Frank Muytjens, Designer at J. Crew

His working philosophy, in work and in life, he says, is not some hardened morsel that he has winnowed down to over years over trial and error. Rather, it is an aggregate, come from widening his gaze, turning on to things farther and farther afield. “Your eye opens and adjusts to new things,” he says. “I’m always in that mode, always have been that way. The only difference now is that I can project that in a job.” To this day Muytjens remembers being gently scolded by one of his drawing teachers. “I must have been 8 or 9,” he says, “and I remember my teacher saying to me, ‘oh, Frank, you always want to make something look beautiful.’ And I remember thinking, ‘yeah, what’s wrong with that?’” But if he is always in search of beauty, the designer, who is still drawn to the inaccessibility and rough exoticism of Edward Weston’s images of the California coastline, is more interested in the journey than the destination. Reaching an end, he says, a perfectly fulfilled, actualized state is in fact, dangerous. “I love the next thing, the getting there. I would be scared if I didn’t have to solve things and learn something new every day.” ●

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Full story available in Faculty Department Vol. 1.

Photographed in 2014 – Brooklyn, New York.