I love the themes. That can’t be easy to do.
It’s funny, that’s where your creativity and perversity comes in. You make a theme of five completely unconnected shows. It might be something really stupid. I think people still read the stories, but I don’t think they’re always necessarily interested, and theming helps things. You have to seduce them into reading about something or someone. If they don’t know who is doing Mugler now, who do you stick Mugler in with to make people interested? Everybody is there for Dior and Chanel. But there’s also people that I really love who I want people to read about. Nicolas Di Felice, I think, is just incredible.
I love him. I think he’s amazing.
Incredible, I really hope he gets a really big job. I mean, he’s got quite a big job now. He’s great and I love him.
He’s excited to tell you about his collection or know about what you’re interested in. He’s a good interview. Do you find that designers have gotten better or worse at talking about their work?
Designers have gotten much better about being interviewed. There were designers I loved who literally couldn’t string three words together about their collection, which was always a shame because you could tell that they were not going to be in the dialogue for much longer. I find that they need to talk to you about the collections. They need to know what you think and they formulate their thoughts about what they’ve done as you are talking to them. It’s a skill to be so adaptable that when they’re listening to you, they’re cooking up: Yeah, that’s what I was doing. Yeah, that was the book. Yeah, that was the movie. Because some assistant was doing it somewhere else, so now you’ve given them this intellectual gloss, without trying to sound arrogant or anything. That’s why your reviews are really valuable to the designer.
How do you feel about designers just not giving interviews. Is it more prevalent now than it was then?
In the early days I was doing it for television, so that was new and people were kind of fascinated. I think designers thought it was something they needed to do because they saw it as a new audience. Even [Claude] Montana and [Yves] Saint Laurent, they’d be propped in front of a camera by a handler, or Pierre Bergé, and they’d be useless, but they’d do it. I think that then PR got in the middle and everything became super controlled. And then Tom Ford came along, and then KCD would be like just four questions. It went from a 45 minute interview backstage that you used 15 seconds of in your final piece to four questions and a 45 minute wait. That whole thing was Tom, he absolutely started it. Then people started doing it for no-names, too. You’d be like I don’t even have four questions for this person. I won’t say names, but you can guess. Do I care? It matches my progress through life. I was chatty-chatty in the olden days and now I’m like, you don’t want to chat? I’m happy to go get a cocktail somewhere.
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