Creating Beauty in FUNCTIONALITY - An Interview With Emilie Arnault

Today’s fashion industry is often fueled by new creative directors taking the helm of big brands, injecting their expertise and style into the existing DNA and offering a fresh perspective on an existing model. As strategic as this is to garner a new audience and reignite dying flames, we found ourselves longing to find a brand that is still as relevant today as it was since the beginning, with the original design team still at the forefront of its ongoing metamorphosis. It’s this authenticity that today’s market often lacks, as we find ourselves in a rat race towards the next big trend. 

So, with that being said, we introduce you to Emilie Arnault. Anyone in the accessories industry knows this name, echoing through the halls of fame when it comes to revolutionising  product design. Although, very few have ever seen the face of the enigmatic, eccentric French woman with beguiling glasses and always a smile on her face. With a rich history in the industry, designing products for some of the most prestigious names such as Damir Doma and even Apple, what Arnault does differently is she does not design fashion, she designs structures and has been doing so her entire life.

Starting her journey in a completely unorthodox way, Arnault began her studies in science. After she would move on to industrial design, and it’s this polarisation of the two ends of the spectrum in which she builds upon in her design language. Romanticising scientific and mathematical properties, be that material or structures, and fusing it with the thought process behind design, The physical and the theoretical flirt with each other and it’s the space in between that Emilie finds home. This is where her creation occurs. 

There are very few designers who have been relentlessly following a singular vision for as long as Paris-based innovator Emilie Arnault. There are even fewer who have continued this vision under one brand. Despite this, Arnault has stayed head designer of Parisian bag brand côte&ciel ever since its emergence in 2008, and still to this day, 16 years after they first made their debut, she continues to evolve its design language whilst seamlessly staying true to the core values of the beguiling bag brand.

Emilie Arnault is what the fashion industry would call a unicorn - a mythical creature that you’d never catch at the trendiest fashion party or sitting alongside the upper echelons at a fancy dinner. This is not because she does not have a seat at the table, but it’s because rather than conforming with the smoke and mirrors that the fashion industry continues to push through our social media feeds, she prefers to sit in her studio coming up with the next design innovation in the world of accessories. She’s anti-marketing, anti-trend, and pro-do whatever she thinks is cool. Exactly how it should be. 

Her unique dialectic with fashion is what makes her so prominent today, with her designs continuously appearing on other brands’ moodboards. Emilie does not design for a specific genre of person nor gender. Instead, people find use of her objects through their own means. She claims the bags she creates are not functional, because she challenges what functionality truly means. It is entirely dependent on the wearer: many pockets might be of use to someone organised, but for someone that isn't, this is a hindrance, and waterproof material is of no use to someone that lives where it never rains. Instead, she develops ergonomic and modular designs that adapt to the beholder, developing versatile structural objects rather than fashionable pieces that are confined to a singular purpose.

This has never been more emphasised than in her work with côte&ciel. For the last 16 years, Arnault has broken boundaries through her eclectic collections, creating some of the most iconic bags in the world. Take the ISAR for example, a bag created to solve a problem - she wanted a bag that would allow her partner to carry his belongings, but also a separate compartment that integrated into the bag for his dirty clothes, to not mix the two. This bag’s design, born from love to fulfil a purpose, would go on to become one of the most copied bags in fashion. 

It’s with all this being said that we are very excited to finally sit down with our friend Emilie Arnault and talk to her about her unique early journey, her thought process behind design, and understand why she will never design for trends again. This is not just an interview, it’s a love story. 

---

Could you please first introduce yourself to the sabukaru network?

My name is Emilie Arnault, and I'm a designer born and based in Paris. I grew up in a modest family from the north of Paris where I studied Sciences as well as Art, and finally industrial Design. These subjects are all worlds apart, and for a long time I searched for a way to justify these early contradictions until it occurred to me: I don’t belong to any of these schools of thought, ‘science against art against industry’ - who cares. I work to bring them all together so that they sit at the same crossroads.

