LONDON, March 6 — At 101 Wardour Street in Soho, where Elton John once ran Rocket Record Co, there is a small office library stacked with nearly every issue of Franca Sozzani’s Italian Vogue; old copies of Lei and Per Lui; and books on 1970s photorealist painting and ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging.
Kanye West has been here (his security had to come around first to clear the space). So has Calvin Klein. So has virtually every top photographer and most top fashion designers, though discretion forbids Angela Hill and David Owen, the proprietors, from naming names.
Sometimes such visitors come with design teams of as many as 10 people, squeezing into a room that barely fits four chairs and a pot of tea. Here at Idea (née Idea Books), books, magazines, printed matter and ephemera of interest to the creative industries — which means basically anything Idea can convince its wide-ranging customers is of interest — are big business.
You may know Idea from its corners at Dover Street Market in New York or in London, where it has kept a concession in books and magazines for years. You may have seen its selections on shelves in other fashion stores: Bookmarc, Marc Jacobs’ bookstore-boutique, in New York or Los Angeles, or, a few years back, at Kenzo in Paris.
But more likely than not, if you know Idea, you know it from Instagram and their weekly email newsletter, where Hill and Owen whisper directly into the ears of their fans, in a voice equal parts staccato mannerism and unbridled enthusiasm. (“Oh wow. Now. New find. The Picnic at Hanging Rock film book from 1975. The scripts the notes the images. Dying more than once.”) Or it may be that you don’t know Idea at all. Your favourite designer undoubtedly does.
“I think they supply a lot of books to the majority of the industry,” said Alasdair McLellan, a photographer who collaborated with them on The Palace Book and is working on an edition of prints. “I think they probably influence a lot of fashion designers in what they’re doing and what they’re looking at. Certainly, they seem to have everyone going there to purchase books from them.” (Kim Jones of Louis Vuitton, Julie de Libran of Sonia Rykiel and Clare Waight Keller, formerly of Chloé, have all gone on the record as fans.)
Idea is omnivorous in its aesthetic diet. Hill and Owen’s recent passions include obscurities on English gentlemen’s clubs, Japanese photographs of hippies in ‘70s Big Sur, bootleg DIY fanzines about River Phoenix and cult-film marketing materials.
It helps that Hill and Owen have a well-developed sense of cool that often outpaces the industry, let alone the public. Idea has been thumping books on 1980s Ibiza for years, and curated an exhibition in 2013 on the subject for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, for which they tracked down Armin Heinemann, the owner of Paula’s Ibiza, a legendary shop on the island. (This spring, the fashion and accessories label Loewe will release its own collaboration collection with Paula’s.)
Before Stranger Things catapulted Winona Ryder back to stardom last year, Idea printed the name Winona on totes — “We were trying to come up with our equivalent of the Birkin bag,” Owen said — and later T-shirts. (Justin Bieber was spotted wearing one.)
Idea began as a side project for Hill, who had worked as a photographer and stylist in the ‘90s, to profit from her collection of rare and vintage books. She began supplying a steady stream of them, first to Colette, the famous Paris concept shop, then to Dover Street Market. Eventually, Owen, a former journalist and copywriter, left his job in the music industry to join her full time. (He is responsible for the Idea voice, an omniscient narration of ongoing obsession.)
When Instagram was introduced, they embraced it as an ideal platform for displaying and selling the volumes they snap up from all over the world. While only a small fraction of their 278,000 followers actually buy the books, with costs that can rise into the four figures for the rarest, Owen estimates they now get 500 inquiry emails a day, from executives and fashion students alike.
“Even if you’re the Met, you still have to be the first one to contact them” for an in-demand book, said Julie Le, the librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, who buys from Idea for the museum’s library.
It is commerce by way of appreciation.
“All we really ever wanted to do was look at something that we thought was amazing and then show it to someone else, because we were so excited about it,” Owen said. “We found that if we sold the book that we were so excited about at a profit, then we could get paid and run a company out of enthusiasm for sharing things that we really liked. That’s not gone away at all.”
What has changed is that Idea is now in the business of making its own books. Beginning with fanzines by the cultishly adored Russian streetwear designer Gosha Rubchinskiy, Idea began quietly publishing its own books in 2014, which often are introduced to throngs at Dover Street Market or Comme des Garçons. (The latest, the first instalment of a 12-part zine by the photographer Willy Vanderperre, was released there on March 1, during Paris Fashion Week.)
As Idea’s collaborator list grew (it now includes photographers David Sims, Terry Richardson and Collier Schorr), larger brands began to notice. At the beginning of 2016, in what Hill describes as “opening the floodgates,” Demna Gvasalia, at the height of the mania for his Vetements label, published a 304-page book of behind-the-scenes photos with Idea. Suddenly, the biggest brands, those that ordinarily would head for established art-book presses, were calling. Gucci tapped Idea for Epiphany, a book of photos by Ari Marcopoulos, which arrived that spring.
“Now we’ve got books to do and meetings to have with all of the labels who are as big as Gucci,” Owen said. “But it’s about them finding something that works with us.”
If the books’ rapid success is a boost to their creators, it also throws a shine on their buyers.
It is a savvy move of Idea’s to invite customers as well as creatives into its haloed orbit, essentially rewarding them for having the good taste to buy. In so doing, it taps into a truth not always acknowledged: That much of shopping is about validation; for books, no less than clothes or cars or jewellery, can be a powerful identifier.
Owen identified two types of shopping: one for duties and tasks (“your groceries, renewing car insurance, horrible things”) and one for self-expression. “That type of shopping is purely creative for people,” he said. “We treat everybody as creative. That underpins everything that we do. We only understand people who are, basically. So we just talk to everyone that way, and it’s like an automatic filter. People who just don’t get it, who are really not in any way creative, are put off by us somehow.” — The New York Times
