The Man Behind the $100,000 Sport Coat
Illustration by Michael Houtz; Photograph by Noah Johnson
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The first time Geoffrey B. Small really got my attention, it was with an email sent in January 2020. I had just arrived in Paris for Menâs Fashion Week, and an invite to his show hit my inbox. In a big bold font at the top of the email it read âJust another Boston guy.â Funny name for a show, I thought. I couldnât think of any designers from Boston. Then, under that header it read: âThe single most expensive clothing piece being presented in all of Paris menâs fashion week.â The cognitive dissonance between those two things made me curious enough to attend.
I had known a little about Small before this. I knew that he was a god to some artisanal fashion obsessives. For connoisseurs of handmade clothing, Smallâs work is a pinnacle of its kind, like a dinner at Noma, or a Patek Phillip Tourbillon watch. That is to say, itâs complicated and very expensive.
The âclothing pieceâ in question that he was showing that week was an âextreme handmadeâ sport coat that Small had fashioned from pure Vicuna and outfitted with diamond buttons. A âsupercoat,â Small called it, the garment was hand-dyedârisky when youâre dealing with a fabric that can cost over $3,200 per yardâin a pattern reminiscent of tie-dye in deep shades of red. The price tag was nearly $110,000.
âWe do bosswear,â Small told me recently. âWeâre making clothes for the guys that run things.â His clients, he says, are Fortune 500 chiefs and other titans of industry that prefer his clothing to the Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli fare youâd typically find on the worldâs business elite. There are some celebrities who wear the Geoffrey B. Small label, too. Usually the hyper-discerning and image-conscious sorts, like Jeremy Strong and Brad Pitt. But the beating heart of the GBS universe is actually the fashion-obsessed purists, those who also worship at the foot of other obscure visionaries like Martin Margiela or Paul Harnden. âThe clients that weâre targeting,â Small says, âtheyâre not just rich people, theyâre smart. I design clothes for smart people. Thatâs why the clothes are so intricate and thereâs so much that goes into them because smart people like that. Thatâs what they like in their music, thatâs what they like in their home, thatâs what they like in their life.â
I met Small backstage after that Paris show in 2020. I had to fight my way through the mob of fans to reach him. He is indeed a guy from Boston. Heâs 64, with long stringy brown hair parted down the middle and one misaligned eye that gives him the slightly unsettling appearance of a cartoon madman. Later, I would have the opportunity to visit him at his studio outside of Venice, Italy, and confirm that he is, in fact, a madman. He is as fiercely driven and staunchly principled a designer as youâll find working in fashion today. As he should be, because the clothes he makes and the kind of business he is attempting to build require nothing less.
âWe do bosswear. Weâre making clothes for the guys that run things.â
Smallâs ambition matches his bravado. When we first met, he told me, matter-of-factly, that he is âjust creating the most exceptional designer clothing that can be done by human beings today.â That confidence is helping Small position his label within a category of his own creation: a kind of hyper-luxury space that heâs inventing as he goes. To be sure, Geoffrey B. Small poses no great threat to the status quo of the luxury fashion marketâheâs not really trying to. Small is up to something different. And this is why I think heâs worth paying attention to.
The world doesnât need more self-regarding designers with big mouths and lofty ambitions. The world needs innovators and restless creatives, full of original ideas and hard-earned skills and the steadfast determination to use them. Innovation on the fringe leads is what moves things forward. For decades, Small has been proposing a different way of making clothes. And heâs been helping to support a network of the worldâs greatest artisans and craftspeople along the way. Heâs not just making clothes for a small community of extremely wealthy fashion freaks, heâs creating the opportunity for the fashion system to compete with him.
The first thing Geoffrey B. Small points out to me as we enter the factory of his Italian headquarters is the lighting on the ceiling, thin rows of LEDs made by an Austrian manufacturer called Zumtobel. Itâs the same lighting rig, he tells me, that Ferrari uses in its Italian factories. The moment is a reminder that Small is not modeling his business on what other fashion labels are doing. When he looks out on the designer and luxury fashion landscape, he doesnât see any peers.
