GILL LINTON, FOUNDER OF BYRONESQUE, IN CONVERSATION WITH BRYNN HEMINWAY, DISPLAY COPY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
BRYNN HEMINWAY_ You founded Byronesque in 2013 before luxury resale was the success story it is now. Tell us how you started.
GILL LINTON_ My background was in advertising. I worked in London and then in New York as a brand strategist. I eventually burned out because there was so much resistance to anything new. Byronesque came about because someone said to me, “Will you stop bitching about it and just do what you want to do? What’s stopping you?” And there was nothing stopping me. When I started having conversations about how Byronesque could work, people laughed. A journalist at Vogue said to me, “You’re crazy”. Same thing with investors — “You’re crazy. No one’s going to buy old, luxury clothes. There’s eBay, why would anybody need anything else?” It was brutal. Now the fashion industry is going through what the music industry went through. Big labels weren’t worried about MySpace. It took ages for them to wake up to Apple. And here we are. It’s been exactly the same thing with fashion resale. And what are we now? A $36 billion industry?
BRYNN_ And growing faster than the broader retail sector.
GILL_ My new frustration is that it’s growing the wrong way. The resale industry is becoming the new landfill; it perpetuates the same problems it should be solving. I hear all the time, “I’ll just buy it because I can always resell it.” Even the word ‘resale’ encourages people to buy something just to sell it. It doesn’t encourage people to care about the craftsmanship or the energy that goes into making something. Byronesque is all about longevity. If there are three things that Byronesque really cares about, they are taste, longevity, and obscure connections.
BRYNN_ What do you mean by “obscure connections”?
GILL_ It’s about not spoon feeding people. It took us a while to realize Byronesque is not for beginners. Beginners can just Google something. If you want to know the history of John Galliano, you don’t need us to tell you. What we offer is an opinion and a point of view. We’re not just about the clothes, we’re about the culture and the energy behind the clothes.
BRYNN_ A perspective on the life and the soul of a moment in history.
GILL_ Yes, and presenting that in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re reading an obituary. For example, we did a project with Michelle Lamy. She’s really into boxing, and she asked us to design the shirts for a boxing-themed pop-up at Selfridges. The history of boxing is very interesting. If you Google vintage boxing, you get 1920s men with big mustaches, like posh blokes with baggy shorts. But for us what is cool about boxing is it’s relationship with hip hop in the 90s. We joined the dots in a very different way. We connected Michelle’s gold grill to Jacob the Jeweler, to beat boxing in 8 Mile, to “Mama Said Knock You Out”. And the fact that rap battles actually came from boxing because rap artists loved boxing; they wanted an alternative to gang warfare so they would spit rhymes at each other instead of shooting each other. So the T-shirt we designed was based on 90s hip hop and Michelle’s gold teeth. And then they did rap battles in a boxing ring in the middle of Selfridges. It’s joining the dots in an obscure way that makes people think they’ve seen something for the first time, but it’s still about the past. That’s what I mean when I say “obscure connections”.
BRYNN_ Let’s talk about the pieces we shot for this story. There are some major moments in fashion history represented here: the red vinyl top from Alexander McQueen’s 1998 “Joan” collection, for example.
GILL_ The interesting thing about the McQueen piece is what was happening in fashion at that time. Back then, all the designers gave away clothes: “Thanks for the work, I can’t pay you, here’s a top.” No one knew that one day there would be collectors willing to pay a lot of money for those pieces, or that someday somebody might want to produce a reissue, or that the Met might want to do a whole exhibition on the designer.
There has been a lot of McQueen going through the auction houses over the last few years, but it’s always the usual suspects, i.e. “Plato’s Atlantis” and the work that was more emblematic of Lee’s last few years at the brand. Because we know where Lee ultimately took the brand, it makes those early runway moments special. When you see the garments, they’re very well made of course, because it was McQueen, but they’re very simple pieces. So while the auction world is selling dramatic, recognizable later pieces, it takes a real McQueen fan to find things from the earlier “Joan” and “Highland Rape” collections. We’re lucky some of those early pieces have come our way.
BRYNN_ Is the person who buys the red vinyl top actually meant to wear it, or are these pieces art objects?
GILL_ People want to wear it but when they realize what it is, they’re scared. There’s a tension there that makes it a little complicated, which I totally understand. We do sell to major museums. And quite rightly so, there are certain pieces that should be in museums to be taken care. But for the most part, the pieces that come through Byronesque are meant to be worn. That vinyl top has lasted this long and it’s still in great condition. You’d have to party hard at a rave to fuck it up. People should wear it, give it a life.
BRYNN_ Tell me about the Comme Des Garçons “Lumps and Bumps” top.
GILL_ Original Comme “Lumps and Bumps” are hard to find because everything that goes down the runway gets made more accessible for retail, and everyone wants lots of lumps, the off-the-runway-kind-of-lumps, and not the “lumpy lite” version, as we call it. The top in this story is the runway lump.
BRYNN_ Not to backtrack, but if you’re giving us permission to wear these pieces, then I have dibs on the Margiela duvet coat.
GILL_ Of course you should wear it! At the end of the day, this duvet is a duvet. It’s a great example of how Martin drew inspiration from quite banal things — socks, gloves, a Stockman mannequin — and turned them into magic.
BRYNN_ Margiela’s legacy of taking banal items like a mismatched sock or a plastic carrier bag and making it into something that we’re still talking about today was upcycling before its time. What makes contemporary upcycling designers intelligent and inventive and not just repurposing trash into junk?
GILL_ It’s about intelligent design and invention. Margiela turned clothes on their side and a skirt became a top, but you couldn’t tell because of the way it was done. It’s that marriage of concept and craftsmanship. Anybody can turn a skirt into a top, but it would look like arts and crafts without real craftsmanship. So it’s not just about the concept. Like Margiela, the designers who are successfully upcycling are concept-driven. They use upcycling as their canvas, but they don’t sacrifice craftsmanship. This is why the passage of time is so important. A lot of people who own early Margiela bought it for next to nothing at Century 21, because it was very avant-garde and niche at the time. Making a halter top out of old, sometimes stained leather gloves — it’s easy for us to sit here now and say, “Oh my god that’s genius and amazing and beautiful, and he was a genius, saving the planet before the rest of us”. All those things that we all love him for now. People and time are fickle.
People should choose upcycled clothes because they are well made and they look good. You can’t just upcycle clothes and say, “let’s save the planet, wear this.” At the end of the day, we’re all still suckers for passion. Vivienne Westwood always said it: it’s about sex and we all want to look good, and we all want to feel cool. Upcycling has to deliver that, or people aren’t going to care.
BRYNN_ It’s human nature to care about how you look. Wanting to save the planet isn’t mutually exclusive to wanting to look good. It’s that dichotomy between loving fashion as an art form, and what needs to be challenged in order for us to move forward.
GILL_ I’m a walking contradiction. It costs a lot of money to look this crap. No one knows what I’m wearing, and I don’t want to be figured out. I don’t want someone to know where my T-shirt comes from, I want them to ask me about it if they like it. I want to be able to tell them this is an emerging designer from the Ukraine, or these are Comme from ‘98. Otherwise I would be wearing Tory Burch pumps and a branded logo bag. It’s like the apocryphal story, “Thanks for wearing the Ed Hardy t-shirt, I already know you’re an asshole before even talking to you.”
[laughs]
So yeah, I think contradictions are good.