Susie Lau: Delving into Smythson’s Archives

As our heritage timeline launches on Facebook, we open up the Smythson archives to guest blogger Susie Lau of Style Bubble…

Delving into Smythson’s archive material is a potent reminder of gentler times, when a Christmas card would contain messages such as “May Christmas bring you many a kiss and never a tear or a sigh”.  I’m not personally one to go riding waves of nostalgia, but it is lovely to know that such a time existed when you’d wish for someone that they never experience tears or sighing without a shade of irony.

I also love a time when invitations to a dinner party or a wedding were incredibly small, with this specimen here on the left measuring about 7cm x 5cm.

The Smythson story is a simple one that started in 1887 when Frank Smythson opened his first shop at 133 New Bond Street.  Initially, Smythson worked in the silversmith trade but turned his hand to luxury stationery for the well-to-do.   The well-kept scrap books reveal a fastidious character, with every Smythson bit of memorabilia preserved and neatly organised.

The more interesting thing about Smythson was that whilst they primarily made stationery, they also offered other little trinkets that ranged from the conventional to the very quirky indeed.

Jewellery seems like a natural link to Frank Smythson’s silversmith beginnings.

A combined bag, hand muff and cushion looks like a product worth reviving today.

A “Victoria” housewife’s kit is nothing out of the norm of the early 20th century.

However a sardine/sandwich server and a suffragette-themed novelty pepper dispenser are the slightly odder offerings from this book of presents.

Smythson’s handiwork can really be seen in the stationery that was created for the Indian Maharajas during the early 20th century.  I especially love the mother of pearl surfaces that can be seen in the embossed emblems.

I had to chuckle at the sheer frivolity of this card which invited people to fly to the Prince of Jodhpur’s sherry and cocktails ‘do.

I copped a feel of the first ever Smythson ‘Panama’ diary, created in 1908 which was a real innovation of Frank Smythson because of the super thin paper used as well as the flexible lambskin used for the cover.

These bijoux sized notepads continued on into the 1920s and spawned some really fascinating gender-aimed notebooks.  There’s some vaguely sound advice in both books.  For instance, a man is told to “Choose a woman with your ears not your eyes” and women are reassured that “He is a fool who thinks by force or skill, To turn the current of a woman’s will.”  It’s difficult not to be charmed by the quaint aspect of these notebooks.

At London Fashion Week autumn/winter ’12

From attending the Jonathan Saunders and Erdem a/w ’12 shows to spotting Smythson handbags and notebooks looking chic on the front row, here are our highlights from London Fashion Week autumn/winter ’12…

The finale at one of London Fashion Week’s opening shows, Corrie Nielsen a/w ’12.

We spotted Liberty London Girl Sasha Wilkins looking chic in one of the key shades of s/s ’12.

Shop our Rose collection here.

At the BFC tents wearing the new Antonia and Rose collection iPad case.

The colour-blocked Cooper shoulder bag in turquoise.

Smythson invitations to the Jonathan Saunders autumn/winter ’12 show.

The amazing view from the nineteenth floor of Broadgate Tower, the Saunders show venue.

Stylist and Fashion Editor Laura Fantacci wore her Emily shoulder bag and shared her London Fashion Week wardrobe on her daily blog, Wearing It Today.

At Erdem autumn/winter ’12 held at the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey.

Harper’s Bazaar’s Sarah Bailey at Erdem using her Runway Notes book and Nancy Tote.

And Vogue’s Emily Sheffield spotted looking stylish with the Emily East/West Zip Tote.

At London Fashion Week: Jonathan Saunders autumn/winter ’12

We attended our collaborator & BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund winner Jonathan Saunders’ autumn/winter ’12 show at East London’s Broadgate Tower on Sunday evening…

The Smythson invitations complete with tissue-lined envelopes.

The amazing view from the nineteenth floor of East London’s Broadgate Tower, the show venue.

The show finale – a ladylike, equestrian-inspired collection of patterns, texture and a palette of colour-blocked brown, reds, greens and sky blues.

And we spotted some Smythson at the after party:

Our PR Manager, Casey York wearing the Cooper in turquosie.

Jonathan Saunders’ PA, Sophia wearing a Smythson Sling.

And British Vogue’s Emily Sheffield wearing her Emily East/West Zip Tote.

Fashion Week Windows…

London Fashion Week begins tomorrow and we’ve installed our latest windows to celebrate, featuring every editor’s essential, our Runway Notes book alongside spring/summer ’12 Cooper and Emily handbags.

Our Visual Merchandiser, Marco,  shares the inspiration behind the display:

The theme of our new windows is “timeless elegance with a modern twist” expressed through the classic architectural structure of columns painted matt white to give a modern, artistic feel. Certain columns are tilted, bringing a kinetic surrealism to the display.

Light plays a very important role in this scheme, diffusing a soft and delicate mood. Spot lights are aimed on to the product in order to give a theatrical feel to the ensemble, especially at night-time.

