Good Things Take Time
Good Things Take Time
Maison Margiela couture show, Matty Matheson's half a decade long restaurant project, and other beautiful celebrations of creativity and craft
“Good things take time” isn’t something I heard often running creative projects in tech — the industry that lives by the opposite motto of “move fast and break things.” A simple phrase that have caused permanent damage to everyone’s brains in Silicon Valley and slowly creeped into almost everything else we consume as venture capitalists poured money into beauty, fashion, media, and entertainment.
More often than not, the task put in front of creatives and craftsmen isn’t to make a really nice coat or produce a show that makes people feel, but to do what attracts lots of eyeballs and revenue with the least amount of resources. It’s an enormous privilege to be able to go out into the world, collect references, and go through several rounds of cuts and edits because most of us are working with a day, a week, or just a few months worth of time.
Normally, all of this sends me into a spiral. But lately, as I slowly begin to understand how to carve out time and space for learning and thoughtful creation within this “go! go! go!” system I threw myself into, I’ve been catching glimpses of hope for more sustainable production cycles everywhere — from Galliano’s Maison Margiela couture show to a beauty brand taking a stand against “digital waste”.
I’ll start with the obvious — last Thursday, I nearly cried watching Galliano’s Maison Margiela couture show. Half way through the Dana Thomas’s book about his and Alexander McQueen’s lives, I still couldn’t quite make out why everyone in the industry is so obsessed with him and his victorian-esque designs — even though I desperately wanted to. But once the clips from the last week’s show started taking over my feed, it all suddenly clicked. It was like watching the black and white pictures of old Galliano shows that I flipped through in the book, come to life and take me into the underbelly of old Paris. All the meticulous details that fashion bloggers had a feast pulling apart — from Pat McGrath’s doll skin makeup to the way models moved through the space directed by Pat Boguslawski, came together to tell a beautiful story that instantly gave me that feeling of “wow yea, I’ve never seen anything like this,” followed by a firm understanding that I was witnessing history. Cathy Horyn wrote in her review in The Cut:
“Maison Margiela closed the spring haute couture collections, leaving most shows, however beautiful and well executed, in its dust. Because it takes time to do truly moving work, to remind people of the power behind clothes. And nearly all big-brand creative directors supervise four to six shows a year. In many ways, Galliano’s underworld scene was a reminder of what a prison the luxury industry has become.”
It took Galliano 12 months (!) and a small army of the best in class professionals to produce the show that spread across the industry and beyond like a wildfire. Instead of falling back on hype, controversy, and scandalous pieces, it pulled people together in celebration of craft and creativity, and reminded us that perhaps, attention is something we should aspire to earn and not grab.
It takes a lot of confidence to tell an investor, a boss, or a client how much time and money it will take to execute a project really well. It gives me chills to hear about anything that took six months to half a decade to develop and launch because I understand how rare it is to be part of a team that’s allowed to move at this pace.
In this old AD video where Matty Matheson and his design partner walk you through the interior details of his Prime Seafood Palace restaurant, Matty casually drops that it took more than 6 years (!) to build and open the place. You have to be utterly insane to pour this much time and money into a restaurant because as I’m sure every guy who took a business 101 class is foaming at the mouth to tell you — it’s the riskiest venture of all. But just look at it! There are so many little details inspired by Matty and his upbringing sprinkled everywhere that forget the food! I need someone to take me a on date there, so I can look up at that crazy well-like ceiling in the bathroom and get lost in it.
Another team that caught me off guard with their attention to detail and production timelines is the one behind the beauty and body care brand Soft Services. In a recent Feed Me interview with Emily Sundberg, the CEO Rebecca Zhou shared that factoring in everything from formulation to naming, their latest product, body retinol, took 3 whole years (!) to launch.
But the thing that always surprised me the most about Soft Services is how relatively slow and quiet the brand is on social media, compared to the rest of the beauty startups that pump out content and influencer campaigns at the speed of the industry’s legacy names. Apparently, it’s because part of the team’s mission is to reduce “physical and digital waste”, meaning everything they put out — be it a body retinol or an IG story, must be thought-out and serve some sort of purpose.
As Emily fairly points out in the newsletter, “there’s an elegant restraint, and they’ve avoided viral campaigns (so far). It just feels chilled vs. amp’ed up TikTok voices and graphics…I want my shower to feel like the former.” And looking back, I have to ask myself — would I have been as mesmerized by Soft Services in the first place if they haven’t given me the space and time to poke around their IG? If they pushed their products down my throat rather instead of letting me check out their beautiful packaging and ingredient details at my own pace? If they are this thoughtful about how they present themselves to the world, it subtly implies that they must be extremely thorough about the products they sell too. And that is the type of feeling and mutual understanding between creators and their audiences that, to me, is very special and well-worth taking the time to achieve.
More on beautiful thoughtful things that take time:
Damon Dominique, one of my favorite OG YouTube creators, on the state of creativity in social media:
”You know when you have nothing to say? Yea that's not the time to be on social media. And yet, that’s exactly the problem because in order to succeed in social media, you basically have to be a slave to it daily. You have to post every day. “Stop overthinking your content. Just put up the last thing in your camera roll with a quote.” Like just put up something…why? So that it’s garbage on my feed?”
Emelie De Vitis, SVP of Product and Marketing at Rimowa, on how they approach collaborations in a 032c interview with Brenda Weischer:
“Collabs shouldn’t be an easy solution. For us, it’s about surprising and delighting. On top of that it can’t just add a logo on a suitcase and say, “There you go! It’s done!” It’s about really joining forces with the brand we’re collaborating with. Going into their codes, their archives, working on what their values are, and how we can build products that really embody those values.
To come back to the example of Porsche: we made a product that perfectly fits the dimensions of a Porsche trunk. And they have never agreed to have the Porsche shield on anything other than their cars before. This is years of working together. You might say we’re quite slow, but that’s because we really want to come up with a product that is really well thought through and that has a rich storytelling.”
Every single detail in the Saie’s masterclass produced by Erin Starkweather:
But especially the vanity trays custom made by Ananas Ananas:
“We spent time studying the different make up products and how each one would be highlighted in composition with the piece. The fabrication process included laser cut sheets and rods to create multidimensional space vessels and balls used to perch the sheet on top creating “wells” for the products to fit into. The process naturally challenged us from shifting between material, techniques and finishes, always keeping in mind its function as a sculptural and intuitive design for Saie’s guests. The most challenging and thought provoking part of this was to take into consideration the amount of times the piece has to survive being transported from city to city.”