2013年4月12日星期五

Brits abroad: expat menswear designers

Luke Leitch meets the menswear designers of Louis Vuitton, Z Zegna, and Rag & Bone - an elite quartet of British menswear designers who have swapped London for Paris, Milan and Manhattan.

After that he'll be going somewhere confidential to create a new season Vuitton campaign and brochure. 'We have done an amazing one in South Africa, and another in Patagonia - we saw pumas -and then we went to a private island off Zanzibar for the last one. It's an important project, because you are showing what you think the lifestyle of the Louis Vuitton man really is.'
If he has time off, Jones tends to hop back on a plane. 'I will go to Japan, or New York, or somewhere else where I have a lot of friends to catch up with. I was just in Palm Springs and I kept bumping into people I know, which was crazy. You know, we joke about it - we call ourselves nomads - but moving around is an important part of the job. You have to keep an eye on the world, see the whole of it for inspiration.'
When his peripatetic frenzies are finished, however, Jones returns home to Paris (albeit via a sly stopover at his house in London). And slowly he is discovering - in a very practical way - the appeal of his adopted city. 'I've learnt how to navigate my way around. I know where to go to buy bin bags and everything else I need. And I appreciate that Paris is so beautiful. This job is so highly pressured that this is the best place to do it from.'