Susie’s Valentine: Amour Sans Fin

Guest blogger Susie Lau gives her take on the limited edition Valentine’s range and explores the inspiration behind it, our company archive…

Valentine’s Day is a double headache for me as my other half’s birthday also happens to fall on the same day.  Is it Valentine’s Day or Birthday first?  I’ve normally gone for the latter given that the day your significant other was born is ever so slightly more important than a holiday honouring a Christain saint.

Still, I can be persuaded otherwise to switch allegiance over to V-day especially after investigating the new Valentine’s collection by Smythson.  Entitled “Love Through the Ages”, the collection is inspired by a page from this early 1900s Smythson catalogue.  I was surprised to discover that the Smythson product range back then was curiously expansive – everything from bronze statues of cockerels to handbags to jewellery were available to the Smythson customer.

A page of motto charms was where Smythson found the words “Amour Sans Fin” which now graces a gold charm that comes with all nine pieces from the classic red lizard print leather range.

I especially love this photo envelope which is a beautiful way of holding treasured prints.   The idea of an envelope clutch purely for the purpose of holding a photo or two is a decadent one but I suppose it is all part of the indulgent spirit of the holiday.

Ditto for this sweet little trinket box which comes with a chocolate leather heart nestled inside.  It’s not edible but it can be stamped with the message of your choice.  Again the singular purpose of this trinket box is pretty hard to resist but it’s the dinky size that really is the winning plus point.

There are some truly horrific Valentine’s cards about, the sort that are so cringeworthy, you can’t imagine actually giving it to someone you liked, let alone your most beloved.

The designs here feature a subtle print of a sonnet, a tiny love bug and the word LOVE spelt out in semaphore code figures.  In fact that last one is about as cryptic as you can get.

Going back to the Smythson archives, there were a few choice items that could potentially be up for a modern day revival when V-day comes around again next year.  This teensy tiny calendar from 1942 for a lady’s purse is positively lilliputian.

I loved this dotty product range seen in another catalogue which happens to be a V-day appropriate shade of red.

I’ll be delving further into the archives next, where I discover more about Mr Frank Smythson’s scarily neat handwriting, decadent invites from Maharajas and the beginnings of the classic Wafer diary.

Valentine’s Windows: Amour Sans Fin – with love, from 1910

Featuring our new Valentine’s collection inspired by a motto charm discovered in our 1910 archive, our latest windows resemble pretty gift boxes with the perfect gift for your loved one inside…

Latest windows: The Year of the Dragon

We’re celebrating the Year of the Dragon this week with a new window display reflecting two new correspondence card motifs designed especially for Chinese New Year.

How will you be celebrating? Check out our guest blogger, Susie Lau’s recipe for a traditional Chinese New Year treat…

Susie’s Chinese New Year

Our guest blogger, Susie Lau, tells us how she celebrates the holiday and shares a special family recipe for a traditional sweet treat…

When people ask how I celebrate Chinese New Year, the unfortunate answer is that I’m now normally working as Chinese New Year falls during New York Fashion Week.  Hurrah for the Year of the Dragon then as Chinese New Year has fallen early.

We kick off Chinese New Year Eve this Sunday on the 22nd and then Chinese New Year begins on Monday followed by fifteen days of festivities.  In other words, that’s two solid days of eating.  I’ll be stuffing my face with my mother’s cookies and cakes that she makes especially for this time of year.  In particular, the peanut puff or “little horns” as we call them in Cantonese is a favourite of mine because they’re portable and I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t find them addictive and moreish.

They sort of look like tiny Cornish pasties and the pastry has a crunch/biscuit texture to them as they’re made by deep fat frying.  You bite in to find a sweet peanut filling that can vary from recipe to recipe.  

I’ve probed my mum for her particular recipe and here it is.  She likes to make them quite small and dainty so they’re bitesize but you’ll see them in all sizes.  The tricky bit is the pinching and locking of the puffs but it’s always funny to see how they turn out depending on how nimble your fingers are. 

To make 48 little puffs.

Pastry
Sieved Plain flour 225g
1 egg
Water 60ml
Peanut oil 2 tablespoons (try to buy it at a Chinese supermarket – my mother says it’s more fragrant)

Filling:
Sesame seeds 60g
Unsalted peanuts 60g
Finely desiccated coconut 60g
Granulated sugar 120g

Vegetable oil for frying

Make the filling first so you have it ready to work with.  Toast the sesame seeds and peanut in a pan over a low heat until they are golden.
Break up the peanuts in a food processor until they resemble fine breadcrumbs.

Mix the sesame seeds, peanut crumbs, coconut and the sugar together so that you have a dry filling. 

Now make the dough.  Mix all the dough ingredients together, kneading it until it forms a smooth dough.  Add flour if it’s too sticky or a little oil if it feels a bit dry. 

Divide the dough into four. 

