It’s easy to take things at face value when you only glance at them for a moment. When you eat a French praline, you might not think too much about it. When you write an email, you also don’t think too much about it. But true artistry happens below the surface: it goes beyond what you see at first. We rarely fully understand and appreciate the final result, even if the final result is as simple as eating a French praline, or writing one of many, many emails.

Clément Jaluzot invented the praline in 1636, while he worked as the chef for the Count of Plessis-Praslin. A few years later, he returned to his hometown in Montargis, France, and opened a candy shop, where he made and sold his sugar-coated almonds to the inhabitants of this small town. No good thing can stay hidden forever, though, and under Mazet and Vieillard’s direction, this little shop turned into a thriving company. Soon, they had another one in Paris, and over time the praline grew to an internationally recognized treat.

Inspired by the story and success of this now ubiquitous French treat, we’ve named our first double-face Loden jacket for men after Clément Jaluzot. He created a delicacy that was fit for nobility, and eventually available to everyone. We want to take Loden and double face in the same direction the praline went. We plan to take this artisanal delight, originally available only to a select few, and make it something you can enjoy and cherish, no matter where you are. Double face is extremely rare in Europe and our mission is to deliver this rarity, lovingly developed and still hand-stitched after centuries, to your closet.

So go ahead: have a praline after your next meal. Savor it. Slide on our Clément jacket for men on your way out the door. And remember: once upon a time, you would have had to be part of the aristocracy to have that kind of experience.

Similarly, experience is what helps us develop an eye for detail and nuance to fully understand and appreciate the final result. It’s something we rarely do.

George Sand, aka Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, was a tour de force. Among the most successful writers of her time, she was known not only for her many well-respected novels but also for her unconventional lifestyle. In the 1800s, here was a woman who not only wrote under a male pseudonym, but also bucked tradition, dressing like a man so she could walk through Paris more freely, smoking in public, and having more than one high-profile love affair.

One of these affairs was with a French poet, playwright, and novelist named Alfred de Musset. And if you read the letters they wrote to each other, you’d see the beautiful, chaste poetry you might expect of two Romantic-period writers in Paris—at least, that’s what you’d see at first glance. In reality, these letters were encoded: their love poems concealed some bawdy messages that were, to say the least, unconventional for the time. If you take a closer look, you’ll discover a second layer to their communication, which is all the more interesting for how seamlessly it’s woven into the beautiful lines that you thought you were reading at first. 

Today you’re more likely to decipher a hidden message such as ‘per my last email’ which, in corporate terms means, ‘do you not know how to read?!’