Gabriel Weil

About

Gabriel Weil works on the voice of fashion and luxury houses: what they say, how they look, and whether the two agree.

He came to it sideways. A first degree in product design, then a career that refused to stay in one department: design and development, wholesale, press, and eventually overseeing marketing, with a master's in fashion journalism from the London College of Fashion along the way. He has sat on most sides of the table, which helps, because brands rarely come apart in the boardroom. They come apart somewhere between the showroom and the shop window.

Every house already has a way of speaking; yet most have never written it down. A brand, like a person, can only go as far as its vocabulary.

So he reads everything: the campaign and the care label, the press release and the note to the store team, the window and the way a sweater is folded on the table. The detail nobody planned is usually the one that gives a house away, so that is where he starts. From there he settles the tone of voice and carries it through communications, visuals, visual merchandising, internal comms and the training of the people who say it out loud every day. The result is coherence, which clients tend to notice only once it has gone missing.

And some of it has to move. He writes and produces campaigns and fashion films, and makes them with his own teams, from the first line of the script to the last day of the edit, usually in places with better light than London: Sardinia, Corfu, Paris, São Paulo.

In house, Dunhill, Orlebar Brown and Reiss. Since then, Richemont, Prada, Miu Miu, Veronica de Piante and anatomē.

He lives in London, works in Paris and São Paulo, and considers this a reasonable compromise.

The book