Letter From the Editor
T’s Women’s Fashion Issue: From Many, One
Working at a magazine is “e pluribus unum” at its finest, creative people attempting to solve a riddle together.
From T’s latest issue, a photograph taken at Hermès’s leather workshop in Paris.CreditCreditOlivier Metzger
Supported by
Of the many delights working at a magazine offers, one is the opportunity to collaborate with people who think differently than you do. The best magazines I’ve worked at are the archetypal American high school remade: You have the newspaper and speech and debate team kids (now the text editors); the drama-club kids (now the fashion department); the skateboarders (now the art directors); and the film society kids (now the photo editors). The result, when it works, is a mostly joyful, if sometimes contentious, collective, a group of people all trying to create something using their particular skills and kinds of intelligence. Magazine staffs adhere to a hierarchy, but too much systemization frustrates the fundamentally communal nature of the organization — it is “e pluribus unum” at its finest, creative people attempting to solve a riddle together.
This is a romantic way to consider your industry, of course, but when you work in a creative or semi-creative field, you’re always looking to related businesses to find either kinship or difference: How do they conceive of not only what they do, but how and where they work? Last year, I went with a few of my colleagues to the Hermès headquarters on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris for tea. The tea (and housemade madeleines) were excellent, and we had to monitor one another to make sure we didn’t slip the sugar cubes, glittery little sculptures in the shape of the Hermès “H,” into our coat pockets as we left. But what most impressed me were the curious anachronisms of the place. Just a few steps from the private dining room, with its Hermès china and homemade jams and butter-sweet air, was one of the company’s glass-doored leather studios, where artisans were finishing hand-stitched leather saddles. Lining the walls were bookcases stacked with ledgers detailing the workshop’s century of orders, the handwriting chronicling the customers’ names, addresses and desires growing fainter and more spidery as you paged ever backward. This was the kind of atelier that could easily have been moved to the suburbs, to some far-flung satellite location, and yet here it was in the middle of Paris, occupying a large slice of wildly expensive real estate in the six-story building it shared with the executives’ offices and, downstairs, the boutique itself.
Like other big-money creative industries (film, theater, art), fashion has always loved a personality, an idiosyncratic, colorful, irrepressible artistic director whose genius is matched by his or her personal magnetism. But these days, it might love those people a little less. It’s hard to make a dominant personality subsume themselves to the brand they’ve been hired to serve. Which is another reason Hermès’s ethos — a group of different experts, each of whom runs a different atelier, but none of whose personal profiles are allowed to eclipse the company’s — feels at once old-fashioned and modern. It is this, as much as the brand’s focus on foregrounding artisanship, and artisans, that recalls the now almost-extinct European guild system. As Nancy Hass writes in her story about Hermès, “With no ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame,’ the modern company hews instead to the contours of the guilds: There are separate ateliers (and corresponding heads) for women’s ready-to-wear, perfume, shoes and jewelry, men’s wear, silk and home furnishings. In France, where the couture tradition has helped keep handwork vital (perhaps only Japan has guarded it as doggedly), this was once called the corps de métier, a web of semiautonomous, highly specialized studios where artisans, trained from apprenticeship, produced a single category of item.”
But while I can easily admit I’m fascinated by the company’s defiance of the supposed rules of modern luxury, it also offers hope to the rest of us. It’s no secret to anyone who’s in our business or follows it even casually that print publishing is an infinitely more difficult, less predictable venture than it was a decade ago. And yet I do it — we do it — because the satisfaction of making something, of pairing photos with text, of arguing over which weight of font will read better on the printed page, of holding the actual thing in your hands, feeling its floppy, satisfying weight, still fulfills some elemental need that humans have to assemble something with our hands and eyes. Call it old-fashioned. But we made it — and it’s ours.
Advertisement
No comments:
Post a Comment