With my unusual educational background, I’m lucky enough to know the scientific process leading to a rainbow yet it doesn’t not affect its magic to me, it makes it even more fascinating. understand both sides. Art has always been my thing as well. I was pretty talented when I was a kid and got very encouraged by the many “waouh” [wow] grownups would make at my drawings, it seemed to make them happy and kids like to make people happy. So when I got older, I tried that too. Once done with science, I went to an Art school as a revenge against conventions. But, with time and after a few years of studying, I started to doubt being able to sell myself and run an ‘ego arty thing’ that you need if you want to succeed. I preferred the shadow of the atelier than the spot lights of the galleries.

I ended up getting into industrial design as an in-between: applying art to reality, problem solving with aesthetics in mind etc… It's almost as if I avoided having to make a choice, but still found a place to not be a misfit anymore. It was a good decision.

Before diving into your time at côte&ciel, please tell us about your days before fashion? 

I made a bit of money with the production of objects I designed at school, just enough to buy a computer and learn how to use it, because at that time, only graphic designers used them. I  illustrated a book for kids, without a computer but as a journalist and writer, old-school approach - but we could not find any publisher, they all found it too scary.

Then I finally got my first proper job as a luggage designer in a French house. I learned a lot there, not so much about design but much more how to make a design happen, that is definitely not a piece of cake, and school does not prepare you for that! Ideas are not enough, you also need to learn how to express and sell them internally.

It took me 10 years to understand what I would never do again: 1) design boxes [luggage is mainly decorative boxes]. And 2) I wouldn’t do it for squarish people [marketing people reducing reality to subjective figures and shaping them as if they knew it all]

In what ways do you distill all of the knowledge from your past professions, science and industrial design, into the fashion landscape? 

I think the red line is experimentation: A painter never knows where to go but only how, through trials, back and forths are not perceived as mistakes or loss of time, it is an experiment. Same for scientists. If they knew everything, why would they constantly research and reshape theories? I see them on both sides of a line of Wonder. Scientists want to explain it [i.e a rainbow is an illusion due to raindrops diffracting light], artists want to express it [a rainbow can mean many things], they both study the same thing, but from different perspectives.

I play with fabric in search of surprise [wonder], I experiment and document my research, it leads to products bringing novelty to the market. It's for me being at a crossroads, sitting in between imagination and action. I basically experiment with fashion for Fashion. Does not fashion as a verb mean to shape?

You have been the lead designer for côte&ciel since the very start of its inception in 2008. It’s not often you see a brand have the same designer for this amount of time. How in ways has the brand evolved throughout the years?

We started as a small company developing bags for computers and ended up as a fashion brand doing bags where you can potentially fit a computer. For some it’s nothing, just a matter of point of view because at the end, it was and it is still bags that we sell. But for us, it’s been a long journey from a product to a brand to finally get sort of a legitimacy in the fashion landscape.

Our story is genuinely authentic. We did without marketing-plan-leading-to-product-and-communication, instead we did products according to a certain vision and got surprised when people started to ask about our vision and now more about our process. Is it not how all brands should get born? The story of a product more than the product of a story?

What things have still stayed the same? How do you find this balance of constant innovation the brand is known for but still retaining the original DNA of the brand? 

Our DNA depends a lot on our design language which is directly linked to our design process. I recently read an article saying that creatives have a lot in common with young kid mindsets: the absence of the fear of failure. Think of the first years where kids are always told, “watch out, you’re gonna fall, or be hurt, or be wrong” but still they do what they want, with no fear, free to discover as much as they can till they get caught by the parents It’s a bit like a designer starting a new collection - the capacity for wonder. In the same way, kids get distracted by things that parents don’t even pay attention to. That’s a good way to picture a designer as well aha. 

