* c fashion through my eyes
*
MUST HEAD
CONTRIBUTORS
Editor-in-Chief:
Photographers: Can Evgin, Rui Faria, Diana Gomez, Frederik Lieberath, Nagi Sakai, Joost Vandebrug, Stefan Zschernitz Fashion: Gemma Cairney, Scott Robert Clark, Cynthia Lawrence -John, Jason Leung, Marcus Söder Make-up: Julie Jacobs, Philippe Miletto, Linda Öhrström, Sarah Rygate, Jamiee Thomas, Natsumi Watanabe Hair: Lok Lau, Ernesto Montenovo, Jan Przemyk, Claire Rothstein, Jimo Salako, Christopher Sweeney, Jaimee Thomas Make-up assistants: Linda Anderson, Julia Laza, Linda Wallsten
RUI FARIA
Art Director: NENA TSAMPARLI
Fashion Director: CYNTHIA LAWRENCE
Design: NENA TSAMPARLI
Typography: HECTOR HARALAMBOUS
Fashion Editor: JASON LEUNG
Beauty Editor: LINDA ÖHRSTRÖM
Contr. Beauty Editor: KYMMENZIES FOSTER
Accessories Editor: KATIE BARON
Fashion Assistant: CAROLINE BURMAN
Fashion Intern: LINH LY
Marketing Director: TERESA HAVVAS
Russian Correspondent: SASHA BOGATOVA
BA ILLUSTRATION IN MAGAZINE DESIGN 2010 VAKALO ART & DESIGN COLLEGE
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Fashion assistants: Caroline Burman , Chris Cook, Laure n Hasl am, Haruki Horikawa, Mars hall Johnson, Victorine Mengot, Bianca J Swan, Liam Warwick. Photographic assistants: Per Almén, Philip Dunlopp , Maciek Jasik, Jean-Philippe Woodland, Baud Postma Models: Louis, Robbie, Lariss a, Elliott Denman and Sam Jadwat at D1 Models, Suzie Birdat Elite, Jacob Coupeat
Models1, Hanna Paatat Next, Sophie Holmes and Charlie Wright @ IMG, Waness a Milhomen at Select Retouching: MPD Digital, London Studios: SNA P Studios, 151-155 New North Rd., London, N1 6TA. Tel: 020 7684 7555 Digital equipment: Threef our Digital, London Printing: Gr anite Colour, contact Simon Dane +44 (0) 7984671293 The paper used in this magazine is elemental chlorine free. It is printed to ISO 14001 environmental procedures using vegetable based inks. C Magazine is published four times yearly. By Volt Publishing Ltd ISSN 1752 2927 Printed in England London Office c/o Unit 11E New North House 190A New North Road London N1 7BJ (UK) Tel: +4420 3393 3014 Paris Office c/o Julie Acroute dit Vampouille 114 Rue de Courcelles 75017 Paris Tel: +33 1 47 63 00 71 www.oolala-productions.com
Moscow Office 5-167 Proezd Nansena 129343 Moscow Russia Tel: +7 915 353 2585 All images contained within this publication are the sole copyright of the photographers and designers and are protected under the international copyright laws. Nothing may be printed, copied or reproduced wholly or in part without prior permission from the editors. C magazine does not accept unsolicited material and cannot accept responsibility any loss or damage. ©2010 Volt Publishing Ltd All rights reserved With special thanks to : Rui Faria, Editor in Chief & Owner of Volt Publishing Ltd Hector Haralambous, Dimitris Kritsotakis & George Vlachos.
