“At This Level, Everything Is Precise”: How Pigalle's Founder Made Swaggy Olympic Gear (EXCLUSIVE)
When the Olympic Games arrive at a major fashion capital, you know the uniforms are going to be stylish. To give the Paris Olympics a jolt of cool, the French powers that be called up Stéphane Ashpool, a permanent fixture in Paris’ fashion scene and founder of buzzy streetwear label turned souvenir shop Pigalle.
Clearly, Ashpool’s graphic bomber jackets and French-flag gradients impressed when he first worked with the Olympics in 2024 because he’s got the gig again. Although this time around, as designer of the French Winter Olympic uniforms, he’s designing for the mountains instead of the track.
“Working on the Olympic Games, both Summer and Winter, always means balancing two demands: absolute performance and aesthetics,” Ashpool tells Highsnobiety. “At this level, everything is precise. Technical constraints are extreme, sometimes down to a thousandth of a second, yet they must coexist with a strong visual vision within a very institutional framework.”
This balancing act, where aesthetic considerations coexist with world-class technology, is visible in all Ashpool’s creations for the 2026 Winter Olympics, which kick off on February 6 in Italy. However, he tipped the scales depending on design.
For Ashpool’s French bobsleigh and skeleton team uniforms, exclusively revealed here by Highsnobiety, performance is paramount.
Athletes will reach speeds of over 90 mph wearing these skimpy skintight suits so they better be both aerodynamic and strong. But once the technical needs were met, Ashpool injected the suits with some flavor. “I looked for a balance around the shades of blue of the French team with an almost spatial dimension, both futuristic and retro, accented by subtle touches of lime yellow,” he says.
Ashpool worked on several additional uniforms for different sports, including snowboarding, alongside all the uniforms athletes wear during ceremonies and around the Olympic village (as in the Summer Olympic Games, these are produced by French sportswear label Le Coq Sportif). Here, aesthetics play a more pivotal role.
“The idea was to create a winter look with a sense of elegance and French heritage,” says Ashpool. The designer created a new print from a hand-painted mountainscape again in the colors of the French flag, which acts as a contrast against the neutral sandy base of everything from duffel coats and retro-looking puffer jackets to bulky Vibram-soled hiking boots. This print, he says, provides the athletes’ uniforms with “a more pop graphic language.”
Though the casual insulated mountain gear is where Ashpool’s graphic-inclined streetwear sensibility is most present, that doesn’t mean he steered entirely through intuition. As the designer was quick to note, “details that feel instinctive in fashion take on a completely different scale at the Olympic Games.”
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