I stay creative through collaboration. When you work in graphic design, you can become a lone wolf, taking on projects that you both start and finish on your own, but as a creative director, you must constantly interact with other like-minded talents—that dialogue really sparks my creativity. On a photo shoot, for example, if you find the right collaborators and establish a common language, you can reach a kind of higher state where everything just clicks, and ideas are generated that you could never have gotten on your own.

I used to share an office with Bart de Baets, another graphic designer. He would often laugh at the fact that, while my work is very particular, precise and in some ways quite rigorous, my home is the complete opposite. I live in the brutalist Barbican Estate in London, but my apartment doesn’t have a minimalist John Pawson interior. The floor is bright green and made of Pirelli rubber, and the decoration is quite eclectic; it’s filled with ceramics, glassware and books that I’ve collected—I think it would probably surprise a lot of people who only know my work.

It fills me with a sense of pride when people collect what I make. I’ve created quite a few print publications for Hermès along with invitations for their runway shows, and I’ll often hear from people who collect them. Sometimes, I’ll receive a picture on Instagram from someone showing me their bookshelf filled with Le Monde d’Hermès magazines or every issue from my 12 years at The Gentlewoman.¹ I really care about everything I do and it’s the biggest possible compliment when people value my work to such an extent.

Two summers ago, I was reading Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. I think it’s quite a good motto to live by. In life, you often try to steer things in a certain direction, but you can’t control everything. Sometimes you have to act, and sometimes you have to react to what’s in front of you.