The Amazing Geoffrey B. Small Story: 1976-2008
 

Often copied yet rarely credited, Geoffrey B. Small is a pioneer and world leader in avant-garde design and making clothes by hand. Since 1993, he has shown more collections in Paris than any American designer, and his concepts continue to lead the designer industry at the highest level. 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 created a national phenomenon in the industry and sold almost one 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 designer moving to Newbury Street, designing clothes for the Governor of Massachussetts, singer Bonnie Raitt, popular recording artists New Kids on the Block, and organizing the city’s largest designer industrial events.

In October 1992, Geoffrey B. Small brought his first collection to Paris in a suitcase, and in 1993, showed his 2nd collection at the original Paris sur Mode salon on the banks of the Seine alongside Maurizio Altieri of Carpe Diem and Roberto Cavalli.  In Paris,  legendary YSL chairman and Chambre Syndicale president Pierre Berge hailed Small in the pages  of Women's  Wear Daily as one of the few American designers with "true talent". Soon after,  along with Martin Margiela and Lamine Kouyate of Xuly Bet, he pioneered the use of recycled design in fashion.  Radical at the time, within less than a decade, recycled designer fashion would go on to become a major business in the industry.

In 1994, Geoffrey B. Small became only the third American designer in history to be officially recognized and listed on the official calendar of the Chambre Syndicale, France’s legendary governing body of fashion.  His controversial first runway show collection entitled "Typical American", stunned the fashion system and garnered no less than 10 pages in Collezioni magazine alone and orders from famous retailers such as Barneys NY, Los Angeles' legendary Charles Gallay, Maria Luisa in Paris, and RosyMaendler and Albert Eickhoff in Germany.   The concept of an alternative, relatively unknown non-commercial American designer showing in Paris would presage the appearance of many more US designers in the years to come including Jeremy Scott, Steven Slowik, Marc Jacobs, Rick Owens, Micheal Kors and Tom Ford.

In 1996, Small introduced the world’s first recycled menswear collection in Paris which went on to become very successful in Japan, the most competitive designer market in the world. Working in collaboration with the country's master retailers of the time including Midwest, Revolution, Galf, Memphis, Basement, Lift and Isetan, Small's recycled clothing was sold in over 40 cities, prompting an editor of a leading magazine in 1997 to say he had become the number one designer for young men in Japan. At the same time, his women's collections counted Winona Ryder, Halle Berry, Tori Spelling and  Mariah Carey as celebrity clients.

During this period, Geoffrey B. Small and his staff pioneered over thirty major recycle design technique innovations later adopted by, and credited to, many others among them Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Comme des Garcons, Dolce & Gabbana, Paul Smith, Dirk Bikkembergs, Helmut Lang, Miguel Adrover, E2, Angelo, and the Great China Wall.

In 1999, the landscape of fashion was quickly changing, heavily influenced by the new growing dominance of large corporate global brands who were investing hundreds of millions of dollars into  advertising, publicity, and aggressively pushing independent creative designers out of the marketplace and or buying their companies outright. At the same time, a new economic crisis in Japan triggered a radical change in the designer market and numerous designers who were formerly independent including Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, John Richmond,  Vivienne Westwood, Costume National, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chayalan, Alexander McQueen began to form licenses and partnerships with larger industrial companies primarily in Italy in an effort to survive  the new environment. After showing more collections in Paris than any other American-based designer, 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 with a manufacturer in the Veneto region of Italy, the world's powerhouse of fashion production and finance.

The agreement worked poorly and after a year and a half, shortly after the events of 11 September 2001,  he restarted his own independent firm again, this time in Italy, making special clothes by hand in his apartment in Cavarzere in strictly limited edition series for a select group of leading research 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 ongoing world political and economic crises, and continue to be able to produce and develop a dedicated pure research collection of some of the industry's most advanced and personal clothing designs.

In October 2006, Small set out to introduce a totally new direction for the industry again with his first medieval collection entitled “Back to the future”.  The first in a series of collections with a special message warning about the world's current social and economic trends.

In January 2007, his controversial  “Classe Dirigeant” show was banned by the Paris fashion establishment, yet  went on to become a landmark fashion presentation for its radical designs and its unique and timely social and political message about a new global feudalism. In March 2007, his "Heroes of Another Gender" examined women in power during dark times in the middle ages and the 21st century.  And in July and October 2007,  his "Schola" collections for spring/summer 2008 contained a secret warning message on the growing dangers of illiteracy to the middle class in western industrialized nations.  Small's powerful medieval-inspired collections and their messages are now influencing a growing sphere in fashion, as medieval looks increasingly appear in other designer's collections and brands.

Proof once again for those that really know, that after almost 30 years, Geoffrey B. Small continues to be a pioneer in fashion.

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to Archive Recycle Paris collections 1994-1998.

"What makes a GBS a GBS"



Geoffrey B. Small
Via dei Martiri 13, 30014 Cavarzere (Venezia) Italia
tel./fax +39 0426 311610

copyright 2005-8 Geoffrey B. Small.