The show was great! And the venue was awesome! I was surprised that not many people went, it really was worth going, music selection was too experimental for me but Geoffrey's work was so impressive and well constructed that makes this detail very irrelevant!
Dear Cain,
Thanks for your kind word and thanks for coming to the show. As I believe this may have been your first time to ever see one of our shows, please let me explain that the crowd size at the show is entirely my fault. I do not invite many people to my shows, I do not work with any press agents, and I have been purposefully out of the fashion press and media loop for many years, for reasons that I have outlined in detail previously in this thread. So while the crowd was small, it was very carefully selected, and the quality of the guests I can assure you, was the top of the mountain.
I am also not sure you understand the nature and reason behind the show itself, which was not to show and promote a fashion collection to an industry that I avoid and abhor, but instead was dedicated to families- and in particular people very, very close to us in our own families right now who have just passed away, or are in the process of doing so very soon. Like the people with Yohan Serfaty this season, we too, are in mourning.
So intimacy, not a lot of people, was paramount to this presentation, from our reception for the guests with white jacket cocktail service, to the beautiful interior design and runway work by the great art installation architect Paul Bradley and his family (who also walked for us in our show), and the contributions of so many others.. including those experiencing big losses and deep pain in their own lives at that very moment, this was really and truly a family affair.
I hope you can begin to understand that that was the point of doing the show at all in the first place, and that our clothes for us this time, were little more than window dressing... the proper accoutrement to a ceremony dedicated to love, togetherness, and sharing precious time with precious people on this precious earth.
And so, I invite you to look beyond the window dressing in the shop window and step inside the store... and please understand that my soundtrack was not just a selection of music for fashion models to walk to (they never are), but rather, an intense story in audio about a real life. And each word and each piece of sound in that track forms a part of that story and that life, from the first breathe to the last.
It was not in any way meant to be 'experimental'. It is the story I had to tell- and what I had to say- nothing more and nothing less. And for some, that story was resonant. One of our guests, Kurt from KH in Cologne, was so touched by the track that he came backstage and immediately asked me for it, so I gave him my backup copy CD as a gift for him. He didn't know why, but he said that he had to get the soundtrack from me. And he did.
So once again, I thank you, and hope that after reading this, you may begin to expand your understanding of what you saw and heard that night and perhaps further augment your experience and memory of it, and its real underlying message. And as you begin to discover our work, and experience your first show with us, I hope you will also begin to realize that there is much more than just construction, fabrics, or aesthetic design behind our clothes and what we do. And that we are never concerned with having a lot of people either liking us, buying our clothes, or coming to our shows in Paris. Less is more. We are not for everyone, and never will be.
In the meantime, I will try to put something together soon on the show that we can post up here in SZ. But we have a lot of other commitments and obligations that we have to take care of at the moment first. Thank you again for your kindness and understanding, and of course, for attending our presentation.
Best wishes,
Geoffrey
for everyone involved with the show
JUST ARRIVED our latest collection of extreme handmade design works... at one of the most unique and personal designer retailers in the world- Masato Yoshihara's legendary Al Select store in Kichijoji Tokyo, Japan- where Masato and his wife Hiroko, have presented the most cutting edge and advanced pieces from many of the world's best independent avant-garde creators for many years inside perhaps the smallest and most power-packed designer retail space on the planet; all to an extensive waiting list of dedicated and loyal customers from all over Japan. Images: video of Koos Faber from the recent July 2013 GBS show in Paris in the windows of the store (courtesy Al Select). Note: we are just now informed by Masato and Hiroko that the entire delivery was sold out in about three days. A big heartfelt thank you to all of the loyal clients who participated in these acquisitions.
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OUR NEWEST EXAMPLES of extreme handmade shoes were just completed for Rosa Orrantia's
Persuade in Bilbao. Only twenty pairs in four special designs were created and built in San Zenone
degli Ezzelini, and finished at Cavarzere Venezia, as a part of our ongoing collaboration with
Giuseppe Rebesco, one of Italy's last remaining master historical shoe craftsmen. Each of the shoes
were entirely hand cut from special Italian Vicentina calfskin or recycle vintage garment leathers and
finished with pure calfskin linings and elegant all leather confezione ago sole constructions.
