St. Tropez. Summer 1971. The long, off-white tassels that hang from the fringes of the canary-yellow parasols ripple, coquettishly, in the breeze. Amid the tall glasses of pastis and ashtrays brimming with the butts of languorously-smoked Gitanes, lunchtime diners, in flowing, printed dresses and shirt lapels that seem to be getting wider by the hour, look out at the vanilla-soft sands of the beach in front.

Try as they may, they can’t avert their gaze from one man standing in the shallows, dressed in nothing more than a pair of thigh-high shorts, the pattern of which is a fiesta of thick vertical stripes in striking blue, yellow, green and purple, a pattern that seems to flicker in the early-afternoon sun.

Who is this man? Could it be Alain Delon, fresh from the bruising travails of his latest Parisian heist movie, Le Cercle Rouge? The only person in the café that knows for certain is the photographer and motorsports journalist, Fred Prysquel. The lone swimmer isn’t famous. He just looks famous. It’s the shorts, Prysquel likes to think, the pattern of which he sketched on a paper tablecloth in this very café the previous summer.