Roll each lump of dough out into a rectangular shape that is about 20cm wide and then roll from the longer edge like you would a cigarette so that you get a tube.  This forms the layers in the pastry that puffs up when fried later. 

Cut up the tube into twelve small pieces. 

Do the same with the other three piles of dough so that you end up with 48 little chunks of dough.

Roll each piece out into a circle shape, about 7cm wide and 1-2mm thick.  

Spoon a small teaspoon of filling into the middle and then fold over into a semi-circle shape and press the edges together.

Now lock the edges.  This can be a little tricky.  Starting from one end, pinch the edge and fold over and do this pinch and fold action until you get a sort of twisted braid going around the edge of the peanut puff.

Repeat for the other 47 puffs.  It’s a real family exercise to fold and lock these little puffs and I used to help my mum do this even if mine always turned out a little misshapen. 

If you use deep fat fryer, heat to 170 degrees and if you’re using a wok or a pan, heat the vegetable oil to medium heat.  Make sure the oil isn’t too hot as you don’t want to burn the puffs. 

Then drop in the puffs, ten to fifteen at a time, depending on the size of your wok or the deep fat fryer.  Use a metal fish slice to stir the puffs into the oil to ensure an even colour.

Once they are golden brown, lift out and drain on kitchen paper. 

It’s best to cool them for an hour before storing them in an airtight container (we use old biscuit tins at home) lined with greaseproof paper. 

They should last a few months in the tin but you’ll probably eat them within two weeks!

The 1908 Smythson Pocket Diary

Happy New Year! Will you be starting 2012 with a new Smythson diary? Did you know – first introduced in 1908, our now iconic Panama diary (then known as the “Featherweight”) was specifically designed to fit a gentleman’s inside jacket pocket.

In 1924, the Wafer diary was created as a lady’s alternative to the “Featherweight”, designed to fit into a small handbag…

Thank You on Paper

From her consultation in our New Bond Street salon to witnessing the traditional printing process at our Wiltshire factory, Susie Lau follows the progress of her very own set of bespoke stationery…

Fashion does perversely honour tradition in unexpected ways.  One of the quirks of the industry is the abundance of thank you notes that go back and forth. In just one week, I’ve received three notes in the post and incidentally, they’ve all been printed on Smythson stationery.   I put this down to the industry’s love of print and the tactability of paper, which Smythson have a rich history in providing.   There’s something truly lovely about receiving a handwritten note in the post that is infinitely more intimate than a quickfire email.

That said, it’s taken me up till now to gather up the resources to make up my own correspondence cards.  It could be my insanely illegible handwriting that has stopped me from getting my first proper set of stationery done.  I’ll have to take the chance that people out there will somehow be able to decipher my scribble.  Plus I now have a legitimate excuse to use the insanely cute coloured pens I’ve picked up from my travels to Tokyo to write on these cards.

Smythson’s stationery salon is a quiet haven of rustling cards, tissue paper inlays and lovely die-stamped letters and a bulging catalogue of motifs for you to choose to head up your cards or stamp your envelopes with.  I settled for a grey border, grey tissue lining and pink text and motif combination, clashing the sensible and the frivolous.

I did resist the urge to go for a motif that was ultra literal and slightly cheesy….

Instead, I chose a camera motif, which wasn’t actually in the catalogue but was a never-before used motif from the archive.

I was then lucky enough to visit Smythson’s factory in Wiltshire where decades-old machinery have been printing their stationery for years with the traditional methods of copperplate printing.

A negative image is put through a copper plate etching machine to achieve the final plate that will be used in the printing press, a process that has thankfully been speeded up but would have taken hours to achieve just one plate, when done by hand in the past…

The plate is then loaded into the printing press and once the rollers are inked up, each piece of paper or envelope is individually placed there and stamped with the motif or text.  It’s an eye bogglingly manual process, one that requires a knack of timing and an in-depth knowledge for how the machines are run.

We then moved on to the section where borders and gilding of card edges are done.  It’s another highly skilled manual process that isn’t governed by science but by simply knowing by eye, how the paint or gold/silver leaf will hit the card.

The application of this gold leaf on to the edge of these cards was pretty stunning to watch….

Then I watched my set of cards get their grey borders and was amazed at how evenly spaced the cards were in order to be sprayed with precision…

Even the envelopes were made up by hand with the all over tissue lining being something of a Smythson signature.  I had a go at gluing together a few of them but I don’t think I got the full hang of it.  Hopefully nobody actually receives my duff envelope in their stationery set…

We then went into the finishing room to see some Christmas cards being packaged up ready to go out, which reminds me that I’m woefully late with my own Christmas stationery.

Smythson keeps all their plates archived and never throws them away.  It was pretty special going through the ‘Celebrities’ drawer stuffed full of luminaries’ names…

My Smythson Stationery journey ends with these familiar blue boxes.  I’ve not yet sent one out yet but after my birthday and the Christmas period of December, I’m sure these will be winging their way, complete with my childish scrawl, to some hopefully grateful recipients.