Casablanca Paris

Casablanca was founded in 2018 in Paris by Charaf Tajer, a French-Moroccan designer who had previously co-founded Pigalle Paris with Stéphane Ashpool before exiting to build a label that read as the Riviera answer to Pigalle's more streetwear-anchored vocabulary. The Casablanca premise was that the visual world of 1970s Mediterranean leisure—Slim Aarons photography, Côte d'Azur tennis clubs, North African deco hotel architecture, classic-car culture—was structurally underserved by contemporary luxury, which had defaulted to either austere minimalism or hard-edged streetwear. The Casablanca vocabulary settled fast around silk camp shirts with full-photo prints of imaginary tropical resorts, terry cloth tracksuits, knit polos in mercerized cotton with the brand's gold "Casablanca" courtside crest, leather sneakers built on a tennis-shoe last but executed in luxury construction, and a recurring cast of motifs—horses, palm trees, classic cars, women playing cards by hotel pools—that registered as Slim Aarons fan fiction in textile form. The horse-and-rider gold-crest logo became one of the defining luxury graphic codes of the post-2018 period, instantly readable across hoodies, polos, and the brand's elaborate silk shirting program. Casablanca moved fast through wholesale into Mr Porter, Net-a-Porter, Browns, SSENSE, and Tokyo's United Arrows during 2019-2020, then opened standalone Paris flagship space and Selfridges concession by 2021 as the brand transitioned from cult menswear pickup into broader luxury distribution. Tajer's collaborations with New Balance on the 327 and 237 silhouettes, with Lacoste on a heritage tennis capsule, and with Pirelli's calendar program established Casablanca as fluent across luxury, sport, and image culture simultaneously. By the mid-2020s, the brand had grown into one of the defining new-luxury Paris houses of the post-Vetements generation, alongside Botter, Marine Serre, and AMI in the category that rebuilt French luxury after the streetwear cycle.