October 24, 2015 |
Paula Gerbase is an intense, dark-haired, iron-willed young woman, who is fast carving a name for herself on the international fashion stage. All right, I’m lying. She’s doing it slow. And her name isn’t anywhere at all. Gerbase’s own label is called 1205, derived from her birthday, and she’s also the relatively freshly installed creative director of John Lobb, a company founded by a bloke with that name in 1849. Gerbase has been there a year, which feels like a long time in contemporary fashion terms. However, the quiet and methodical Gerbase is, characteristically, only now starting to subtly but surely make her mark there.
Born in Brazil and now based in London, 32-year-old Gerbase cut her teeth on Savile Row, at Hardy Amies first and then Kilgour, before going it alone. “I don’t think I ever made a choice to become a designer, I simply never considered anything else,” says she, carefully and precisely, in the same way she approaches her work. “Savile Row taught me discipline and absolute respect for the process of garment making, and this still and probably always will inform my work.”
You can see that approach emerging in her work for Lobb, focused on footwear and leather accoutrements, giving Gerbase’s urge towards OCD perfection a perfect outlet. It’s tough to reinvent a classic – especially something like, say, a desert boot, the sort of thing that has been refined over years of use to ensure it does its job perfectly and unobtrusively. Redesigning history? That’s a challenge Gerbase is evidently eager to take on.
Text by Alexander Fury, take from Issue 42 of 10 Men, on newsstands now
