Geoffrey B. Small

[cerfas]

The Geoffrey B. Small Story: 1976-2004

Geoffrey B. Small is a pioneer of avant-garde tailoring. He began his career in 1976 working as a blue jeans salesclerk for the Gap Stores in Boston. From 1979-1980, after working for 3 years selling jeans for the Gap Stores and starting a small business with an old Singer sewing machine in his parent’s attic making clothes for friends, he was judged a winner from over 34,000 competitors by Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, Geoffrey Beene and Elsa Klensch in the largest student fashion design competitions in North America.



From 1984-1987, he sold almost 1 million dollars worth of a single white shirt he designed ("the Ultimate Shirt"), from his house in Newton Massachussetts through the pages of American Vogue Magazine.



By 1991, Small had become Boston’s leading bespoke made-to-measure tailor moving to Newbury Street, designing the Governor of Massachussetts’ campaign suit and organizing the city’s largest designer industrial events.



In October 1992, he brought his first collection to Paris in a suitcase, and in 1993, along with Martin Margiela and Lamine Kouyate of Xuly Bet, he pioneered the use of recycled design in fashion.





In 1994, Geoffrey B. Small became only the 3rd American designer in history to be officially recognized and listed by the Chambre Syndicale, France’s legendary governing body of fashion, with his controversial first runway show collection entitled "Typical American".



In 1996, Small introduced the world’s first recycled menswear collection in Paris and went on to become one of the leading designers for young men in Japan. During this period Geoffrey B. Small pioneered and innovated a long list of recycle design techniques later adopted by many others including:

the use of inserts, the 2-piece twinset , themed collections based upon a particular concept or garment type, inside out, metamorphosisizing garment types (changing the original use of the garment into a different type pant to vest), half&half , tape bands, mesh, camouf-lage, plastic, metal, electronic components, graffiti tagging, painted leather, painted jeans, zippers, the pinch seam,inside pinch seam, inside exposed overlock seam, laser and silkscreen prints on pants, jackets, button-down shirts, leather and knitwear, chiffon over jersey, holes, label outside, intarsia stitching, convertibles (2-in-1 or 3-in-1 garments that can be changed into bags, backpacks or alternative garments), slashed knitwear, antique patches, ergonomic cutting and stitching, overdying, denim and khaki, refitting menswear into womenswear, customizing repairs, and the development of comprehensive standards of resizing and production methods for recycled clothing.





In 1999, after showing more collections in Paris than any other American-based designer in history, and producing and distributing over 30,000 handmade recycle pieces from his own independent company in Boston, Small entered into a licensing agreement to produce, finance and distribute his designs in Italy with a manufacturer in the Veneto region.



The agreement worked poorly and after a year and a half, he had lost everything and found himself with his wife and two twin babies in the small town of Cavarzere and no means to get out.



Shortly after the events of 11 September 2001, Small restarted his own independent firm in Italy, making his special clothes by hand in his apartment in Cavarzere in strictly limited edition runs for a select group of about 15 shops in the world. With a maximum of five hundred pieces per season made for the world, the concept was successful and enabled Small to survive the continuing world political and economic crises, and continue to be able to produce and develop a dedicated research collection of some of the industry's most advanced clothing designs.

In September of 2003, Small founded the Association Internationale des Createurs Independants to serve the needs of indedepent designers at the international level, and in January 2004 launched the first AREA presentation in Paris along with a radical new collection of Napoleon-inspired clothing entitled 'Brumaire revisited".

www.geoffreybsmall.net



anyone have more information?

 

[cerfas]

More pictures, from firstview:

S/S 03

 

[cerfas]

 

[cerfas]

 

[cerfas]

 

[cerfas]

Oops - that's F/W 2001! Not 2003...

 

[Honey~Blade]

I love the knitwear and jeans from the first post.

 

[droogist]

Hey, I'm glad you started this thread! Geoffrey's a friend of mine.

I think the bio is pretty thorough...His company used too be big stuff in the early 90s, but as mentioned above, he had a spell of impressively bad luck and has since scaled things way down. He works a lot with recyclage and makes almost everything by hand. My husband wears a lot of his stuff.

Here's a couple pics of his latest collections (Women's A/W 2005 and men's S/S 2006. The womenswear pics are from Collezioni magazine.

 

[droogist]

Also, he recently won a design competition for MTV Germany:

Geoffrey B. Small has been named the winner of MTV Germany's Designerama competition for menswear. The winner of the competition was chosen by audience-online voting and will participate in a live fashion show in Berlin on September 14 entitled "Designerama On Stage 2005". The event will be broadcast on the leading German music and youth culture channel to an estimated audience of several million viewers (see www.mtv.de/designerama).

 

[helena]

i really really like some of the pics posted by cerfas. thanks cerfas. I think my husband would like it too. The knitwear looks really good.

 

[jhaime]

woah, this is very impressive stuff indeed...cheers cerfas

 

[faust]

Thanks for posting Cerfas and droogist! The clothes look very nice. I actually put a piece by him in my Yoox dreambox, but it's now sold out. It was a grey frock jacket - really beautiful.

 

[cerfas]

droogist--that is so cool!!
Thank you for the additional pictures. I didn't have much luck searching the internet, and was really curious to see the newer things.

you're welcome helena, faust.

You all have very stylish husbands! And faust, you are a stylish man.

Is the picture of the coat still up on yoox, or not? If so, i'd love to see it

 

[Estella*]

new to me.
thanks for the thread, cerfas and for the additions, droogist!
i love the antique flair about everything, nice cuts, too...

 

[cerfas]

You're welcome...
I can't believe i had never heard of him before...i guess it's cause he's under the radar now. But I'm really glad to have found out

 

[Lena]

i've met him at his 'alternative tradefair' in Paris but i'm not terribly impressed to be honest
some of his ideas are cool but ..technically speaking i'd like to see them executed in a more 'proffesional' better way
sometimes his work seems fresh out of fashion college which can be a bit annoying after being around for all these years

thanks for the topic guys