WE MEET AT A cosy private club in West London, the sort of hangout popular with fashion professionals who believe in the semblance of bohemia. For thirty-six years she’s been working at British Vogue, twenty-five of those as the magazine’s fashion director, but not long before we meet the fashion press has been full of headlines announcing her departure. We order lattes, and I’m struck by how candid she is.

A month and a half ago I was fired from Vogue. I phoned my lawyer; she asked me what I wanted to do about it. I told her I wanted to write a letter to my colleagues to tell them that Edward [Enninful] decided to let me go. And to say how proud I am to have worked at Vogue for as long as I did, to thank them for being such brilliant colleagues. My lawyer said sure, but don’t tell HR. They wouldn’t have wanted me to send it.

Later I was having lunch with an old friend who had just been fired from Sotheby’s. She said to me, ‘Lucinda, will you please stop telling people that you’ve been fired.’ I asked her why – it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. She told me, ‘If you keep talking about it, then that becomes the story. The story should be that you’ve had the most incredible career for over thirty years. The story shouldn’t be that you’ve been fired. Don’t muck up the story.’ But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the person who puts on a brave face and tells everyone, ‘Oh, I decided to leave the company,’ when everyone knows you were really fired. There’s too much smoke and mirrors in the industry as it is. And anyway, I didn’t leave. I was fired.

Fashion can chew you up and spit you out. I worked with a brilliant designer when I was at Marni – Paulo Melim Andersson. I adored him. He was challenging, but highly intelligent. Fragile, like a lot of creative people. We had our ups and downs, but he stayed with us for seven years. Then Chloé came along. The CEO at the time asked my advice about Paulo and I told him, ‘Paulo is great, but you have to know that he won’t turn the brand around for you in a season or even two. You’ve got to give him time, and surround him by the right people.’ ‘Absolutely, absolutely,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’ Three seasons later Paulo was out. They didn’t give him time, and he never got his people. I felt so sad for Paulo. If you want good results, you have to support people. You don’t get the best out of anyone by making them feel insecure or nervous. Ultimately, that way of treating people is only about control. If you make someone feel nervous, you’ve got them. But in my view, you’ve got them in the wrong way. You’ve got them in a state of anxiety. I’m thinking of one fashion editor in particular: it’s his modus operandi. He will wrong-foot you and wrong-foot you, and have everyone going, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’

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 of what happened to me. If my shoots were really crappy… Oh I know they weren’t all good – some were crappy. The June cover with Alexa Chung in a stupid Michael Kors T-shirt is crap. He’s a big advertiser so I knew why I had to do it. I knew it was cheesy when I was doing it, and I did it anyway. Ok, whatever. But there were others… There were others that were great.

In fashion people take you on your own estimation of yourself – that’s just a given. You can walk into a room feeling pumped up and confident, and if you radiate that the industry will believe in what you project. If, on the other hand, you appear vulnerable you won’t be seen as a winner. I remember a long time ago, when I was on maternity leave, Vogue employed a new fashion editor. When I met with my editor after having had my baby, she told me about her. She said, ‘Oh Lucinda, I’ve employed someone and she looked fantastic. She was wearing a red velvet dress and a pair of Wellington boots to the interview.’ This was twenty years ago. She went on, ‘She’s never done a shoot before. But she’s absolutely beautiful and so confident. I just fell in love with the way she looked.’ And I went, ‘Ok, ok. Let’s give her a go.’ She was a terrible stylist. Just terrible. But in fashion you can go far if you look fantastic and confident – no one wants to be the one to say ‘… but they’re crap.’ Honestly Anja, you can go quite far just with that. Fashion is full of anxious people. No one wants to be the one missing out.

