The Object
Saint-Tropez in 1971 was still a fishing port that happened to have film stars in it. Fred Prysquel, a photographer who covered motor racing, spent his summers there and could not abide the swimming trunks on offer, the brief Speedo cut that left a man with nowhere to put his hands. So he had his own made. A little longer, a little looser, cut to be seen in on the quay rather than only in the water.
He called the label Vilebrequin, the French word for crankshaft, a nod to the engines he photographed for a living. The joke stuck. More than fifty years on it is still stitched into the waistband of men who have never lifted a bonnet in their lives.
The first trunks were made from spinnaker cloth, the light synthetic that sailmakers use for the big downwind sails. It was bright, it held its colour, and it dried in minutes under the sun. That last part mattered more than it sounds. A man could swim before lunch and sit down to it dry, which in a port town built around the long table was rather the whole point.
A good swim short is not beachwear. It is what you wear from the water to the table without changing, and Saint-Tropez worked that out before anyone else.
The prints came later and became the signature, the small repeated motifs, the turtle the house adopted as its emblem. Collectors now chase the early runs. The making stayed fussy in the way that lasts: a back pocket closed with a press-stud, metal eyelets, a cotton lining. The sort of detail you notice only when a cheaper pair lets you down.
What Prysquel really sold was a posture. Not the muscled display of the racing brief, not the surfer's baggy knee-length, but something between the two that a grown man could wear at forty without apology. The coast took to it because it recognised itself in it. Unhurried, a touch vain, happiest in the stretch between the sea and a cold glass.
Walk the Riviera in July and you still see them everywhere, from the Garonne square where the brand began to half the pools between Marseille and Monaco. The engines Prysquel once photographed are museum pieces now. The crankshaft he named his trunks after has outlived them all.
