Interview

Does Your Jacket Have Three Armholes?

Interview

Does Your Jacket Have Three Armholes?

A Conversation With Virgil Abloh, Creative Director and Founder of Off-White

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A Conversation with Virgil Abloh

‘I did a fashion show recently called “Nothing New.” It was based on criticism I got from another designer. So I took that statement and tried to unravel it and make it into a question. Does fashion have to be new? What is new anyway? Does fashion have to be new to be valid and relevant and important? People often lob ‘it’s been done before’ as a critique but without asking themselves those questions. “Newness” has become the barometer by which we judge things in fashion. “New” is a farce to me. It’s a critique intended to keep people like me out.’

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Branding Authenticity

Interview

Branding Authenticity

A Conversation with Miuccia Prada, Head Designer of Prada and Founder of Miu Miu

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A Conversation with Miuccia Prada

‘Censorship is huge now. Basically you can’t say anything interesting on the record. I did an interview with a very important journalist some time ago, but then I told him to cancel eighty percent of what I’d said. I know that makes me the censor but I don’t want to ruin my life over an interview. I have responsibilities. It’s hard because whatever I do, someone ends up being upset. A company our size has to think about everything. I made the choice not to be niche, only for the sophisticated few, so I have to accept the limitations of that choice.’

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Monoprix at 40 Rue de Sèvres

Interview

Monoprix at 40 Rue de Sèvres

A Conversation with Demna Gvasalia, Creative Director of Balenciaga and Founder of Vetements

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A Conversation with Demna Gvasalia

‘I like playing roles; it makes me feel safe. Authenticity for me perhaps means something different than for most people. I don’t have one interpretation of authenticity when it comes to style; I like moving between them. When I wear a sweatshirt with “Monoprix” on it, what am I signalling? Am I saying it’s cool to work at a supermarket or am I making people ask themselves why I’m wearing a Monoprix logo, when I could be wearing one from Balenciaga? Well, you tell me. Obviously everybody knows that I don’t work at Monoprix, well everyone who knows me does anyway. If a stranger sees me in the street wearing my Monoprix jumper, they might think I really do work there and I quite like that.’

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Dressing For Magic

Interview

Dressing For Magic

On the Transformative Quality of Ritual Dress

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Conversations on the Transformative Quality of Ritual Dress

‘Within the context of a public event, clothes help to endow the wearer with a greater sense of themselves. You find yourself behaving differently when wearing a costume and you are often less inhibited. The costume helps to give you a new persona to project yourself from. With a ritual, a simple black robe does the opposite and is often worn as a form of anonymity. I find elaborate robes project ego and when working in a ritual context the will needs to be focused on the job in hand.’

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Life in Colour: Green

Interview

Life in Colour: Green

Elizabeth Sweetheart Rosenthal on Life in a Monochrome Spotlight

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A Conversation with Elizabeth Sweetheart Rosenthal

‘My mother died a couple years ago at one hundred and four, and she had macular degeneration. But she could see in her periphery and she could always see me. We’d go walking together. She loved me being green. I’ve had a long life and have been through a lot and have my design studio and this and that. But when people see me they just see the Green Lady. That’s fine.’

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A Billionaire In Clothes

Interview

A Billionaire In Clothes

A Conversation with Ben Moukacha, Sapelogue

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A Conversation with Ben Moukacha

‘Every Congolese child is a sapeur. You shouldn’t ask when I became one. The point is that I’m still one. Some practice a bit and others practice deeply. I’m very deep in it. For us, clothing speaks. Fashion in general is out of fashion. One day it’s enormous rings, the next day they’re gone. La sape is beyond fashion; it’s like the earth. You’re born dust and you die dust. You’re born and we lose you as well.’

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Will I Get A Ticket?

Interview

Will I Get A Ticket?

A Conversation About Life After Vogue With Lucinda Chambers

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A Conversation with Lucinda Chambers

‘You’re not allowed to fail in fashion – especially in this age of social media, when everything is about leading a successful, amazing life. Nobody today is allowed to fail, instead the prospect causes anxiety and terror. But why can’t we celebrate failure? After all, it helps us grow and develop. I’m not ashamed.’

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Life In Colour: Red, Blue, Green and Yellow

Interview

Life In Colour: Red, Blue, Green and Yellow

Yui and Takaharu Tezuka On Life in Colour

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A Conversation with Yui and Takaharu Tezuka

Yui and Takaharu’s designs feature almost no colour. One project, the Roof House, is all sandy wood, topped with a sloping gray roof. In their own lives however, colour is a defining characteristic. Yui wears almost exclusively red; Takaharu blue. The objects they share are yellow. Their daughter, fourteen, wears yellow, too; their son, eleven, wears green.

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Silver Belly Hats And No Holey Jeans

Interview

Silver Belly Hats And No Holey Jeans

The Broken Spoke's James White on Honky-Tonk Image

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A hat tells the story of what you do. If you’re a bull rider, different hat. Barrel racer, different hat. I wear a cutter’s crease, which is for cutting horses – it’s an event. The only difference between a cutting horse and a cattleman is a dimple here on each side. Then there are the hats that we call a Kmart, Walmart special. Some people from out of town come here with those cheap straw hats, it’s kinda like a heehaw hat, comical. But we like it. They’re trying. They’re proud to have it on.

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A Conversation With Kenneth Goldsmith

Interview

A Conversation With Kenneth Goldsmith

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Poets hate the fact that I have a persona because poets aren’t supposed to have one. You’re supposed to be yourself, authentic, natural in T-shirts and jeans. To me it’s all show business. My whole poetic oeuvre is made up of falseness, inauthenticity, appropriation and plagiarism, so if I was trying to pass that off as an authentic persona, it would be contradictory. So I’m playing my role as a poet as much as they are playing theirs. My role is ‘inauthenticity’ and theirs is ‘authenticity.’ It’s all a construction.

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Pants For the Cost of A Postage Stamp

Interview

Pants For the Cost of A Postage Stamp

A Conversation with Jacob Yazejian, Used Clothing Exporter

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There’s like, a hundred different grades of industrial wipers. The best kind of wipers were made from men’s underwear, called gansies. For jeans, nowadays it’s all about torn this and torn that, but thirty years ago pair of jeans with a hole in the knees used to be cut up and sold to the Navy. You’d clean your machinery with these wipers. Looking for vintage is like looking for a needle in a haystack. One year the Japanese want over-sized printed T-shirts, the next year they want super small ones. The dredge of the industry for one period was men’s polyester pants. Those used to sell for six cents a pound. Ten years later, those same pants were worth $15 a piece.

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The Colour of Oil and Money

Interview

The Colour of Oil and Money

A Conversation With Manuel Cuevas Sr, Designer of Western Wear

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I’ve dressed kings, queens, beggars, prostitutes, lawyers, bankers. I dressed Gram Parsons, Dolly Parton, John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, The Rolling Stones, The Jackson Five and all four Hank Williams. I made Elvis’ gold lamé suit, and people say that I put Johnny Cash in black, but I’ve never in my life felt the need to be important or rich. I hate money, because of what it does to people. When Barbara Walters asked Johnny Cash about the black suits I made him he said, ‘I wore black before, but nobody put me in a better black than Manuel.’

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