Geoffrey B. Small
originally published in volume 04
Photography _ Zelinda Zanichelli
Styling _ Nobuhiko Akiyoshi
a conversation with Geoffrey B. Small
Writer _ Sofia Nebiolo
I once came across a Geoffrey B. Small sweater in a vintage store in Japan. It appeared to be a vintage green army sweater, reworked with patches and a ruffle around the collar. The subtle yet transformative adaptation from something old to something new was inspiring. Each time I wear that sweater, I feel a certain energy – a creative force. Having the opportunity to speak with Geoffrey was not only an honour, it was as if I was looking into a magic ball. His ideas and hopes, his past, struggles and successes, it is a story I find so important to listen to today as we face so many unknowns. Geoffrey, of course, draws a lot from the past, but ultimately he is creating the future.
How many shows have you done in Paris?
Spring/summer women’s 2017 is the 97th collection. It’s hard to believe that we’ve done almost 100. In the beginning, back in ’93 and ’94, we only did women’s collections, and we did two per year. It started in Boston in 1979, just making clothes for friends. I started with a shirt, as that was the only thing I was actually able to make because my tailoring skills were limited. I then spent about 15 years in Boston teaching myself how to make clothes. But as a women’s brand, it started in Paris.
What first attracted you to working with women’s clothes?
Well, for Paris, we did women’s because that was where the bigger show was. I think for most people that get into Paris fashion, work-wise, their first introduction is usually through women’s because the women’s fashion week is more publicised and more known. It takes a while for people outside the industry to know when to even come to Paris and when the shows are taking place. I don’t even think I knew about the men’s week in the first few years, so that’s why I did women’s. I think it was in January ’95 that we first showed during men’s week.
And you were the first American designer to show in Paris?
I was the first avant-garde designer from America. There were two other designers before me. One was Patrick Kelly, who is deceased now. He was a black American who came and lived in Paris and started a collection in the ’80s. He actually became very famous in the ’80s. He was interesting and creative, with a sort of Moschino-type approach – a lot of humour. But, he died very young. The other was Oscar de la Renta, and he came a couple of seasons before us and started to do a type of haute couture for ready-to-wear. Then I was the third. But the difference between Oscar de la Renta and me was that I was coming out of nowhere. We had no money and we wanted to do avant-garde. We wanted to be the Comme des Garcons of the US. We wanted to be the first from our country to come in and actually show that America could do creative fashion. And that, at the time, really didn’t exist – you couldn’t do it. America was Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.
Do you consider Rei Kawakubo as an inspiration?
Sure. I can’t remember who said it, but Kawakubo is the mother of us all. Part of that was the business model. She came from Tokyo, she came with Yohji in pretty much the same year. They came out of nowhere and presented a very, very different point of view – a radical one. And, they made a success that eventually grew into a global name. I think she was the first to create that kind of model.
There were others before us. The Belgians in the mid ’80s – Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela and Dries van Noten did it from Antwerp. Helmut Lang did it from Austria. And you know, in ’86 and ’87, we were looking at them from Boston and thinking, ‘If they can do it from Antwerp, we can do it from Boston.’ So, we decided to give it a try.
When did you first go to Paris?
We went over to Paris for the first time in ’92 with the collection in a suitcase. We were knocking on doors, you know, the old L’Eclaireur on the Rue des Rosiers, Maria Luisa and all those places, but they were all out looking at the showrooms and going to shows so nobody was there. So, the next time around we came back and did a trade show which is now defunct. It was a funny show called Paris Sur Mode, but it wasn’t the Paris Sur Mode that you have today. It was run by its founder, a nutty guy named Jean-Pierre Fain. He was sort of an inspiring guy. He was really trying to do a trade show with some innovation. He told me, ‘We don’t need a cheaper version of YSL here – we already have YSL. We don’t need a second collection of Givenchy – Givenchy is here. You come here to Paris, you have to create a new classic that nobody has ever done before.’ And that was an epiphany, because I never got that in the States.
How was it in the States?
In Boston we were always close to New York. I had won design prizes when I was younger and received a lot of job offers to work in the New York industry. And then later, when we were doing the shirts, we talked a lot with the department stores there, but it was just rejection all the way. It was always, ‘How much money do you have behind you? How much advertising are you doing? How much production do you have?’ It was always bigness and business. Suddenly, I was here in Paris with these professionals and they were on you for your work: ‘Yes, but what is the collection?’ That for me was fantastic – a place where a designer is supposed to design. I felt then that I had to do it there somehow, someway, so we did Jean-Pierre Fain’s show in ’93.
Was the show a success?
