RAREBOOKSPARIS
RAREBOOKS PARIS
INTERVIEW BY FELIX PETTY
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS LENSZ
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE: ISA GENZKEN
FROM THE PREVIOUS ISSUE
MANIFESTO
From June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound.
FROM THE SHOP
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft.
MARK FLOOD
1017 ALYX 9SM
In January 2023, KALEIDOSCOPE presented a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood (b. 1957), curated by Alessio Ascari, at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan. In his paintings, Flood deploys the detritus of contemporary culture—slogans, celebrities, logos, and memes—to mock American society and the elitist art world. The exhibition also provided the scenography for the runway presentation of the 1017 ALYX 9SM Fall/Winter 2023 collection.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Begun almost imperceptibly as an outgrowth of the work of its founder, Gregory Brooks, a designer and collector, RareBooksParis is part bookshop, part research project, part archive—a curated haven excavating modern and personal narratives within the history of fashion.
FELIX PETTY
I wanted to start at the beginning. A very simple question but with a complex answer: What sparked your love of fashion publications? It’s such a specific and timeless medium for capturing fashion, and you’ve got such an interesting viewpoint in the books you collect and sell.
RAREBOOKSPARIS
I’m perceived externally as a bookstore, but, in reality, my Instagram feed is basically like a research engine for me. The fact that I sell books is almost like a byproduct of the research. I’ve been in Paris almost 20 years now. I used to work as a designer. But I’ve always been very interested in printed matter and publications.
FP
Where are you from originally? Australia?
RBP
Australia, yeah.
FP
I could hear a tiny slither of an Australian accent.
RBP
It comes and goes. I definitely have some deep Australian roots. But I’ve been a little bit all over the place. At the end of the 90s, I was in the UK. That’s where I got the fashion bug, hanging out with the kids at Saint Martins. But I studied in Australia, and a friend moved to Paris and convinced me to come. So I just quit my job and I packed a suitcase and, naively, with my portfolio under my arm, I was like, “Okay, go for it.”
And it was just this classic story of faith, chance, timing, talent—probably all of the above. And I wrote a letter to Martin Margiela and then told him about myself and everything, and, after a bit of a process, they hired me as a menswear designer. I was really lucky. I worked with him for eight years. That was really where the obsession with fashion books and just research in general started.
FP
Some of the most incredible pieces of fashion printed matter came out of that era at Margiela—the Mark Borthwick stuff, obviously.
RBP
It was a dream job. We had carte blanche. Martin gave us a lot of freedom. The fashion system was very different. We did two collections a year, and we would spend a lot of time researching, traveling, thinking, collecting, buying books, developing ideas, cutting things up. I collected things compulsively. I always just had an eye for interesting stuff. It’s a very personal collection. I don’t buy things because they’re expensive; I don’t buy things because they’re valuable—I buy them because something strikes me about them.
I worked with Nadine at Margiela; then she went to Hermes, and I went there too, but my passion for actually designing waned, and I started the Instagram account, and, almost immediately, stylists and designers started contacting me.
And then I understood that people in creative fields now, they don’t have time to conduct proper research anymore but they need constant inspiration; they need to be fed ideas. For me, it was a dream setup. I still felt creative because I was still basically researching every day, but I didn’t have all the stress and the anxiety and all the horrible stuff that comes with actually working for the company. But I’ve always been a little bit hidden and behind the scenes, so, for me, it was perfect. That’s how it began. And then it continued like that.
FP
A “rare book” has a different value to a good book, or a book you love. It’s a different judgement. But despite being called RareBooksParis, it’s not really just about the rareness of the publication but also about what it has to say about fashion.
RBP
It’s really personal. If I see something and I like it, I’ll buy it and share it, but it is a really emotional thing. I often don’t understand what’s attracted me to something straight away. Even with the Instagram feed, I never really wanted it to become something predictable. I always wanted people to feel surprised by what they saw, especially with including art books, architecture. I can’t think of anything more boring than this very aesthetic, beautiful page where it’s just like you know what’s coming next.
FP
It’s interesting you mention art and architecture, because the idea of a fashion book, or a fashion image, is so broad now. On the one hand, we all know what a fashion image is: traditionally, it’s a Steven Meisel shot of a girl in the latest season’s dress. But, also, it can be a Cindy Sherman artwork, Isa Genzken sculpture, a Bar- bara Kruger text piece.
RBP
Art and fashion do flirt with each other. It was funny—I was looking at an old book of Vanessa Beecroft’s yesterday, going back to really her earliest performances. No one knew about her, and she had no money. She is a contemporary artist but very quickly became involved with fashion, with Miuccia Prada lending her clothes for performances.
It’s easy to think of this a modern phenome- non, something that starts with Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, but, as just one example, [painter] Lucio Fontana was making dresses in the 50s.
But what’s interesting for me is really this question about, not even necessarily the value or the rarity, but what is modern. The example I always cite is a catalog that was shot for Jil Sander by Craig McDean in 1996, and you look at this catalog, and still each image just feels like it was made yesterday. It hasn’t aged a second. And why? That’s what I’m always asking myself: What is it that makes something look right or feel right? And that’s constantly shifting, I suppose.
FP
And there’s a thing here about the idea of the fashion archive. Fashion is, on one hand, incredibly disposable—it’s designed to be replaced—but then some things become timeless even as they remain a very specific record of a time or place, of trends in advertising, industry, graphic design. Then, the printed matter archive is a very different kind of archive from, for example, going to see an exhibition of dresses at Palais Galliera.
RBP
Historically, people weren’t really interested in it. People threw a lot of things away; no one thought it had value. The fashion show was a very small, niche, privileged event that really was only viewed by a small number of buyers and journalists. The main platform for communication for a house was in these brochures, catalogs, printed matter.
And, so, the aesthetic values are super high, because it was really important. That was almost the only tool for them to communicate the collection.
FP
Vogue Runway didn’t exist. Instagram didn’t exist. Nothing was instantaneously transmitted across the world.
RBP
Exactly. And, because these publications were really only for people within the industry, there weren’t a huge amount of them in circulation. It made the content even more precious.
Sometimes, I can spend a whole day traipsing all over Paris and buy one book that I like. I think what I have is ... It’s really about quality, not quantity, because I know there are other people that have huge libraries, but I’m not interested to have every issue of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. What I want to have is being selected by me with my eyes and for a reason.
Housed in a private residence on the Left Bank of Paris and founded by Australian former designer Gregory Brooks, RareBooksParis is an online book store and research project that collects rare, out-of-print, and hard-to-find tomes, and some of fashion’s most collectable iconography.
Felix Petty (b. 1987) is a London-based writer, editor, and head of content at KALEIDOSCOPE.
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRIS LENSZ