âWeâre the only ones that do this,â he tells me, proudly and without even a flicker of doubt. âAnd we know it, because we know how difficult it is to have a production system thatâs capable of doing this level of complexity.â
Geoffrey B. Small does almost everything at a very high level of complexity. He doesnât just make clothes, he makes âextreme handmade design superclothes.â And the facility he owns and operates in Cavarzere, a town 20 miles southwest of Venice, isnât just a studio or a factory; he calls it the GBS Superworkroom. The retailers that sell his designs are referred to as GBS Superdealers. Small is a prolific and eloquent advocate for his work. Heâs quick to find analogies for the level of precision and complexity heâs mastered. As he guides me through the Superworkroom, he not only references Ferrari, but Patek Phillipe and the worldâs best restaurantsââThe equivalent is a Michelin three star restaurant,â Small says. âThis is a kitchen and we make some of the best plates in the world.â
Another comparison he likes to make is to Christian Koenigsegg, the founder of the ultra-high-end Swedish carmaker Koenigsegg Automotive. âHe makes the fastest homologated automobiles in the world,â Small says. âThey build 10, 20 cars. They sell them for $2 or 3 million apiece. We have a similar approach. They focused on a certain part of the market, which is demanding more and more excellence, more and more technology, more and more research, more and more quality.â
This fixation with quality and with controlling pretty much every aspect of his business was central to Smallâs mission when he moved with his wife and twin children to Italy in 2001. He had worked for the previous twenty years as a tailor and designer in Boston, and had shown his work in Paris for years. Eventually, he did what many of his contemporaries did, and he entered a licensing deal with an Italian firm that would produce, finance, and distribute his collection. That deal fell apart in 2001, and Small realized that to continue designing and producing clothes independently at the level he wanted, heâd have to be in Italy himself. He started in an apartment in Cavarzere, where he began making artisanal clothing in very small quantities, producing no more than 500 pieces per season.
âThe equivalent is a Michelin three star restaurant. This is a kitchen and we make some of the best plates in the world.â
âItâs small numbers for a normal production brand,â Small says. âBut you have to think that the average value of each piece is much, much higher, the average amount of time and investment. And we know thereâs a customer out there that digs this.â
Slowly, Small expanded his artisanal fashion empire. He rented two additional apartments in the same building to use as workrooms, which contained his business until 2013, when he moved into a larger residence that had more than 1,000-square-feet of work space.
In 2021, Small moved his expanding operation again, this time into the 3,000-square-foot industrial building where weâre now talking. The Superworkroom is a remarkable project of its own, the result of decades spent in the business of producing clothes. The new space offered room for a production facility that could meet his exacting standards, house his extensive archive of samples and fabrics (which he keeps in an enormous vault behind a very thick, bank-style metal door), and establish a permanent showroom. Today, the Superworkroom has 25 employees, but still makes only 1,800 pieces per year.
I point out that he might consider increasing production just slightly, bringing a few more guys into the GBS world. âNo, we canât do that,â Small is quick to say. âThatâs the trust. These guys, this client, they donât give a shit what the price is. So the pact, the agreement is to stay true to the mission, to keep giving them more, to raise the price if we need to, but make the piece even better than the last one. And the minute we waiver from that, weâre dead. We canât lower the standard. We have to raise them. And thatâs not easy.â
Smallâs whole idea is to use the best possible materials and the most intensive processes. His gamble is that the extremely high levels of difficulty required to produce his piecesâand their correspondingly exorbitant costsâare exactly what makes his business viable.
