Bleu de Kinh

The Silk Road navigators had already been exchanging the overalls of Chinese farmers and workers for several decades when Mao imposed it on everyone in the 1950s. Produced in mass, it was exported in bundles to Marseille, strategic port of colonial France. 

Practical, durable, affordable, Shanghai workshirts have been adopted by workers and farmers in the surrounding area for generations. Now a sartorial symbol, it unites Marseille to Algiers, Bastia to Tunis, and the 1960s revolutionnaries to the great Parisian couturiers, who all appropriate the shirt as a piece of their identity.

Kinh imagined and designed the Bleu de Kinh to pay homage to this journey and these cultural exchanges. Hand painted in our workshop in Marseille, our motif takes up the pieces of the puzzle of this story. The blues mix sky and sea, embody the irregular floating of the swell on the horizon, and intermingle perfectly to form a pattern, which is repeated endlessly.