Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Geoffrey B. Small

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • LOVE
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2007
    • 192

    Good God your work is inspiring

    Comment

    • Pumpfish
      Senior Member
      • Sep 2010
      • 513

      Stunning Geoffrey, the colours. It's beautiful to see what can be done with the freedom you have to construct, exactly as you want.
      spinning glue back into horses. . .

      Comment

      • Geoffrey B. Small
        Senior Member
        • Nov 2007
        • 618

        Why a touch of color is needed these days

        Dear LOVE and Pumpfish,

        Thank you very much for your kind comments. We do feel a little color, worked in the right ways is very important right now, last summer in Paris there was a sea of black in the Marais during men's week and it was not all good (if you get my drift). In fact, many of the longest running "blackest" spirits in the circuit were all agreeing it was getting time to move elsewhere a bit. This is also natural in life too. The best-dressed people know how to work with some color. This is especially true at a certain level of maturity, society, and taste. Now I am not talking about a Raf | Sander kaleidoscope of pink orange and cobalt blue all over your body, and we have and continue to do dark as much as anybody, and do it well, but especially for summer and especially if you live in sunny Italia or steamy Japan for example, it's key to really know a little something about your lighter weight fine fabrics, and how to use some color... and do it well with taste. In the very very deep northern lands, black alone may be fine, but down here in summer black alone simply doesn't cut it very well.

        It's an intellectual thing. And it's a cultural one as well. People see these head to toe "dark knights" walking around Venice in the middle of July or the Biennale week when the sun is hitting and cooking them (black absorbs all that light and all of its heat) at over 37 degrees centigrade or 95 Fahrenheit thinking they look great, and it's pretty sad because they don't. They stick out like a sore thumb. Fish out of water. And yes, tip everybody off that even if they spent some serious money on their stuff they are still culturally, ummm, shall we say discreetly... "gotta a little way to go." This is Italy, like food, rich or poor--it is not how much you spend, it is how well you eat that counts and gets respected. It appears anybody can have black "artisanal looking" clothes in their wardrobe these days (especially all over China and Shanghai now where Eth0s is), the truly advanced and enlightened have some other colors too. And as the black thing continues to grow in audience size, we need to keep in mind that the best dressers are always the ones who do not want to look like everyone else or be one to follow the pack, or mix with the crowd. We hate crowds. And we lead the packs, not follow them. Too much of a good thing is still too much. And right now there is too much black alone thinking and dressing out there. It doesn't have to be bright. Indeed one can learn to use navy, greys, beiges, olives and ecru, natural colors that can still be sombre, quiet and beautiful and yet more in harmony with the climate, temperature and nature around you at that time of the year in that part of the world where you are. We are after all, living in the hottest summer on record in the history of the world right now in 2015, right? So the SS15 collection is dark but also has a lot of play on new approaches with color, which we are continuing as well for SS2016 to help keep our clients- adequately well ahead of the pack...

        and on that note we are uploading something for you now...

        Thanks again LOVE and Pumpfish
        Cheers, Geoffrey & the Team

        Comment

        • Faust
          kitsch killer
          • Sep 2006
          • 37852

          Saw the new arrivals at Hotoveli yesterday - SO DAMN GOOD. And, I know we talk mostly menswear here, but the women's was astounding! Ladies, don't sleep on it and I hope Geoffrey can share more of the fall collection women's images.
          Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

          StyleZeitgeist Magazine

          Comment

          • Geoffrey B. Small
            Senior Member
            • Nov 2007
            • 618

            GBS at Hotoveli in New York

            .



            Thanks so much, Faust... Well very quickly, here are couple of graphic pieces from our AW2015 campaign that we can show
            SZ viewers right away. We are very excited to be back in New York and the U.S. market after many years. Hotoveli has the
            North American exclusive for our menswear this season and also many women's pieces that are also exclusive to the US &
            North America so of course, we would like to cordially invite all readers in the area to visit them and begin to try on and
            experience our work in person. Best wishes and thanks again, Geoffrey & the Team






            men's:









            women's:

            Comment

            • patR
              Junior Member
              • Apr 2015
              • 25

              All those SS15 pictures a few posts above look incredible. I'm in love with that collection. Thank you for creating such wonderful clothing. I look forward to seeing more of your work and would love to own a piece or two in the near future.

