David Owen and Angela Hill are the brains behind IDEA, applying a genius level of expertise and their own connections in tracking down the rarest and most limited edition of titles. Their treasures provide the unique, fashion-celebrating inspiration that creatives crave, and IDEA is a go-to for some of the biggest names in the worlds of photography, styling, writing and designing. Owen and Hill scour all corners of the world for their loot and come up with some of the most delightfully obscure gems, but the way IDEA’s goods up for grabs are communicated to its adoring fans is modern and refreshingly simple: Instagram. The social media platform, along with the fashion-fan haven that is DSM, is helping IDEA put coveted prints into eager hands. David Owen tells us how it all got started.
What is your personal background, what has your connection to books been?
I started out as a journalist and editor of magazines on graphic design, photography and advertising. Then I was in the music business, the dot-com world, then wrote books and co-created a TV show called Flipside TV, which ran very late at night for a very short while on Channel 4. It was a zig-zag of a career path, but it all informs and adds up to IDEA. Throughout it all, Angela and I bought and sold books through Colette and then Dover Street Market. Angela had her own career throughout this period but in 2009 she asked about the space beside the St. Martins Lane Hotel and suggested a pop-up shop. They gave us three months straight away so suddenly we needed a name and a company, and that was IDEA.
Have you also always had a relationship with fashion?
Angela much more so than me. She worked for Browns and Comme des Garçons as her first jobs. She assisted fashion editors. Then she was a stylist working for i-D in the late eighties, was a successful photographer and co-founded a magazine in the nineties. She actually knows what she is doing!
How did you and Angela form IDEA, why did you set out to make it what it is?
Angela and I have two things very much in common which have shaped IDEA. Even before we started the company we would buy a book we loved and then if we saw it again later we would buy it again – and then again. We couldn’t leave them where we found them and a lot of what we do now is redistribution. We find the great books and see that they go to people who can work with them. We also share the same impulse to show people amazing books or pages or photographs as soon as we find them. In our pop-up stores we used to do this all day, over and over, the same incredible image from the Charlotte Rampling book or the Handmade Houses book. Then Instagram came along and that impulse became a very popular mechanism.
Can you talk about the relationship between IDEA and Instagram?
Instagram is completely perfect for what we do. The fashion industry has taken to it like no other business. It has been adopted even at the highest level. If you think about film, for example, there will be a lot of people in Hollywood who use it but not the big directors, writers and producers. In fashion it is the really successful editors, designers and photographers. The fashion world is fascinated with image and images, and because of this it is Instagram rather than Twitter or Facebook that has become the default mode of communicating. We are hugely fortunate in that what we do works so well in that medium. If we post the Larry Clark Kids book, for example, we will sell the book in a few minutes but the images will keep working – adding likes and followers. The perfect shot of Chloe Sevigny can add a hundred new followers in an hour.
What do you think is special about the relationship between fashion and books?
Designers, stylists and photographers are the most avid buyers of books and magazines. They need the images and ideas for reference and inspiration. This will also be the case in other creative industries but perhaps in fashion, where the cycle of trends now comes round so fast, it is at its most accentuated. IDEA is only really interested in the images in the books. We are totally drawn to aspirational images of people but also interiors and architecture and sometimes landscapes.
How do you curate your books, what do you look for?
Angela and I happen to be able to see the creative potential in a book or an image. We just have a very good feel for what someone else will find inspiring. We work a little differently for Dover Street Market as then we are putting books together and often juxtaposing them. It is remarkable but the more we disrupt the expected idea of a book display the better results. So we will put an ET Colouring Book next to Joe McKenna’s first issue of Joe’s and the same customer will buy both! The only time it didn’t work was when we decided we should sell a copy of the French edition of Closer with the Kate Middleton topless photographs – it was only a month after it came out and looked so obviously contemporary that customers kept taking it up to the staff saying someone had left their magazine. It was like trying to sell a half-finished Starbucks latte!
Who do you find your core customer base is?
Probably 80% of all sales are to well-known names in fashion – none of whom we care to mention!
What is your own collection like?
One or two books! We really have nothing.
Are there any holy grail books or magazines that you’re forever on the hunt for or dream of owning for yourself?
There are quite a few books we had once and cannot find again and there are a few we know about and have never found. It feels like it might jinx our search to mention what they are, though! There are also a number of books and magazines we have had and sold privately before they were shared on Instagram or our superbook emails. We desperately want to show them but we have a rule not to upload books we don’t actually have for sale – it is as infuriating for us as it is for people who want to buy them.
Are you still seeing inspiring books put out today, or do you think the true gems are older?
There are brilliant books published all the time, probably with the same regularity as in the past. Of course, what is published this month or year can never match the highlights of the last fifty years. That is one of the starting points for IDEA. New bookstores can only have what is currently in print. So someone looking for Ettore Sottsass, for example, can only find the latest book or most recent retrospectives of their work. The best books on or by Sottsass were published forty years ago and they are the ones we want to be selling and our customers want to buy.
Credits
Text Courtney Iseman
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