by Garance Dore
Finally, I decided not to go back to university. I was twenty-six, I had spent way too long in college, and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. My mom was so deeply disappointed (I had been such a talented kid!, she said) that she barely talked to me anymore.
There was pain in her eyes when she looked at me—it was terrible. I had always gone to her for guidance; I had wanted to make her proud. And now I was alone.
Deep down, I was disappointed in myself too, but I was mad at her for doubting me in the first place and not letting me study art—even though by now everything seemed to prove that she had been right.
But I didn’t give up, and in a funny turn of events, fashion put my first mentor on my path. I had heard about an internship and sent my résumé to the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille—the only place in the city that would make me feel anything close to the creative life I was craving.
I got an interview, and I was so excited that I bought a pair of terribly expensive boots to wear.
To give you an idea of how dire the situation was—after buying these boots, I was totally broke.
Maybe I needed to send a message to the universe.
FOLLOW THE SIGNS.
I interviewed with the museum’s director, and the next day I got a phone call. But it wasn’t the director. A man said: “I saw you yesterday at the museum—nice boots. Would you be interested in working with me at the museum’s cinema? I’m looking for someone like you. Can I steal you from my colleague? She said it was okay.”
And that’s how I started working in cinema. I would be handling PR, and my new boss would teach me everything he knew about film. The internship was unpaid (I was still working another job) and I had no idea what I was doing—I had learned nothing practical from my studies. But I made it work.
I’d call my friends for help. “What’s a ‘press release’? What does it look like? Can you fax me one?”
(I know, fax.)
That’s how I came to understand that I was able.
I was doing it. This was real, intellectual work. And I was good at it. Small things, but still. Bérard, my boss, was pleased with me. He was a great teacher. I had sensed that his phone call was one of those moments when life gives you a chance and I had been right to say yes. I was so happy.
Just when I began to think that I might try to make a career in cinema, I met an illustrator. I remember the moment perfectly. I was having a coffee with friends, and a charming blond girl sat down. A friend of a friend.
I asked her what she did and she said, “I’m an illustrator.” I remember turning bright red, like I always do when I’m overcome with emotion.
I begged her to show me her studio and to talk to me about what she did. She agreed and we spent an afternoon together. At that point I knew next to nothing about what being an illustrator really meant—but something about it appealled to me. She answered all my questions that afternoon, and although it was not a lot to go on, it was everything I needed to decide I would give it a try.
It was finally time to act on that longing that had been deep down inside of me and that had come rushing back in a second.
I gave myself a year. If it didn’t work, I decided, at least now I knew I could go back to a normal job.
One year to become an illustrator. I would quit all my little jobs. I needed to create a real sense of emergency.
Just imagine my mom’s reaction.
RISK FAILURE.
I said goodbye to Bérard, showing him my first illustrations—which were a disaster (imagine his face). It was too late (and I was too broke) to go back to school to study illustration, so I decided I would teach myself. The plan was to put all my savings (I had none) toward trips to Paris, where I would show my work to art directors (I knew none).
I promised myself that I would show my work, no matter what.
The important thing was to get rid of doubt. Was I born to be an illustrator? Was it my calling? I couldn’t go back to my previous life without being absolutely sure.
The risk of failure, of seeing my dreams crumble, somehow didn’t scare me. I knew it was better than living with doubt. And, anyway, I had already disappointed my family. I was already broke. I had nothing to lose, and I needed to know.
What a year that was. Trips back and forth between Marseille and Paris. So many closed doors. So many rainy days, lost in the Paris metro with my huge portfolio. So many nights on my friend Maelle’s sofa. She was a saint: She never complained.
A year spent at my desk, learning to paint by studying other people’s work and guessing at their techniques, doing a hundred bad drawings for one good one. The harsh feedback from art directors who were kind enough to open their doors to me. My first computer (which my dad paid for after a phone call that I hated to make: “Dad, I never ask, but this time I need you”), my first attempts on my graphics tablet, my first tries at building a website to create an online portfolio.
My first commission in a local magazine. And then in a national magazine.
I was an illustrator!!! Finally! Mooom, looook!!!
But I didn’t have a second to sit back and enjoy my success—reality was knocking at the door, now more than ever. I learned that a half-page illustration in a magazine earned about three hundred dollars.
Crap!
An illustration took me about two weeks to make. I did the math.
I had accepted that an artist’s life wouldn’t be comfortable, but I suddenly realized that at this rate I would end up under a bridge, exactly as my mother had predicted.
USE WHAT YOU’VE GOT.
I had no choice. I would have to learn how to draw much faster. That’s what I was determined to do.
If I could make an illustration in an hour, and if I could count on selling a ton of them (applause for my business plan, ladies and gentlemen!), it just might work.
