Cavarzere is a sleepy Italian town about twenty-two miles southwest of Venice. Until the 1950s its main business was agriculture, but eventually it became a part of the fashion and textile manufacturing powerhouse that the province of Veneto grew into during the second half of the 20th Century, and that is now also dying or being transformed thanks to the two Frenchmen who are keen on buying up as much of Italian manufacturing as possible.
One person in Cavarzere who does not get much sleep is the American designer Geoffrey B. Small. In his own, under-the-radar way, he has been trying to both harness and salvage the clothes-making skills of a town that was once a denim manufacturing center. All the seamstresses Small employs are refugees from that industry. They know how to make clothes and then some.
The “then some” part is what’s required by Small, who has quietly built a brand in which uncompromising quality is the main modus operandi. To experience Small’s clothes – the softness of the exquisite cashmeres, the subtle shimmer of the silks with which he lines his garments, the enveloping, lived-in quality of the tailoring that immediately makes it yours – is a revelation. And they do need to be experienced – no photos can do them justice. In our digital, plastic world, Small’s work is pointedly analogue and natural. It is no accident that Small’s creations are tinged with historicism, nodding back to a time when the world felt more immediate and tactile. But that historicism is filtered through Small’s point of view, so his clothes don’t look like costumes; they are made for today. Small sums up his design ethos as “classicism meets artistry.”
Small’s studio – or “super workrooms” as he calls it – is located on the second floor of a nondescript warehouse building, but what goes on inside is anything but nondescript. One part of the space is devoted to work, another to storing his formidable, 3,000-piece archive, and yet another functions as a showroom, where buyers can place orders and customers can be measured for Small’s made-to-measure program.
In the workroom itself, there is a “Tintoria” room, where Small experiments with dyeing, and the main design and production space, strewn with Juka sewing machines, boxes of fabric, the button station, and a custom corner where special orders are handled. It was a quiet Friday afternoon in June when I visited and most seamstresses were out to lunch – meaning they went home to eat at their leisure. Small, and his wife Diana were mulling which buttons should go on a new model of a tailored jacket – “a button story” as Small called it. This was no exaggeration – buttons, hand-cut, hand-carved, sourced from local manufacturers that are a dying breed – feature prominently in Small’s designs, as do the hand-sewn buttonholes, a truly luxurious detail in an industry that is built on relentless optimization. In Small’s work the buttons and buttonholes often feature a contrasting thread, and it is such subtle details that add that slight personal nod visible to those who know how clothes are constructed. Handwork is one of Small’s tenets. His aim is tobuild quality clothes in an honest, traditional manner, outside ofthe fashion system.
Small is vocal about his methods and aims, but he is not naive. He came to this work ethos after running the gamut of the fashion system – winning awards, being praised in the media, even his work being shot by none other than Karl Lagerfeld – and realizing what a harsh, dispiriting place it can be. At sixty-four, he has settled into a rhythm that suits him well and allows him to do what he wants.
Small was born and raised in Boston. He began by making clothes for himself and his friends using his parents’ old Singer sewing machine. In 1979 he won the Next Great Designer Award in the US, and began to grow his clientele, which eventually allowed him to establish a made-to-measure shop in Boston’s Newberry Street. Inevitably, he would outgrow Boston and leave for Paris, where he showed his first collection in 1993 and was the third American designer to be inducted into Chambre Syndicale, the official French fashion designer association. At the time Small was designing around the concept that was later called upcycling, long before the term was born. He was praised – Pierre Berge, Yves Saint-Laurent’s partner and the President of Chambre Syndicale called him “a true talent” – and courted. Small was offered manufacturing and distribution deals, before he realized that the industry would take its pound of flesh. He also saw the rapid corporatisation of the fashion industry, in which marketing trumped design.
And so instead of making a Faustian pact he bowed out. In 2000 he moved to Italy, and started making clothes in his kitchen on a Singer machine that now graces the hall of his workrooms. He dyed fabrics in his apartment’s bathtub. Small went to luxury fabric suppliers like Piacenza and managed to convince them that even though he’s a foreigner who will be doing strange things to their materials, he will do them justice. Slowly, he built up relationships with various suppliers, down to the button makers and the local artisans who make his garment boxes. “We believe that our suppliers, particularly of fabrics and components, are the best in the world,” says Small. “We’re not a big volume customer, but we are loyal. That adds up and we do get some leverage and they take care of us when we need it.”
Small continued to present his clothes in Paris until Covid happened. Like many other designers, Small experienced hardship and challenges in working under a lockdown in a digital-first manner, which for an artisanal brand is like making a Michelin star meal in an online video. Still, Covid led to some welcome adjustments, like eschewing showing in Paris altogether. Instead, the buyers now come to Cavarzere, which gives them the advantage of seeing Small’s archive, from which he can reproduce whatever garments they want, in whatever fabrication they want. (The day after I visited a buyer from a store in Nagoya was coming into the showroom to do a buy for his store.)
And the pandemic allowed Small to see newfound proof that the artisanal model works. “I think really creative stuff happens as close as possible to where the work gets done,” says he. “And so if an artist has got his hands in the pot, with the paints and the canvas, and he’s actually able to get involved with every aspect of the work, he’s going to come up with stuff that I think is more more deep and more valuable than an artist who may have other people doing it for him. My view has always been, production dictates design. You can’t design what you can’t make. Which is more and more important in the 21st Century, in a world where less and less people can make anything.”
Sadly, one casualty of Covid was Small’s young international staff, who had to go back to their respective countries. This was somewhat of a blow to another of Small’s aims, to teach a new generation the clothes making skills that he has learned over the course of five decades. According to Small, there has been a decline of fashion education. “Fundamental design and clothes making skills, making patterns, cutting, constructing sewing, that’s becoming less and less of the curriculum of the majority of design school programs now,” says he, “And I think this attitude is also being promoted by companies that are hiring celebrities to be designers.”
It’s not clear to Small whether he can recreate this apprentice system again due to current immigration policies in Italy, though he would like to. “I’m 64, and the horizon of how much I can do is much shorter than it was when I was younger,” he says. “So we have big decisions to make in terms of continuity. In the meantime, the total commitment and focus is on continuing to build an organization that can continue this kind of work, tailoring for the 21st century.”
Yet, Small is optimistic about the future. He thinks there will be an inflection point where the Western world will realize that the deliberate erasure of clothes-making skills is to its detriment. “I increasingly feel like I am the only plumber left in Manhattan,” says Small. “Maybe 20 years ago it was the lowest thing on the ladder, but suddenly you’re the only one who can fix the toilet, and you can be very successful.”
All photos by Eugene Rabkin
