Satisfy Running is not a collection of sportswear like any other. Blame it on Brice, its founder, who infused technical clothing into the culture of skate and punk to create an offbeat brand, absolutely unique in its kind.
Brice Partouche does not have exactly the classic look of a long-distance runner.
Rather, it looks like it came out of an archival rock and punk history movie. Like: customer ofas famous as the late CBGB in New York, an evening of entertainment by Blondie, Television, Patti Smith or The Ramones, circa 1978. Fitted jeans and a vintage t-shirt on a skinny body, long and abundant hair that would not have been looked down upon the MC5.
Yet he is indeed a runner. And he was born very far from the urban centers where the great surges of the counter-culture were brewing, well after the baby boom.
“I was born in Grenoble,” says the founder of Satisfy Running. It is a city surrounded by mountains. Fairly young, over there, you ski, snowboard, you are in contact with the mountains, you are immersed in a very open air culture, hiking, climbing ... But that did not interest me so much. I loved to skate and play music. "
Looking at the clothes he creates for the race, we quickly guess that his world has never strayed so far from those who animated him in his youth. “It's a culture! Skateboarding is not really a sport. It's a pretext to be with your friends. There is no winner. For me, running is the same ”, says the one who now lives in Paris and prefers to run alone, near the Canal Saint-Martin, sometimes stopping, at the end of his outing, at the café that he owns in the Marais, named Ob-La-Di. Yes, as in the superbly psychedelic piece from The Beatles White Album.
Miracle of medicine
Despite his 44 years, Brice does not have at all the look borrowed from the old man who plays it young. The spirit of his youth visibly inhabits him, giving him instead the air of a wise punk. His extremely relaxed attitude invites conversation, which he also feeds with verve.
He thus recounts, while laughing, the radical professional bifurcation that finally led him to the world of fashion.
“I wanted to be a surgeon. So I started studying medicine… which I quickly gave up, ”he says, laughing at what visibly appears to him today as a somewhat absurd aspiration. Especially since his future was announced elsewhere.
As a teenager, he had founded a small skate brand and had t-shirts produced in confidential quantities for his friends. His father had a jeans design and manufacturing business. Music is imprinted as a recurring motif on his life: he played it, it fascinated him. It percolates in everything he does.
As you can hardly imagine operating to the sound of Minor Threats or sipping Boulevardier in a cocktail of surgeons, you can imagine him perfectly out of place in the world of music and fashion.
In 2000, in his father's footsteps, he launched his jeans brand: April77. As will be the case later with Satisfy, iconography and rock spirit are omnipresent.
In 2000, in his father's footsteps, he launched his jeans brand: April77. As will be the case later with Satisfy, iconography and rock spirit are omnipresent. “I was very interested in the history of this music, but more broadly also, in the cultural movements which resulted from it and how it affected fashion. For example: how young people, at different times, diverted military clothing and other types of uniforms. "
When he starts running, under the influence of his current girlfriend, he finds that one thing is crucial in the sport: clothes that he would like to wear and that would not only respond to its look, but also its principles from punk. Fair trade, veganism.
This is where Satisfy Running was born, of which he will outline the main principles that make it successful, in addition to telling us more about his practice as a runner, in our next text dedicated to him.
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This portrait of one of the suppliers of Faux Mouvement is part of a series of reports designed to help you get to know our partners, their vision and their products. By reading them, you will quickly understand why we have chosen them.