ADDED EXTRAS
A new wave of independent accessories designers is bringing back a spirit of craftsmanship, and with major fashion houses tapping their know-how, a shake up is happening. By Jen Nurick.
A new wave of independent accessories designers is bringing back a spirit of craftsmanship, and with major fashion houses tapping their know-how, a shake up is happening.
BY INTERNALISING TOO much, you lose perspective on the fashion world and ecosystem,” illuminates Raphaël Brisson, the 24-year-old senior designer and production director of shoe workshop Arpent Studio. Brisson founded the company – originally a sneaker label of the same name – with husband and art director Thomas Massias in Paris in 2016, but third-party requests for the pair’s design services gave rise to a new business idea: producing accessories and shoes for luxury brands to outsource.
While in the past luxury brands would hire design studios to quietly and anonymously produce accessories for them in-house, the recent embracing of outsourced design foreshadowed Arpent Studio’s decisive evolution into freelance footwear design.
The studio started with Palomo Spain’s spring/summer ’18 show and has also been commissioned by Area, GmbH and now Courrèges – creative partnerships that have enabled the studio to simultaneously grow its public profile and innovate within the fashion space. Together, Brisson and Massias have forged a niche cog in the wheel of ready-towear collections, sparking a renewed interest in the artisans and craftsmen behind the curtain, and inspiring others to follow suit.
“You need many more machines to make shoes than you need to make clothes,” explains Rem D Koolhaas, the founder of Los Angelesbased label United Nude, whose shoes have graced the runways of Issey Miyake and Iris Van Herpen since the label’s launch in 2003. “Until designers have a big investor, they cannot do their own shoe program,” he says. “I guess they figure that we give them exactly what they want … They’ll just say: ‘This is our best solution. This is our one-stop shop.’” An architecture graduate from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and nephew and namesake of architect Rem Koolhaas, he took advantage of sharing a public relations agency with Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen to offer up United Nude’s services. “She came up with some ideas, and then we’d just turn it into a product and put it into the right proportions,” he explains of his first collaboration for Herpen’s autumn/winter ’10/’11 collection.
For Brisson, the process of collaboration provides opportunities to exercise different creative muscles and showcase the studio’s expertise to a relevant network. “The cornerstone of what we are trying to put
“I work with people from different departments such as apparel, bags and shoes … delegating and outsourcing makes sense if the items aren’t your speciality”
forward is a beautiful shoe that is perfectly balanced; it has equilibrium in design,” he says. Whereas some commissions come with constraints – “At GmbH, vegan leather was a prerequisite; Courrèges has stopped working with plastic” – others grant studios and independents carte blanche to create freely. In doing so, these partnerships foster invention that drives designers to diversify their skill set further. “You’ll definitely do things that you couldn’t do all by yourself,” Koolhaas reflects. A fundamental element of reciprocity also underscores this new status quo. As he explains further, these collaborations are advantageous for both parties: “We both sell the shoes, we’ll promote the product … and there’s a lot of mutual understanding and respect.” For Koolhaas, the equation is simple. “If you like Iris Van Herpen, there’s a reasonable chance you would also like United Nude.”
This framework has transposed into the world of jewellery, too, where Korean-American designer Yoon Ahn, who helms her own label Ambush from Tokyo’s Shibuya, presides over jewellery design at Dior Homme under Kim Jones’s creative directorship (her debut collection launched for spring ’19). “[At Dior Homme], I work with people from different departments such as apparel, bags and shoes – delegating and outsourcing products makes perfect sense if the items aren’t your speciality,” she says. This alignment of independent designers and storied houses represents not only a move to bring young studios and specialists into the fold, but also an industry-wide recognition that outside voices are welcomed and should be nurtured in order to avoid insularity and move fashion forward.
For Ahn, such alliances also encourage designers to finesse their visual identities: “As a designer, you must know how to draw the line between the worlds you are going back and forth from. Your aesthetic will be evident but don’t mix the two – learn to separate.”
For others, like Nicholas Knightly, British design director of leather goods at Louis Vuitton and founder of luxury handbag brand Mallet & Co, which launched in 2015, degrees of separation are less obvious across different areas of his work. Rather, his accessories point to similar treatments of calf leather and an overarching colour scheme that importantly bind his designs in a common thread. “By balancing various clients and aesthetics, you manage to build a personal trademark,” echoes Brisson.
Given such partnerships are still in their formative stages, protocol is still being improvised as luxury brands and independents continue to learn from experience and launch each other to new heights, breeding an atmosphere of togetherness in fashion. “It’s always working in compromise,” emphasises Brisson. “Fashion is always compromise.”