              Comment

              • AVerdantShore
                Senior Member
                • Jan 2011
                • 112

                Damn--I wish we could have stocked you back when I was helping out with the menswear buy there. Looks great, Geoffrey!

                Comment

                • Geoffrey B. Small
                  Senior Member
                  • Nov 2007
                  • 618

                  "Radicalissimmo" Paris video

                  .



                  Thanks patR and AVerdantShore,


                  Now up:

                  The official video shot by Jerome Chichet in Paris of our "Radicalissimmo" men's collection
                  presentation for SS2016 last month. Another remarkable experience with so many remarkable
                  people. Many thanks to everyone who was involved. For photos of the show you can go here (thanks to SZ-mag for all the coverage), hope you enjoy viewing it as much
                  as we had doing it….









                  .

                  Comment

                  • jakubtoronto
                    Junior Member
                    • Jul 2015
                    • 12

                    Originally posted by Geoffrey B. Small View Post
                    .



                    Thanks patR and AVerdantShore,


                    Now up:

                    The official video shot by Jerome Chichet in Paris of our "Radicalissimmo" men's collection
                    presentation for SS2016 last month. Another remarkable experience with so many remarkable
                    people. Many thanks to everyone who was involved. For photos of the show you can go here (thanks to SZ-mag for all the coverage), hope you enjoy viewing it as much
                    as we had doing it….









                    .
                    This was a terrific show Geoffrey!! Congrats again and on your new accounts in the US, I will be in NY before the end of the summer and surely will have a look. You have left a lasting impression here in Toronto, I've received some great feedback on the FW15 and SS16 shows from friends/clients.

                    Comment

                    • nictan
                      Senior Member
                      • Jul 2009
                      • 885

                      some images taken from inside the studio, in cavarzere venice, of the production process.

                      larger images: http://www.eth0s.net/pages/exclusive...b-small-studio



















                      Comment

                      • Geoffrey B. Small
                        Senior Member
                        • Nov 2007
                        • 618

                        Via Spalato: beyond the photos (part 1)

                        Thanks so much Nic and to Matteo Carcelli for his beautiful shots. It was great to have you all over here in the workrooms, we hope to see more of our dealers in the future here where we create all the clothes.

                        In reference to some recent discussions taking place on another thread, I will take the liberty here to use the photos above of Via Spalato to emphasize that this is the total opposite of a Moldavian outsource factory op and the mindset that agrees to and performs such decisions and thinking. Here, 10 of us now work at one thing and one thing only- to create the best clothes human beings can make in the world today. That is all we are driven to do. And to do that we need great human beings and we accept the fact that we need to be able to pay for them and keep them working with us. So, we don't do anything to "cut" or "save" on our labor costs.

                        In fact, we are raising them. Every day. We are one of the only companies in our industry at the moment in all of Italy that is hiring . In less than 2 years, we have already tripled our staff size and we intend to continue even more. Some are now even coming from beyond Italy (one from Spain and soon one from the US) as we build a super world-class team. You see, we believe in human beings when they are trained right, treated with respect, and given the right atmosphere and environment to thrive in and reach their true potential. And it is working. That is how we believe this little revolution is slowly going to win this game in the future. We have discovered that doing everything in-house, when done the right way, is not more expensive, but actually less expensive, more efficient, and much better at creativity and quality than outsourcing. That is heresy for any student of classical US (and now global) business-school management. But it all comes down to how intelligent and how great you want your organization, your product, and your art, to be. Several leading MBA programs in Italy have already invited us to speak to them about this revolutionary new philosophy of business and managerial thinking in the luxury fashion industry precisely because it is so contrarian to the current norm which now has overtaken even some of our most revered brands in the "SZ" family of designers.

                        But for me, I am done with all the compromises of working for somebody else, be it a licensee, a backer, or partners. Some can see the production of their ideas suddenly being shifted out to a place and a concept like a Moldavian production program and all its ramifications, and find it acceptable for them. But not me. I couldn't when it happened to me years ago with my Italian license deal, and I can't today.