I would have to train myself like crazy and totally change my illustration style. And this would have to happen three times faster than the first time around, because the clock was ticking. I decided to do everything on my drawing tablet, to speed up the process. And I knew I didn’t have time to go back and forth to Paris anymore to bother random art directors. I had to find a way to get precise, honest feedback, fast.
I needed a new way of showing my work.
It was 2006, and at that time in France, people were just starting to talk about blogs. But there was no such thing as a blog that had known big success. And in those days blogs weren’t very pretty or visual.
But at that moment I needed a way to put my work out there. Something quick and cheap, and a blog seemed like a good option. It was all that I had anyway. That and my imagination.
By building my online portfolio, I had already learned a bit of coding. I knew I could make it look nice and give it a rhythm. I would publish an illustration every other day. I would time myself. An hour a post. No more.
Wait. But what if it failed?
Showcasing my work on the Internet was the most public thing I’d ever done. And, you know—in 2006 it wasn’t cool at all to have a blog. It was definitely not something to brag about.
The reaction when you mentioned a blog was a bit like:
“I’m sorry, a what? A blog? What the hell does that mean?
All this is why I decided I would go with a nom de plume.
And because I’m not a huge fan of weird pseudonyms (yes, thinking about you, Lady Gaga), I decided to choose a name that felt like a real name. I gathered my three best friends, told them about my idea. I had thought about Doré already, because it’s the name of one of the first illustrators I’d ever heard about. And one of my friends, Sarah, gave me the name Garance.
Garance Doré.
This is how my story began. A computer, a name, and a dream.
And an infinite dose of energy, bubbling up after years of failure and frustration.
FALL IN LOVE.
I fell in love with the medium.
I could never have imagined I would love blog
ging so much.
It was just about training myself to be a faster illustrator, in the beginning. I was only thinking I would get honest feedback that would help me improve. But something I’d never expected began to happen.
I actually loved sharing my work on the blog. I responded to everyone who wrote to me, tried to do better every day, thought about it every second. I was passionate.
I remember all of my “firsts” so vividly, like a love story.
The first time I posted an illustration. The doubt, but also the feeling of, What do I have to lose? Nobody can see me anyway.
The first time I posted a little text to go along with an illustration. My first comment.
The first blogger who linked to me, sending me a ton of new visitors.
The first time a post got eighteen comments. I called my boyfriend: “Ooooooh myyyy goddd, this is craaaaazyyy!!!”
And everything that followed. I loved, LOVED, what I was doing. It didn’t bring me any money—nobody would have even thought about monetizing a blog at the time. But for the first time in my life, I adored my work. And I felt like I was not so bad at it.
People were encouraging me. I had fans! Unknown people from unknown places would visit the blog every day to tell me they loved my stories and my illustrations.
To this day, it’s still the thing that brings me the most joy.
I talked a lot about fashion on the blog because I loved it. I had always been an avid reader of fashion magazines, and I’d always believed that through fashion one can express almost anything, from the most superficial to the most profound.
Obviously, my one-hour rule didn’t last long. I even remember spending a whole vacation waking up before my friends just to have a few hours to myself to write for my blog.
In other words, I was crazy in love.
SEIZE THE MOMENT.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had created something completely new.
Without even thinking, I had caught a wave that was about to change everything.
There were blogs; there were illustrators. There were fashion lovers.
But I was the first fashion-loving illustrator with a blog. Magazines started to call, wanting to interview me. At first I didn’t want to show my face—it was one of the reasons I had changed my name—but that didn’t last long.
People started calling to offer me illustration commissions. Better jobs. Better pay. I had decided I would never mention that I was not living in Paris. I had come to realize during my visits that living in Marseille was not looked upon favorably by the fashion world.
That proved to be a smart decision, but it made my life pretty complicated.
My boyfriend didn’t want to leave the South of France, but I could sense this was my moment. People were calling me for meetings, never imagining that I could be living anywhere other than Paris. So I decided to go, just to give it a chance. With my tiny budget, I would only be able to survive there for a couple of weeks.
But I was going to Paris!!! The city I’d never even dared to dream of.
It was a tough landing. Paris is a gray city. People don’t have time for you. Apartments are small, even more so when you’re broke. It was like being a student again. I was thirty-one and living on a convertible sofa.
But for the first time in my life, I was passionate about what I was doing. I was happy. I was working like crazy, but it was not work. It was pure fun.
I even started to make a little money.
My blog was a window into my work, so people called me for illustrations but also to write for them. Supreme surprise: I had never thought about my writing as something people were seriously interested in. I considered my readers my friends. I wrote the way I talked. It wasn’t an effort; I didn’t have to search for a style. I didn’t care about being perfect; I just loved expressing what I felt, simple words and energy.
