MARTINE ASSOULINE: CFO/ FOUNDER OF ASSOULINE PUBLISHING: BOOKS WITH LAVISH BEAUTY AND MIND-ALTERING CONTENT
Assouline is unarguably the best publishing house in Art and Fashion today, led by Martine and Prosper Assouline, and seconded now by the younger generation, Alexander Assouline. It epitomizes luxury lifestyle, visual pleasure, and quality. Assouline books on art, fashion, architecture, gastronomy, and traveling are meticulously produced by a team of top professional designers in an environment that rivals the very books they produce for beauty and style. When Martine set this dream in motion, she had no inkling it was going to expand to reach the global acclaim it enjoys today. Assouline’s books - an art of sorts in their own right - vividly reflect beauty at its best in a quality format that is a perfect match for what they show. We may venture to say that it is not a book you are acquiring, it is a handcrafted experience.
I had the chance to meet super affable Martine Assouline, cofounder and CEO of Assouline Publishing, for a conversation in which stellar names like Dior, Carolina Herrera, Valentino, Vuitton, Azzedine Alaïa, Chanel et al flowed naturally. It was at her stunning yet cozy office with windows overlooking an impossible to forget rainy, foggy, cool, and atmospheric New York - perfect background for this interview.
I want to mention that I had the privilege of translating “Gauchos” by great Argentine photographer Aldo Sessa into English, printed by Assouline Publishing in 2018
First of all, Martine thank you for your time. When someone is very successful at something, the first question that comes to one’s mind is how that person began. What were his/her beginnings? Was it a dream? Was it something that came up by chance?
It was a decision that came between Prosper and I at the time Alexander, our son, my second son, was born, and I decided to stop working and spend more time with him. Prosper at the time was at a fantastic creative agency that was working for the best brands in fashion and luxury in Paris, at Place Vendome, but he was a bit restricted in terms of creation, he was someone who had made a lot of magazines and things like that since he was 17 years old, and later more in publicity, advertising, for Chanel, Dior, but he was a bit frustrated sometimes in terms of creation, with an extraordinary eye and visual culture. I was more on the side of texts and knowledge of that field, and both were book lovers, so I was doing nothing at home and at the time we had a spacious place, so we decided to do this, but not with a view to an international business. At first, it was just about creating books that we couldn’t find at bookstores. At that point there were very very few books on fashion. Most of them were in their subjects, their making and their style very classic and very expensive. So it was for us something to do and bring, and that was the beginning.
Well, that is what every creator does, to create something that he cannot find in his world. But I am going to go a step back: how did you meet Prosper?
I met Prosper when I arrived in Paris from South America. He was one of the first persons I met and we became friends. I was very very intrigued by this guy because he was extremely enthusiastic, which is not a very French way to be, you know (smiles) and he was also extremely creative, very fast and very much creative. And as we say a good idea is an idea that you do and he was doing that. So we had a lot of very good lunches or dinners like friends, but we were changing.
Where were you born, Martine? Because you’ve been to many different places...
I was born in Africa, part of my family has a long history in Africa, but in different places, and I was raised a bit in France, but a lot in South America. I started with Argentina and I went to Peru afterwards, and my father loved Peru so much that he wanted to just stay there. He was in charge of all Latin America’s business of a big European group, so he travelled.
When you began this company, did you imagine that it was going to reach this point?
Never. Absolutely never. It was step by step. And not only did Prosper and I learn the job of making books, with mistakes, you know, with different types of steps, but also we started to learn the business, which was important. And we started with another business because the second step, I would say, was when we found a good distributor as the first one was one that we’d met I don’t know how and it was a bad one. He was not really for our type of books. Then we found a great distributor who was interested in us, so for us was fantastic. We started this business in France and in French-speaking countries, but also we soon started to go to fairs, book fairs. The first one we went to was in Miami and we went with two books and with no meetings set up. People who went there on business had appointments every 15 minutes. We just went with two books and showed these two books, which were very different but also very special. After three days we had met everybody, all the big CFOs from each company, and they went - “Oh, you’re the crazy French!” (Laughs) -
Well, it opened doors!
But it opened doors... So they could see it was something intriguing, imaginative, I don’t know, but I can say that between the second and third year we were selling all our books to all those different publishers whether in England, in America, Rizzoli, Random Press, but also in Spain, in Portugal, Japan. We started to create new collections, first collections on fashion. That step was very important to make the business come true and also make us a household name internationally. That was a very strong step. And then we began to approach it as a real business.