                        Now don't get me wrong. Rick Owens, Carol Christian Poell, Maurizio Altieri and I all started out in the circuit in the same generation. I go way back with all of them. My first retail store client in the world was the same as Rick's. We were both with Charles Gallay at the same time and we almost showed together in the mid-90's in Paris at Charles' request long before Rick ever showed in Paris or even New York by himself. When Gallay retired and closed the doors of his last store on Sunset Blvd, the only collections he still believed in were in that store, and they were Rick Owens (that he was making himself in LA at the time) and us (that we were making in Boston). My first agent in Milan in the late 90's was Carol Christian Poell's first agent as well for the world, Daniele Ghiselli. And Maurizio and I both shared our first presentation experiences showing next to each other on the banks of the Seine in tents at Jean Pierre Fain's legendary original Paris sur Mode. Over the years, we each went our different ways, and for better or for worse, took different paths and destinies as we went along. More often than not, our collections would find themselves hanging in the same stores around the world at various times in our careers. I respect and admire each one of these colleagues and their contributions, as well as many others, and more often than not, and more often than most people here will ever know, understand the reasons behind why certain things have gone in certain ways, if you will.

                        For my part I had fought a 20-year battle to be an independent working in America, not necessarily by choice (there was a reason both Rick and I eventually moved to Europe). By the late 90's, there were some very huge challenges in keeping that battle alive. And I, like so many others in the game at that time including Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, the Capasa brothers at Costume National, Raf Simons, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Schoenberger, Ann Demeulemeester, Dean and Dan at D2, Jean Colonna, Martine Sitbon, John Richmond, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, and yes Rick Owens too, and so so many exciting and good design people at that time who were facing or had faced similar pressures, basically threw in the towel and if we could- if we had gotten to a certain level in the game- started to talk with the swarms of Italian System fashion producers and their agents about a possible license and production deal to make our collection in Italy. And make no mistake about it, while you may be laughing at some of those names for what they represent now in fashion today, back then they were doing very good work. And I mean very good, all of them, believe me. Their work has changed because the system changed it and changed them. And that is part of why you must understand a designer's processes to understand his or her design results. And why the selection of the production strategy is so critical to the final design and characteristics of the product created from it. Once you go with the "System," the system will start to design your collections more than you.

                        Production dictates design. Always.

                        But first, the system people had to get you hooked and reeled in. They threw you a tempting cocktail of ideas: money, backing, incredible technical capability, access to beautiful Italian fabrics, way more press and magazine coverage for you and your work, the "big show" in Paris, a whole new level of distribution and growth for your collection and the realization of what your design dreams were hoping to accomplish for the past few decades of your life (instead of eating packaged ramen every day so you could make your payroll tomorrow and your rent on Monday and just keep your dream alive). That was the courting phase, and boy for all of us, it sounded great.

                        You see, that was the game in those days. Get started and go as far as you can as an independent, then get yourself signed in Italy with the right producer and get to the big-time numbers with the System. Once you got to the big numbers, there were a variety of strategies and things you could do next. Jean-Paul Gaultier led the way with Gibo Spa in the late 80's and rocketed to becoming a global star. God, if even a french indy star moves his production to Italy, then that has got to mean something, right? Damn right. Gaultier was followed in 1990 by Helmut Lang at Gibo after a less than super-stint with Zamasport, and let me tell you people… Helmut at Gibo rocked. And Gibo was selling Helmut to the world at Daniele Ghiselli in Milan, and that was why both Carol and I and even Raf Simons for his first collection, all ended up there. Then there was Alexander McQueen, who rather than waste a decade or so actually trying to build and grow an independent business that actually sold and made anything, saw right through it all and appraised the game at the time for exactly what it was.

                        The name of the game was name. So McQueen, using his extensive local resource strengths by being not only the genius that he was but a genius in London (where if nothing else, if you had the stuff--and he had it, you could pull off some pretty amazing shows for the international press that would be seen), simply did 4 impossible-to-ignore live catwalk presentations over several seasons with no intention of selling a single design, but rather to build his name as fast as he could to simply to attract the attention and the securing of a deal with the right backer. That backer turned out to be Gibo once again, and the rest was history.

