Olympia Gayot fell in love twice: first with her husband, the curator Matt Black, and then with the book collection that came with him. The Toronto native, currently J.Crew’s Creative Director and Head of Women’s and Kids’ Design, has spent her career translating an eye for design and typography into clothes people actually want to wear. At home in New York, the designer surrounds herself with a series of collections—rare T-shirts here, Murano ashtrays there—that filter into her riffs on the J.Crew uniform (Tiny Rollneck anyone?). But it’s the trove of books she and Black have accumulated over the years that are her most constant creative companion.
The pair’s shelves lean heavily on Juergen Teller: Gayot owns every photography book he’s put out. You’ll find a well-worn copy of Fashion: Photography in the Nineties, that rarest of tomes edited by Camilla Nickerson and Neville Wakefield, alongside stylist Alexandra Carl’s Collecting Fashion, a Rizzoli release years in the making that profiles the most prolific fashion collectors (an Alaïa completist, Michèle Lamy and her Comme des Garçons archive, the late architect and footwear fanatic Zaha Hadid). A small Charlotte Perriand side table holds two books from different eras—Teller’s Go-sees and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Early Works: 1970-1974—whose covers happen to share the same design hierarchy and color palette, a glimpse at the visual cues Gayot looks to to build her own mood-boards.
Below, Gayot talks bookstore pilgrimages, artist collaborations, and why collecting is just another form of memory-making.
Where does the story of your personal collection begin?
Understanding the visual importance of an image with typography and photography was something I was attracted to from a young age. As an artist, designer, and stylist, looking at books was always a huge source of inspiration, and collecting them—whether going to a new bookstore or an old bookstore—was always something I did.
When I met my husband, we fell in love over our book collections. I remember meeting him, and us sending each other pictures of the books we had, and sitting on the floor together going through them. Really what you’re seeing in these images is a mix of both of our collections, collectively gathered since the 1990s. It’s just become this massive project.
What is the most far-flung destination that you’ve retrieved a book from?
Everywhere we go, whether it’s Paris or Copenhagen or Hydra, we always research where the bookshops are. We just went to Japan, and [stopped by] Cow Books. It’s hard when you travel because you can’t always bring everything back with you, depending on how heavy it is.
How do you bring art into your professional sphere at J.Crew, given previous collaborations with artists Nicole Wittenberg and Ann Craven?
There’s something so democratic about the brand. Art doesn’t always feel that way to everybody, so I love the idea of showing people art through fashion. It could be an amazing T-shirt with a beautiful painting on it, or, with Nicole, a printed blouse featuring her painting or a printed bucket hat. Whether they know the artist or not, people gravitate toward the actual art, and they buy the piece because it gives them an emotional reaction.
With Ann, it was amazing because she lives in Maine in the summers and paints the moon and flowers. She also has a studio in New York, so she has this very coastal city lifestyle, which is very much part of the DNA of the brand as well. It was an interesting partnership because I was thinking about how she lives her life between the city and the coast, the types of things she paints, and how connected all of that was to the history and legacy of our brand and what we stand for.
We also did a collaboration with Katherine Bernhardt when I first started at J.Crew, and we wanted to focus on education in New York. She actually created some original paintings for the collaboration. They were within her style and aesthetic, but she incorporated slices of pizza, the Statue of Liberty, pencils, and notepads. She built this whole world that everybody, whether or not they knew her, just loved because it was something they could understand and relate to, but it was also so uniquely hers.
What’s the most honest advice you’d give someone who wants to start collecting?
Even if you don’t think you can afford the thing, it’s not really about the price. It’s about the hunt and the discovery because there’s actually quite a range. Thinking outside the box is the best way to start a collection. Travel, too. The most beautiful collections are built over time and within creating a memory, like through a trip that you took. For example, we went to this little beach off of the island of Hydra, and there was a little bar on the beach. The girl serving us drinks was wearing this cool T-shirt and I asked, “Is the T-shirt for sale?” and she said, “Oh yeah, I happen to have some behind the bar” and then I brought that T-shirt home and now have the memory of that moment.
Which piece in your home provokes the most conversation among your visitors?
I would say the ashtray collection. A couple of my aunts collected these mid-century Murano ashtrays; they were passed down to me and that was the beginning of it. I don’t smoke, by the way. I use them for my jewelry, incense, little votive candles, or just as vessels all over the apartment. I have a lot of them. They’re scattered all over, and then that turned into like a collection of ceramics, including Roger Herman pieces and other vases and vessels. I feel like it’s like a way to embrace something from a bygone era.
Do you think your well of creativity at work spills over into your collecting and your personal taste?
They feed each other for sure. It’s such an amazing thing that humans are capable of these things, whether it’s taking a beautiful picture, making a painting, singing a song. I always find it very insane that we can create such beauty. I’m always looking for that. That’s the thing that feeds me, whether I apply it to work or suddenly get inspired by it because I take a trip somewhere to see something. We all have the regular day-to-day stuff we deal with in our lives, but living a life of beauty, or being inspired by visuality, is something that feeds me always.
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