To say the Colbans like to keep a low profile is an understatement. “We tend to decline a lot of things,” says Jean-Claude. He and his sister are seated in leather chairs in their father’s former office, which is lined with books and ephemera such as Champagne-shaped bottles of Charvet detergent. They say no to most interviews and don’t have much to say on the subject of their personal lives. (All I came to know after spending several days there was that Jean-Claude has a son who may one day come to work for them and that Anne-Marie lives somewhere on the Left Bank.)

They are also loath to discuss their notable clientele, past and present. “We don’t like to play favorites,” says Jean-Claude, who works on designs. “We enjoy making them shirts. And that’s what’s important, our relationship with the clients,” says Anne-Marie, who works with customers.

People with money and power have long been fitted for shirts from Charvet. So while sultans, pashas, and princes have all been clients, and heads of state like Charles de Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, François Mitterrand, and Winston Churchill, it also has a long history with the creative set who defied typical boundaries of class and wealth: Émile Zola, Charles Baudelaire, Robert de Montesquiou, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint Laurent, and, more recently, Sofia Coppola and her husband, Thomas Mars; and David Beckham. Chloë Sevigny has been photographed in its slippers, and The Row once sold them before it started making a similar version. The Manhattan gourmet grocer Eli Zabar gets his boxers made at Charvet and, Anne-Marie says with a giggle, “He always wears two shirts at a time.”