A Day In The Life - Flore-Adèle Gau

This month we asked Flore-Adèle Gau. One of the three co-directors of Claire de Rouen Books, Gau also curates  the Maison Alaïa Claire de Rouen space on New Bond Street and leads creative projects at Webber, balancing art, publishing, and a lifelong obsession with books.

06:30

Each morning, like clockwork, I am woken up by Miles Davis. Not by his music, but by my one-year-old black cat, who shares his name. His twin sister, Grace Jones, is much more relaxed. She knows he’s getting the job done and always patiently waits by her bowl. I get up, feed them, and go back to bed to read for an hour. I just started On Women, 2023, by Susan Sontag—too early to form an opinion, but the first chapters did wake my brain up.

07:00–07:30

I grab my personal phone. I start what will be a set of three Lime bike reservations, check on friends, scroll through the gazillions of absurd memes we exchange daily, catch up on news, then revisit my saved tabs from the night before, digging a little deeper and noting references.

07:30–8:00

I grab my work phone, check emails, see what’s happening on social media for work, and then start getting ready. 

09:30

At the office. I’m the Creative Lead at Webber. The London HQ for the agency and the gallery are both in Fitzrovia, in central London, making for a lovely cycle ride from where I live in De Beauvoir, in East London. I love arriving in the morning to find all the familiar, lovely faces of the people I work with. We’re a tight team and have the luxury of working under a gorgeous light well, surrounded by our artists' prints on the walls. My day of calls, emails, and meetings is punctuated by a few cigarette breaks on the roof terrace.

When leaving the office in the evening, we luckily have to walk through the gallery. I always take the time to take a look at Peter Tomka’s Bachelor Suite, the current exhibition. Tomka is a talented LA-based artist whose work we showed at the Grand Palais for Paris Photo last November, and I love him and his work dearly. 

18:30

Today I planned a pit stop at Alaïa’s New Bond Street store for a delivery en mains-propres of book gems. In addition to my role at Webber, I co-direct Claire de Rouen Books, situated in Bethnal Green, alongside Chantal Webber and Dominic Bell. When they invited me to join the ride toward the end of 2023, they made my retirement dream of becoming a book dealer come true—and early!

Pieter Mulier and his special project manager, Victor Leleu, made another dream come true this past December when they invited Claire de Rouen Books to collaborate with the unparalleled Maison Alaïa on a bookshop situated on the second floor of their New Bond Street store. Claire de Rouen herself infamously wore Alaïa in the Azzedine days; she was sometimes spotted walking up Charing Cross on her way to the OG bookshop location in Soho. I can only hope her ghost is proud.

Go check it out! The space, the atmosphere, the curation—made possible with the invaluable help of my cara Matilde Manicardi—are truly something special and well worth a visit. 

20:00
Back to my Studio Nocturne, my desk, for a few remaining bits; more book digging, maybe a movie in the background. Right now I am editing a video project I’m working on with my talented friend Clotilde Franceschi.

I’m also happy to share that I received a book today from Totodo Books in Tokyo—one that I've been searching for for years: the photographer Shoji Ueda’s posthumous and eponymous monograph. A thing of beauty.

It will join the pile of titles I started last year when Trine Stephensen asked me to curate a selection of books for her exhibition program Bolette. The pile includes Kristine Roepstorff’s 2021 work The Archive of Dark, which was published by InOtherWords, and Rosemarie Trockel’s  2019 book The Same Different. These are now gathered with the books I return to regularly: René Ricard’s Notebook 2010-2012, which was published by Mörel, and 2020’s Shame Space by Martine Syms (I’ve stopped counting the times I’ve flicked through these pages), Michaela Coel’s 2021 Misfits: A Personal Manifesto, 2023’s What’s Ours by Myriam Boulos, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s Bone (2014), 1928’s Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, and Bettina Grossman's monograph, which was published by Atelier EXB.

Eventually, late, I’ll be back to bed, ready for the next chapter of On Women tomorrow morning.