Moving to Paris was the craziest decision of my life, but it was also my moment of opportunity: Paris was the place where my life was waiting for me. I never went back to Marseille.
QUESTION YOUR BELIEFS.
For a long time I believed that I shouldn’t ask for too much. That it was shameful to be ambitious.
And it wasn’t even on my radar when I first got to Paris, but do you know what happens there twice a year? Fashion Week.
In 2007, Paris Fashion Week was not the super-publicized event it is today. There were no street-style darlings, no livestreams. Style.com was just starting. Oh, and there was that guy, the Sartorialist, who was taking photos of people on the street.
I decided to go and check it out with a friend. “Take your camera!” she said.
That’s how two things happened at the same time:
1. I discovered I had a talent for photography.
2. I fell in love, again.
As I took my first steps in the Tuileries, the center of the Fashion Week universe at the time, a friend casually introduced me to Scott Schuman, the Sartorialist. Meeting him was not only the beginning of a friendship that ended in a love story.
To me, it was like meeting America.
It was simple. In the beginning, we spent our time fighting. We would run into each other between shows and chat. That’s the way our friendship started. Our ways of thinking were totally opposite, and we would inevitably clash over something.
He didn’t understand anything about my ways.
Like the way I was talking about my blog, for example:
“It’s only a hobby! It’s not my work! I’m an illustrator!”
He said that I was thinking small. Or the way I talked about other bloggers:
“What would they think if I started taking myself seriously and tried to really make something out of the blog?”
He said I was letting the opinion of others keep me down. Or investing in a better camera:
“Why would I do that? My photos are just for fun! I’m not a photographer; I’m an illustrator.”
He said I was putting myself in a box.
I would argue, but I always ended up listening. Deep down I wanted to believe in his anything-is-possible American point of view. I wanted to believe him when he said “If you know how to create emotion, you can create a business” (horrified shout on my end). He challenged me, made me question my own beliefs, and it was tough—but I could feel the world slowly opening up to me. I was opening my eyes.
MAKE YOUR OWN RULES.
I decided it was time to break the mold. My blog could be more than just illustrations. I started to take photography more seriously. I published my first photos on the blog.
Publishing photos had an impact I could have never imagined. The immediacy of the photos, the fact that you didn’t need words to understand them, took the blog to a whole new level.
It became completely international.
Along with the photos came travel—the more popular the blog became, the more I was called to travel around the world to take photos. It was constant. I was not even really living in Paris; I was not really living anywhere.
That’s when the blog exploded.
I started to get serious job offers. Shoot a big editorial for a fashion magazine. Meet the editor in chief. Write my own column. Sell ads on my blog at a moment when I didn’t even know how or how much. Shoot an ad campaign for a brand, get shot for a magazine, attend a gala, sit in the front row of a fashion show. I had never done any of it before.
It sounds like a dream, but I had no one to guide me. I didn’t know anything about the delicate, nuanced rules of the industry that was about to open its doors very wide to me. I may have made a few mistakes.
But had I known the do’s and don’t’s of fashion, I would most certainly not be where I am today. I would have been too scared, too intimidated. I would have stopped dead in my tracks—so I guess my innocence and ignorance worked in my favor.
I had learned how to learn as well. To make something from nothing. To ask questions, to surround myself with good people and believe in my ins
tincts.
And because my world was only just starting, and everything was yet to be invented, I made my own rules.
From there, things happened really fast. The blog became bigger. I was getting recognized on the street. People would call me and ask to be featured on the blog. I would be invited to be on TV shows, offered crazy jobs, book deals. I had to learn to say no. I moved to New York. I was featured in The New York Times. I received a CFDA Award, the highest recognition you can receive in fashion. It’s like the Oscars. And this was the first ever CFDA Award to be given to a blogger. Times were changing.
YOU HAVE TO CREATE YOUR OWN DEFINITION OF SUCCESS.
FOLLOW THE ENERGY.
That brings us to today.
I still remember that day in Paris when, exhausted by the amount of work I had to do, I hired an assistant to help me with my e-mail. That was the beginning of Garance Doré Studio.
All right—let’s talk about the name. You know why I called it the Studio? Because when I started, I was living and working in my tiny Paris studio. “Studio” gave me a big, bold feeling, but it was pretty ironic. Each time I think about it, I crack up.
It’s amazing to think back on it now that I have a real studio that’s big and bright and with a view of the New York skyline.
And a real team that I love.
I remember one piece of advice that Scott gave me when I was feeling confused by the pressure of success and all of the questions that it raised.
What should I do with all of it?
Make as much money as possible?
Try to become “someone” in fashion?
Go on TV and become a celebrity?
Continue on without changing anything?
He told me: “You have to create your own definition of success.”
For some, success might mean a career as a teacher, shaping young lives.