âWhat weâve done is weâve gotten very, very into the engineering of clothing,â Small says. âInstead of being a look or an image or a fashion or a trendâwhich turns a lot of really powerful and wealthy people offâshow me something thatâs really, really built incredibly. Show me a Patek Philippe. And I can understand that. Okay, thatâs our guy. Thatâs our client.â
I asked Eugene Rabkin, founder of the fashion magazine StyleZeitgeist, which has profiled and supported the work of Geoffrey B. Small for years, who he thinks the GBS customer is. âA lot of artists and musicians and people in those industries who wouldnât be caught dead in a traditional suit, but they love quality and they want to look interesting,â he says. âThe thing about artists is theyâre rich, but they donât want to look rich.â
I reached out to one of GBSâs largest accounts, Darklands in Berlin, to ask who they see gravitating toward Smallâs particular vision for clothing. Campbell McDougall, the shopâs owner, tells me, âWe dress rock stars to investment bankers in GBS. At a risk of generalizing, they are free-thinking, art loving individualists that rebuff the large, over-marketed fashion houses for something smaller, more exclusive, more quality-oriented and with more integrity. In the end, people want to buy something that they feel represents them and that they feel good about getting behind.â
Producing clothes that elicit such feelings requires manufacturing in a unique way. To the laymen, the GBS Superworkroom looks relatively similar to any high-end clothing factory, but closer inspection reveals a few innovations that you wonât see anywhere else. The main room is a large, open floor plan thatâs divided into distinct work stations. Each station is for one specific task, but Small does not operate an assembly line. âEach one of these is a special station weâve designed over the years to make single pieces, one person at a time,â he says. This process is similar to how HermĂ©s makes a handbag. âWeâre not doing line production. Each tailor makes a complete piece. Thatâs important for overall quality, but itâs also really important for the personal satisfaction of the people making it.â
At one station a woman is hand-stitching the buttonholes on a shirt. âWe spend 10, 15 minutes for one button hole,â Small says. âA coat might have 10 buttonholes. 150 minutes. Itâs two and a half hours of work.â Using a machine, it wouldnât take more than a couple minutes to sew all the button holes. âYeah,â Small says. âWeâre not in Moldavia.â
In the back of the studio there is a woman working by herself in a small room that appears to be some kind of kitchen, full of stainless steel appliances that I do not recognizeâone of them is a 150-liter Berto boiling pan. It can boil 150 liters of water in just a few minutes. âThis is the most unique hand-dyeing and fabric-treatment operation in the business,â Small says. It seems hyperbolicâhow could he know?âbut Iâm sitting here looking at some exquisite silk fabric hanging to dry after being tinted a glorious shade of yellow in a vat of turmeric water, realizing that it doesnât really matter. Whatâs undeniable is that Small is pushing the boundaries of artisanally crafted clothing. Heâs attempting to do things that no one else can do, things that will improve the quality and impact of clothes production. He believes this is important to his clients. I believe it is important to the future of fashion.
One of Smallâs enduring obsessions is exclusivity. Itâs why this hand-dying business is so importantâno two pieces will be the same. This emphasis on uniqueness has been an important part of his practice since the beginning. Smallâs early success came making bespoke suits as a high-end tailor on Newbury Street in Boston, designing for such illustrious clients as the then Governor of Massachusetts, Bonnie Raitt, and New Kids on the Block. But he had a developing interest in avant garde fashionâComme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto had created a global sensationâand he pivoted to creating his own line of experimental clothes with a novel new concept. The entire collection was made using recycled garments, and he started showing the collection on runways in Paris in 1992. (Small is quick to point out that he wasnât the first to do this. âMartin Margiela was the first,â he says, âbut we took it to another level.â)
Small does claim to be the first designer in Paris to introduce pieces that âspecifically address global warming and climate change,â but his recycled collections came long before anyone was throwing around the term sustainability, and they served an entirely different purpose: âEven back then we had to offer exclusivity,â he says. âThe stores wanted unique pieces the competitors wouldnât have.â
Itâs the same impulse that drives his hyper-small production today. For some styles in the GBS collection, only two pieces will ever be made. Orders are produced one at a timeâso if two stores want to carry the same shirt, those shirts will be made separately, and finished with different details.