CONTENTS
pg 2 Imprint pg 3 Contents & Editorial pg 4 Agenda pg 10 Designer Hail Mc Queen by Bright Foley pg 20 Photography Renaisance man: David La
Chapelle by Anna Carnick pg 32 Xclusive Marc Jacobs for Luis Vuitton by Glenn O’ Brien pg 50 Product Kylie meets friends: a tribute to
underwear pg 62 Face Nicolas Ghesquire by Tom Ford
EDITOR’s NOTES
In the moment, Or not? The words “fashion“ and “marketing“ are virtually interchangable. Yet a fashion brand cannot expect to thrive on marketing alone. Consumers, happily, just aren’t that dumb. Jean-Jacques Picart, the Parisian fashion consultant, told me, “Over the years i’ve advised many brands, and if there is one thing i am absolutely sure of, it’s that you can’t lie. You can bluff, you can rearrange the truth, but you can’t cheat. Marketing can persuade a customer to push open the door of a shop, but if the clothes they find inside it are ugly, they will leave. Today a product at any level must achieve the correct balance between price, quality, creativity and wearability. If one of these factors is below par, the customer will not be fooled. The best marketing in the world comes down a person standing in front of a mirror.“ (Mark Tungate, Fashion brands: branding style from Armani to Zara)
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ﾎ組enda
September
London Fashion Week 2010
Milan Fashion Week 2010
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Burberry Prorsum
24 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Issa London
25 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Julien Mcdonald
26 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Matthew Williamson
27 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Paul Smith
28 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Vivienne Westwood
29 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
D Squared
24 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Versace
25 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Fendi
26 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Emporio Armani
27 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Gucci
28 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Roberto Cavalli
29 / 09 / 2010, 20.00 hours
New York Fashion Week 2010
Michael Kors
24 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Marc Jacobs
25 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Donna Karan
26 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
BCBG Mazazria
27 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Calvin Klein
28 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
DKNY
29 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Octomber
Paris Fashion Week 2010
Lanvin
24 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Chanel
25 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Louis Vuitton
26 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Stella McCartney
27 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Balenciaga
28 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
Alexander Mc Queen
29 / 10 / 2010, 20.00 hours
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MARC JACOBS for Luis Vuitton
illustrated by Nena Tsamparli
Designer By Bridget Foley
Alexander mcqueen has entered a bold new phase with a fabulous fall colletion, a stunning l.A. Store and even an unexpected lightness of being.
Mc Hail
Queen
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In Alexander McQueen’s new, gracefully curved
sunshine and a bounty of spectacular frocks. That
store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, the impos-
both of these characters should move into the light
ing figure of a man—a wingless angel, actually—
is no accident; they’re merely manifesting the mood
rendered in shiny stainless steel extends through
of the designer, who, after an extended dark period,
a circular skylight, his head outlined against the
both personally and professionally, has embraced
clear L.A. sky. For his fall fashion show in Febru-
the light. And, as indicated by his stellar fall collec-
ary McQueen told a tale inspired by the ancient
tion, his work is the better for it. Long considered
elm in his garden, about a girl who lives in a tree
an enfant terrible of fashion—a label he loathes
but eventually flees its leafy oppression to find love,
and one which, at the age of 39, should no longer
photographed by Steven Meisel
Alexander McQueen Winter Collection 2010
apply—McQueen has seemed at various times in his career to work through his demons, but he has never completely done so. Sometimes a dark current would wend through even his most glorious shows; other times, a season of pure romance might be followed abruptly by a brooding display of melancholia or outright anger. Such was the mood of last fall’s Witches show, inspired by a distant ancestor, Elizabeth Howe, a victim of the Salem witch hysteria. It offered not Hawthorne-esque romance with some hint of redemption, but a study in vitriol expressed via fashion—an assault McQueen now considers at least partly a mistake. That performance came in the midst of a calamitous time in his personal life that included the end of a three-year relationship, the much-talked-about death of his friend Isabella Blow and, just after Witches, the exit of his longtime stylist, Katy England. Yet today, McQueen finds himself happy and in love with fashion all over again. The just-opened L.A. store is a source of pride; his recent fall show won critical raves; and now he is well into planning a spring collection that should be completely different, with a “very modern” theme based on engineering. McQueen attributes his newfound power of positive thinking to a “transformative” trip to India and, ironically, to Blow’s suicide in May 2007. He spent a month, the longest he has ever been away from home, on what he calls a pilgrimage—a get-away-from-it-all excursion during which he immersed himself in the contemplative life and Buddhist culture. It didn’t hurt that he came away not only with the resolve to throw himself back into the joy of fashion, but with an angle for the show that would prove so spectacular.
