EXCLUSIVE: Ramdane Touhami Introduces Fashion Game and New Creative Agency
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GAME ON: Fashion’s a game, literally, for entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami, who created a board game called Art, Recherche & Industrie to mark the official launch of his creative agency of the same name.
“It’s kind of a Monopoly of fashion and design,” he told WWD on Monday, the day before he would host a fete in Paris for the kickoff. “The idea of this game is you go around exactly like in Monopoly. You have to build your first store, your flagship store. And after, in the rules, we wrote clearly you have to be the richest. Don’t be nice to anyone, they’re all hypocrites.”
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Three hundred of the artisanally designed games are being produced for Touhami to gift. “This is sarcastic fun, but it’s still fun,” he said.
The “franc mode” currency ranges from 100 FM bills to 50,000 FM bills, which feature portraits of famous fashion figures, including Gabrielle Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin.
As players pass go, they collect 20,000 FM in salary. Here, the roads are named after tony shopping streets, like Rue Cambon, Fifth Avenue and Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The three other corner squares of the board are Burn-Out, CEO Bonus and Holidays Simple Weekend.
Money and turns can be gained or lost by drawing cards in three different categories. On a card from the Drames (or Dramas) section reads: “T Magazine misspells your name in the title of an article, which makes it impossible to find on the Internet. Skip a turn.”
A card from the Surprise section reads: “Kim K just posted a selfie with one of your products. Stock-out!” That player gets plus 10,000 FM for notoriety and minus 50,000 FM for extra temp workforce. From the Mondanités (or Social Niceties) pile, a card might read: “At last, you have enough money to install your contemporary art collection in a mansion. You charge visitors.” That’s worth minus 10,000 FM.
“I think fashion is terribly lacking in humor,” said Touhami, who clearly isn’t himself. The game reflects his wit and savoir-faire. About his agency Touhami explained: “It’s the only one, maybe in the world, which can create a font and design a store.”
Touhami most recently developed the successful L’Officine Universelle Buly retail concept started in 2014 by creating everything in house, including bottle caps, drawings and labels.
His creative agency started in January and is now developing hotels, a brand on Instagram, apps and a historic coffee chain, among other projects.
Art, Recherche & Industrie, with offices in Paris and Lausanne, Switzerland, is now targeting the fashion industry.
“We don’t do things quickly; we do things slowly,” explained Touhami. “We work by hand. We take our time. We are obsessed with A to Z.”
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