It was historic because of my neighbours at the show. One was a strange old guy trying to make a comeback, and we thought he was just nuts. He had long hair, a rocker style, psychedelic clothes and all these younger rocker girls around him. He was some Italian guy and I remember looking at him thinking, ‘Geez, I hope I don’t end up like that.’ Turns out it was Roberto Cavalli. I mean, it was unbelievable, but he was in the process of making a comeback. He was at rock-bottom and trying to start up his collection again, and he was showing there. We were right next to him. That comeback ended up making him over 500 million a year ten years later. The other guy was more my age and generation, and it was before he ‘clicked.’ He was a young guy from Rome called Maurizio Altieri, and he was doing a line, Carpe Diem, which is very different to what we know it as now.
We didn’t sell enough at the show to be able to continue and I had to change. I had gotten one order from a crazy guy with a store in Paris, near Bastille, called Magic Circle. He said, ‘Before you go back to Boston, why don’t you come by the store?’ So I visited the store and had a look around. There was Martine Sitbon, Helmut Lang, Rifat Ozbek – all of whom were hot at the time – and I said, ‘You have some really great designers and collections here.’ And he replied, ‘Yeah, but none of it is selling.’ You see, Paris in ’93 was in crisis. Young people didn’t have any money to spend, so a lot of these brands were just sitting on the racks. The guy then invited me to this huge room on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Antoine, and he just had a ton of used clothes. He said, ‘This is what’s selling. The kids don’t have any money, but this is value for money and the style is good.’ He then showed me this long rack of used white shirts that had been hacked up and re-sewn together from cheap fabric, and said, ‘This is what’s really selling.’ It was this African guy named Lamine Kouyate who was doing a line called Xuly Bet, and apparently it was flying off the racks.
That season, Xuly Bet was on fire – every supermodel was wearing Xuly and it was just like, ‘Wow!’ This was also the moment that Martin Margiela was starting a revolution. He had taken a part of Comme des Garcons and Yohji, but really it was Comme des Garcons’ collections in the early ’80s when they did deconstruction for the first time in one form or another. Martin saw it and took that, and then created an entire collection based on deconstruction alone. Within that collection, which came out in ’86–’87, he had this one used jacket where he tore the sleeves out and put a couple of automatic snaps on. It was a used vintage jacket with a detachable sleeve, and it was the first use of recycled clothing in a Paris collection. Well, Xuly took that one piece out of Martin’s collection and became the first to do a whole collection out of recycled clothes. He used ‘recycle’ as a single concept. And recycling at the time had serious advantages because you could come up with very innovative and creative things and sell them at a very affordable price in stores. So for young people, it was ideal – wonderfully creative stuff that was affordable. Xuly was flying.
Did that make you change your approach?
Myself and a colleague of mine, who was also a designer, looked at that and our heads were spinning. We walked around Paris all night being philosophical, looking at each other and saying, ‘What is a designer in the world today? Is it somebody who makes a pattern, cuts and constructs, like we were always taught to believe?’ By that time, I had been working for 16 years, making handmade clothes in Boston, and here was this revolutionary thing. Finally, my colleague disagreed with me, but I decided to go back to Boston and try it out. So, I went back and started to try to take apart garments and remake them. I won’t go into too much detail, but once we had the hang of it, it became a success in Boston almost immediately.
We then came back to Paris the next season. I had saved up enough money by doing alterations and custom suits so I could do another collection. It was all recycled, and we booked 14 or 15 orders from Barney’s NY, stores in Japan – all of these stores bought it. We were able to do what so many young designers have such a hard time doing. We got in and we grew very fast because we were good. I mean Xuly had a very strong run, but he wasn’t able to really continue it after a couple of years, I think because he was trained as an architect and his technique eventually had a limit.
Is recycling still a part of the Geoffrey B. Small DNA?
Yes, we still have recycled elements in the collections. It is part of our DNA, it is part of our history and we actually took it further than both Martin and Xuly. I was a tailor, and there is an endless array of possibilities for a really good tailor with recycling. If you are technique-based you can go to town with it, so that is what we did. That is how we made our first period – our first international name. We did recycle design in the ’90s and that got me to a certain point where the Italian industry – the producers and the agents – wanted to do the license, and in those days that was the game, sort of like a filmmaker or musician getting signed to the right label. In the late ’90s we had all these offers coming in from different Italian producers, and there were other things on the wall, in the total environment of things, that sort of indicated that we should try that. So in 2000, I signed my first licensing agreement with an Italian producer. That is what got me to Italy. That went for a year and a half and it was a disaster. I lost everything and I learned a lot of hard lessons. Then, in September 2001, I made a life decision with my wife Diana. I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to get out of this license, we’re going to restart from scratch and we’re going to build.'
Is that when you decided to stay to Italy?
