Spurr of the Moment

SIMON SPURR has ditched his trademark use of colour for a darker approach this autumn. blue carreon meets the designer in New York City to hear why he rejected the safety of the major houses for the freedom and risk of going it alone

WHEN I VISIT him at his studio in New York, Simon Spurr is going over his spring 2012 collection with his team. It’s mid-August and the stores have started to roll out the autumn/winter 2011 merchandise, but with New York Fashion Week approaching in less than a month, Spurr’s mind is focused on his sartorial offerings for next year. Asked what he’s delivering to the stores for the current season, he has to pause to think. “Spring 2012 is basically done. The clothes are finished,” Spurr says. “My mind is now already on fall 2012.”

Autumn 2011, he finally explains, is filled with sharp suits, heavy topcoats lined with shearling, chunky, cable-knit cashmere sweaters and skinny jeans. “Over the past few seasons I’ve been known for using a lot of colour,” he acknowledges. “It’s very hard to make a guy wearing a pink suit look masculine, which apparently I achieved. Fall 2011 for me is definitely a different take on that. I switched the colour palette to more blacks and greys. It’s definitely a more sinister approach to menswear. I was really trying to appeal more to a European customer. The execution is a little more intellectual. It’s still clean and architectural, but there’s a lot of movement and texture.”

In a world where conglomerates dominate the landscape, there are only eight people on Spurr’s team. “We’re a growing brand. We’re a small team and we wear multiple hats. There’s always a ton of work to do.” That includes the challenge of educating consumers about the product. “It’s even more difficult to compete in the designer arena if you aren’t an established house, if you don’t have the money for marketing, branding and advertising. I’m a veritable unknown brand. With high-quality products, nine out of 10 times, if people have a choice between Dior and Simon Spurr, of course people will go with Dior because they’re familiar with it.”

He started out working with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent before Tom Ford took over. “Working with Hedi for over two years was really what shaped and moulded me as a designer,” Spurr says. “He was very much about a strong vision, precision, androgyny, minimal colour, and proportion. He really redefined men’s proportion in a way that has not been replicated since.” His time with Slimane was followed by stints at Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, where he oversaw the upmarket, suiting-focused Purple Label.

When he turned 31, Spurr found himself in a pre-midlife crisis. Should he stay at Ralph Lauren, where he could have a great career and earn big money, or make a leap of faith and set up his own operation, giving him the freedom to do what he wanted?
“It was really a crossroads for me, and I decided to make the educated risk of starting my own label,” says Spurr. “I’m a bit more of a family man and have always had a dream of having four or five kids. It was a life-changing move not only for my career. I wanted freedom.”

In a world where conglomerates dominate the landscape, there are only eight people on Spurr’s team. “We’re a growing brand.
We’re a small team and we wear multiple hats. There’s always a ton of work to do.” That includes the challenge of educating consumers about the product. “It’s even more difficult to compete in the designer arena if you aren’t an established house, if you don’t have the money for marketing, branding and advertising. I’m a veritable unknown brand. With high-quality products, nine out of 10 times, if people have a choice between Dior and Simon Spurr, of course people will go with Dior because they’re familiar with it.”

Spurr has been cautious about China for this reason, so he has very little presence in the world’s second-largest luxury market. “It’s definitely a significant growth area for any company,” he notes. “It’s an important market, but it’s a market that if you break into it, you have to sustain, and that takes time, manpower and resources. Being a small company, I don’t want to just drop our product and not go there to educate them and tell them who I am.”

Come the day that Spurr makes his presence felt in mainland China, his clean, architectural and modern clothes might be seen as a sartorial palate cleanser for a market obsessed with logos and unnecessary details. “My aim is to help men understand how to dress,” Spurr says, “and to make men feel comfortable about the way they dress.”