Casablanca Avenida Print and Le Passage Explained: What These Signature Collections Actually Mean

What Is the Casablanca Avenida Print?

Retro travel imagery, compressed into graphic form. That's the short answer. The word "avenida" is Spanish and Portuguese for boulevard or avenue, and the print earns that name: palm-lined streets, warm stucco architecture, a colour palette that suggests somewhere hot and faintly glamorous, like a postcard that got left on a car dashboard too long. Not a literal street scene so much as the emotional residue of one.

Casablanca founder Charaf Tajer grew up between Casablanca and Paris, and he's spoken at length about the brand's fixation on leisure, sport, and the specific world of tennis clubs and poolside afternoons that his upbringing gave him access to. Avenida sits squarely inside that reference pool: sun, movement, warm-weather pleasure filtered through a slightly nostalgic lens, the way a favourite holiday destination looks better in memory than it ever did in real life. Strangely, that slight distortion is exactly what makes the graphic work.

On the sweatshirt, the print is bold and placed with real intention. Organic cotton keeps it grounded as a casual garment, but the graphic scale and colour density make it read as something more considered than a logo tee. Casablanca has applied the Avenida motif across multiple pieces over different seasons, which is precisely what makes named prints collectible: they accumulate meaning rather than expire with the drop.

The Casablanca Avenida Sweatshirt is CHF 280, made from 100% organic cotton.

Avenida Sweatshirt: How to Wear It

The graphic carries enough visual weight that everything else in the outfit needs to step back. Straight-leg trousers or tailored shorts, clean trainers, nothing competing for attention. It works as a single statement piece over a plain tee when the temperature drops, or alone when it doesn't. Worth knowing: the print is considerably louder in person than it reads in flat product photography. It commands a room. A little.

The organic cotton construction means it breathes and softens with wear, developing a quality that crewnecks from heritage sportswear brands never quite achieve because they're too precisely engineered. This one drapes more generously, which suits the resort-leisure DNA Casablanca is working from. It's not stiff. It moves the way a sweatshirt should when it's been chosen rather than just worn.

Understanding Casablanca's Le Passage Print

A different register entirely. Where Avenida is warm and geographic, Le Passage is architectural. Columns, archways, structural forms seen through a four-dimensional perspective that feels painterly rather than technical, like someone tried to render a Roman atrium using the visual logic of Cézanne. "Le passage" translates as corridor or passage, and the print reflects that literally: a sense of moving through space, framed and enclosed by architecture.

The reference points are harder to pin to a single location, which is part of the point. It reads as Mediterranean or North African architectural tradition processed through a European fine-art sensibility, and that layering is entirely consistent with how Casablanca builds its cultural references generally. Tajer grew up between two cities, two languages, two architectural traditions, and Le Passage sits precisely in that gap: formally composed, somewhere between two worlds, not fully belonging to either.

The Architecture of Le Passage

On the T-shirt, the print runs across both front and back. That's a deliberate choice, not a production flourish. It makes the garment feel considered from every angle, closer to a wearable artwork than a branded tee, and it means you're never quite done looking at it. Construction is 100% organic cotton, made in Portugal, regular fit that holds the print without distorting it across the chest or pulling at the seams.

The Casablanca Le Passage T-Shirt is CHF 250.

Le Passage T-Shirt: Styling the Print

Overstyling around this print kills it. Wide-leg trousers, minimal footwear, nothing else with significant graphic content competing for attention. The dual-sided print means the back is as much a part of the look as the front, which is worth thinking about when you're layering: a half-zip or jacket worn open works well; anything that covers the back completely is wasting half the garment. Honestly, that feels like a small loss.

The palette tends toward the refined side, cream, stone, terracotta tones depending on the season, which makes Le Passage slightly easier to dress up than the Avenida sweatshirt. Both are fundamentally casual pieces. But Le Passage reads a degree or two more formal when it needs to.

La Colomne T-Shirt: A Third Visual World

A quieter print than either of the first two. "Colomne" reads as a stylised take on the French "colonne" (column), and the graphic leans into that architectural register: clean vertical forms, restrained colour, closer in spirit to Le Passage than to Avenida's warmth. Where Le Passage feels like moving through a structure, La Colomne feels like standing still inside one.

The Casablanca La Colomne T-Shirt is CHF 250.

Le Temple Du Sport: Casablanca's Leisure-Club Universe

"Le Temple du Sport" translates directly as "the temple of sport," and the print commits fully to that framing: the visual language of a mid-century athletic club rendered with the same reverence most brands reserve for actual temples. It's the clearest expression of the tennis-club, poolside-afternoon world Tajer has cited as a formative influence, made explicit rather than implied.

The Casablanca Le Temple Du Sport T-Shirt is CHF 250.

