First published by T Magazine on 8 January 2016
The fashion line 1205 is best known for its elegant, tailored women’s wear, which has shown during London Fashion Week for six seasons — but today, its founder, the Brazilian designer Paula Gerbase, holds her first men’s wear show as part of London Collections: Men.
In fact, Gerbase comes from a men’s wear tradition. She spent five years as head designer for Savile Row’s Kilgour, and has been producing her own men’s line since starting her brand in 2010. “Even though we’ve always been doing a men’s collection, since the beginning and alongside women’s — people have not known about it,” she says, sitting in a quiet corner of her Farringdon, London, studio the day before the show. Tall, boyish models wander in and out for a casting.
If it’s possible for fashion labels to be described as extroverted or introverted, 1205 is firmly the latter. Gerbase says she has “always wanted it to be about silence. I was really frustrated that so many people were making so much noise, and I always felt that it was quite empty noise.” A couple of seasons after launching 1205, she bumped into the critic Sarah Mower. “She asked me where my jacket was from,” recalls Gerbase. “I said I’d made it, and she said, ‘Who are you? I’ve never heard of you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what I want.’”
Her restraint in self-promotion reflects a quiet but firm faith in her own work. “It seems a bit mad, to not want to talk about what you do, but it wasn’t that I didn’t feel like it was necessarily worthy,” she says. “I wanted people to find it for themselves, and I didn’t want to, you know, push it or present it to people in a particular way.”
Doing things the easy way doesn’t seem to appeal to Gerbase; she left Kilgour, for example, because it started to feel too straightforward. “Yes, it’s really beautiful to work with a cashmere doeskin — but it’s beautiful on its own,” she explains. “I think on Savile Row, everything is so pristine that in the end, for me, I kind of lost interest.” Now, she often works on the opposite end of the spectrum: She is fascinated by the magic of turning synthetic yarns into high-quality, luxurious garments. “It’s interesting, because when you say polyester, or nylon, or polyamides, it’s sort of a dirty word, and the link is sort of ’80s. But we’ve just moved on so much since then, in terms of the working of these yarns.”
Her new men’s collection includes four-piece suits: a shirt, an overshirt, a coat and trousers — all made in very lightweight nylon. From a distance, they look like silk evening wear; to the touch, they are as soft and weightless as sportswear. “I’m so not interested by being able to read something from far away,” says Gerbase dismissively. Alongside the suits on her rails are chunky, slouchy sweaters, again in a nylon yarn that gives them a sheen; shirts in both wool and “a really beautiful polyester”; and khaki and camel outerwear pieces in sheepskin.
Gerbase has always imbued her men’s wear pieces with messages and secrets: an unexpected texture on the inside of a garment, for example. This season, she has gone one step further, painstakingly logging the process of creating the collection, and hiding relevant numbers inside the clothes — the exact time at which a pattern was finished, for example, might be embroidered somewhere almost imperceptible. “I love putting loads and loads of time and effort into something that no one will see,” she says. “I think there’s something really beautiful about that — that you’re only doing it for the wearer.”
This hyper-personal approach is the reason why she has waited several years to bring men’s wear to the runway. But she has found ways to make today’s show her own: She secured the Royal Institute of British Architecture as a venue, with a relatively intimate and salonlike show-space. She wants guests to be close enough to hear the sounds of the clothes. “Sometimes if something’s really heavy, or like a bonded cotton, it has this punctuation when you walk, and that highlights the movement of the body,” she says. “So all those things are quite interesting to me and felt right in that space.”
What engages Gerbase the most in design, she says, is precision and detail: “The three millimeters that are going to change a shoulder.” Here, her Savile Row background shines through. “I think the word luxury is just thrown around so much at the moment — and it means nothing, absolutely nothing any more,” she says. “But quality, I think very few people are able to claim.”