You can read more about our extreme handmade shoe design work, or Rosa Orrantia's Persuade in
Bilbao, on the GBS thread here on StyleZeitgeist.com at the links below:
about our shoes: http://www.stylezeitgeist.com/forums...132#post420132
about Persuade in Bilbao: http://www.stylezeitgeist.com/forums...027#post405027
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Would you like to list some of your distributors online?
I was not easy to find your clothes...
Looks like Ethos in Shanghai got a nice new shipment recently.
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde
StyleZeitgeist Magazine
I've just discovered this thread and I must say that this is the stuff I'd like to wear everyday. Amazing work.
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Dear Church of Tiamat,
Thank you for your kind post. Yes, that is a big part of our mission. You can indeed wear our work everyday. And when you experience how you feel when you wear our pieces, you will. Some of our clients even sleep with our clothes on. It's always a struggle to convey over a digital medium here, but what we do, and what we are designing, is not just visual, it's the comfort of our design's experience that we have been focusing on for over 3 decades. We believe our pieces must offer a level of wearing performance for our customers that simply does not exist with any other. That is why we make our clothes by hand- really by hand. The hand work component in our pieces is higher than any other designer collection at our level in the world. There are some great designers out there and I respect each of them… but their product is not made by hand. It is made by machine in factories, and the difference between what they do, and what we do, is like night and day. Especially when you feel the clothes on you. And not only do we design and build them to be worn, we also build them to last. Our goal for each piece in fact, is a minimum 10-15 years of wear for our owners. Many are breaking the 25-30 year barrier now. We believe really great avant-garde design has to be designed with a 25-year view and beyond. If you ever run across a 30 year-old GBS, maybe you will understand. In the meantime, unlike so many others, we must not sacrifice this intense and unique quality for brand growth and distribution. Which leads me to my next reply…
Dear Palgrave,
Sorry, but I am not sure I understand your question regarding "distributors online." If you are looking to buy our work online, perhaps if you read this thread on what we do more thoroughly, you will understand our work, and more importantly, what it stands for- a little better. We do not allow any online shopping sales of our work and... for many, many reasons already listed in previous posts over the past years... are not at all interested in doing so.
We have no interest to be the biggest "designer" in the business….we don't do gym or go to discotheques, we don't have any time for that, we just work on our clothes 24/7. We don't have others "dealing with all the artisans." We are the artisans. We aren't looking for a "backer." Our customers are our backers. We don't have time to chase the press, or push and manage distribution across tens of dozens of stores who don't have a clue as to how to begin to represent and service the clientele of our level of the business. We don't care about anything other than just to make the best handmade clothes in the world, for the best customers in the world. That alone is our focus. Finding out how to find us and own our work is not about being "easy." If you want the best, you need to work a little harder to both acquire it and find it. And really, finding out where you can buy our work is not really that difficult, a quick google search should answer most of your question.
With respect and best wishes,
Geoffrey
ONE NEW EXAMPLE OF WHAT WE ARE ABOUT : This new extremely rare superlux ETC01
handmade topcoat in pure Piacenza Alashan Cashmere with pure Como silk print mosaic
patchwork lining story, is one of only two pieces created for the entire world this season.
Featuring our new "Accident Dye" hand dye technology, one piece was made for Johnbull
Private labo in Japan. The other piece was built for Minority Rev also in Japan. Priced to retail
this year at around 500,000 Japanese yen, and designed to last and hold its value for decades,
each of the two ETC01's were individually built, hand dyed, finished, hand-signed and numbered
entirely in our workrooms in Cavarzere Venezia, and required over 58 working hours to complete
each piece. Each piece has its own totally unique hand dyed patterns, colorations, and mottled
effects and represents the cutting-edge of our industry-leading extreme handmade clothing
technology and artistic research, while also providing its owner with one of the most beautiful,
comfortable, and wearable pieces of clothing in the world.
