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Summary 2 friends have started a fashion venture that makes clothes promoting benefits of European Union.
Gauthier Bas, a 26-year-old Frenchman who works in Brussels as a PR consultant, and his friend Charlelie Jourdan have founded P-Lux - the very first Europe-wide brand of clothings dedicated to promote the European Idea.Among the items they have created are T-shirts bearing the image of Robert Schuman - a French foreign minister who was instrumental in the creation of the EU - and commemorating the 1992 signing of the Treaty of Maastricht - the legal basis of the euro.“We think that it is important to talk more about Europe and to talk differently about Europe, because the communication policy of the institutions is quite useless,” Mr Bas said, pointing to recent PR disasters such as the “Science: It’s a Girl Thing” campaign and a Kill Bill-inspired video promoting the EU’s enlargement policy that triggered accusations of sexism and racism.Mr Bas worked as a trainee at the European Parliaments communication services, but said he disliked the white T-shirt featuring a blue and yellow EU flag that he was asked to wear.“We decided to do T-shirts, because if you put a message on a T-shirt the person wears the T-shirt and carries the message around,” he said. “Some people will ask him about the T-shirt. It creates a dialogue. They could sell at H&M.The shirts - of which around 100 have been sold so far - are made in Sweden and printed in Berlin, and are climate neutral.Upcoming designs commemorate the Treaty of Lisbon, Jean Monnet (another founding father of the EU) as well as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President François Mitterrand holding hands close to the Verdun battlefields in 1984.
