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Geoffrey B. Small

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  • Avantster
    ¤¤¤
    • Sep 2006
    • 1983

    #76
    Welcome, Geoffrey. I'm sure many of us would love to hear what you have to say.

    To insert images, it should look something like this:
    let us raise a toast to ancient cotton, rotten voile, gloomy silk, slick carf, decayed goat, inflamed ram, sooty nelton, stifling silk, lazy sheep, bone-dry broad & skinny baffalo.

    Comment

    • Mail-Moth
      Senior Member
      • Mar 2009
      • 1448

      #77
      Dear Geoffrey,

      Sorry I can't be of any further help.
      About the shirt, there's nothing to be done, since I've sent it back to Pollyanna quite a while ago, and then been properly refunded.

      But thanks for your kind proposition.
      I can see a hat, I can see a cat,
      I can see a man with a baseball bat.

      Comment

      • Johnny
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2006
        • 1923

        #78
        actually when I'm making a post i don't get that screen either, the one that avanster posted.

        Comment

        • lowrey
          ventiundici
          • Dec 2006
          • 8383

          #79
          the availability of the inser image function depends on which message editor interface you have selected in the user options. its in User CP > Edit Options > Misc options at the end. select Standard to have more options.

          However, all the button does is adds the url of the image inside the IMG tags.

          so basically, to post images, just put the URL of the image inside the image tags:

          [ img]http://www.website.com/image.jpg[ /img]

          (without the spaces)
          "AVANT GUARDE HIGHEST FASHION. NOW NOW this is it people, these are the brands no one fucking knows and people are like WTF. they do everything by hand in their freaking secret basement and shit."

          STYLEZEITGEIST MAGAZINE | BLOG

          Comment

          • Faust
            kitsch killer
            • Sep 2006
            • 37849

            #80
            Originally posted by Johnny View Post
            actually when I'm making a post i don't get that screen either, the one that avanster posted.
            Because you are automatically getting the "quick reply" window. You need to hit the "go advanced" button.

            Geoffrey, we obviously would like to hear your thoughts. You are more than welcome to respond. Please read this thread and it will make your navigation here easier.
            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

            Comment

            • hobo
              Senior Member
              • Jul 2009
              • 301

              #81
              Originally posted by philip nod View Post
              can some one explain to me how the colored buttons do anything but detract from the outfit?
              Originally posted by Johnny View Post
              I can't......they don't. Gratuitous.
              Originally posted by Johnny View Post
              just think that they make the jackets look a little "novelty". the fabrics look fantastic and the shapes are quite good too. but i think he's chasing the artisanal dragon too keenly with the buttons
              I thought the same thing when I first saw these pieces but now I own several all with the odd buttons, even though Geoffrey offered to change them for me.

              I think that you really have to see the buttons up close and listen to Geoffrey’s explanation of each one. Literally every button has its own story and it fits with the history of the jacket. For me they are an integral part now. I wouldn't dream of changing them just as I wouldn't dream of buying a jacket with odd coloured buttons from anyone but Geoffrey.

              I think sometimes you have to sacrifice a little of your aesthetic in order to gain a little soul.

              Geoffrey, tell 'em about the buttons, my friend.
              "I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." — Oscar Wilde

              Comment

              • Johnny
                Senior Member
                • Sep 2006
                • 1923

                #82
                way-hey! thanks Mike and Faust - i got more options now.

                i echo the sentiments encouraging GBS to post - let's hear about those buttons! :¬)

                Comment

                • Johnny
                  Senior Member
                  • Sep 2006
                  • 1923

                  #83
                  About 20 years ago i had a cdg Shirt shirt which was black and had different coloured, different sized soft cotton buttons, in pastel shades. i loved it, but i'd feel like a right fanny wearing it now

                  Comment

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

                    #84
                    Thanks to everyone for all their help... I am following up on all the suggestions from everyone and will get back on as soon as we get this worked out. Please bear with me, it is also quite busy here with regular work obligations.... Best wishes, Geoffrey

                    Comment

                    • zamb
                      Senior Member
                      • Nov 2006
                      • 5834

                      #85
                      Originally posted by Geoffrey B. Small View Post
                      Thanks to everyone for all their help... I am following up on all the suggestions from everyone and will get back on as soon as we get this worked out. Please bear with me, it is also quite busy here with regular work obligations.... Best wishes, Geoffrey

                      Sweet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
                      “You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”
                      .................................................. .......................


