OWN A PIECE OF FRENCH FASHION HISTORY

The store was founded in 1933 by Joakim Grimbert, and was known for its luxury menswear and accessories, whose scions headed the delightfully quirky business up until the 18th of June 2012, when Louis Vuitton S.A. Moët Hennessy (LVMH) announced its decision of buying the tiny store.

French President François Mitterrand, an occasional Arnys customer, survived an assassination attempt on the avenue de l’Observatoire in the 1950s. Like a ley line of Francocentrism, the Paris Meridian also runs through it: calculated by the Observatory’s scientists in the 17th century, the French used this arc as the line of 0 longitude for two centuries. It competed with England’s Greenwich Meridian for recognition as the international prime meridian.

In its own way, Arnys was the Paris Meridian of menswear: a store of uniquely and arbitrarily French designs and taste that suggested another timeline, an alternate incarnation of French style, Arnys lay claim to a Frenchness, that was all about the noticeable.

Arby’s was one of the few truly original menswear stores in the world – somewhere you would travel to visit and could find nowhere else.

Arnys was a small, unique and beautiful store.