In collaboration with Saint-Martin Bookshop, Meryll Rogge introduces a rotating selection of one-of-a-kind vintage books. Curated by different creatives over time, each edition reflects a unique constellation of references, interests and inspirations. The first iteration is curated by longtime friend and collaborator of the designer, Elise Gettliffe.
The artist feels through her hands. As a ceramist, Gettliffe’s practice exists in her ability to convey emotions, thoughts through the shape of her palm. Understandably then, when making her curation, she saw it as necessary to go into Saint-Martin’s bookstore—so much so that she travelled to Belgium the first day she was back on European soil after a months’ long residency in Tibet.
As her hands moved through the shelves, an image started forming, one that was familiar for Gettliffe. For Stéphane Aisinber, owner of the Brussels institution, it was a “touching” process to witness. “She recognized old friends through the books she touched, she was remembering her life through them.” Gettliffe, has lived many lives before she landed on the spinning potter’s wheel.
Growing up in France in a family shaped by the arts—her father was a ballet dancer—Gettliffe sought a more practical medium through which to express her creativity. She initially found that vessel in fashion, an interest that would lead her to Antwerp. The time spent in the Belgian city marked the beginning of her adulthood and of the relationships that still define it. Her friendship with Rogge is one of these connections, their memories together are majorly represented in her curation. As Gettliffe puts it, their relationship remains “one of the most important relationships in my life.” Between them, she says, “dialogue doesn’t need to exist, it’s telepathic.”
Yet despite the connections fashion afforded her, Gettliffe soon became disenchanted with the garment industry. “Fashion is about the body, I’m more interested in the Earth.” Clay became a way of giving form to that curiosity. After moving to Japan, she began an apprenticeship with an elder ceramist, who taught her that perfection was not aspirational Still, fashion remains present in her curation, alongside books that recall her desire to belong to hip-hop culture, her discovery of Japan, the artists who changed the way she sees the world, and the people who have shaped her life. Her love of craft runs through them all, so too does a tendency to remember tactilely.
Lothar Baumgarten - Makanaíma - Marian Goodman Gallery 1987
In Lothar Baumgarten’s Makanaíma, Gettliffe found an image that connected two periods of her life. “I was struck by the image of a woman holding her children, completely naked. This is a photographic documentation of a tribe in the Amazon.” The photographs, many taken from behind, brought her back to the onsens she visited while living in Japan, and to the bodies of the older women she encountered there. “The old women had such a specific way to stand while naked, the way their bodies were just neutral, their butts flat.” What stayed with her was this particular physical presence, the way a body can be observed without being turned into an ideal or an image to aspire to. Her association offers a counterpoint to fashion’s relationship with the body, a subject that runs through Meryll Rogge’s work. Placed alongside the clothing collection, the book opens up a different perspective on dressing and undressing, and on what the body communicates before clothes give it shape.
Civic City - Cahier 1, 2 & 3 - Bedford Press 2010
Cities, for Gettliffe, are a way of reading how people organise and understand the world around them. In the three volumes of Civic City, she finds a representation of her interest in architecture, which she expresses through the contrasting identities of Japan and France. “There’s a certain ideology behind it,” she says of Japanese architecture, where individual buildings belong to a broader continuity. Paris, by contrast, feels to her “much more schizophrenic,” its streets bringing together “different eras and different ways of seeing the world existing in the same space.” It is this coexistence that interests her. This way of thinking finds a parallel in fashion, where clothes can carry traces of different periods, influences and ways of seeing the body. Alongside Meryll Rogge’s latest collection, Gettliffe’s selection allows books to exist in a collective of strangers, where each retains its character while revealing unexpected connections. Much like the city she describes, the collection takes shape through juxtaposition rather than uniformity, reflecting how the way we compose a world around ourselves is a way of expressing how we see it.
Comme des Garçons Six - Sixth Sense - Number 7 1991
It took leaving fashion behind, at least for a time, for Gettliffe to understand what had initially eluded her about Comme des Garçons. “When I was studying fashion, I hated it. I didn’t understand it.” Her move to Japan changed that perception, opening her up to a different way of thinking about the label and Rei Kawakubo’s work. “When you see all the craziness of Comme des Garçons, it’s really about the mind of the person behind it. Someone who has to use everyday life as a starting point and then takes it somewhere completely wild. There’s no real boundary.” What she came to appreciate was the leap from the familiar to the unexpected, the freedom to take something ordinary and push it beyond recognition. Japan gave her a new context for understanding this impulse, revealing possibilities she had not previously considered. Looking back, the book marks a shift in her own relationship with creativity, from the constraints she felt while studying fashion to a more open-ended understanding of what making could be. Its inclusion in her selection for Meryll Rogge is a reminder that the references we return to can acquire an entirely different significance as our lives and practices evolve.
Martha Cooper - Hip Hop Files Photographs 1979-1984 - From Here to Fame 2013
Long before it became a reference for her work in fashion, Martha Cooper’s Hip Hop Files: Photographs 1979–1984 held the promise of a world Gettliffe could only observe from a distance. Growing up in a small French village with three brothers, she was drawn to the energy of street dancers and the sense of belonging they seemed to find in their culture. “They were so cool, and they were so young and already so completely involved in something,” she recalls. For Gettliffe, that involvement carried a particular longing. “As a girl, you were treated as if you were somehow less important. I remember wishing I could be part of a group like that.” The book would return to her years later, when she was studying in Antwerp and drawing on its photographs for her graduation collection. What began as an adolescent fascination had become part of her creative vocabulary, a reference through which she could translate an earlier desire into her own work. Its place in the curation is therefore inseparable from the passage of time: the same images that once represented a world she wanted to enter eventually helped her shape one of her own. “This book is really a piece of my life,” she says, describing not just a formative influence, but the distance between the person she was and the designer she was becoming.