                      Zam Barrett Spring 2017 Now in stock

                      Comment

                      • delirium
                        Senior Member
                        • Sep 2008
                        • 164

                        #86
                        awesome, thanks for participating!

                        Comment

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

                          #87
                          Hello again, I think we have worked out the image posting technique. However, we are trying to provide you with a very thorough and complete overview of our design approach in regards to the button discussion and are discovering that there are character and image limits set for a single thread reply. Our feeling is that if we are going to participate seriously in a real design discussion, we do not wish to compromise on the completeness of our information and contributions to the discussion, so please bear with us as we must now re-edit our reply text and images in a manner that will work with the existing reply format limits. Sorry, thank you again for your kindness and patience.
                          Best wishes, Geoffrey

                          Comment

                          • Faust
                            kitsch killer
                            • Sep 2006
                            • 37849

                            #88
                            We shall wait :-) Also, you can always host images elsewhere and just provide links here. Of course it's cool for our forum to have these images presented here.
                            Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                            StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                            Comment

                            • random
                              Senior Member
                              • Dec 2007
                              • 974

                              #89
                              for posting pictures, im more inclined to recomment what ML said...

                              e.g, if your picture URL is

                              www.stylezeitgeist.jpg

                              then use the following code to post pictures, but please remove all the "*"'s


                              [img*]www.stylezeitgeist.jpg[/img*]

                              would def be interested to hear your comments and see some pictures. :-)
                              Last edited by random; 09-06-2009, 02:57 AM.
                              I don't exist.

                              Comment

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

                                #90
                                Some notes about our work and buttons (part 1 of 3)

                                Ok, we have worked out the technical problems involving image-posting and limits, thanks to all for their help and patience.

                                Please note we have purposely avoided divulging images of our recent work online now for many years due to extensive copying by industry competitors. Our presentations have been closed to industry press and photographers since 2001, and we do not post any of our recent collections in detail on our public sites. I therefore agree to provide SZ with some images for the thread based in good faith that they will be utilized solely for the intent and purpose of design discussion and clarifications as per the stated mission of SZ. However, we are aware that many designers, retailers and industry players are now watching SZ carefully, so if we discover any abuse of the information we provide to SZ, we will need to drop out immediately and abstain from continuing our participation. Hopefully, this will not be the case. Sorry, but we work in very tough business and are still around to say so. I hope everyone understands. That said, I will now continue with some issues regarding the current thread about my work and yes, buttons. I am sorry about the length, but I wish to do a thorough and complete explanation as my time available to be online with SZ is limited, I have production and deliveries to do, and a new collection to develop and show in Paris in under a month.

                                First, the real medium we are working with is the clothes, not images.

                                And the clothes we are making are really very special and need to be seen and touched in person to really get any understanding of them. I find it is very risky and compromising at the least, to be talking about and making design judgments about clothing solely from sparse and often very poor images online.

                                Clothes are like food...

                                In the end, you have to smell, taste, chew, feel, swallow and digest the food to understand what it really is. And looking only at pictures when it comes to really high-level stuff, is nothing short of ridiculous. In fact, some of the most beautiful images of food you can find, sit on the outside of packages or cans of some the worst products you can ever put in your body. Nice images take time, talent, skill and usually lots of money to produce (these types of skills don't come for free). So it falls in line with large industrial companies who have the volume and resources to blow money on photographers and images (instead of food quality) to come up with beautiful pics.

                                The rare, really educated customer, knows better and avoids the smokescreen. The vast majority however, are fooled, and proceed to buy the sh..., and eat it. You can eat packaged food, McDonald's etc. often beautifully photographed and well publicized, or you can eat a really good home-cooked meal made perhaps by your grandmother or mom which has no publicity... I think we can all agree, there is a difference in both quality, value, and experience.

                                Bear in mind, that next to food, nothing is more personal than your clothes. They are the only things that touch your skin and body all day long, all your life. For mlllenia, they have been the fundamental protection for your body from the elements and environment around you, and they have served always to determine your position, role and influence in the community and society around you as well.

                                Early in my career, I was hit by the sheer brutality of how much our society has devalued the work it takes to make a good piece of clothes. But it was only up until about 160 years ago that we did not have our clothes made specifically for us. Prior to the industrial revolution, for thousands of years going all the way back to the neolithic stone age period, people always had their clothes "made for them."

                                They were made by a tailor, or your mother, or someone who had the responsibility to make what oftentimes was your first and only defense against the outside elements--and often with a goal to make something that would last a lifetime, or even two, of wear.