But I understand it all happened very quickly to a certain extent. The first steps were methodical, but then it expanded quickly...
It expanded quickly because when we had the distributor we decided to pick the good ideas, the good creations, that we had in the drawer. And one of them was the collection on fashion. As I said before, we created not only the fashion niche, but also in a book that was not expensive, so it was all thought out beforehand to have something easy to print with 80 pages, no more. At the time it was sold for less than 100Fc, which would be at the time some 20€ today. We started to do Dior and Chanel, the big institutions, and Azzedine Alaïa was the best of the best in contemporary creation, and Vionnet, because Vionnet is in the history of fashion so it’s fundamental to show that we were there. At the time places like Dior and Chanel were much more open than today so they let us work because they trusted us since they knew we had a good eye and we knew them well.
That was the question that was coming to my mind. Those people are not very approachable so managing to win them over must not have been easy at first...
No, no!, it was easy because Prosper was working for them in advertising.... so he knew everybody, even Karl Lagerfeld.
What is this field, fashion and art, within the publishing industry different from any other, from any other books, ambience like? What are the difficulties?
To me there are no difficulties because when you create a book you start to learn a maximum about a brand or a designer to understand them and to take whatever you can in order to subsequently digest it and retain the essence. That is, for me, the job. I think that when you make a book you have to do all this job to afterwards give a visual answer for the person who is going to learn, to enjoy, whatever. So for me it is not complicated to do art, fashion or whatever. The complication comes up when, and it happens, unfortunately more and more, the marketing of a company interferes with the creation and they don’t understand. They come with the new rules, new aspects, new directions, for the year and they don’t have the overall picture, and sometimes even knowledge of the company or even cultural knowledge of the period you are talking about. That is creation so you have to come with the big picture, but also with a lot of knowledge. Some people in marketing have it and some others have no idea, and they feel very very important and in some way they can disturb and the project becomes a beautiful book, but more like a catalog than something the people are going to enjoy. And you can sense that.
How involved are you in the production of a book? Do you involve yourself completely?
Completely. Here we are all the big kitchen. All the people here are making the books. Other publishers do not have this kind of business. For them it is a matter of making 100 books a year so they do 20%, 30%, or 40% of them, but they have a small team and a lot of people outside, whether designers, whether researchers, whether editors. We have them all here. So they know our vocabulary, our spirits, our style. Also, they go to fairs that I haven’t been to for years because the business for them is to sell books so they can buy books from Japanese, English, Italian publishers, translate them into English and put their names on them. So you cannot have anything very coherent. It’s a different business.
What’s working with an artist like? How do you work with a photographer, a designer? Difficult, easy?
We meet to understand each other, and to be able to understand what their dream or their will or goal is and then we work without them, absolutely without them, to know the maximum number of things and to have the exterior eye to digest all that and to do our best with what we know from them. At the end, when the work is done, we sit together and here it may be “Oh, I don’t like this photo”, or “This painting is weaker than this one” little things like that. But we don’t do a lot of books with artists, we do it when we feel it. First we have to like what they do, and, when it’s a big book that you put your soul into, and second we have to like the person. Making a book is very costly, it’s expensive, it’s a lot of dedication, it’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of energy, it’s a lot of everything, so if you like the person you’re working with it’s going to be “wow”. You have the good material and you want to achieve something of somebody you love, you respect, you admire. And that makes a lot of difference. You cannot quantify that, but it shows in the book. When I did the book on Architect Santiago Calatrava, why did we decide on the book? I knew little about his work, not a lot, but we met him at a dinner with friends and a year later with another person and I thought this guy was so different from what I thought because he was so humble, normal, down to earth and full of knowledge, whatever he was talking about was interesting. So this simplicity, this intelligence, you know, attracted me, so OK, let’s do something beautiful. He let us totally do the book. He came at the end when the book was done. He said “You know what? It’s the most beautiful book ever I’ve had on me and I think it will be the one forever”. He loved it.
Martine, is this trust that common?
