A.P.C. clothing is designed to “make something deep and exciting with boring elements,” the brand’s founder has said. Photograph courtesy A.P.C.

When the word “normcore” became a household term, in 2014, nobody was as displeased as Jean Touitou, the founder of the French clothing brand A.P.C. Initially characterized in an article in New York as “fashion for those who realize they’re one in 7 billion,” normcore was a personal style defined by a kind of trendy embrace of the anti-trend. We’d already cycled through everything new and cool under the sun, and now, in rebellion against our oversaturated culture, some trendsetters had turned, aggressively, to a purposeful blandness: fleece zip-ups, plain baseball caps, turtlenecks, straight-leg pants, neutral-wash jeans, and sensible sneakers.

This embrace of basics was what A.P.C. had been doing all along. Touitou explains, in his new book, “Transmission,” that he founded his company, in 1987, because he struggled to find a well-proportioned sweater and a “normal” pair of jeans. In the thirty years since, A.P.C. has been a beacon of a certain kind of well-appointed normal. The company is known for its stiff, dark denim, snug crew-neck sweaters, light jackets that nod ever so gently at a military influence, and simple leather accessories. The line has always included primarily navy-blues and blacks, khakis and camels, with carefully considered stripes or pops of fire-engine red. It’s a brand for people who wish to pare down rather than add to their closets, designed with the goal, as Touitou puts it, to “make something deep and exciting with boring elements.” A.P.C. is one of the few—if not the only—ready-to-wear brands with the status of a high-fashion house but little of the flashy presence in the high-fashion world. Its just-shy-of-luxury prices reflect this niche—jeans will run you two hundred and thirty-five dollars; a sweater around three hundred dollars—and its aesthetic is more tailored and more French than the hipsterish hallmarks of American normcore. But one could argue, nonetheless, that Touitou is an inadvertent, and unwilling, godfather of the movement—an evangelizer for the idea that “no-fashion fashion works.”

The concept of normcore is deeply offensive to Touitou because, in his view, it cheapens the very idea of minimalism and insults the ambitions of his brand. “This is not the house of normcore,” he announced in June, 2014, delivering a tirade before he presented A.P.C.’s new menswear collection. “I am done with minimalism. This is why we will use hardcore styling.” Touitou, a mercurial and roly-poly French-Tunisian who looks more spritely than his sixty-six years, is prone to these sorts of melodramatic pronouncements. But, in the case of his 2014 menswear collection, he proved powerless against his own fashion instincts. The garments looked like the usual A.P.C.: there were the signature dark-wash jeans, the perfect-fitting button-ups, the navy-and-white-striped T-shirts. There was one short-sleeve button-up with a bright seventies print, layered over a vintage T-shirt, that seemed out of place. That such a subtle distinction could be presented as a “hardcore” paradigm shift only underscored how principled and consistent the A.P.C. brand is.

“Transmission,” published by Phaidon Press, is a five-hundred-page anthology that serves to catalogue and justify the A.P.C. aesthetic in a post-normcore world. The book is broken into three chapters: the first is a scrapbook of ephemera from Touitou’s life before A.P.C., which was shaped by the influences of his mother, rock music, and Communist politics. The third is another visual collection, presenting, in chronological order, all of the clothes that A.P.C. has produced, from the camel crew-neck sweaters of the late eighties to the camel crew-neck sweaters of 2017. It is the book’s second, and shortest, section that is the most compelling. Here, Touitou’s infamous pre-show speeches have been printed, with odd line breaks and capitalization patterns, to give the text a poetic effect. In these stream-of-consciousness missives, Touitou comes off as part madman, part sage. “WHAT I TRY TO DO IS REACH SUBLIME SIMPLICITY… Bitch,” he writes, furiously addressing the idea of A.P.C. as a place to buy “great basics.” He is often curmudgeonly and highfalutin, and always entertaining. “The thing is, the street has no effect on me,” he writes of street style. “It just tells me what not to do.” He cites Samuel Beckett as a “style icon” and is prone to making grandiloquent leaps between fashion and art. And yet there is an infectiousness to his minimalist convictions. By the time I was finished with Touitou’s texts, I wanted to immediately purge any tacky, trend-mongering, or ill-constructed piece of clothing in my closet.

Part of the aim of “Transmission” is to deepen the meaning of clothing in a world of e-commerce and fast fashion, where shoppers are herded blindly through a world of micro-trends before they’ve even realized it. Touitou writes in his foreword that, “in today’s world, things disappear into some suffocating digital space.” He is not alone in his urge to reclaim meaning for clothes—Emily Spivack published, just this month, “Worn in New York,” in which sixty-eight New Yorkers tell stories about garments of clothing that are special to them. In this collection—a follow-up to her book “Worn Stories,” from 2014—the writer Gay Talese argues that his smartly tailored suits and hats protect him from the march toward death, and the designer Jenna Lyons rhapsodizes about the feathered skirt she wore to her first Met Gala. New York’s first female firefighter details the significance of her uniform. There is a reason that most of the stories collected by Spivack are from before 2000, when the city hadn’t yet transformed into a playground for rich Europeans and N.Y.U. students. Less moneyed and less connected to the hive mind, this was an environment that encouraged offbeat style decisions. A deep longing for this past permeates every story. “Little by little, because of outsourcing and economics, the Garment Center is disappearing, turning into condos, hotels and restaurants,” the designer Anna Sui laments in her essay. Touitou is similarly wistful in “Transmission” as he remembers A.P.C.’s origins and his time immersed in France’s Trotskyist scene, attending political rallies with his Communist counterparts. “Reminds me of how great-looking the ‘activists’ were,” he writes.

A.P.C. was initially started as a men’s brand, but Touitou is at his most provocative when discussing women’s clothes. He is maniacally critical of contemporary women’s fashion, returning to the subject repeatedly: “Why do people only show parts of the female body overdetermined to trigger men’s sexual desire?” he writes. “You don’t need to show your boobs to be sexy.” Whatever you think of this attitude (a liberating approach to women’s fashion, or a misguided policing of women’s bodies?), it cannot be denied the tasteful, modest look that A.P.C. is known for—denim skirts that hit just above the knee, high-necked knitwear in neutral colors, low-heeled leather sandals with tiny gold buckles—has found a deep foothold in women’s fashion outside of A.P.C. in recent years. The ready-to-wear marketplace is flooded with smartly branded companies claiming their own piece of the basic-wear pie. Last month, in a piece about the cleverly marketed clothing startup Everlane, Lizzie Widdicombe described the idea of a utilitarian wardrobe that “you could buy on your iPhone from the elliptical machine.”

If you live in New York City, you can get many Everlane items ferried to your doorstep in under two hours. But most of these pieces are a far cry from Touitou’s careful creations, exploiting the same commitment to simplicity and restraint without the same attention to quality and craft.

You might try to imagine an installment of Spivack’s “Worn in New York” published, say, two decades from now. The prospective entries are the stuff of Touitou’s nightmares. Here is one woman’s pair of black Nike Flyknits that she had delivered to her via Postmates. She wore them to buy lunch at Sweetgreen every day, until she discarded them and got a new pair in a slightly different color. Here’s another woman, writing about a slightly oversized button-up that she ordered from Everlane and wore to the office four times. And here’s a man’s quiet bomber jacket, which he and six of his friends all ordered after being served the same ad on Instagram. He has five others that are almost exactly the same. He’s one in seven billion.