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^this is beautiful inside out, the hours you've put in to each creations of yours is making everything timeless..
So there is absolutely no machine work on this pieces?
Ha ha, dear Cain, not so fast... and not at that price!... while we maintain the highest component of handwork in our limited edition collection pieces across all of our designs of any designer currently showing at the Paris designer collection level, and are currently developing some of the first 100% hand sewn clothing pieces of their type in the world... the ETC01's 500K Japanese yen pricing does not at all reflect a garment of its level and complexity of construction that is totally free of using a sewing machine to build it, especially by us. To do so, would push the retail pricing up by a factor of at least 10 fold. So you would be looking at about 45-50 thousand euro piece instead of a 4-5000 euro piece, which while feasible in our private client bespoke services and well within our mission and artistic technical interests, currently falls a bit outside our current authorized retail dealers' market and budget targets. And these are our partners to whom we present our collections to in Paris, so we must take things step by step... The 2 pieces shown above were constructed with about 72 percent use of purely manual techniques without a machine. For example, we spent about a day setting up the patterns manually on old fashioned paper (no CAD), and super-carefully laying out and cutting, one coat at a time (no layering-no cutting machines-using only very serious Japanese or antique Wiss USA scissors) the 200-plus euro a meter pure Alashan cashmere cloth from Fratelli Piacenza, the oldest woolen mill in the world (founded 1733) and the world’s most respected cashmere fabric makers... who spend about 70 working hours on their end just to weave and finish the incredible cloth to achieve its amazing drape, softness and characteristics (not included in our total time number). More hours are then spent carefully deciding, designing and then cutting the intricate patchwork design lining pieces out of the 4 different Como silks... each single-ply, not layered (if you know anything about cutting operations, you may begin to understand that we are using the most time-consuming approaches possible on each of these steps). The special hand dyeing work took no less than over 14 hours of intense work to reach the precise final mottled patina color and effect for each of the two pieces. The real working sleeve buttonholes like all of our buttonholes, as well as the button attachment work, are not machine done but 100% hand stitched. A total of 10 hand stitched buttonholes (each one requires 8-10 minutes to cut and sew, over 2 hours was spent just on the buttonholes and button attachment for the single coat) in luxurious pure silk Bozzolo Reale Milano Seta thread (which also takes longer to sew with than regular cotton or polyester threads) were required for each of the 2 coats. All of the beautiful besom and welt pockets were hand cut and assembled by us without the use of any welting or automatic machinery as is generally used in factory operations that take a fraction of the time our approach takes. And that does not even touch upon our hand finishing and delivery prep work, which also stands totally apart from the rest of the industry, and required another 4 and half hours of my own personal work for each of the 2 special pieces before we could put them in the boxes to Japan.
A machine was used to execute stitches for long main structural seams such as center-front, center-back, sides, sleeves, and many attaching seams which were very carefully and very precisely performed using our wonderful state-of-the-art Juki industrial straight-stitch machine by one of our top tailoring team members at the Cavarzere workrooms. We can and wish to perform these operations using purely hand stitching techniques without using a single machine, but the time required would be ten times the total working time of the piece and therefore push the pricing into an entirely different level of market and client (which we are in fact, developing at the moment). Basically, we would have to perform all of the long seams that we used the Juki for by hand needle using a millenia-old backstitch that would provide the strength and security of modern machine's lockstitch. The difference in time is dramatic (it is not by accident that Isaac Singer's invention of the sewing machine is directly linked to the history of the industrial revolution) and to arrive at anything close to a currently reasonable price point/value relationship for our stores-must be respected, although we are intent on the beauty that can be achieved with the handstitched version and are in the process of pursuing it.