Fashion moves like a shoal of fish; it’s cyclical and reactionary. Nobody can stay relevant for a lifetime – you always have peaks and troughs. The problem is that people are greedy. They think, ‘It worked then, we’ve got to make it work now.’ But fashion is an alchemy: it’s the right person at the right company at the right time. Creativity is a really hard thing to quantify and harness. The rise of the high street has put new expectations on big companies like LVMH. Businessmen are trying to get their creatives to behave in a businesslike way; everyone wants more and more, faster and faster. Big companies demand so much more from their designers – we’ve seen the casualties. It’s really hard. Those designers are going to have drink problems, they’re going to have drug problems. They’re going to have nervous breakdowns. It’s too much to ask a designer to do eight, or in some cases sixteen, collections a year. The designers do it, but they do it badly – and then they’re out. They fail in a very public way. How do you then get the confidence to say I will go back in and do it again?

The most authentic company I ever worked for is Marni. We didn’t advertise, and what we showed on the catwalk we always produced. We never wanted to be ‘in fashion.’ If you bought a skirt twenty years ago, you can still wear it today. We never changed the goalposts. Our shows were about empowering women. We always treated our models beautifully and had incredible diversity in the company: my team was half boys, half girls, all different nationalities. It was very transparent, but when the company was sold everything changed. The Castiglionis were naïve. They sold sixty percent of the company, thinking that the new owner would respect what they had built. I never understood why they sold it to Renzo Rosso of all people. He is the antithesis of everything Marni stood for. The antithesis. When Consuelo left, I remember thinking why not give the design task to someone from the team? It would have been a reflection of how fashion is created today, and it worked for Gucci – Alessandro Michele had been at the brand forever before becoming the creative director. I talked to Renzo and he agreed, but then at the last minute he changed his mind. He brought Francesco Risso onboard, who had nothing to do with the company. Before Marni, he did celebrity dressing at Prada. He’d never done a show, he’d never run a team. But he knows Anna Wintour. And who is Renzo Rosso enthralled by? Anna Wintour. The last womenswear collection at Marni was a disaster; it had terrible reviews. The show was appalling. I heard the cost to produce it was two-and-a-half times what we used to spend, and it sold fifty percent less. A lot of American buyers didn’t even bother to turn up. Marni is no more. It saddens me, but then I remind myself that from the ashes something new can emerge.

When Vetements came on the scene, what they were doing felt very new. At that particular time, it wasn’t what anyone else was doing. And when I saw the last Balenciaga show… Okay, you could say it’s a bit Margiela or a bit this or that, but honestly I was really really really excited. You know what was smart about it? It was the scale – you saw this tiny model emerge and it took forever for her to get close to the audience. It built up expectation. Everything was thought through: the casting, the music, the space. Everything. And I loved how we were all seated: so far from each other, it all felt anonymous. Normally at a fashion show, everyone looks at each other – who wears what, who sits where. ‘Oh, she’s got the new Céline shoes.’ But here you felt as if you were on your own. It was a new feeling.

Fashion shows are all about expectation and anxiety. We’re all on display. It’s theatre. I’m fifty-seven and I know that when the shows come around in September I will feel vulnerable. Will I still get a ticket? Where will I sit? I haven’t had to think about those things for twenty-five years. Most people who leave Vogue end up feeling that they’re lesser than, and the fact is that you’re never bigger than the company you work for. But I have a new idea now, and if it comes off maybe I won’t be feeling so vulnerable after all. We’ll have to wait and see.

There are very few fashion magazines that make you feel empowered. Most leave you totally anxiety-ridden, for not having the right kind of dinner party, setting the table in the right kind of way or meeting the right kind of people. Truth be told, I haven’t read Vogue in years. Maybe I was too close to it after working there for so long, but I never felt I led a Vogue-y kind of life. The clothes are just irrelevant for most people – so ridiculously expensive. What magazines want today is the latest, the exclusive. It’s a shame that magazines have lost the authority they once had. They’ve stopped being useful. In fashion we are always trying to make people buy something they don’t need. We don’t need any more bags, shirts or shoes. So we cajole, bully or encourage people into continue buying. I know glossy magazines are meant to be aspirational, but why not be both useful and aspirational? That’s the kind of fashion magazine I’d like to see.

Lucinda Chambers served as fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s editor-in-chief and founder.

