for the new pursuits in Switzerland and at A Young Hiker: “Beauty was my job; mountains are my passion.”

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Opening a store that sells hiking gear between the Paris flagships of Serge Lutens and Rick Owens­ is quite the statement. Why there?

I wanted a store with a view of nature, and the windows look out to the Jardin du Palais Royal. It is a spectacular place. You have clients who are more relaxed, with more time. It is not a shopping mall. Most people who go there just hang and have an ice cream or coffee. It’s not random tourists; it’s people who know the place. A Young Hiker is a community — many people come just to discuss gear and where to climb. It reminds me a lot of the skateboard places where I used to hang out all day without buying anything. We are also organizing weekends in the mountains in Fontainebleau, outside Paris.

Paris is your base now. Was it always the first place you thought of, to open A Young Hiker?

No, no, no. The big Tokyo store is opening in September, in the Daikanyama district, which is also a very green neighborhood. I only open stores where I like to hang and go by myself, not for economic reasons. It has to suit my mental comfort. Trump was elected the week after we opened a Buly in Bergdorf Goodman in New York, so we closed it and left.

Hiking is having a moment in fashion — Louis Vuitton’s latest campaign features Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal strolling through the snowcapped Dolomites in Italy, wearing light knits and T-shirts, and strapped up with petite Vuitton backpacks stuffed with climbing ropes. How different is your take?

The global narrative attached to mountains is all Swiss chalets and American outdoor wear. It’s a pure white world. But there are mountains in Africa and Asia. No one knows you can ski in Congo and there’s a glacier. I have two sides to my brain — I grew up in Europe, but I want to show what is happening all over the world. I am only stocking mountain brands coming from Asia.

How did you decide what you were going sell?

It’s all brands I buy, or by people I know. I have a close relationship with Setsumasa Kobayashi of Mountain Research whose concept is anarchy in the mountains, and I love that. We’ve talked a lot about the 19th-century naturalist Henry David Thoreau. There’s a whole intellectual side to all of this. It’s all about bringing new colors and vibes to the mountains, with people as well as design — we are working with the Rastas of the Jahiking Club in Paris on trips now.

There are lots of conversations in fashion about gender and circularity. Do those factor into what you’re doing?

We stock a range of sizes from very small to extra large and there is no gender attached to it. It’s technical clothing. You don’t make a technical skirt. Being waterproof and weather resistant are the most important things. With my own personal brand that’s going into the store, we are going to start making things with absolutely no plastic involved. Next week we are going to stock vintage pieces from the ’60s to the ’70s. We have been searching around the world for the last year and found the best that exist — North Face from 50 years ago, pieces no one has seen before. I am trying to create a new market in luxury for this kind of vintage.

Why does hiking have such a colorful aesthetic?

You don’t wear black in the mountains. If anything happens to you, you need to be visible. Outdoor brands only started making things in black when they found out people were buying their stuff to wear in cities. I developed the Drei Berge Collection of textiles with Fischbacher 1819, which we debuted in Milan this year, and the three different fabrics are all woven in bright colors. I recently was at the opening of a hotel in Nice, in the South of France, and it was all beige. The planet has so many colors, why not use them?

Fashion is a lot about merch right now, and you elevate it to an art form. A Young Hiker produces ceramics, umbrellas, bandannas and rock-shaped candles bearing the typography you developed for Drei Berge. How does the hotel fit into your design practice?

The hotel is a lab. That’s the only thing it is. The paneling on the umbrella is a collection of logos and colors associated with different mountains. Fashion is all about things being the same, but this is expressive. When I opened the hotel, I decorated 17 rooms but kept two untouched, so that my friends Aaron Aujla and Emily Adams Bode Aujla [designer of the Bode fashion label] could create something. What they did was really surprising, using jockey silks and horse show ribbons. I didn’t want a hotel that was all my own work. It was a fantastic experience — we created bedsheets together based on American horse blankets, with show names on them. I really like the idea that someone will wake up in the sheets we have designed, in the room we designed, then go to the bathroom and brush their teeth with a brush and toothpaste by us, using soap by us. I want it all, A to Z. I like the idea of creating a world with my own logic.

You’ve been into hiking for 25 years. What’s the appeal?

It is therapy for me. Every pore of your body is happy in the mountains, with the clear air and water. If you spend at least six months of the year at a height above 1,500 meters [4,920 feet], you live 10 or 15 years more than the average. I am one of the biggest nerds when it comes to hiking. I have 22,000 magazines about mountaineering that I have collected over 10 years. I was talking to the C.E.O. of VF Corporation five days ago, which owns North Face, and he didn’t know where his own archives were. I told him they were at Utah State University. I’d been there the week before. I know what I am talking about.

With Buly, you looked back to calligraphy, imagery and interiors from the 19th century. What has been the main historical inspiration for A Young Hiker?

One of my biggest inspirations was the 1920s Kibbo Kift hiking group, which started out as an antifascist movement in rural England. It was about going back to nature. Nazis seem to be coming again, including in France, and we need to go back to this ideology. They want to destroy everything; we need to protect it. Maybe nature is the answer.

Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/style/ramdane-touhami-hiking-paris.html