                        Gibo was a unique power in the field, a Tuscan producer that had been bought outright by the Japanese powerhouse Kashiyama/Onward to lock up both rising avant-garde designer talent and research and wider distribution and production possibilities using that talent and research across their main markets in Japan and Asia where they were, and still are, a mass market force-- one of the earlier examples of global investment in designer Paris level collections, and not the easiest people to deal with. I can say this, because at one point in my career they were talking with us about a deal as well, and I felt like I was being handled by a mafia group, figuratively, if not literally (the real mafia is well involved in our industry but not with them), but these were some of the real original system players in the game, and they knew how to play it rough when it was to their advantage. Especially with designers. But it wasn't just them... ask anyone who knows what Ford, Del Sole, and the Kering people did to Hussein Chalayan back in those days, for example.

                        Eventually, in December 1999, I did sign a deal and after just a few quick months into my "Made in Italy" licensing deal arrangement in Italy with an Italian producer, I found myself suddenly by force in a very sad place called Baiu Mare deep inside Transylvania (really), in the country of Romania, watching my collection being made there because the Italians with whom I had signed the contract and given the rights to produce, distribute, and finance the collection with my name on it, had suddenly decided they did not want to make it anymore in Italy.

                        (to be continued....)



                        .

                        Comment

                        • Geoffrey B. Small
                          Senior Member
                          • Nov 2007
                          • 618

                          (continued from above) Via Spalato: beyond the photos

                          .



                          The 1999 article in MilanoFinanza announcing the licensing deal
                          for our collection to be made in Italy, on the same page that Dolce
                          & Gabbana were claiming to be reaching the 230 billion lire annual
                          sales mark. The news of the licensing deal quickly generated press
                          coverage in Europe and at home...







                          Article in the Boston Herald announcing the licensing deal and my decision to
                          close our 20-year old Boston firm and move everything to the Veneto region in
                          order to concentrate 100 percent on the new made in Italy project.








                          A french magazine spread in Paris announcing the Italian production
                          deal and its goal to make a new made in Italy production version from
                          new materials of our successful recycled collections that we had made
                          famous from Boston.






                          YOU SEE Romania was the Moldavia of its time in the late 90's and early naughties.
                          Since then, as you can learn in the RAI 3 piece I posted already on the Rick Owens' thread, Romania has been used up and spit out in less than a decade by the slash-and-burn economic policies of the Italian Fashion Production System mafia.

                          "For the price of one Italian, I can have 10 Romanians" my producer told me at the time- "Made in Italy is not important anymore… we can say Made in the EU instead."

                          Further excuses were then added that after months of promising me that technically they had everyone they needed to make our collection (which was technically very special and tough because of its recycled approach--it was unique then and we were famous for it), that in fact:

                          1. they were afraid it would cost too much-- the labor costs would be prohibitive to produce our ideas which we had been producing for 14 seasons in Boston,

                          and then 2. the real whammy, that in fact, they didn't even really have the people that knew how to do it. After searching for months, there was no laboratorio in the area that either had the skill or the desire to produce our collection as it was intended to be done. The pieces were too much work and not in enough volume to make it worth it for them to even try. The licensee had already botched the sales of the first season so badly that our collection sales had dropped by about 70 percent from the previous season which had been run by us and produced in Boston that our production numbers were totally reduced making us very unattractive to get made in an Italian factory.

                          So, even though I had signed a contract with them to do GBS made in Italy, I suddenly learned the hard way that it was all turning out to be a lie and a scam. They really had no intention of making my collection in Italy, they just wanted to put my name on their stuff, not mine, that they could make wherever the margin could be the highest.

                          And there I was, stuck in a factory with 80 people in Baiu Mare and 1 month to make 50 different styles with an average run of about 5 pieces each. Not a very easy job at all. The producers were so incompetent, they now had to force me to go in and run the production myself. I did so and the 80 people worked hard and with the supreme help of 5 of their top people, one of whom could speak some English, we got it all done together. While I was there, I saw and felt a sadness that pervade an entire people, culture and society that I will never forget.

                          The factory owner was a big fat guy ex-Communist apparatchik for the Ciaucescu regime (do you know what that means?) And when he discovered I was an American designer, suddenly offered the factory and all of its people to me for rent on a monthly basis of 50 thousand dollars a month whenever I wanted it. Unlike all of the others in that place, he seemed fine and happy.