Remember also, we are not working in a Bangladesh sweatshop, but in the highly developed Veneto region of Northern Italy (where the gross regional product exceeds the gross national product of Switzerland and Austria combined) with fully-legal highly-experienced (our 2 top tailoring masters not including myself have a combined working experience of over 65 years) and highly-trained employees who are paid what they are truly worth and protected to the full extent of European labor laws. Note also that when I refer to using a machine in our workrooms it is completely different than the way it is done in a typical Italian or otherwise, factory making a designer collection of clothing. Our process involves a single, highly trained and paid artisan who normally makes the piece from beginning to end, whereas a factory uses assembly-line workers, who are far less skilled and less paid, who work only on single task operations all day long with no concept of final form or objective in a robot-like repetitive manner, and are unable to follow and build a product completely by themselves. This approach is used by the vast majority of designers and firms to save money in production costs and human training, commitment and investment, and in my own view from over 3 and half decades of experience, consistently yields far poorer results for creativity, artisanal quality, long-term and overall social value, and product personalization. Perhaps, even more importantly, this approach has consistently proven itself to be economically unsustainable over the lifetimes of it's workers and the firms and yes, the countries, that utilize it.
Note also, that unless a designer owns and operates 100% of his/her production process, a very expensive and managerially difficult-if not impossible approach for most, he or she cannot avoid working in the industrial manner. Very, very few designers completely control their production from front to back the way we do. And virtually all of them must subcontract their production work out to other firms, who must always adapt the designs to industrial manufacturing norms and processes. The reasons for this are both economic, and technical-logistical and are too complex for me to explain to you in this thread at this time as I must attend to other obligations with our work. Perhaps another time....
I hope you understand some of these concepts and I hope this answer was helpful.
And thanks for your question.
Best wishes, Geoffrey
Last edited by Geoffrey B. Small; 10-13-2013 at 01:56 PM.
Geoffrey,
Its always brings me great joy as I read and you continue to educate many about the true substance contained in this metier that we do...........that it isnt about flash and hype but pushing the craft of garment making to the highest level of Art that can be realized in it.
I am reading and showing this to a friend right now, who is a tailor for more than 40 years and he is just admiring it and proclaiming "I would wear that every day!"
Your work is a special work for a special kind of client!
blessings to you my friend!
“You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”
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Zam Barrett Spring 2017 Now in stock
Bravo Geoffrey! I'm really happy to see that someone is doing fashion business in a good / ethical and professional way! I know that in time I will have one of your pieces on me, I was really fascinated on your last show in Paris.
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Dear Zam, always a pleasure to hear from you. Thanks for the kind comments. As one of the few, and I emphasize, the very few, designers in this forum who are really making their own stuff, you too are an inspiration to us. And your comments and support mean a lot to me. With all the talk about artisans out there, talk is pretty cheap these days. And the fakers are running rampant and multiplying like bunnies. Real practitioners you can now count on your fingers. Please keep up the good work on your side of the ocean.
Dear Cain, thank you so much for your kind comments, and thank you for coming to our Paris presentation. For Spain, and all of southern europe, we have just completed a new collection of works for Persuade in Bilbao and cordially extend our invitation to you to make a visit and view them if you are able. Best wishes, Geoffrey
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One of the largest collections of our works ever to be made available in Southeast Asia,
is now arriving in Singapore at Earn Chen's legendary Surrender store in the Raffles Hotel.
The expansive collection of super limited edition pieces all made by hand at our workrooms
at Cavarzere Venezia feature a vast array of incredibly soft fabrics in Piacenza pure alashan cashmere,
angora cashmere and wool, cashmere and wool, and super 150's Emotion micron virgin wools;
along with Luigi Parisotto silk and cashmere and super 120's double-twist pure cotton shirtings,
and pure Como silk, viscose, cotton and Bemberg cupro lining stories. And of course, our
extreme hand-work technologies inherent in each piece from hand-stitched buttonholes and
buttons to extensive hand-stitch detailing. All hand dyed in our studios with effects that must be seen
and tried on to understand and experience their extreme value and beauty. We cordially invite you
to contact the store to arrange a thorough test drive and experience them for yourself. info@surrenderous.com
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