It feels completely surreal to think that you are holding the tenth issue of AVANT in your hands.
Ten issues. Seven anthologies, three special editions. 2,024 pages. Insane.
In December 2018, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund AVANT’s first issue, An Anthology of American Workwear. Three months later, in March 2019, there it was.
Nearly 10,000 copies have been sold since, and it remains the best-selling title in the collection.
Back then, I never imagined that eight years later, AVANT would be publishing its tenth book and available through more than a hundred partners around the world. Call it whatever you like. I call it one hell of an adventure, and I’m so happy to share it with you.
I do have a confession to make: what I love most is watching a new issue come together.
Starting with an idea, developing it, beginning to write, and then seeing the layout take shape page by page. Nothing is more satisfying than building a project like this from the ground up and, a few months later, finally seeing the finished book arrive.
Of course, there are doubts, difficult choices, changes of direction, and sometimes even disagreements along the way. But the research, interviews, and writing are so rewarding that everything else eventually fades into the background. The problem is that I love this creative process so much that as soon as one issue is finished, I immediately want to start another.
Still, I can feel the challenge growing with every issue. In the early ones, I wrote about the subjects I knew best: workwear and militaria. They still required extensive research, of course, but I already had a solid foundation. These were worlds I knew well. Today, I feel the need to broaden the scope of my writing and step outside my comfort zone. For you, so that AVANT can explore a wider range of subjects, but also for myself, so that I can keep learning and discovering new horizons. This new issue devoted to outerwear is probably the best example yet.
Even though I grew up in the middle of Fontainebleau Forest, one of France’s great rock-climbing destinations, I have always considered myself more of a city kid than an outdoorsy one.
The woods were never really my thing. I preferred playing soccer in the park near my house. Vacations were no different. My parents were not mountain people either, and throughout my childhood, we always went to the beach. As a result, I never learned to ski or developed much of a taste for mountain air. Unsurprisingly, the whole world of clothing designed for skiing, camping, and hiking felt completely foreign to me for a long time.
Despite that, my passion for workwear and militaria has brought me into contact with plenty of outerwear over the past twenty years: hunting and fishing jackets, bags, and even the iconic grizzly jacket, which connects all of those worlds. But putting together 196 pages on a subject this broad and fascinating also requires the humility to approach it like a beginner, ready to learn everything. Or almost everything.
That is exactly what drives me today: the challenge of creating something you will not find anywhere else. I am not the world’s leading expert on outerwear, and I would never claim to be.
But I can approach it in my own way. Offer my own perspective on the subject. Bring you along to meet larger-than-life characters and tell you the stories behind the clothes we still wear today.
After all, that belief is what inspired me to launch AVANT in 2018: every garment has a story to tell. So, after telling you about the denim jackets worn by miners, U.S. Army shirts, and cowboy boots, I wanted to turn to down jackets, mountain parkas, and all the other garments designed for life outdoors.
More than any issue before it, this outerwear edition of AVANT is meant to be read by the fire, in a cabin somewhere in the mountains or deep in the woods. Take it from a city kid.
Eric Maggiori