The Outsider‘s Edge: Why Distance breeds Mastery

Following up on last week‘s post, I have been wondering about the role of the outsider in the advancement of traditional arts and crafts. Custom shoe- and bootmaker Korbinian Ludwig Hess was trained in the European tradition in Vienna, so when it comes to making cowboy boots, he‘s on the outside looking in. This outsider position allows him to be arguably more ‘objective’ than anyone who was raised in the tradition ever could be. Plus, nobody would expect him to design the ‘perfect traditional cowboy boot’, so at the end of the day, he can do whatever he pleases.

At this point, KLH boots carry on the tradition, but they also improve on it. Korbinian has a very unique, extremely elegant style. The trained eye will easily recognize a KLH boot. See last week’s post for a perfect example.

In this case, not being bound by tradition is a major advantage. While his boots pay respect to heritage, in some aspects they clearly improve on it. One example is the arch support: American bootmakers traditionally use a flattened nail for the shanking. It’s functional and fast, but not very elegant. Korbinian uses the traditional method that has been perfected in Europe for centuries. It requires a lot more work, but it results in a far more elegant structure. This is inside the boot, so nobody will ever see it, but in my book, it‘s little details like this that make the difference between a skilled craftsman and a true artisan. Don‘t get me wrong, both approaches are perfectly legitimate.

There is one major difference, though: A craftsman like Pablo Jass in Lampasas, Texas is carrying on a tradition. An artisan like Korbinian Hess will always strive to further improve on it and develop it.

This is A LOT harder than it may first seem, though. Successfully improving or forwarding a time-honored tradition has high requirements, including but not limited to:

• Outstanding artistic skills
• A true passion for your work
• A perfectly open mind and the ability to think ‘outside the box’
  

Once you start thinking about it, quite a few other outstanding personalities come to mind:

Berlin-based custom tailor Alexander Amann (herrenschneider-amann.de) was trained by one of the world’s finest tailors in Cologne, Germany. Very much like Korbinian, he was schooled in the European tradition but never considered this a limitation. His basic credo is ‘Ich mache Anzüge für Menschen’ – I make suits for individuals.

The suits he makes for me are PERFECT Southwestern cowboy style, with one major difference: In every single aspect, his craftsmanship is several steps ahead compared to anything I could have had made in the US. In Texas or Arizona, they live the style, but, sorry to say, they can‘t master the craft like this anymore.

On London‘s Savile Row, they still master the craft. Unfortunately, most of them are unable to break out of their rigid tradition and would not understand my style.

Speaking of Savile Row: These days, the best English bespoke suits are actually made in Paris. Cifonelli is considered by absolute connoisseurs to be the ultimate benchmark when it comes to the perfect suit. The English on Savile Row invented the tradition, but the French and Italians developed the tailoring (especially the famous Cifonelli roped shoulder) so artistically and elegantly that many style icons today prefer to buy in Paris rather than in London.

The list goes on and on:

• The Music: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is widely considered the unofficial anthem of the American South. It was written by Robbie Robertson, a Canadian from Toronto. When he wrote this song, he had never even lived south of the Mason-Dixon line. Instead, he spent several weeks in the Woodstock library studying the history of the Civil War. The depth of profound historical knowledge contained in this song still baffles me today.
• The Cuisine: The globally recognized gold standard reference book on Thai cuisine is Thai Cooking by David Thompson, an Australian.
• The Denim: The world’s best, most authentic jeans in the style of the 1940s and 50s, woven on vintage shuttle looms and dyed with natural indigo, do not come from the USA today, but from Japan. The Japanese were so obsessed with classic Americana style that they perfected the craft when the Americans themselves had long since switched to cheap mass production.
• The Spirits: Masataka Taketsuru, the founder of Nikka Whisky in Japan, traveled to Scotland in 1918 to learn the craft of distillation from scratch. Back in Japan, he built distilleries that copied the Scottish tradition so meticulously and perfectionistically that Japanese whiskies now regularly dethrone the Scottish originals. In 2008, his 1987 Yoichi Single Malt was named the world’s best single malt whisky at the World Whiskies Awards—the first of many such accolades.
• The Pizza: Consider the reinvention of pizza by Chris Bianco in Phoenix, Arizona. If you ask for the best pizza in the US, you don’t end up in the Italian neighborhoods of New York or Chicago, but right in the middle of the Arizona desert at Pizzeria Bianco. Star food critic Ed Levine once called it the best pizza in the world. Bianco (a guy from the Bronx) took the Neapolitan tradition, stripped it of all kitsch, and elevated it through local, artisanal ingredients to a level that leaves even critics in Naples speechless.

Every single one of these outstanding personalities has several things in common: the skill, the passion, and the mindset of a true ‘Nerdier-than-Nerd’ contest winner.

In a way, this phenomenon is exactly what drives my own curation at Galerie filmposter.net. Since 1996, the gallery was never meant to be just another local archive for ‘the prettiest German posters of the 1950s’. Instead, it has always been fueled by this exact outsider’s perspective: An international, collective view of movie posters as a global art form, unfettered by purely domestic nostalgia.

By stepping slightly outside the traditional, rigid boundaries of local collecting, you stop looking at an object merely through the lens of history, and start seeing it for its pure, raw design and cultural impact. It turns out that sometimes, you have to leave the comfort zone of a culture just to remind it of what made its craft so magnificent in the first place.