                                Intense amounts of care and even love, in addition to toil, blood, sweat and tears went into the single garment, for the single person, that would last a lifetime.

                                And the person that created that garment was a far more esteemed member of the community than his or her equivalent today. If he or she did their job well, it may well save your life. The old english saying "my tailor is rich" did not arrive without having its many true examples. Yet a "tailor" or a "stitcher" or a "seamstress" in 1979 when I started out, and still today, is deemed as 3rd-World work, valued at less than 5 dollars a day. Something to be done by "someone else" somewhere else, probably without papers, for as little money as possible.

                                More money per hour is paid today in the west for cleaning your latrine than
                                making you a serious suit of clothes


                                In the meantime, customers have no idea who made, and what went into, the clothes they buy and wear. Workers who make the clothes have no idea who is going to wear their work and what their real needs are. The industrial revolution has entirely ripped out the human aspect and personal connection from clothing, and as such, totally devalued and degraded the entire thing. And when you take out the personal connection, the quality immediately drops--because the personal responsibility and reward feedback loop is gone. The people who make the clothes never make the entire product by themselves, and they never see or know the person who has to pay for, wear, and use the clothes. So, it is easier to "let a few things slip" here and there. This is the industrial system.

                                Somehow, I have ended up spending the last thirty years of my working life trying to survive this phenomenon, and now find myself uniquely prepared as we enter a paradigm shift in everything we do on the planet, including how we will dress ourselves.

                                Since 1979, our mission has been to elevate the Art and Science of making clothes by hand

                                By nature, our clothes are designed to be different than others. We believe that everybody wears clothes and that people talk with their clothes, saying who they are and who they want to be. The extremely competitive and tough global business we have been in now for the past 30 years has forced us to find niches where we have been able to maximize our strengths as a tiny, independent artistic house with technique and passion, in order to survive in a land of commercial and industrial giants who have been steadily eroding our ability to exist.

                                One of these niches is to design for the individual who does not want, or need, to conform and dress like "everybody else"

                                These people are few but very smart, and of course, very good dressers. They are also the people who have the courage and intelligence to be first in their groups, and followed by others. Leaders. For over thirty years, this has been our primary customer, and we have been committed to serving that customer in everything we do.

                                We are a true research house, having initiated hundreds of approaches, techniques and trends that have been adopted by the rest of the industry from so-called "cutting-edge" and "artisan" designers, to mega-designer brands like LVMH and Dolce & Gabbana, to H&M. Most of you don't know about it, because the industry doesn't want you to know about it for obvious reasons. And for decades, the industry has totally controlled the information that has been available to you. Fashion companies, generally stopped paying for research over ten years ago, they found that it was cheaper and easier to steal it. As a result much has been degraded and sadly, although I have paid a very high price myself, many many of my talented and dedicated colleagues have been pushed out of the game, including Maurizio Altieri.

                                A large part of my own story, is how one independent research designer has been able to continue to survive in this really difficult environment.

                                One key is reducing distribution and quantity. For example, CDG works with about 500 retail points worldwide a season, Rick Owens is now at about 300, Carpe Diem in its heyday, between 30 to 40. I prefer to work with less than 10.

                                The people in Italy near me who own 100 percent of Martin Margiela are often dissatisfied with the number of production pieces per model (NPPM) of the MMM collections, which at one time averaged 150 NPPM a season. Their production system and economics generally needed 300 NPPM a season. That's 300 pieces of one design, usually in one fabric, for one season, in the world. The CDG, and Junya main collections target average is around 30-60 NPPM a season. My average NPPM per season for the world is less than 5.

                                Ours is a completely different product, approach and concept.

                                Different than what most people know about or understand...we are not making an industrial product. They are. Even at 30 NPPM. Whatever the "artisan-made" hype-- they are producing using industrial sub-contractors, methods, materials, treatments and technologies...and often the very same resources, materials, processes and even patterns used by their competitors. Their interest and ability to change, adapt, innovate and serve the customer who does not want to be like anyone else is vastly different than ours. Their economics are also very different. They need critical volumes of business to maintain much larger structures of people, overheads, production minimums, and marketing to stay alive. As such, they need to compromise in every area that we do not.

                                This is part of the massive paradigm shift which began in 2008. We are at the end of the industrial age, and the beginning of something very, very different.

                                Perhaps some of it can be explained with how we look at and work,
                                with buttons...

                                (to be continued in my next reply thread)

                                Comment

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