Jean Jullien on his new collaboration with Petit Bateau

Petit Bateau has partnered with acclaimed illustrator and It’s Nice That favourite Jean Jullien to create a capsule collection for children and adults alike. For the collection, Jean has illustrated a series of animals – including a cat, a dog, a ram and a zebra – that have been knitted onto the designs.

“I went right to the animals,” Jean Jullien tells It’s Nice That on the beginnings of the collection. “An animal lights up the imagination quickly and vividly. I went into it with the eyes of a little kid, to learn, to understand and to create my characters." A visit to the Troyes factory also helped to further along Jean’s ideas through “discovering the production processes, talking to the people who worked there and seeing how they responded to my ideas fascinated me,” Jean continues. "It was also in the factory in Troyes that I found the ram: it appears as a logo on one of the machines!”

Each pattern on an item of clothing is inspired by the animal that decorates it too. “I wanted these animals to draw the patterns of the clothes themselves,” the artist says. “I made the original drawings in black with brush and ink. I wanted to mirror the ‘messy’ aspect that children like when they start to draw. The black has of course become ‘navy blue’, Petit Bateau’s icon shade, on the clothes. A textile, for me, takes the form of the person who wears it. Drawing for a garment means accepting deformation and wear. And the first function of the garment is protection, so I also like the idea of drawing for a medium that is useful.”

The collection will be available in stores at the end of September 2019.