With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

***

Nathalie Ours: A garment should have a soul, a personality. That’s what distinguishes fashion from just clothes. But making fashion in big factories as we do today – where what matters is how much you can save on cost – you lose something. You lose the humanity. I’m not saying that this makes the product bad; it can still be desirable. I often see fashion shows and think a collection is amazing, but when I see it in the store I lose interest.

Nicole Phelps: Most consumers don’t want design innovation, exaggerated volume or a third sleeve on their garments. They want their garments to get them laid.

Andy Spade: Ultimately the consumer decides what works and what doesn’t. People in fashion like to criticise the big corporations who supposedly created ‘the system,’ but if the system were to break they’d all be without a job.

Steven Kolb: A fashion company has to worry about selling. That doesn’t mean that you can’t also strive to be creatively fulfilled, but being a fashion designer is being a businessman. Unless you make clothes as a hobby, you can’t use fashion as just a leisurely release of creativity – it’s very different from being an artist. To be a fashion designer is to participate in the fashion system.

Jean-Jacques Picart: In America fashion is an industry. Here in France we still find it hard to accept that fashion is commerce, and that beautiful things have to sell. Many designers suffer from a form of snobbery, where they think they should be above pedestrian concerns like how to sell a dress.

Robin Schulié: People talk about whether fashion is art or commerce, but that question is a false dichotomy. It’s both. The challenge if you’re a fashion designer is making a garment that has artistic value but that’s also commercially viable.

Thom Browne: The commercial side of fashion frustrates me. The way retailers buy collections, how conservative they are, how price conscious they can be, how they can just come into the showroom and say things they shouldn’t… I shouldn’t be so specific, but those are the little things that frustrate me.

Jean-Jacques Picart: The generation of designers that became established in the mid-Seventies knew how to bridge commerce and creativity. Kenzo Takada, Georges Rech, Sonia Rykiel. I call what they did ‘creative prêt-a-porter.’ There was an immediate connection to consumers. In 1976 I worked with Thierry Mugler and Kenzo Takada at the same time. Mugler would put on these spectacular and glamorous shows, and afterwards he would think of how to sell it. With Kenzo it was the other way around. He had his sales period before he showed the collection to the press, and we weren’t allowed to work on the show until the sales period had ended. The night before the show we would go through the collection. The sales people had organised two rails of clothing for us. One had all the clothes that had sold really well, and those we were obliged to show on the catwalk. And the other had clothes that hadn’t sold very well, so those we should show less of on the catwalk. Kenzo would come, look at both rails and start to mix the clothes that had sold well with those that hadn’t. He would mix a commercial flower pattern with, say, a more difficult graphic one to make both press and buyers happy. This is how the famous Kenzo mix-and-match style was born.

Robin Schulié: The retail landscape changed an awful lot in the late 1990s, when the big fashion conglomerates got involved. In the 1980s and early 1990s brands like Givenchy, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton were still considered really stuffy and old-fashioned. Fashion-forward people bought clothes from new designers like Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester – and they were sold in boutiques like Maria Luisa or L’Eclaireur here in Paris. When big corporations started investing in fashion, they realised that they had to get younger customers – the seventy-year-olds who were still buying Givenchy or Balenciaga were on their way out. So they started getting cool, young designers like Marc Jacobs or John Galliano to take over conservative old brands like Vuitton or Dior. These old brands had boutiques already, so to grow they started targeting department stores who were obviously interested because the big brands would hire floor space for ‘shop-in-shops.’ Department stores could make money the way a property developer would, with minimum risk involved. A department store structured in this way is like a mini-mall essentially. Independent stores like Maria Luisa have found it more and more difficult to compete, and many stores have gone out of business because of it.

Jean-Jacques Picart: In fashion we have to accept that there is an end to success. Every designer has a life cycle. An older designer retires, and a new one can flourish. This is the way it should be. That’s why I’m not keen on the revival of fashion houses. Why doesn’t a conglomerate invest in a new designer instead? An executive would say that an old brand already has a reputation, a ‘heritage,’ and that it will take less time to revive a brand like that than to build a new one from scratch. It’s a calculated risk, and succeeding in fashion is about taking calculated risks.

