In the last few years, as fashion refocused on finance, the word "luxury" stopped indicating artisanal and exclusive products to define corporate and industrial power. Yet, only a few decades ago, luxury indicated not branded items, but pieces made by skilled craftsmen using high quality materials and techniques.
In the February issue of Ural-based magazine WTF (What's The Fashion?), a publication for design, architecture and fashion fans, I talk with independent designer Geoffrey B. Small about his vision of luxury, based on high quality, craftsmanship and ethical principles.
A pioneer in avant-garde design, Geoffrey B. Small started his business in the mid-to-late '70s making clothes with an old Singer sewing machine, becoming a bespoke made-to-measure designer in Boston.
In the '90s Small was also invited to showcase his menswear collections in Paris, where he imported a radically new style, something that could be defined timeless classic yet relaxed with a quirky and twisted historical element thrown in. Think about a character from Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice or from August Sander's collections of portraits who may have stumbled upon a time machine and may have travelled into the future and the past hanging around with artists, poets and dandies, and you may get an idea of what his hand-tailored collections look like.
Hailed as a rising talent by Yves Saint Laurent's chairman Pierre Bergé, in 1994 Small was the third American designer in history to be officially recognised and listed on the official calendar of the Chambre Syndicale. Around the same time fashion started a strange mutation: after the early 1990s Chanel expanded dramatically increasing the fortunes of owners Alain and Gerard Wertheimer, while free-wheeling deal makers Bernard Arnault and François Pinault focused on the rise to the top of their groups by acquiring and merging one company after the other.
Geoffrey B. Small decided to go his own way: as early as 1996 he pioneered the use of recycled design in his menswear collections, launching over thirty technique innovations that were later adopted by many other famous fashion brands and houses. After a licensing agreement with an Italian manufacturer didn't work out, in 2001 he decided to go solo, making special clothes by hand in his apartment in Cavarzere, outside Venice, where he currently produces limited edition collections consisting in 500 pieces per season (made with very special textiles from rare mills such as Fratelli Piacenza and Tessuti Parisotto) for selected shops all over the world, proving that his combination of high quality and smaller quantities worked out pretty well even in times of crisis.
I'm embedding at the end of this post a preview of the magazine to give you an idea of the contents (in Russian) and lookout. With many thanks to Geoffrey B. Small for the wonderful feedback he provided for the readers of WTF about the contemporary fashion industry, tailoring, craftsmanship and textiles.
Image credits for this post
The super limited edition ETWJ04 handmade jacket; one of only 4 pieces of its kind made in the entire world. Of these, just 2 pieces were created by hand for all of Europe exclusively for Persuade in Bilbao. The pieces also feature special buttons in real horn made for the designer in Parma, Italy; cloth covered buttons made in the designer's studios, and real hand sewn buttonholes in luxurious pure silk Bozzolo Milano Reale threads (it requires at least 8-10 minutes to make each of them). Each piece was also hand dyed in the designer's workrooms using a special process that requires over 6 hours for each piece to achieve its unique colours, patina effects and softness. Pieces are hand-signed and numbered by the designer. Courtesy and Copyright Geoffrey B. Small
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