Well, I don’t put myself in first, never. I am starting to do now some introductions to some of the books because Prosper asked me to, but I don’t want to interfere with what this person is doing, but I am doing most of the books. There are books that now I am not touching because there is a good team that knows Assouline very well. There are ones that need really really work and the work is huge. There are not a lot of people we trust and less and less. For example one of the first books I did on fashion was Givenchy. The author of such book fell ill halfway through the book and so I had to influence every part of the book. Givenchy did not have so many images, so I had to put my hands on everything. So one day I phoned him and told him: “I’m finished. I have the lay-out. I want you to see it”, so I went to his beautiful place in Paris. I will always remember, we were in the sofa, a green sofa, a velvet sofa, beautiful. We were with the maître d'hôtel. etc and we started. I put all the pages in front of him. Silence. So I said to myself “Maybe he doesn’t like it”. Silence. Silence. Then, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and he said: “Martine, you can’t imagine the emotion for me to see this”. That was a great moment.
That was the book…
That was the book. But today it is more and more difficult to have this kind of people, you know. There are always agents, marketing people, the Press people. Everybody wants to be involved and they don’t get that it is a creation book and that everything goes with everything and if you take out one of the legs, the balance will not be the same. And that’s only when you’re a professional and with the experience that we have of 25 years that we can feel that. It’s a feeling, it’s a construction, yes it’s my construction, but it’s also a feeling.
How long does the process take, from the moment you decide to do a book until the books is finished?
The average is less than one year, maybe 8 months, all the steps including the last one, printing, and so on. There are some exceptions, sometimes I don’t the good material, I put the book away and I try to search. For example the one on Les Ballets Russes, I finished it after 6 years of starting it because the material was not appropriate to make something strong. Things like that can happen. A long period.
You need to be completely convinced....
You need to have the good ingredients and the good food.
How is the approach? I haven’t seen it, but I heard that the book on Carolina Herrera was basically photos of her, I mean, not celebrities wearing her designs or whatever. So every person seems to have a different approach. How do you decide on it, we are going to approach this artist like this and not like that? Do you discuss it with your team?
No, no, no. I think it’s feeling. You can call it intuition, but I would say it’s feeling. First, when I approach a book, I want to really find a way to make something different. If it is something which was already done, it’s not very interesting. It may be OK business-wise, it’s going to make money, but I am not very interested. When I start a book, I like it to be a challenge. For Carolina Herrera, I took a look at her images. When I saw the images, I saw objects and I said: “She’s the most interesting”. She has been portrayed by so many good photographers.... she’s pretty .... she wears her own designs and they fit her, you know, it’s the image ... so here it’s the way. We were going to tip for some of them to show that it’s artistic, they were taken by photographers, it was not boom, boom, boom, you know. So I asked for all the photos she had to see the evolution of her and of her clothes, and that was something interesting and ...
Challenging.
Challenging. But that was obvious, if you want to do something different, it was obvious. And in the end, she was with her two daughters, who are beautiful and also very much in this style so it was... it was just right.
I would like to know how you work with your team when you begin a project. You have an idea - I suppose first of all you discuss it with Prosper - and then ... how does the project begin? How do you put it in motion?
First of all I say yes, the project is possible, “Do you have an idea? Yes, I have an idea” But it goes very quickly because if the idea is not good for the other... trash. There is no ego in that. And if the idea gives the other another approach, well, that’s the beginning. Once we agree on something, I try to get the most information and I set a direction or a table of content or a different kind of book and then I try to research what I think could be the kind of visuals that could go to show the best. So I ask the researcher and editor to help and go on a chase for that.
And then, I suppose, you have a lot of meetings with your team.
I have the meeting of the direction once I am really sure and once I have enough material to start, I ask each of them to do their part. And with some of the books, I do myself the design... not the design, but I set what the trends are at Assouline, it’s a big culture on image. We are in the civilization of image, hundreds of them come each day, but not for that they’re good quality, not in the sense, in the meaning or in the artistic visual part. My job is to educate the eye of the people as well, not only to have the good images and nothing else. It is about giving good content, visually. So here our strength is the knowledge, the connaissance of the images, the photographs of today, the photographs of yesterday, illustrators, painters, artists, et cetera, et cetera, even films, all is important, all the knowledge is important, it’s what I say to my people. And so is the editing. The editing is the most important thing. My eye today is good enough. When I did Sisi Vuitton, for example, I went through I think 16,000 pages of his scrapbook. It was a lot. It was years and years of scrapbooks, and to choose inside I went quickly. The first thing is the good image. Whether it’s Ibiza, Aspen, Capri. You have to put image with image to make it work. Sometimes it’s image with a quote. Meaning plus sensation. Visually good. The visuals will bring you the knowledge, the emotions.