Tim Blanks: Death used to be so convenient for fashion; a brand stopped when the designer died. Now it’s like the walking dead; the whole notion of the zombie has had a pernicious effect on culture.

Thom Browne: A lot of people are afraid of taking risks because they’re afraid of failure. I’m not afraid of failure; I make sure that I don’t fail. At the beginning of my career in fashion, people certainly weren’t banging on my door to buy my collection. Not many people understood what I was trying to do. I remember thinking ‘What am I going to do if this doesn’t work out?’ And then I just thought, ‘I’m going to make it work.’

Andy Spade: My dad used to tape my pants up when I was a boy, and when I grew up I kept wearing my pants cuffed with coats from the boy’s department at Brooks Brothers. I used to work for Thom Browne, and he’d see the way I dressed and he started dressing the same. He’d turn up to the office wearing very short, cuffed pants. And then he took the idea and made a whole concept and a business from it. I was like, I should have thought of that! He beat me to it.

Jean-Jacques Picart: The generation of designers who are rising in the ranks today understand that they have to cater to the laws of commerce if they want to survive. They know that the era of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen is over.

Nathalie Ours: A designer who wants to stay in business has to take things very slowly, step by step. I’ve lost count of the designers who were the hottest ticket for a season; all the buyers wanted the clothes, and the designer got overwhelmed and couldn’t deliver on time. After two seasons like this the buyers get fed up because late deliveries mean that the clothes won’t spend enough time on the shop floor before the sales start. Or maybe a market blows up – as we had recently with the Russians. So many designers started getting orders from Russian boutiques, and then the market dropped. The designers never got paid. Young people think fashion is very glamorous, but really – it’s hard work. Fashion is glamorous for the two minutes it takes to take a bow at the end of a catwalk show.

Nicole Phelps: We’ve had few failures that can compare to John Galliano’s recent one. I guess the best way to describe it is as a private failure committed in public. People hypothesised that LVMH weren’t sorry to get rid of him. His business had been stagnant for a while and at least from an editorial point of view he had peaked a long time ago. And now he has taken on another very visible job at Margiela, and he’s back on the stage. He failed, but he’s managed to come back.

Tim Blanks: John Galliano was always a loose canon; he was always a miserable mean drama queen. I remember being with John in a London nightclub in 1989. He just got up from the table, pulled his cock out and pissed all over everybody. He could never handle his drink or drugs. McQueen was exactly the same, and on top of that severely unbalanced and heavily suicidal. He was always self-destructive. His experience as a child was so insanely traumatic that he could have been working in a road crew on a highway and it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. You can’t blame the industry for the cracks in someone’s psyche.

Glenn O’Brien: What I see around me is only heartache and misery. Vanity. Enslavement of Third World people. People thinking that they are more important than they are. People without consciousness or principles. That’s the corporate world of fashion we have today.

Robin Schulié: The fashion industry today is a beautiful lie. Nobody is happy. Everyone is fucking frustrated. I don’t see happy faces – I don’t see happy people doing their jobs.

Nathalie Ours: In the 1980s fashion was still fun; there were no real rules yet. There were fewer brands so each designer occupied a much greater share of the market. Now there are so, so many brands.

Tim Blanks: As far as I’m concerned Cristóbal Balenciaga and Charles James are the two most fascinating people in the history of fashion. In fact, Charles James is a key person when you’re talking about success and failure. He was human and inhuman at the same time, such a genius. He was always pushing boundaries – never accepting the limits of his material. And at the same time he was a dyed-haired, drunken, queeny, vicious, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you fuck-up. Like Caravaggio – biting his patron’s hand. I kind of like those people. John Galliano. He inherited Charles James’ mantle. Both were such utter successes and such devastating failures at the same time. McQueen is another one. A genius that destroyed his own genius. Sacrifices. With people like that it’s always a matter of when, not a matter of if.