                          Women in the town were naked. They wore almost no clothes and they attacked any Italian men working there on production jobs like swarms of mosquitoes. You had to be careful. The problem of Italian men falling prey to women in Romania was rampant. Back home in the Veneto one family after another was getting destroyed because of it. Daddy has left home for someone he met in Romania. And for the women in Romania, it wasn't love--it was survival and a way to get out. It was business pure and simple. If it wasn't outright prostitution, it was damn close. Eastern Europe was already well on its way to becoming a world leader in the trafficking, prostitution, porn and sex industries, so it should have come as no suprise. But the impact when you are there is a whole different ballgame. It got so bad, that producers had come to realize a new internal rule of not allowing any of their tecnicos ("production technicians") to go to work in Romania for any period longer than 3 weeks to reduce the chances of getting hooked by a Romanian lover. The guys would disappear (they were always men) into the country and not show up for work for months on end.

                          And this also was part of the system, a cost of doing the business.

                          I was informed by the staff that the factory worked for everyone Hilfiger, Boss, H&M et al... and then was shown one very large room where a mountain of garments all in the same fabric, and all in the same pant model were piled from the floor to the ceiling. It was a weird sight, there must have been 10 thousand pieces thrown into that room onto the not-so-clean floor and then on to each other, a real mountain of cloth. The cloth was grey and when you touched it you could feel a lot of poly, and the pieces were half made but the labels were already sewn in: Zara. I was quickly told that Zara was their biggest customer by numbers of pieces, and that they paid the least per piece and most importantly they paid the slowest of all. Hence, the mountain of unfinished pants stuffed into the huge dark room, and the thought that even though the wages and the labor costs were so low, and the work so hard, and so much of it, that the buyer would still delay payment for all that work and all those people--or maybe not even end up paying for it at all. Always a risk in this end of the game. I felt the sadness and remembered the name on the label.

                          When I found out that the average pay for workers in Romania and the plant I was standing in was significantly less than 200 bucks a month (and that no, it was not enough for people living there to get by on, even with their cost of living where they were, as they told me continually all through the month I was there), I asked my producer on the phone if he could at least give the top five people that had helped me there another 50 each for the month that they worked with, and for me, so hard and so well. He immediately and bluntly refused, and hung up on me, as if I too was one of them.

                          And in some ways I was. I did not even have the cash in my own pocket at that time to give out the 50 to the five people myself. I too was waiting for a payment from the producer. And I was stuck here against my will in this sad, sad place far away from both home and dream, a puppet with all the strings being pulled from above to make me do whatever they wanted me to do.

                          At that point, I decided that the license world, the backed designer, and that life, was over for me, and that one way or another I was going to get out of it, and spend the rest of my f___ing life doing something about this sick industry, and doing something better for anyone anywhere that was fed up with the corporate bullshit, the slavery, the abuse, and the degradation of this Art which had brought us all to our knees, most of all the designers, the so-called creatives, the artists,… those who were supposed be the ones to bring in new ideas, forms and beauty into this genre but in the end are just little more than fancy mouthpieces, PR pawns, and names to use up and spit out when the time is right.

                          I never went back to Romania again.




                          (to be continued..)

                          Comment

                          • unwashed
                            Senior Member
                            • Dec 2008
                            • 694

                            Wow, thanks for the story so far. a very good read, very insightful and informative

                            The struggle is real in this industry, this isn't something new. Would really be great if there would be a documentary about this from the designers perspective, but they of course would need to jeopardize their careers for this.
                            It is a survival of the fittest...
                            Grailed link

                            Comment

                            • Geoffrey B. Small
                              Senior Member
                              • Nov 2007
                              • 618

                              Dear Unwashed and fit magna caedes, thanks for your comments, both very appreciated.
                              Next part coming right up... cheers, Geoffrey

                              Comment

                              • zamb
                                Senior Member
                                • Nov 2006
                                • 5834

                                thanks a lot for this Post Geoffrey. as a student of this business I am very much aware of your experiences, albeit not with the kind of firsthand knowledge that comes with your own personal experience and the perplexity and angst involved.

                                I think the previous two posts (and the one to follow) is a must read
                                by anyone who really want to honestly know how this industry works and the sacrifice that is always needed to accomplish what we do.
                                This industry and its effects have worn down, eaten away at and killed many of its greatest practitioners.......
                                “You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”
                                .................................................. .......................


                                Zam Barrett Spring 2017 Now in stock

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X
                                😀
                                🥰
                                🤢
                                😎
                                😡
                                👍
                                👎