Yes, we couldn’t move back to the States. We had two kids, 9/11 had just happened and Diana and I were asking ourselves where we were going with this. The licensee had stopped paying me. It was a very bad situation. We were in this small town outside of Venice with no way out. We thought we might as well start from scratch. I had done it once before in America, so I could do it in Italy. So, the idea was to build a research company here that would just make the best possible stuff and find the best people still working in this country. Try to find things and slowly build organically. That is what we’re doing now- it is just a continuation of that idea. So, that is a bit of the history.
So the history is basically in two parts?
Yes, there is a US part and an Italy part. The company has an amazing story. It’s a unique story and hopefully it’s a story that will continue. Now it is really about spreading the story and what it can do for people as much as possible. I am still around and hopefully we are getting it to a point where it can continue. The idea is to continue making great clothes and continue the art and science of making great clothes with human beings. I think the clothing is what people ‘get.’ It is the vibe in the clothes when they see it. It is aesthetic – we are very serious about how it looks.
How has the aesthetic changed over time? I notice you have pink in this collection, and I don’t know if I have ever seen pink in your work.
Well, this is a new technique. This is a new hand-dyed colour. We call it antique rose. Every time we come into Paris we must introduce new work, new ideas and new technologies. That is fundamental. We don’t want to get in the rut of some of my fellow colleagues, my generation, who have been very successful in the avant-garde, but in the past five to ten years have not really developed any new, innovative work. I think now more than ever, as we begin to catch on in the market and become ‘slightly commercial,’ we absolutely must step on the accelerator to maintain research and develop creativity. So, the model again is to be the Ferrari of the industry. Ferrari makes beautiful, fast luxury cars for rich clients. But Ferrari also does Formula One. And Paris for us is Formula One. So we come into Paris and our job is to, you know, go. Comme des Garcons, Yohji and all the young good ones coming in, they’ve all got their newest stuff, and we’ve got to have our newest stuff. So, one of those things is antique rose. The other one is the fabrics, and this goes back to our partnerships.
Can you tell us a bit about these fabrics?
These are extreme hand technologies, because they are completely hand-woven fabrics by a family we started to work with last year, the Colombos at Tessitura La Colombina. They have an amazing story. They work north of Treviso in Badoere and they have three generations in silk making and fabric making. They also have a room full of 18th century looms in wood that the family has had for generations, and they had the brains not to throw them out. They kept everything. A few years ago they decided to try to make a return to hand-woven fabrics using their wooden looms and their know-how passed on from generations, and we jumped on it. So, you’re looking at about seven to eight hours of physical work just to make the cloth for a single piece, plus a day to set up the loom. It is very human and hands-on, and requires skill and brains. And what you get when you put the garment on is a feeling that’s just incredible. When we work with the fabric, it has its own characteristics so we have to change our tailoring techniques and technology just to be able to work with it. That is just one example, but there are others too.
When we did the Examen Reginae collection a year ago, we wanted to take the greatest of the greatest and we wanted to study it. Not the recent greats, but the originals. So, we studied it and decided we wanted to do our own version of it. We have all the elements of the original, but we have also taken it beyond. We view this as classic clothing. We think that the greatest tailoring house in the world needs to be able to address all the great classics. If you’re a great orchestra you’ve got to play Beethoven, you’ve got to play Mozart and you’ve got to do it in a way that’s correct, that follows all of the rules but with innovation. And that’s what a great conductor or a great orchestra does. We view clothing design the same.
How do you feel about your men’s collection?
The men’s collection continues to be super strong, and this season we focused on early baseball.
What is that about?
I think it is part of the sort of sadness we feel as a nation, to maybe touch on something of another age when perhaps we could be proud of where we were from and what we did. We took something that was a nice example, I think that’s really part of it. The other thing is when we researched that period, we found fascinating clothes. We have pants with belt loops right in the centre, or these funny pleats. And as you look at early 1920s baseball pants, and you look at the pleat, it’s like, ‘What the hell is it for?’ As a tailor, that is interesting. You have to understand that if you make clothes all your life, you get bored making the same stuff all the time. So, you get interested by such things – baseball jackets from 1905, New York Yankees, Washington Senators, pre MA-1 and pre knit sleeve cuffs. They are fantastic pieces and they can be worn on all sorts of bodies, which makes sense as there wasn’t a unique pattern for every guy on the team.
We jazzed up the baseball jackets and used pure silk from Como for the lining so they can be worn inside-out. We do that a lot because our pieces are expensive, so we’re constantly trying to build extra value into them. You pay a lot now but you are going to be able to wear it in more ways and over a longer period, and that is part of our design philosophy. It’s what I call ‘Long-term Design.’ The target for everything we do – and it is avant-garde now – is to have a 25-year minimum lifespan for each piece. If it is going to cost like a Ferrari, it has got to last like a Ferrari and hold its value. 50-year-old Ferraris are still incredibly beautiful, so that is what we are trying to hit all the time.
