filthavenue:

Robert Geller

ManStyle Daily - In Conversation With Robert Geller

It’s been five years now since you began your namesake label. 

Five years exactly. This is the tenth season. 

How has it evolved? Is it headed in the direction you’d hoped and planned? 

Yeah, for sure! The thing is with these things, it’s pretty amazing because you can’t control it; I mean you can control the look of it, but you start something and you have an idea and you push it and then the market kind of tells you where it wants to go. 

It takes a life of its own, so to speak. 

Yeah, and the way you design certain styles, some things just don’t sell. We get excited about some designs and buyers will say [in drab voice] ‘oh, we don’t get it’, and then we can do a super boring piece and they’ll be like ‘we love it, it’s the best!’. I know the limits of the market now, and I still push those limits, especially for pieces in the shows, but you just become a smarter designer because what matters in the end is your sales. If people go into the store and feel comfortable with and in something, that’s when they’ll buy it – if it’s the right colour and price and style. You can work with details, but you can’t just make this huge billowy shirt, because guys just won’t buy it. Or, like, two guys will buy it, and in the end, you really need to sell more than that. 

And menswear, by virtue of what it is, has more restrictions or, I should say, traditions than womenswear. 

Definitely! But you know I look at myself and what I wear. The collections that we’ve pushed the most are the ones that have not only got the least amount of buys, but the ones I’ve got the least personal wears out of as well. So in the end, you keep criticising stores and customers for being boring, but look at what I’m wearing: pants and a t-shirt. You can push it and style it and put it together in a cool way, and that’s how men make their clothes special and unique. We don’t want big, crazy cape things. 

And why just menswear? Was that a conscious decision?

Definitely. I mean in school I did both, but I did more menswear than the other students. I always had an interest in men’s clothes. They’re close to me, and I was interested in fashion by the clothes I could wear myself, and that’s the reason I always chose to do menswear projects at school. At Marc Jacobs I met Alexandre Plokhov, who was the pattern maker there at the time, and we just got on really well, and he had started the menswear line Cloak, which went to sleep for a season which is why he was at Marc Jacobs, and he asked if I would come and consult on it, which I did and then we became 50/50 partners after that. We worked together well and it was really exciting for me to be involved in a project with Alexandre, who’s really fantastic at making clothing, he’s so good at it. I knew I could learn a lot about the process. 

And then you started Robert Geller for your own creative fulfilment? 

Well from the outside Cloak was very successful in terms of awards, but we had a tough time making it work financially. We did it on our own, and it’s very difficult in this industry to do it on your own finances. So I left and that’s when I was approached by this this Japanese production company, my partner now, who wanted to do a menswear collection with me as the head, and it’s kind of like a dream situation, it’s worked out really well: I get to do what I’m good at, like making clothes, being creative, putting on the shows, and all of that, and they take care of the things they’re good at: the finance and production side of things. And they didn’t want to push it anywhere that I didn’t want to go, which is everyone’s worry [when working with a backer]. They have zero creative control. They suggest units and numbers of garments I should do, and I don’t have to, but really it makes sense, it’s a structure based on last season’s sales. They’ve been really great. 

Can we expect Robert Geller stores in the future? 

Well it’s all dependent on finances. We’re on a very good path, but with Japan [the earthquake crisis and subsequent cultural and economic shock], it’s now all about crisis management. We’re doing well to have gotten through the last few years. But to open a store and do it properly, it’s quite an investment.

Exactly. It’s an achievement to have built a business in the past five years.

Well we’ve had things help us along: in the GFC we had the GQ/CFDA award, which helped out with awareness, and again now the CFDA award. And the brand awareness is getting strong. But we’d love to have a store in the next few years, but we don’t have concrete plans. I definitely want a store to make my own, house the collection in a relevant atmosphere, and the first one would be in New York. 

full interview here