To be creative you need to be in a playful mood, and to be able to play, you need to feel safe. Let a happy kid in a room with toys and ask the parents to leave, the kid will play and patiently wait for them to come back, they feel secured. Let an overstressed kid in the same room with millions of toys, he’ll cry till they come back. I don’t believe in the mythology of the creative only being able to work under pain and pressure. It’s a perverse idea. I’ve been lucky enough to always find support from the team. Novelty is not difficult when you feel secure, it applies for a creative as much as for a company, but consistency is key.

I’m the shape maker of the company, I help the babies to be born but we all raise them together. As long as the babies will be conceived following the same process, in my atelier, according to briefings freely interpreted, as long as they will be welcomed by the family no matter what, then patiently discussed and modified according to the market and everyone’s inputs, the final products will always end up in good shape. We’re a protective family. 

côte&ciel means the Coast and Sky in French. Can you please explain where this name derives from? 

The name was chosen before I joined the company, so I had to make it mine. I saw in the name the crossroads I referred to before. The coast and the sky are two opposite entities but when you look at them, you make them collide. A scientist will tell you it’s because your eyes turn a perspective into an image which gives you the illusion of a line [horizon], that this line looks flat from your perspective but it is actually round from the sky etc….

A poet will tell you that the ideal world belongs to the sky and the coast stands for reality. I see a nice symbol there. Creation is a matter of vision, and design a process to turn ideas into reality.

What we find interesting is not only your process talks about this middle point where two things meet, but also the essence of the brand's style. It's technical yet elegant, industrial yet beautiful. Was this always the idea, or something that organically occurred?

Well, as a french, contradictions are my playground, so no wonder why that’s also what people see in our designs! I’d say that it organically occurred but maybe it was a subconscious idea from the beginning. It’s always difficult to tell from where and when ideas can come, intuition does not need words to process, in my case, words mainly come after when I start reflecting on what I did because I have to justify it.

côte&ciel bags are interesting because they champion functionality, but not in ways that many people interpret the genre today e.g hundreds of pockets, GORE TEX membranes, and built for the outdoors. In your own words we’d love to hear your take on what functionality actually means? 

Despite what people may think, functionality is a subjective concept, it mainly depends on the context you consider it in. Who, what, where and how are the key questions to design something [functional].

Give a bag with a hundred of pockets to an unorganized person and you’ll see this person getting crazy at opening everything to find a single thing. Give a one-volume-bag to a control freak and you’ll get kind of the same result - discomfort. Both will consider the bags you picked as not functional but if you reverse the offer, they’ll find them much more practical and will congratulate you for your sense of functionality. So basically, functionality is a matter of context before the object.

With this, how is côte&ciel functional, even without all these modern descriptions of what functionality is?

At côte&ciel, we prefer to speak about ergonomy, rather than functionality. Functionality in a fashion context is a marketing word to give a technical vibe to something which is most of the time a gimmick. If you put aside fashion and style, the true function of a bag is to gather personal belongings to be held by the wearer from one place to another. Pockets are a way to organize, but a single volume is enough to contain, as said, they are only needed for certain types of people in a certain type of context. So Instead of targeting market shares via style trends and convincing ourselves that pockets are functionals, we prefer to focus on what we all have in common: bodies in contexts.

We’ve noticed a slight focus on movement within your communications as of recent, especially with the most recent London event you hosted. Why is it that you wanted to explore this field of practice, and how does it relate to the products?

This focus on movement was our way to contextualize our perception of functionality. Our bags are not designed to be worn on a run, nor on long hikes, or to go camping in - can you do all of these things with them? Of course. But, where the functionality lies within côte&ciel is the adaptability of the bags according to the wearer. Our soft shapes and ergonomic designs can be worn even in the most illustrious positions, like two dancers in a performance all the way down to the busy commuter on their way to work and still retain their shapes and usage. We do not confine the products to a single use or persona, instead we allow the wearer to discover this based on what they need it for. 

