The conversation with Martin Leuthold took place online on December 3, 2020. The event was originally envisioned within the framework of the two-day symposium “Finders Keepers” in October 2020, but had to be shifted to the virtual space due to the corona pandemic. We thank Martin Leuthold, the former creative director of Jakob Schlaepfer AG, St. Gallen, for his flexibility and the fascinating exchange. You can find summaries of other conversations conducted in this format under the filter Finders Keepers.
The company Jakob Schlaepfer AG has been producing fabrics known far beyond the borders of Switzerland for over 100 years, and the creations of Jakob Schlaepfer have thus inspired couturiers, architects, and fabric lovers around the world. The fabrics continue to be conceived, tested, and realized in St. Gallen. What role does the archive play in this sector, in which “the new” determines success or failure season after season?
We conducted a conversation with Martin Leuthold, and spoke with him about his work and his connection to the archive. Each year Leuthold and his team created over 1,000 designs for fabrics and helped develop the company archive as of in the 1970s. He is convinced that nothing new can be created without the past—and the in-house archive hence plays a central role in the creative process and what is ultimately created.
The conversation with Martin Leuthold took place in the Art Library and Leuthold led us piece by piece through the dozens of fabrics samples and books of fabric samples that he had brought along with him—the fact that such a conversation is more than merely a talk and the quality that can arise from it also becomes apparent in the documentation that follows.
Archives as Inspiration
Archives are our memories, according to Leuthold. We learn from them, quite didactically, but can also simply be inspired by them. Particularly individuals who work with archives in a creative way, hence as Leuthold made his personal creative principle, should not only copy, but also interpret anew, and, in order to facilitate this, it should be possible to access, touch, and experience archives as directly as possible. This is indispensable particularly in the field of textiles. One must be able to feel fabrics, to grasp the fall of their folds or their lightness. According to Leuthold, when archiving them, this sometimes leads to big challenges, since textiles are available in such abundance that archiving them can become a problem. Textile companies usually keep folios or sample books with small reference samples pasted into them. They are valuable, since they thus document samples, colors, materials, and printing techniques—but the samples are also difficult to use because they can no longer be touched and “animated.”
The Archive of Textiles
As Leuthold explained, fabric is primarily a semi-finished product, which means that it is a product that has not yet been completely processed, is still not a wearable piece of clothing. St. Gallen has established itself in this field of semi-finished products and looks back at an 800-year history of textiles. A large portion of the fabric produced has always been intended for the luxury segment. A lot of innovation—from linen, to cotton, to cotton embroidery and machine embroidery, to the laser- and 3D-printed fabrics of today—has always influenced the production of textiles. Despite all this innovation, St. Gallen has always exercised a certain amount of caution because the textile production sector stands in the background and is unable to show any finished products—truly a complete understatement in comparison with the renown of couturiers and fashion labels, as we agree with Martin Leuthold.
The world of fashion with all its facets produces an abundance of fabric designs and products and this gives rise to the impression that one is constantly seeing the same things. A look back, however, shows how important a particular material or technique was at a specific point in time. A variation of borders or trims thus at first just seems to be a range of—simply—borders or trims, but this abundance, just like fabrics embellished in diverse ways with gold and silver, represents the preferences that characterize the taste of a region, nation, or even continent as it is catered to by producers of fabrics.
Jakob Schlaepfer AG’s In-house Archive
In the 1950s, a young female employee helped shape the company’s archiving strategy. Because she showed a real talent for sales after having been employed for only a short period of time, the company released her from her secretarial work and sent her on business trips to Japan and the Middle East. Even though she favored books of samples, in addition to them, she also wanted to preserve the sample swatches with which she traveled and based on which she presented collections. In the 1950s and 1960s, she therefore began preserving two of each of the aforementioned sample swatches for collections. Up to that point in time, they had been destroyed or given away because they were not considered of value.
It was on this basis that Martin Leuthold developed the archive for Jakob Schlaepfer AG. One copy of each of the sample swatches was sorted by number and put aside. A collection that is not there to be touched, not to mention used. The second collection with the duplicates of the sample swatches is arranged according to genre or technique and intended expressly for use: clients and employees have access to it and the fabrics can be touched and inspiration obtained from them. For Martin Leuthold, this is the central point of a functioning archive: “It must also always be alluring.” People might talk a lot about fashion, but it must ultimately be possible to touch it as well.
It is therefore not surprising that barely any efforts to digitize the samples have been made so far. Although the current situation has led to the fact that the newest collections are also stored digitally so that clients have the chance to look at the samples electronically, they nonetheless then immediately request samples of the fabrics.
Archives and Innovation
For Leuthold, the concept of an archive is strongly linked to that of innovation. It is in this that he also sees the strength of Europe’s cultural history, with its numerous museums and archives, because it has thus provided a basis for many other creative innovations. During his presentation, however, the concept of innovation also caught our attention in another context, namely, in connection with techniques and technologies. Leuthold again and again invented old techniques anew or encouraged the further development of existing machines in order to achieve new results. The books of samples are thus also a quite fascinating presentation of technical improvements.
We then asked him if he maintains his own archive. His private archive, Leuthold said, consists of a library with books on the topic of fashion, circa 800 fabrics, and an extensive collection of postcards. He already began collecting the fabrics spoken of here while studying and subjected them to two criteria: they should be fabrics about which he thought, “something like this will no longer be made later on,” and the pieces of fabric were supposed to be at least 1.5 meters long so that they could also be used to produce something small at a later point in time. This also shows once again that Martin Leuthold advocates a very lively concept of an archive, since he also hopes that his private archive might serve as the basis for further inspirations in the future—be it in a museum or in connection with further training purposes.
Always new, always ahead of current trends—fashion consistently and unrelentingly demands a lot of sensitivity and intuition from its designers. The conversation with Martin Leuthold not only made it clear how trailblazing research into or historical knowledge about technology, ornaments, and so forth can also be for contemporary designs for fabrics or fashion; we also realized what role archiving plays in this. It is perhaps not even the archive itself, the place and the boxes, that are important here. But instead the individuals who design the archive, the decisions they make—and, above all, the employees with their knowledge about techniques, machines, and designs that have perhaps been forgotten, but with which one can now create entirely new, fascinating designs once again today.
