Vilebrequin Brand Guidelines: The Saint-Tropez Swim Shorts Named After a Crankshaft

A motor-racing writer on the Riviera.

Vilebrequin is the French word for a crankshaft, an unlikely name for swimwear, and the brand’s origin explains it. It began in Saint-Tropez in 1971 with Fred Prysquel, a photographer and motor-sport journalist, and Yvette, a fashion designer who ran a boutique in the town, according to Wikipedia in French and English and the magazine Luxury London. The company’s timeline says the two registered the brand that year.

The story most often told is that Prysquel drew the pattern for a pair of shorts on a paper tablecloth in a Saint-Tropez café. Square Mile and Wikipedia date that to 1971; Luxury London places the sketch a summer earlier. The inspiration is told differently too. Roland Herlory, later chief executive, told The Rake that Prysquel had seen what surfers wore in Borneo and Australia, while a Fairmont hotel feature quoting Herlory says California. Either way, the shape was a shorts cut for men at a time when briefs were the common style, and it was sold in Yvette’s shop, with local women who owned sewing machines recruited to keep up with demand, The Rake and Luxury London report.

The first cloth is also reported in two ways. Wikipedia in French and English describes spinnaker cloth, a sail fabric. Luxury London quotes Prysquel on the “boubou” and “wax” fabrics he saw used for swim shorts in Dakar, Senegal, and brought home after his military service, and Herlory told The Week the early shorts drew on colourful fabrics from Africa. Yvette helped pick the colours, Luxury London says.

The name, the company’s timeline says, came from the shop: its wrought-iron staircase reminded Prysquel of the shape of a crankshaft, and that component inspired both the name and the shape of the first logo. Herlory has since joked, in the Fairmont feature, that it was the worst marketing word imaginable, because nobody knows how to pronounce it.

Berthet, then G-III.

Prysquel sold the business in 1991 to Loïc Berthet, a textile specialist also from Saint-Tropez, Square Mile and Luxury London report. Berthet is credited with the details that now define the product: a back pocket closed with Velcro, eyelets in a metal alloy called zamak, and a cotton inner lining. Under him the range widened. In 1994 boys’ sizes arrived, a father-and-son idea that French Wikipedia gives as “tel père, tel fils.” Through the 1990s and 2000s the brand opened in London, Alassio, Paris, Geneva, New York, Hong Kong and Madrid.

In 2012 the American clothing group G-III Apparel Group bought it, and G-III’s website still lists Vilebrequin as having joined its portfolio that year. Herlory, who had spent more than two decades at Hermès, became chief executive that year, The Week reported in 2017. On the group’s earnings call in March 2026, management called it “our status swimwear brand” and listed it among its key owned brands, alongside DKNY, Donna Karan and Karl Lagerfeld, according to a transcript published by The Motley Fool. The website’s legal notice names T.R.B. International SA, registered in Geneva, as its publisher, and Wikipedia in both languages places the headquarters in that city.

Women’s swimwear came late. Wikipedia dates the first women’s line, and the move into resort clothes and beach accessories, to 2013, citing French trade press; Square Mile says 2015. Since then the label has lent its shorts to other people’s pictures: the Rolling Stones in 2015, with a collage of album sleeves; the Italian photographer Massimo Vitali in 2016; Karl Lagerfeld in 2018; the American artist Derrick Adams in 2020. In 2025 Fiat and Vilebrequin launched a Topolino Collector’s Edition, which the company’s website presents as a car for trips to the beach. In 2023 the company’s timeline records the first Vilebrequin beach, and the G-III call described hospitality business in Cannes, Doha and Crete, with a fourth partner beach in Oman.

Prints, places and packaging.

Swimwear and resort labels sell a place as much as a garment, so their visual identity tends to start with the setting. Seafolly’s website speaks of Bondi Beach and the Australian beach lifestyle; Vilebrequin’s speaks of Saint-Tropez in 1971. For a designer, the useful question is how that place is carried through photographs, shop interiors and the small printed items around a sale.

The printed fabric is the first thing to study. In this category a swatch can work like a logo: Vilebrequin’s chief executive told The Week in 2017 that it made a sea-turtle print every year in a different colour, and its website describes lining up a back pocket by hand so the pattern runs across it. A print archive, where a label keeps one, gives it a repeatable source of colour and motif from year to year.

Lookbooks then supply the setting. Beach huts, pool edges, towels and harbour walls appear often in this kind of photography, and they do the job a product shot cannot, by showing the clothes in the place they are meant for. Collection names often work the same way: Ragtrader’s report on Seafolly’s summer 2020 range lists names such as Summer Memoirs and Check In, each tied to a print.

Boutique displays and packaging finish the picture. A stack of folded prints reads as a colour field; a swing tag, box or pouch carries the mark away from the shop. Each brand in this guide sets out who founded it, who owns it now and what it says about where its goods are made, and marks what rests on the company’s own word. The palettes here are our own interpretations, not official colours.

Turtles, tile mosaics and pink elephants.

The print is the identity. Herlory told The Week in 2017 that the company makes a sea-turtle print every year in a different colour, with part of the sales going to Te Mana O Te Moana, a French Polynesian charity working on sea turtles. Luxury London has described shorts with Portuguese tile mosaics and crocodiles in pink and yellow mangroves, and The Rake quoted Herlory’s line that you can wear green penguins and pink elephants “and not look ridiculous.” The classic cut is the Moorea, which French Wikipedia, citing Les Échos, calls the brand’s icon; the website’s style guide also shows the lightweight Mahina, which folds into its own rear pocket.

Vilebrequin talks about production in unusual detail, and those are its own statements. Its website says making a pair of shorts takes nearly 49 steps; The Rake gave a figure of 32 in 2017. The site says the back pocket is positioned by hand so it lines up with the printed pattern, the drawstring is assembled by hand, and the fabric is inkjet printed. Herlory told The Rake that only two fabric printers, one in Italy and one in France, could do what the brand needed.

On place, the company says 90 per cent of its clothes are made in the Euro-Mediterranean region, naming France, Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, and it names the French textile firms Fremaux Delorme and Les Tissages Perrin as partners. It says it uses Econyl regenerated nylon, names Oeko-Tex Standard 100 for its dyes, and runs a repair workshop in Paris. The site’s heading for its house story is “The Art of Living In the Sun.”

The brand’s lasting tie is to one town. Its sunglasses, Herlory told The Week in 2017, had crankshaft-inspired arms engraved with a line recording the brand’s founding in Saint-Tropez in 1971. The American-owned house still signs itself with that date and that town.

For a design guide, Vilebrequin shows how an engineering word, a staircase and a repeating print can carry a brand across three owners. Compare Orlebar Brown, the London swim-short label, and Seafolly, the Bondi women’s swimwear label. For this guide we use a Riviera navy, a parasol yellow and a sail white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vilebrequin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.