You have developed a trademark style of folding and twisting fabrics to create form. For people who may not understand this method, could you please explain it and the difference between this and a usual process of designing? 

Since a bag is a volume where we put things to hold and transport, I simply decided to investigate how to get a volume from a flat piece of fabric. A usual method for garments includes cutting and sewing fabric, but for this, you need to take measurements and calculate. It takes time, it is not intuitive and even at times counterproductive because if you fail, you lose time and fabric. I prefer to improvise, let it go, and see where it leads me. Like a sculptor. Folding and twisting are easy ways to do it, it requires no calculation at first stage, just physics, play with forces, and in theory, you can do and redo it with a single piece of fabric forever.

It is movement applied to fabric, and since a bag also implies movement when in use [opening zippers, filling a pocket, holding a strap], I simply use movement to create objects to be used in movement and around it goes. I find it easier to work that way because it is dealing with forms and functions at the same time, no status on what has to come first. 

It reminds us of origami, is this an inspiration for you when designing?

Yes and no. I’d say that my inspiration comes much more from furoshiki*

* traditional Japanese wrapping cloths, usually used to wrap and/or to transport goods.

When we think of côte&ciel, you guys are ingrained in the history of modern fashion bags - anyone who is anyone has owned an ISAR and likely still uses it today due to the quality. Do you find this a daunting notion, having to continue to live up to these high standards of quality and experimentation? 

It’s actually a pleasure more than anything. As a designer, I like problem solving and constraints. 

The creation of the ISAR was a true historical moment for the bag industry. It was never done before, and changed the way bags were perceived and designed there after. It’s almost as if you are an inventor first, fashion designer second - is this how you see yourself?

My background speaks for me. I don’t design to make things nice, I design to make things work in a new way. I’m not self-centered enough to see my activity as a way to spread beauty all over the world like some fashion designers could see themselves, I prefer to serve a purpose.

When a shape is new, intriguing yet understandable, it starts making sense to people, they appropriate it and then start speaking about beauty. Beauty is not in the thing but in the way you look at things. If the object resonates with you, you feel happy and see beauty.

This notion is even further reinforced because côte&ciel also never follows trends, something any normal fashion brand needs to do to survive. Do you find this a hindrance to your design process due to needing to search for inspiration, or an aid because you're not confined to the usual industry expectations?

So far it’s more of an aid because trends are meant to please everybody, bringing the the risk of losing authenticity. Also, following them requires huge investments, large production flexibility, and a lot of wastage. Somebody once said “small is beautiful”, and it very much applies to us.

You have collaborated with some of the best brands in the world; Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, and Undercover. As such an experimental designer, how do you find common synergy between your way of design and another designer when collaborating?

It’s like falling in love. Same initial excitement, lots of expectations, positive energy, and sometimes a bumpy return to earth.

We have seen small hints at potential garments in which iconic bag features have been implemented into ready to wear clothes. This brings to mind the fact that côte&ciel is a much more of a design platform that just happens to make bags. How do you, as the designer, feel about this idea?

The garment project effectively takes my design language with bags and how they are designed and recontextualizes it. Staying true to the DNA of the brand, this project is a good example that what côte&ciel does can be translated into almost anything when it comes to design. It’s a way of thinking differently, or more accurately a way of doing differently. I can tell you it’s gonna rock. 

Reflecting on how a bag brand can become a design brand is also interesting because it calls the design language question - is it a matter of details or process? School of thought or style? Language is a way to communicate, so if spreading côte&ciel’s design language is a way to build a community, I’m into it!

Is there any final closing words you could share with up and coming designers that are looking to not follow trends, and instead be original? 

I see trends almost as if a way to justify copying. A smart way to please people and make money. I’m not against copying in general, it is part of a learning process. That’s how we grow up. A baby learns how to stand by observing others, and then walk, develop language, manage to communicate, and finally exist in the world. So it should not be about ignoring others, but much more about learning how to be true to ourselves.

Words by Joe Goodwin