It’s to have the right perception, to know what it’s going to work, what content should go...
That’s all the book. Then it goes to designers who put the right typography, the right size of the image, et cetera, et cetera. They do also their job, which is very important. But the editing is me.
When I was translating Gauchos into English, I received on my iPad the digital copy of it for me to give it a final reading. What about the new platforms in this field? Because one imagines this kind of books in hard copy, opening the book, smelling the book, but what about the new platforms for the younger generations? Do they have any space?
The young generation is more about subjects. For example you talked about Gauchos. Gauchos for me was important, it touched me, not only because of Argentina, also because it’s a tradition and we are in a world that is moving so much, such terremotos, that I like this kind of subjects. Second, great photographs. So what we did, we did it because we felt the beauty of that, but for me it was a risky book because, you know, people don’t know what a Gaucho is... imagine in Tokio. It’s not something that is going to cause a revolution and it’s never good business. But it’s beauty and so it’s also important to do it. And so we did it in a large way, as you know, because the photographer is excellent and you have to show an excellent thing when you have excellent material. But I would never put any effort in converting that into a documentary, it would be fantastic!, but that is another kind of purchase, but not in a digital thing or whatever. To convert the experience of the book, the imagination of the book, the book itself in something else, we are thinking of strategies, we’re starting to do it with my son, who is very good at that, in opening to experiences, with things like traveling, exhibits, which are naturally going with a book, but with another kind of audience. And also I think that my son, who is another generation, is working on an idea of mobile. You can have him tell you something about it.
In how many places do you have your company now? New York is one place.
New York is the place. In Paris we have the boutique, but also my other son is working for Europe from Paris, he has his office there. And we also have a little office in London because we have Maison Assouline in London so, that’s it.
What are your plans? When you have reached this level of success, what are your dreams?
Dreams at my level are more like… like when you ask an actor, the dream will be the next role, or a réalisateur, it may be the next work … when you are in the creation you are so much engaged in what you do that it’s pleasure also, but the next one is the challenging one, that is the dream in fact. My son may have another one and my husband another one. My husband is both a creative and a businessman, an entrepreneur. For my son is very much digital and going to Asia because his father also wants to go to Asia, but for the moment we won’t because we want to control the images, and what we do and so we are trying to do it at the right moment and not to push too much. My goal is not in this field.
You mentioned it several times, timing is important. It’s not only the product, but also the timing, which is much more abstract in a way.
Yes. I think that everything is going together. The books that I was doing in the 1990s were for the public at that time. The mentality has changed and you have to adapt as well because you have to think of the person who is going to approach your subject and show it with the eyes of today, and that is very important, to be penetrated, inspired by your time. And also to be able to say what you want with all you have learned. That is an important job for a publisher in general, I feel it like that. I feel that in our brand we have a very recognized style and that’s why people who want to commit to books come to us, because of our style, this approach. And because we decided to open up, not to be just about books, but to open up to the idea of a contemporary library, to make objects like candles, with a taste, with a meaning, something that is also going with out books, you know, and that is our special edition that you see there and all that is part of a whole process. When Prosper in the early 2000s came to me with the idea that we had to get out of the bookstore, I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think he was right. At the time the bookstore was flourishing, very important, and I don’t think that he smelt that something like Amazon or iPhone was coming, but I think that the book was another process in our life and our life was not just a book, it was much larger and he wanted to show all that to have people understand it and that’s the reason why we did the object, and the candles, et cetera, et cetera and we started with all these new branches and also a direction of the company that put us like a luxury brand.
Martine, thank you so much.
ALEXANDRE ASSOULINE - VICE PRESIDENT OF ASSOULINE PUBLISHING
Alexandre Assouline, the younger generation at Assouline Publishing, shows a perfect, mathematical balance between the drive of youth and the savviness found in knowledgeable business people. When speaking about his plans, he does it with zest, imagining a very promising future. He is in charge of the new digital platforms and venturing into a very attractive market: Asia.
What areas are you in charge of at Assouline Publishing?
I am leading the new platforms and making a foray into the Asian market.
What is the role of the new mobile platforms - gaining - slowly, but steadily - ground and displacing traditional platforms in a medium, namely art books, that we tend to inexorably associate with paper?
I know that Millennials are turning growingly into the digital platforms, but under no circumstances do I think that books as we know them today will disappear and least of all in this kind of field like art.