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NATE: This episode is funded by The Glick Fund and the Christel
DeHaan Family Foundation, who inspire philanthropy
and creativity.
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We're here in New York City to meet Elan Cole,
a world-renowned graphic designer by day,
but a hands-on leather artisan by night.
You've got to check out his work.
Follow me.
ELAN COLE: I was always kind of restless.
I loved the idea of making a physical thing
and seeing that physical thing in the world.
What's my vision of what I want this thing to be?
What do I want it to look like?
What makes me feel good?
How do I need to make it?
Not just what does it look like, but how is it made?
I didn't know what it was called,
but I was always going to be a designer.
There wasn't a time when I thought I
was going to be something else.
I'm Elan Cole.
I'm a designer, and I'm based out of New York City.
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At some point along the way, I got--
I realized that I don't actually have a skill.
This is a field that goes back centuries,
and I've completely disconnected myself
from understanding with my hands how stuff is made,
rather than just shipping stuff off.
So actually, these posters behind me
I did all on computer, and I did it,
because I didn't have the confidence to actually draw it.
All of the lines in those posters
are deliberately skewed.
I was trying to make stuff look imperfect in a perfect medium.
Something I did-- I visited a tattoo artist in Brooklyn,
and the process completely opened my eyes.
He had a sheet of tracing paper, and he drew this like wonky
circle like with a little bit of detail.
And he folded the tracing paper over,
and then he sort of made it more fine.
And he did it a couple more times until finally,
like it was iterations and layers and layers and layers
of imperfection to get to a perfect-ish thing.
And I realized that one of the things that freaked me
out the most about a white piece of paper
is that it's a white piece of paper
and that the first line needs to be perfect.
And if you can't get over that, then it's
going to be really hard to move forward.
But what I love--
I mean how much of a part of what you're doing
is, in a lot of ways, you call it practice-- like play?
Is it just playing?
It's all play.
Yeah.
It's all play, but it's practice.
It's like the more I play with it, the better I get.
Like there was a period a couple of weeks ago when I was doing--
I was working with--
this is one of the prototypes of the bags.
Man, that's really cool.
And yeah.
And so like I would start a stitch,
and then the back would be all pulled out,
like completely messed up, which anybody with half an hour
of training on a machine is like, oh,
you didn't set your tension right.
Right, right.
Or you're not using the right--
you didn't thread it right.
And I'm thinking like, oh, I broke the machine.
You know, so I'm finding that out on my own.
And then I'm looking it up online.
But that's all play.
It's easy to go, I don't know how to do that.
I'm going to mess it up, and I don't want to do it,
because nobody wants to make something ugly.
We all want to be able to do something incredibly beautiful,
but the most important thing is if you've never done something
before, you know, the head craftsman at Louis
Vuitton at one point in his life had never done that before.
And it's OK.
Like mess up, because that's the only way that you'll get there.
In a lot of ways, the leather right now that I'm focused on
is a combination of both the design
and the manufacturing and the artistic expression
and the love of materials.
So the materials part of it is--
it's all equal love.
It's all equal fascination and focus.
Like I get to go to the leather store.
I get to go talk to the people who know leather.
So this is actually really gorgeous.
Can I see this?
Coming to a place like this and working
with the people who own the store, very likely,
I could find something here that if I go to another store
down the street, I wouldn't find.
If I have an idea in my head of what I want to make,
and I go into a store, and I go into someplace to buy
my supplies, I have complete art supply ADD.
So I'm going to go get sidetracked
by some other kind of thing that I have like a kind of blade
or a kind of pen or a kind of paper or something
that's totally different than what
I walked in thinking I want.
When you build a network around you of people, starting with I
want to do this.
I wonder who I need to talk to--
those people then pass on knowledge to you.
You have to be really mindful to be patient
that you're not going to create something amazing.
If you do create something amazing the first time,
terrific The next time, you'll probably mess it up.
Like I made stuff either in drawing or carving
wax or silver or the leather, where there's a perfect stitch,
and that's really pleasing.
And then the rest of it is totally messed up.
And then I try to remember, OK, what did
I do on that perfect stitch?
But there's evidence of perfection.
You will go through a lot of paper.
You will go through a lot of ink.
You will go through a lot of leather.
That's OK, because that's the only way to get a feel for it.
And you'll find perfect moments in those mistakes too.
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