Jeff Wall - Restoration - Kunstmuseum Luzern and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1994
A visible seam in a photograph might seem like a technical detail, but for Gettliffe, it can become a way of understanding an artist’s practice. Her admiration for Jeff Wall began long ago. “I’ve always loved Jeff Wall’s work,” she says, recalling an image inspired by The Great Wave off Kanagawa that she encountered while living in Japan. It was a retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation, however, that revealed something she had not previously considered: how the evolution of printing technology had shaped Wall’s work over time. His earlier large-scale photographs were assembled from two sections, leaving a line where the images met. As printers grew larger, that trace disappeared. Gettliffe was fascinated by the change, by the way the history of a tool could remain visible in the work it produced, then gradually become invisible. This attention to the physical conditions of making resonates with her own practice as a ceramist, where clay records pressure, movement and touch. For Gettliffe, the appeal lies partly in these traces of production, in the evidence of how something came to exist. The disappearance of Wall’s seams marks a technological shift, but it also raises a question that runs through her selection: what remains visible of the process once a work is finished, and what is lost along the way?
Christian Boltanski - Reconstitution - Badischer Kunstverein 1978
A heartbeat is perhaps the most intimate record of a person: involuntary, individual, and yet shared by everyone. Gettliffe remembers encountering one of Christian Boltanski’s installations on an art island in Japan, where visitors could record their own heartbeat and enter a dark room in which the sounds of those who had come before them were played back. The work left a lasting impression, bringing together the singularity of each person and the possibility of belonging to something larger. Her interest in Boltanski also carries a cultural dimension. “Boltanski is an important artist for me,” she explains, emphasising her desire to recognise Jewish artists and Jewish culture. For Gettliffe, making that distinction matters: an artist’s identity and cultural inheritance deserve to be understood on their own terms.
Topology in bed by Chi Tsai Ni: a selection of bed sculptures from his younger days - Nos:books 2015
“You would like it,” Stéphane Aisinber, the owner of Saint-Martin Bookshop, told Gettliffe as he recommended Topology in Bed by Chi Tsai Ni. The book brings together arrangements of recurring forms that seem to fold into one another, at times resembling bodies pressed together or caught in an embrace. Its strange cover initially amused Gettliffe, but it was the images inside that held her attention. “I wish I took a photo of it open so I could look at it forever.” Aisinber recognises this attraction to the unusual from years of knowing Meryll Rogge’s taste as a customer. “Meryll bought books through the years and she always had a specific taste, high level, super rare or super strange books. And Meryl was always into this kind of stuff.” In Ni’s sculptures, Gettliffe finds a particular pleasure in the way a form can change through repetition and arrangement, acquiring new associations without losing its simplicity. It is an instinct that crosses naturally into her interest in ceramics and clothing, where proportion, texture and the relationship between forms can transform the way an object is experienced.
Lionel Estève - Un petit mot - Edition - 2023
Gettliffe remembers encountering Lionel Estève’s work during her years at the academy as something that felt immediate and tangible. The French artist works across sculpture, drawing and installation, often exploring how colour, texture and unexpected materials can shape an object’s presence. “His work is very much about textiles—not necessarily in the traditional sense, but there’s a strong relationship to material and texture. I loved this work. It was very inspiring when I was at the academy. It felt very real.” That last impression is telling. Rather than approaching material as something to be subordinated to an idea, Estève allows its physical qualities to lead, giving texture and form a voice of their own. For Gettliffe, who would later turn to ceramics, this offered an understanding of making that went beyond representation or finish. The material itself could be expressive, carrying a feeling before it needed to communicate anything more specific.
Daniel Sannwald - Pluto & Charon - Ludion 2010
For Gettliffe, Daniel Sannwald “Pluto & Charon” is inseparable from her grand-uncle, an architect with whom she shared a close relationship. She gave it to him years ago, drawn to its strange ruffles and forms- “I gave him this book but I don’t really know why. He kept it anyway because he knew it would make me happy.” What stayed with her was not simply the book itself, but the fact that he had kept something because it mattered to her. The gift became part of their shared history. Following his passing last year, it carries that history in a different way, bringing back the thoughtfulness of an everyday gesture and the affection behind it.
Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai) - Recollections - Gallery Magazine 2023
Gettliffe’s interest in architecture has followed her across places and practices, and Studio Mumbai is a studio she has admired since her years in Antwerp. Founded by architect Bijoy Jain, the Indian practice has developed an approach in which architecture takes shape through the act of making, bringing architects, craftspeople and builders together to explore materials, construction and form. Rather than relying on drawings alone, the studio works through physical models, mock-ups and material experiments, allowing each project to evolve in close dialogue with its surroundings. “They made a series of objects in clay that I thought were amazing. It was one of the first editions they sold in this shop. Studio Mumbai became much bigger later, but I knew their work from when I was in Antwerp. I’d followed them for a very long time. I think I was fascinated by the studio because I love architecture.” Published by Gallery Magazine in 2023, Recollections reflects a practice in which the relationship between the hand, the material and the finished object is fundamental. The clay works that first caught Gettliffe’s attention offer a point of entry into Studio Mumbai’s wider philosophy: an understanding of design not as an abstract idea imposed on a material, but as something discovered through working with it. This sensibility resonates with Gettliffe’s own move towards ceramics, where touch and experimentation are central to the process.
Text by Pedro Vasconcelos
Images by Daniil Zozulya
