Media for Change
Article from issue 1 of ‘later’ – the Parsons Paris alumni magazine
Conversation between Léa Germano & Molly Apple, edited by Giulia Tacchi
In a world where sustainability is still a challenge, there are small realities that can help us make it easier. Molly Apple is the founder of MERDE magazine, a publication that covers sustainable, upcoming designers, upcycling, vintage fashion. Léa Germano is the co-founder of Studio Paillette, a fashion renting company accessible to everyone. I brought them together to discuss ways of consuming fashion sustainably, and the importance of media coverage of sustainable fashion practices, while giving us interesting insights about their respective projects.
Molly: I’m excited to hear more about the origins of Studio Paillette. Is it paillette?
Léa: Yeah, you say it right. It’s paillette, but most Americans say palette. It’s not very English friendly, but we’ll figure it out when we grow. MERDE is so cool! I love what it looks like: the layout, the typography, everything; it’s visually very impactful. Usually we’re not—well, we’re used to everything that’s created around sustainable fashion to not have a very strong stand visually. I know it’s changing, but it’s been like that for a long time… When did you start your own magazine?
MOLLY: I went to Parsons Paris in 2018 for the Fashion Studies program. And I was taking this course with Justin Morin, who is a teacher there, and the Editor-in-Chief of Revue magazine. I’ve always been obsessed with fashion magazines since I was a kid, so it was my favorite class. It was more of a fun project at first for me, I wasn’t really thinking about it as my thesis. But I always wanted to start my own magazine. After the class ended, I talked to Justin and he helped me find the concept for MERDE. He asked me: where do you see a gap in fashion publishing and what is something that frustrates you in magazines that you don’t see? And I said: I don’t really think there is a lot of humor, I think people take themselves really seriously in this industry. And the Vogues and even the niche publications, like Purple, all feel so serious. It feels gate-kept. Like we see the same brands, the same writers, the same photographers, the same art directors… and they are all beautiful and creative but it kind of feels like we’re losing, or we don’t have this representation of, one: vintage, up-cycled clothes, and two: young designers, and people on the fringe of the industry who don’t necessarily get a lot of media attention. My thesis ended up being centered around this project, that was my way of inserting myself into the field by making a magazine. Then after I made it and I finished my thesis, I just couldn’t stop because I was so addicted to the process. It’s addicting. [laughs]
Léa: It’s super cool.
MOLLY: I wanna know about you, when did you start your own business?
Léa: I did my fashion design degree in New York, but I did one semester in Paris when the school opened in 2013. I also went to Central Saint Martins for six months after that. And I graduated in New York, started working there—I was a designer at Marc Jacobs. And then I came back to Paris, and designed at Balmain for a few years. Two luxury houses, that was the beginning of my career.
MOLLY: Wow!
Léa: So I graduated eight years ago? And I started Studio Paillette because I wanted to create an access to fashion. I realized that most people don’t know brands, especially emerging designers, and don’t really know them as a product they can actually wear. It’s all very disconnected, very glossy Vogue campaigns. And another need I had was to revalue products from past collections. Being on the design side, we’re asked to create products that are new every season, and that update the past season, which is completely stupid, obviously. I really believe in styling being the core of everything, and so when you style a product in a new look, it changes the story. So for me it’s not which season does the product come from, its about how you style it, and what you do with it image-wise. So it started from that: creating looks, multi-brand looks, which is the core of what I do. It obviously starts from my personal aesthetic, but it brings together specific luxury brands, premium brands, emerging designers, and streetwear brands… Mixing them together makes something that’s a lot closer to what people wear. It’s having fun with it.
MOLLY: I think we have very similar aesthetics when it comes to—obviously you can’t tell right now ‘cause I just threw on a tank top, but I like the way you layer… lot of layering, lots of mixing and matching, I don’t know if you heard of the term raggamuffin style?
Léa: Oh, no, I know the word, but I didn’t know there was a trend.
MOLLY: It’s kind of like… you mix a lot of things and patterns…
Léa: I like that, I’ll write it down. Also Studio Paillette is a very different rental than most platforms that emerged because it’s not about being solely distributor, buying the stock and putting it on rent. We don’t buy the pieces from the brands: we invest all of our money in communication, the visuals we create, the community we’re building. So, we give commissions on the rental, but it’s more a client acquisition.
MOLLY: Interesting!
Léa: We’ll charge brands for the content we produce eventually, but later on and in different ways. Today is communication services in exchange for products.
MOLLY: Who you see is interacting with Studio Paillette?
Léa: We have two types of clients. The pro clients who came to us very easily (stylists, content creators, artists, agents…). But I didn’t wanna make it just a service for people that are already in fashion. I really wanna create a new way of consuming, and the end consumer to be a part of it, to touch a much larger audience. So, apart from those pro clients, we have two targets: people 25 to 40 that have a reason to get dressed, and wanna have fun with their outfits, but that are not necessarily fashion insiders. The other half is more Gen-Z, 18 to 25 years old, that consume a lot of content on TikTok, on Instagram; they wanna access fashion and it’s cheap for them, it’s affordable. Everything is 10% of the price per month, so lots of our pieces are like, 17 euros or 21 euros, 37, and the price includes delivery back and forth, and cleaning. We want to replace the idea that Zara is the only option if you wanna wear fun, cheap pieces that go with your outfits, or follow trends. We make the pricing so accessible that financially, it makes a lot of sense to rent with us, which is not the case with other platforms, because of course they buy the products and they have to make it profitable for them.