The crown jewel of the Geoffrey B. Small operation is a chest full of buttons that sits in near the center of the studio, close to Smallâs desk. âButtons for us is a real art,â Small says. âSo in this, weâve got âŹ50,000 of button inventory. This is critical. People have no idea. Most designers have no idea how important the buttons are.â
Most of Smallâs buttons are made by Fontana, a small, family-run Italian button-maker. âTheyâre fucking geniuses,â he says. His reverence for the makers he works with is intense. These materials are as important to him as his designs, if not more. He shows me a piece of cashmere laying on a table. âThis is made by Piacenza,â he says. âFounded in 1733. Theyâre in their eighth generation of family management. This is Breathâitâs pure Alashan. Itâs the lightest cashmere suiting made in the world, 170 grams.â
Smallâs business hinges on these suppliers, and he treats them like legends: Como silks from the Brena family. Viscose linings from Ezio Ghiringhelli in Baresi. Hand-woven fabrics by the Colombo family. âCarlos, the son,â Small says. âThe father of Pino, passed away a few years ago.â Each supplier has a story and Small knows them all. âThese guys are down in the Provincia Treviso about an hour from here on. Itâs a three-generation family in this place.â
The last area of the Superworkroom Small shows me is the special orders department. This one-person studio-in-studio is committed entirely to building wardrobes for a handful of high-profile clients. This is where the suit that Jeremy Strong wore to the Emmy Awards in 2020 was made. During my visit, finishing touches were being put on a tux to be sent overnight to an actor attending an awards show.
Small quickly moves us past this area so I donât take too long staring at the wall with pictures of famous men pinned all over it. âWe never talk about or divulge our clientele in special order,â he says. âWe have to keep it discreet because weâre not sponsoring. Theyâre buying and theyâre paying a lot of money, and itâs up to them if they want to say who made the piece, but itâs not up to us to promote it.â
Itâs easy to read in Smallâs bravado a kind of vitriol toward the fashion industryâto detect a resentment over being overlooked, despite purposefully working outside of the system. âIs he mad at the fashion system? Sure,â Rabkin tells me. âBut he set out to prove you can build an independent house and you donât need the fashion system. He realized that the only way he could compete is to make better clothing.â
For all his strong opinions about the fashion world, Small doesnât strike me as particularly spiteful. It just seems that he wants to set the record straight. He wants to be sure that his contributions to the fashion canon are not forgotten or overlooked. Heâs put his entire working life into his company, into his exacting vision of menswear excellenceâand heâs done so precisely at a moment in history when the large fashion houses and well-funded corporate behemoths were paying enormous new attention to the market. It would be understandable for him to worry about his efforts being overshadowed. But Smallâs contributions are very real. Heâs applying old-world techniques to extremely modern ideas about fashion. Heâs sourcing materials from mom-and-pop makers that would be in perilous positions without Smallâs business. And heâs experimenting with the very substance of luxuryâI donât think anyone else on the planet is hand-dying Vicuña the way Small is. Smallâs contributions are important to fashion the way that the contributions of all avant-garde and experimental designers are important. Not because they reach huge masses of people, but because their ideas and innovations change the course of fashion even if you canât find them on the biggest runways, or in the biggest department stores.
âI think we can say it now, weâve got something that itâs the next level beyond. They canât do it on the haute couture, they canât do it in Savile Row. Weâre talking about the most advanced hand-made clothing designer factory in the world.â
Above all, Small just wants to offer a different kind of argument about how menswear gets made. He wants to show that thereâs room for a madman like him; he wants to exemplify artistry and fierce independence and exacting standards and he wants to do it all on his terms.
âI think we can say it now, weâve got something that itâs the next level beyond,â he says. âThey canât do it on the haute couture, they canât do it in Savile Row. Weâre talking about the most advanced hand-made clothing designer factory in the world.â
It may not be for everyoneâit canât be. Itâs too expensive, and there isnât enough of it. But as lofty as he can be, as impossibly lavish and excessive as the clothes may seem, Small loves to return to the simple things that clothes should beâlong lasting, great value. This is why he adds extra fabric to the waistbands of his trousers, so they can be let out. He uses the best natural materials he can find, not just because they are luxurious, but because they are good for your body. âWhen you have plastic in garments,â he says, âyour body feels it.â Small pushes the limits, but the essence of his business makes a lot of sense. He will make a Vicuña overcoat with diamond buttons that costs $110,000, but then he will say something that is just diabolically pragmatic. At one point he shows me an all-silk puffer parka from a recent collection, explaining that the process he used to create the silk batting was first developed in ancient China during the Ming Dynasty. As for what occasion could possible befit such a grand jacket, he has some very simple advice: âOn airplanes these are fantastic.â
Noah Johnson is GQâs Global Style Director.
Originally Appeared on GQ