Silk Paysage: The Print Named in the Opening Line

"Paysage" is French for landscape, and this is the piece that print gets named after, the one mentioned right alongside Avenida and Le Passage from the very start. Rendered on silk rather than cotton, it moves the whole idea upmarket: a landscape scene with the same warm, faintly nostalgic colour logic as Avenida, but on a fabric that changes how the print catches light. At CHF 650, it's a genuinely different tier of piece, the kind of shirt built for occasions rather than daily rotation.

The Casablanca Silk Paysage Shirt is CHF 650.

Tennis Club Icon: Where the Sport References Turn Graphic

Less painterly, more logo-adjacent, though still built around the same leisure-sport reference pool as Le Temple Du Sport. The Tennis Club Icon graphic reads as Casablanca's most direct nod to actual club culture: crests, icons, the visual shorthand of a members' clubhouse rather than a travel poster. On a sweatshirt, it's the most casual of the six pieces here, built for cooler weather rather than resort seasons.

The Casablanca Tennis Club Icon Sweatshirt is CHF 290.

Why Casablanca Names Its Prints Instead of Using Seasonal Logos

A Design Philosophy Built on Collectible Storytelling

Most brands at this price point anchor identity in a logo. A monogram, a hardware detail, a signature colour applied season after season until it becomes shorthand for the brand itself. Casablanca chose a different structure, and the logic becomes clear once you're inside it. Each print is a named visual world with its own vocabulary, and those names recur across seasons and silhouettes, building depth the way a musician builds a catalogue: individual tracks that make more sense once you understand the album.

It also makes pieces searchable and tradeable in a way that logo-first branding rarely achieves. Someone hunting for an Avenida piece is looking for something specific, not just something with the Casablanca name on it. That specificity holds value in the secondhand market. It gives the brand a depth of catalogue that a monogram alone can't manufacture.

Tajer launched Casablanca around 2018 with a visual coherence that most new labels spend years chasing. The named-print structure gave every collection a clear internal logic from the first season, which is partly why the brand felt fully formed so quickly. That's not a small thing.

Named Prints vs. Traditional Branding

A traditional branded piece ages with the brand's stock. When the logo falls out of favour, the piece follows it down. A named print ages with its reference material, which is often far more durable than any brand cycle. Mid-century travel imagery. Mediterranean architecture. These are sources that predate fashion cycles and will outlast them, the same way a Penguin paperback cover from 1962 still looks better than most graphic design produced last year.

This is why Casablanca collectors tend to track specific prints rather than specific seasons. Finding a Le Passage piece from an earlier drop carries more weight than finding something from last season that doesn't connect to the rest of what you own. You're building a wardrobe with internal coherence, not just accumulating sequential buys that happen to share a label.

Avenida vs. Le Passage: Which Print Is Right for You?

Warmth, movement, travel-poster energy: that's Avenida. It's the more immediately accessible of the two, visually louder in a way that's confident rather than busy. The sweatshirt at CHF 280 is also the more versatile silhouette for Swiss weather, something you'll actually reach for eight or nine months of the year without thinking twice about it.

Le Passage is for the person who wants compositional depth, architectural reference, and a quieter kind of complexity that reveals itself over time rather than announcing itself immediately, which is a genuinely different pleasure from the one Avenida offers, and not a lesser one. The T-shirt at CHF 250 is a summer-weight piece primarily, though it layers cleanly under an open jacket through spring and autumn. The print rewards attention in a way Avenida doesn't require: you can wear Avenida without anyone understanding it, and it still works. Le Passage has something to offer the people who look closely.

Both are genuine Casablanca pieces. Neither is a straightforward seasonal graphic tee. Understanding the difference changes how you wear them and, honestly, how you feel about owning them.

Shop Casablanca at Bloc Magasin Zürich

All six pieces covered here, the Avenida Sweatshirt (CHF 280), Le Passage T-Shirt (CHF 250), La Colomne T-Shirt (CHF 250), Le Temple Du Sport T-Shirt (CHF 250), Silk Paysage Shirt (CHF 650), and Tennis Club Icon Sweatshirt (CHF 290), are currently stocked at Bloc Magasin, Flüelastrasse 16, 8048 Zürich-West. We carry a selection of Casablanca pieces sourced through trusted channels, and you can browse what's currently available in the full Casablanca collection online.

If you want to see the pieces in person before deciding, contact us to arrange a private appointment at our Zürich-West location. We don't do walk-ins, but a short message is all it takes to set something up. You'll get the space and time to actually handle both prints side by side, which is genuinely worth doing when the choice is this close.

Follow us on Instagram at @blocmagasin for new arrivals, restocks, and a closer look at how these prints wear in real conditions, not just flat lays.

Understanding these named prints changes how you collect Casablanca. You're not buying seasonal drops. You're building a visual story, one that holds together across years and garments in a way that logo-first pieces rarely manage.