Geoffrey B Small puts in the hours.
Battle planning, digging the trenches, leading the front line, and planting the flag. Geoffrey B Small takes on the industry and his imitators step by step.
For years Geoffrey B Small has stood alone in the battle against the fashion behemoths refusing to become a cog in the 'mans' machine, outspoken, fearless and utterly ruthless with his unique and groundbreaking output. He was one of the first to use recycled materials, he single handedly began the landslide of Napoleonic and medieval infused designs dotted throughout the last ten years.
Small oversees and takes part in every waking moment of his garments journeys all the way to meeting and greeting the front line shop assistants who sell his products.
Tirelessly fighting his corner he will not stand for his work on an eco level to be questioned in anyway (as I sombrely learnt from a naively worded question on my part).
His character and belief in what he does and what Geoffrey B Small stands for is unquestionable and makes for a barrage of second to none collections that have dotted his house's colourful and successful history. The attitude is such that you know every customer who purchases a Geoffrey B Small piece will walk away not just with a beautifully constructed item but a social conscience to boot.
You grafted as a youngster on a Singer sewing machine. Are you still loyal to Mr Singer?
I have no personal thing with Singer, I happened to use Singer machines in both startup phases for my Boston and later my Cavarzere operations in Italy. Both were home businesses: one in my parent’s attic, the other in the kitchen area of our small apartment. Both were started on a shoestring and there were little funds for buying a machine. In 1979, I started with my mother’s old Singer home machine, and in 2001 I bought a very similar machine to get me out of the Italian production contract I was tied into with another company. In both cases, however, I bought more serious industrial equipment as soon as I earned enough from my sales and deliveries, and the primary machines I have always used have been industrials, some were Singer (although the company stopped a long time ago), others were Japanese Brother and Juki machines, and today our Cavarzere studios are equipped with state of the art Juki machines, which honestly, are the best I have ever worked on.
Were you taught to use the sewing machine or was it a craft passed down to you through the family?
No, I actually come from a family of academics… teachers, physicians, scientists and a few artists. Although my mother sewed her own clothes for years when I was child, her work as one of the first women physicians in America eventually gave her little time to stay at it, and she never taught me. I started on my own and then had some basic introduction in a design school in Boston before I got kicked out, and the rest I had to learn on my own over several decades
What was the first garment you worked on?
I tried to make a full-blown tailored men’s jacket by myself with no idea how to sew anything. I took my best jacket, a 1979 Giorgio Armani from Charivari in New York, that I had bought for myself with the prize money from winning my first major student design competition in New York, took it apart completely, and tried to recreate it from scratch. I never finished the project, but it was the first step up a very big mountain, and I began to learn and respect the discipline, and the massive amount of knowledge, technique and most of all, discipline, required to make a serious men’s jacket. It would take me 10 years to get to the point where I was able to actually reproduce and make that kind of a jacket by myself.
How did your time working retail at Gap affect your outlook on fashion?
I learned the fundamental importance of the retail floor. That that is where it all happens. And that the retail salesperson is the key to success or failure of any design, collection or store, no matter how great it may or may not be. It’s where the rubber hits the road. Trying to drive a Lamborghini at 200km/hr on bad tires is useless and will kill somebody. The person on the floor at retail is the person who actually controls the industry. Once a year, I try to personally visit every store in the world where my work is carried, and one of the main reasons I do so, is to pay my respects to the members of the sales staff in each store and get a chance to talk shop with them. They have access to a lot of information that is invaluable for a designer to do his or her work in a superior manner, yet very often they are overlooked by so-called higher-ups in the industry. I know. I was one of them many years ago. And most often, nobody ever listened to me. At the same time, I could totally determine what items were going to sell and not sell in the store. If I liked something, it would be the first thing every customer coming in would see and know about. If I didn’t like something, the customers would never know it even existed. That’s part of the power of the retail floor and the person who is working it.
What has growing up in America given you as a designer?
From an industrial view, nothing. Other than how to ruin the greatest economy in the world by trying to pay people less and less, and at the same time get them to buy more and more. The fact is, once upon a time Boston and the New England area was a global leader in textile and clothing and manufacturing and technology, but by the late 1970’s I had to start and build an entirely independent company on my own to create my designs because there was no other company in all of America that could possibly do anything like it. It was a fundamental problem of thinking and looking at things in a different way and at a different set of values. And eventually, I had to leave America and go to Italy to raise it to yet another level.
And what about Italy in comparison?