Glenn O’Brien: People have always been attracted to success; it’s our natural instinct. We want to survive, move up and get rewards but those rewards are illusory. We find that out later, when it turns out we didn’t make it. We see the dream getting further and further away the more we chase it.

Nathalie Ours: Sometimes I wonder how long we can actually expect a designer to be successful when fashion is so fleeting.

Tim Blanks: I remember going to the Met to see the McQueen show; the queues were a mile long. There were people there who wouldn’t know McQueen from a bar of soap. There they were queuing up to see what this Icarus-like figure left behind. As if that would reassure them that they took the right course in their lives – that it really was better not to fly too close to the sun. That’s the price of genius – self-immolation.

Robin Schulié: We expect a lot from our designers today in order to think of them as successful. We expect them to have their own brand, while designing for a big house. We expect them to have shops worldwide. We expect them to constantly be in the press.

Tim Blanks: Someone like McQueen makes ordinary people fantasise: ‘What would it be like to be a staggering, glittering genius? What would it be like, to not be me?’

Robin Schulié: Look at young brands like Christopher Kane, Nicholas Kirkwood or J.W. Anderson. The corporations that own them are investing so much money in them, they aren’t allowed to just grow organically. The expectations are very high, and that in itself can be disastrous for a brand that is still establishing itself. These brands were profitable before they got investment from Kering or LVMH – they already had private backers. But they couldn’t afford to lose money so they couldn’t grow. When they get backing by corporations, their growth speeds up immensely all of a sudden. New shops are opened, new campaigns appear in the press. And now these companies that were previously profitable, start losing money. Their sales don’t match the investment they’ve received. The sheets aren’t balanced. It makes me wonder how long it’ll be before one of them hits the wall.

Tim Blanks: Cristóbal Balenciaga walked out of his office one day, turned around, locked the door and walked away forever. He closed his business when ready-to-wear started in 1968. A German company had the license to produce wedding dresses and perfumes, and they sold it to a French company in the mid-Eighties. In the early Nineties Josephus Thimister was placed as the head designer for ready-to-wear – Nicolas Ghesquière came later as a license designer. Thimister came from Antwerp and must have been brought on after the momentum that Tom Ford created at Gucci. Executives started thinking about another old venerable fashion label to resuscitate, and Balenciaga must have cost about a penny to buy. Thimister was just so fabulously wrong; he did a show with some Belgian New Beat band that played live so loud that by the third look the auditorium was a third empty. By the end of the show, the only person left – and this is one of my favourite fashion memories ever – was Suzy Menkes sitting in the middle of the front row, her hands covering her ears. When Ghesquière took over after that, there was really nowhere lower to go in the hierarchy – the next step would have been to get the receptionist on design duty.

Jean-Jacques Picart: A good collection is one that fulfils three key points. You have to present things that are already known, as well as others that are the same but with a slight twist. And then you have to present things that are completely new. Buyers never buy the thing that’s completely new – those serve as research for the following season. A designer also has to show that he understands the codes of the house: that we’re at Isabel Marant and not Haider Ackermann. The bulk of the show has to be recognisable looks but with new proportions, colours or a slightly different silhouette – that’s what will appeal to your buyers. And the completely new thing is what appeals to the press – it’s what we think of as risk-taking. And it’s what the buyers will order next season, when it already feels familiar. Few young designers understand this equation; they think that repeating themselves makes for bad design. They don’t understand that the focal point of their house is the product, and that the customer has to have a sense of familiarity.

Glenn O’Brien: Culture is getting stupider and stupider. I worked in the music industry for a long time. And what I learned was that a record company, Columbia Records for example, might have three hundred artists and they have to put the same amount of work – A&R, publicity, radio promotion – into each one. So when you come across a Michael Jackson and you make one hundred times more money than from all the other artists that still require the same work, the economies of scale dictate that you don’t want twenty really good artists, you just want one overwhelmingly popular one. Everything comes down to the bottom line.

This article was first published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘One Minute Sculpture’ series, ongoing since the 1980s.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.