Do the people you work with also contribute to achieving this target?
Yes. And that is part of the great period we’re in right now, where we have the reputation, the contacts and the respect to be able to work with the greatest people in the business to do the things that we need to make the greatest clothes. So we get fabrics developed and made just for us, and that’s fascinating. We also get great components, for example these mother-of-pearl shell buttons made for us by Claudio and Cinzia Fontana, who I think are maybe the greatest living button-makers in the world today. They are based near Parma in Italy. Their buttons are art. We think it is very important to show pieces that are made with these kinds of things while we still can, as it may not last forever.
We use organic fabrics like Grezzo Super 120’s Double-twist Cotton, woven for us by master-weaver Luigi Parisotto, who we work with on research fabrics. Originally, he only worked with cotton and linen, but we pushed him to do cashmere, wool, silk and other things. He is around my age, a little younger, and what is exciting about him is that he is one of the few people in the textile-making industry who decided not to close his family business, which spans three generations. He is a genius. He loves weaving fabric, not by hand like the Colombo family, but by machine. What he can do with a machine power loom is amazing – he is brilliant. He can set the loom himself, he loves to experiment and he loves to try new combinations. He is our research textile guy.
Where do you find your inspiration?
We do a lot of research. That’s the thing, when you are a tailor for 40 years, you get bored. We started looking at history about 13 years ago.
Do you look at old clothing?
Sure, we did a huge thing with Napoleonic style in the late 2000s, which completely started a trend. Nobody was doing it, then we started doing it and in a year it caught on, because people watch us. Eventually, Lagerfeld photographed it for Numero, but before that, he put it into Chanel. Galliano as well. When he did Napoleon style, he did it two seasons after us for both Dior and his own collections. They watched us. We did about five or six collections from that period. You can still go to the Musee de L’Armée in France and they have over 200 uniforms you can look at. I would go to the museum and spend half a day in there, just looking, and for a tailor it was very humbling because after seeing two or three pieces you can see a lot of what’s going on, and you begin to feel like, ‘God, we are nothing.’ There were people before us, as tailors, who blew us away. We are doing nothing today – crap. And that’s when I began to realise that we have to study historical tailoring.
What other historical periods have you been inspired by?
We got into medieval after that. Medieval was less tailoring. The technology of cutting and sewing clothes really wasn’t there. They were weaving, though. What they were really doing was dyeing, so all of our dye technology, 90% of it, is from our study of medieval dyeing techniques. That used to be a huge business, like in Florence in the 1400s there were 200 families dyeing. Each one had secrets they would keep until death of how to hit certain colours. It was a serious business. Different colours of clothes would dictate what class somebody came from. Colours like beige, tan, ecru, and brown were for the poorer classes, but if you saw somebody wearing black, get out of their way, because black was the most expensive colour to obtain. It was for ruling classes only because it had to be done over and over again with all sorts of different colours. Another ruling-class colour was red, which came from a very expensive root, and another was yellow, which used saffron. There were stories of the Florentine army dressing in red, and when their enemies first saw them before going into battle, they saw all that red and panicked, thinking, ‘Jesus, they have so much money and power, we can’t possibly beat them!’
Today it’s not quite the same, but back then the colour of clothes would actually signal where that person was in society – fascinating. That was what we got from medieval, and there are other periods too. That’s why we look at history. We also made pieces that are more the 1940s and 1910s, using wonderful fabrics like silk, cashmere, and linen, also from Luigi Parisotto.
We pursue long-term design so we have all these archive collections as well, and we’re continuing to build. Normally, in our showroom in Paris, we have the new research collection and then we have the archives. That’s pretty standard. For the stores, archive collections are good because they can continue pieces that we developed in earlier collections. The problem is, when we do this type of aggressive research and development, the stores can’t buy it all in one season, especially because our pieces are expensive.
How do you wish to be presented in stores? Do you have minimum requirements for buyers concerning new and archive collections?
Yes, we fight that battle a lot. Each case is different and we have challenges and issues based on that. We oftentimes think a store ought to be buying a little bit more of this and a little bit less of that. In the end, though, it is their company that runs and owns the store and it is our company that makes the clothes. We’re in an agreement where there is some sort of compromise. There is compromise all the time until you can have your own stores and put whatever you want in those stores.
Is that something you are looking to do?
Sure, we are trying to move the company to Venice in the next few years. Venice is very expensive, and the type of place we need is very particular. When we move, we are going to have something where people can come and see not just the store but the ateliers, too. They are going to see the clothes being made and they are going to see the process and the people making the clothes are going to see the customers. I think it is going to be a revolution, and it is going to be fantastic.