First, you are surrounded by about three thousand years of art, culture and history which forms the basis of what many would call “European” culture and civilisation. This is your backyard- Palladio, Bramante, Brunelleschi, Giotto, Titian, DaVinci, Rafael, Michelangolo, Tintoretto and the work of about 300 thousand other geniuses including many that most people may have never heard of- that make up the culture of one of human history’s most remarkable mass achievements. Everywhere you go it’s there. And it educates you and influences you as an artist, a craftsman, and a member of this human civilisation. Second, it is still home to a few of the last remaining and very best people in the world making serious fabrics and clothes, and it has allowed me to have a chance to work with some of them and create some of the best new clothing in the world today.
How did you come across some of your renowned Italian suppliers ?
By physically living and working in the guts of the Italian production system. Unlike many of my colleagues, I am not in Milan, Florence or any big city where the focus like London, is mainly on PR and sales. Instead I have spent over a decade now in the bowels of Italy’s manufacturing powerhouse region the Veneto, in the small working-class factory town of Cavarzere, and over this time, I have worked in the trenches if you will-- slowly identifying, finding, and then building, very special relationships with the absolute world masters in all the necessary mediums, that are required for a designer today to create the best clothing in the world.
Why do you find it so integral to have had a hand in tailoring every item you produce?
It’s not just a hand really. It’s hands, eyes and mind….Art is a product of all three- human thought, eyes and hands. And so, their direct involvement is integral in every item we produce. Every Geoffrey B. Small piece is uniquely made to order for a specific client and purpose. And I am personally responsible and involved in the creation and execution of every single one of them. That is why I can put my name on each one without comprising myself. One of my working models is Cristobal Balenciaga (the real Balenciaga operation that ended when he closed it in 1968—not the Balenciaga that is run and owned by Gucci N.V. today.) If you study him and how his ateliers worked while he was alive, you will begin to understand how we go at things. But beyond that, for today and tomorrow’s leading clothing concepts, just putting together great materials and components into a standard package in a factory and slapping a designer label on, is not at all enough any more, for us, or our clients. For over a decade now, I have been steadily increasing the amounts of handwork involved in the creation of our pieces, and we can now state that the handmade component of our work is one of the highest in the designer industry, bar none. The focus has not been just to reproduce effects of “a day gone by,” but to look at and arrive at new and forward-looking applications of hand-work on modern 21st century life and design as we know it. This course has been pursued both out of our passion, and out of commercial response: it sells very well…the more hand made and difficult to produce the piece is, the better it generally sells for us in the Paris collection arena. Now, we are finding it is becoming efficient too. Hand work requires no electricity, petroleum or machinery. It emits no carbon or methane into the atmosphere. It provides life skills and work to human beings with talent, and enables them to create garments autonomously with less dependency on a system with vastly diminishing resources (for example, one of us can execute a beautiful hand slip-stitch down a jacket front ourselves with just a needle, thread and know-how, far faster, less expensively, and more beautifully than the classic AMF machine system industrial alternative.) And it creates high value works that are beautiful, unique and meaningful in a multitude of ways. The return to handwork is also leading us to a new world of artistic perspectives and directions that we are continuously pursuing and experiencing as we increase this new interpretation to maximize a very old application.
How did you find your education as a designer where any social or global issues ever addressed?Did any fellow designers ever show the same passion as you?
Never, and not really.
The way you portray yourself in your words and methods is almost that of a teacher, how do you propose to further your teachings?
I come from a family of teachers, and I am a teacher. It’s in the blood. And it is a primary job required of me as a designer and manager in order to achieve the level of work we do as a group- which actually involves a myriad of company associates, and supplier, retail and support partners around the world creating some of the best designer clothes in the world. About 50 percent of my time every day is spent teaching somebody something concerning work or life skills – associates including many many designers in the field today, suppliers, colleagues, team members and also of course my children. I would like to form perhaps a formal teaching school for design, clothes making and tailoring technology, because it is so lacking in today’s design school offerings worldwide and the school’s are so bad at the international level… And I mean almost every one of them--completely failing to prepare their students for what they need to know, and be able to do, in the 21st century to do this job for a living. But our firm is so busy, I need to tend to that 100 percent still. So basically, my school is in my company and work and the teaching goes on every day, one or 2 persons at a time, focusing on quality not on quantity. Like the Jedi warriors in Star Wars, we generally try to train only one apprentice with one master at a time.
And so we hope, nae pray that the next generation will be even a touch on Geoffrey B Small. This is no false idol or working class hero worship its looking into the future and imagining a place without such minds. We need to throw away the cookie cutters and make a massive cake, without an oven.
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