Making It

Two recent stories in the Financial Times (ft.com) caught my eye. Both are written by the wonderfully named Scheherazade Daneshkhu. Both have a Paris dateline. The headline of one is “Risk to France’s fashion savoir-fair.” And the other: “Europe laments craftsmen’s demise.” And the cause of the former is predicated on the latter: the actual making of things—high-priced luxury goods, that is—is beginning to disappear from La Belle France, as well as from other western European countries, including the U.K.

In the “Europe laments” article Daneshkhu quotes Guy Salter, deputy director of Walpole (thewalpole.co.uk), described on its website as “a non-profit-making organisation that furthers the interests of the British luxury by harnessing and sharing the collective knowledge, experience and resources of the membership,” and part of an alliance of luxury goods industry bodies from France, Italy, and Spain, “All young people want to be designers and very few, makers. We want to try to change that by promoting craftsmanship in the luxury sector.”

But there is another issue, which is the outsourcing of some of the work that has historically been done in places like the U.K. and France to low-cost companies in Asia and eastern Europe.

In the “Risk to France’s” piece, Marc Rousseau, director of Confection Rousseau, a company that specializes in luxury fabric cutting and sewing, is quoted, “I want the large luxury companies to answer the question: is it necessary to preserve manufacturing and savoir-faire in France? My fear is that these companies are happy to sell through the use of marketing and celebrities and that they don’t care about quality any more. So there is a real threat to the industry.”

While this might not be particularly germane to all but a handful of well-heeled individuals, this is hardly the case because according to the “Europe laments” piece, “European brands account for 75 per cent of the 170 bn Euro global luxury market, according to figures from Boston Consulting Group.”

Seventy-five percent of any market is non-trivial, and when it comes to the high-end market, it is about real money for not only the companies whose names trip off the lips of readers of Vogue, but to the craftspeople who produce the couture products.

Perhaps one of the reasons the articles struck me—and trust me, it isn’t because of an interest in haute couture—is because I was reading Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World by Mark Frauenfelder (Portfolio). Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make, the do-it-yourself (DIY) magazine. One of Frauenfelder’s points is that people have a tendency to toss things that are broken or no longer fashionable though completely functional, that people—except those in the DIY community—are loathe to make things from scratch. Frauenfelder says that one of the things that he’s learned from his immersion in the DIY culture is “mistakes are not only inevitable—they’re a necessary part of learning and skill building. Mistakes are a sign that you’re active and curious.”

Here’s the connection: When people stop actually making things, when they outsource the making to other people at other companies in other countries, they lose a real fundamental understanding that is essential, not optional. To be sure, in the short term it may not matter much, but in the long term it has a huge effect on the fortunes of both the people and the companies for which they work. They lose the active curiosity that Frauenfelder identifies as being important to learning. This is not to in any way diminish the importance of design, but to say that design must be intimately connected to the engineering and manufacture lest the product designed become nothing more than a commodity.