MOLLY: I love that! A lot of businesses that are in the same lane of Studio Paillette, are either marketed toward a rental program for regular consumers, or it’s a fashion insider showroom for stylists and celebrities. So it’s cool that you’re blending the two, and making it accessible to anyone, because the way we consume fashion is changing. I know I look at my closet differently than I used to. I try to think of it as this rotation: if I buy something new I have to rotate something out, and bring it and sell it, or give it to a charity shop or something. So I’m trying to be more thoughtful about that.
Léa: I’m curious, do you think magazines should only feature sustainable brands? I was gonna say no, but you tell me.
MOLLY: I agree, I don’t also think that featuring only sustainable brands is showing the whole story. I think part of being a responsible brand is that you are different. I think it’s about mixing, or just at least being thoughtful. When people talk about sustainability they say “oh, it’s all about the planet,” but it’s also about the sustainability of the industry in general. How we produce and consume things and be thoughtful about the world that we’re in makes us sustainable. It can feel like an oxymoron when we’re trying to save the planet but also produce things, but the future is knowing what makes you feel good, and having a clear conscience at the same time. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Léa: Yes, it does. On my side of things, one of the answers is to create very sustainable access into optimizing the products of brands that do not necessarily produce right, for so many reasons. So I’d rather, for example, have one beautiful Marni product that people dream about and fantasize about because it’s glamorous and it’s a cool brand, and have it optimized, and worn by sixty people, instead of three times in real life. Because at the end the consumer is consuming brands and products, and what is exciting for them comes priority from the visuals. You can track down what brands do well or not, and I think it’s starting to be more transparent; you can read online about it, soon it will be on the label a lot more… There’s a lot being done to make the whole chain fully transparent, but it’s not up to the consumer yet to make that choice.
MOLLY: I listen to the BoF podcast, and they have a lot of conversations about sustainability, but it’s all very surface level, because they are covering a lot of luxury. And it’s good that people at the top are having these discussions, and hopefully from the top it can trickle-down. But I think it’s important to have the trickle-up as well—I’m not saying we’re at the bottom, but we are the next generation of consumers, or at least our audience is, as media. We are having these conversations a lot on the shoots that I’m arranging for this small self published magazine, so it’s cool to see it both from the top and the bottom.
Léa: Yeah, I agree. I’m being asked to cover, regularly now, a sustainable fashion podcast, and I’m part of meet ups conversation where they ask me to talk as the small actor at the table with big directors of big French companies.
MOLLY: Cool!
Léa: And I’m supposed to bring up topics that they are not bringing up themselves. I personally feel—and that’s also why I didn’t stay in luxury—that sustainability is not their priority; it’s gonna sound lame and pretty basic, but they’re into making money, and that hasn’t changed yet. And even though there are legislations in France, like the new law about not being able to destroy unsold inventory—and it’s huge, and they’re trying to bring it up to European level—, luxury companies will still relocate their inventory to the States so they can burn it there. And there are a lot of little media who are talking about sustainability. But the main ones are still trading it as a side subject or atopic in itself: oh, the sustainable brands… It shouldn’t be like that, sustainability is part of everything now, it’s the root of why we should do things. And I like it when it’s done in a way that the product is interesting, like MERDE is looking pretty cool. That’s what people care about. They want to consume content, and products, they don’t wanna consume a way of consuming.
MOLLY: In our last publications we had a lot of these young showrooms with very cool aesthetics, and something that I do in MERDE to support them is, when I did the credits I didn’t just list all those things, but I also said from which showroom they were from, ‘cause I think that having this transparency is another core pillar of MERDE. We like to be super transparent, and so it was like: vintage Marc Jacobs boots from Lidow Archive in Los Angeles. And sometimes even adding little notes like, “biggest collection of vintage Marc Jacobs boots in the world.” So it’s kind of giving free publicity to these people who are doing a really good job at these things. So we like to be really transparent about that too.
Léa: It’s very cool that you guys do that. I’m always very curious when I read an editorial to know where the clothes come from, but actually come from. Because it’s just the brand that’s credited, and, okay, it looks very unattainable, probably the PR agency just sent over the products, and it doesn’t feel approachable. Sometimes we are the PR agency for some small brands, but the same clothes are also accessible to anyone. So after they see the editorial, anyone can actually wear the look. And that was the goal of Studio Paillette when it was created.
MOLLY: I love that!
Léa: But, still, there’s a whole other topic of if you only feature luxury pieces, they’re too expensive for people, even though you make it accessible, and no one’s gonna dress like that. It’s interesting when influencers nowadays are saying more and more like “this was lent to me,” “this was a collaboration,” “this is a gift,”… it makes it more human. So you know that that’s how you made your look: you had that on hand and you didn’t have to pay for it. That’s a good first step, the second step for me is in making clothes accessible to everyone.
MOLLY: We have to wrap up and I wanna say that I would love to work for you and I think we should do an editorial for MERDE! We should produce a story together.
Léa: Yeah! I would love that! I would love to. I think that the aesthetic would look very great. That’s an amazing idea, let’s keep in touch. Thank you Giulia for introducing us!