“I
He titled the production The Girl Who Lived in the Tree, anchoring the set with a huge tree wrapped Christo-style “for a feeling of protection.” The show captivated with its beauty, romance and hail-Britannia motif rendered in tulle and embroidery. The first half, set inside the tree, featured Victorian Goth ballerinas in darkly decorative black dresses over petticoats, as well as some muted punk plaids. By the second half, the girl had shed her sorrows and switched her royal fascination from Victoria in perpetual mourning to the young Elizabeth II, bedecked in Fifties British couture, and to the Indian maharajas, from whom she acquired a love of color and ornamentation, including lavish, embroidered flat slippers—a major deal by McQueen—and mind-boggling amounts of jewelry from India’s famed Gem Palace.
don’t know, it was time to come out of the darkness and into the light,” McQueen says. “It was kind of my life.”
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Witches had proved the most shocking, yet not the sole, expression of the bleakness of that period, bracketed as it was by spring 2007’s lyrically beautiful Sarabande, about “wilting decay,” and spring 2008’s ode to Isabella Blow, in which one could find ample pathos in the notice-me clash of madcap hats and aggressive tailoring that the fashion editor was known for. “I learned a lot from her death,” McQueen says. “I learned a lot about myself. [I learned] that life is worth living. Because I’m just fighting against it, fighting against the establishment. She loved fashion, and I love fashion, and I was just in denial.” The night before this interview—and before his birthday—McQueen had a dream about Blow. She had come back from the dead to get free clothes from a tailor. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She was like, ‘I’m getting some free clothes and then [having] them altered.’ She’s getting more free clothes!” he says with a laugh. “The thing about Isabella is, money was like water for her,” he explains ruefully. It’s a theme that would surface even after her death, and not only in a dream.
photographed by Steven Meisel
Alexander McQueen Winter Collection 2010
photographed by Steven Meisel
Alexander McQueen Winter Collection 2010
photographed by Steven Meisel
Alexander McQueen
Winter Collection 2010
The two met when, after McQueen’s spectacular student show at St. Martins in 1994, Blow wanted badly to meet him, even tracking down his mother and calling her relentlessly to arrange an introduction to her gifted son (she would later buy the entire collection). “Who was this loony lady calling?” he recalls. “She met my mother before she met me. They loved each other.” So much so that, shortly before she died, Blow went to see McQueen’s mother in Essex, leaving her with many mementos. It’s a visit McQueen now realizes was a deliberate goodbye. Shortly before, Blow, who was long known to have suffered bouts of depression and who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had arranged a private meeting with him as well at her house in the Cotswolds. “We were at peace with each other,” McQueen says. “She had called me up. Two weeks before she did it, she made a point to get me there. And I thought she was fine. We sat down and talked for about three hours, we talked about things we had been through and…. God, I’m hoping things are all right. I said, ‘You look so good,’ and I said, ‘You’re not talking about death—no, are you?’ And she said, ‘No, no.’ She really f---ing shamboozled me, didn’t she? She knew what she was doing. I was just—she had convinced me that she was fine, that she had come through the worst of it. At first he bristles at the mention of published rumors of a rift between them rooted in what Blow perceived to be a lack of appreciation on his part. But then he can’t help responding to the months-old gossip, stating, “I know what I did for Isabella.” He implies financial support only vaguely, except to state flat-out that that he and their friend Daphne Guinness paid for Blow’s hospitalization: “We didn’t give her all the money. If she wanted [us] to pay for [it], we would pay directly to the hospital. “It’s so much bollocks,” he continues. “These people just don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know me. They don’t know my relationship with Isabella. It’s complete bull----. People can talk; you can ask her sisters.… That part of the industry, they should stay away from my life, or mine and Isabella’s life. What I had with Isabella was completely disassociated from fashion, beyond fashion.” Thus, though he attended her funeral at Gloucester Cathedral, he avoided the memorial service held during London Fashion Week, horrified at the thought of being “surrounded by people that I don’t know, people that think they know me and know Isabella.” Guinness, a longtime friend whom McQueen met after seeing her across Leicester Square decked in his dragon-embroidered kimono, knows him well,
“S
he must have believed she was responsible for my success, and she is, for finding me..”
“These people just don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know my relationship with Isabella.
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and would, she says, “take a bullet” for him. “He’s adorable and kind, and he’s unbelievably good to his friends—generous without noise,” she says. “He was very good to Isabella.” Still, McQueen admits that Blow thought herself responsible for his success, particularly in bringing him to the attention of Gucci Group when he was at LVMH’s Givenchy and desperate to get out. “The bit with Gucci, you’ve got to understand that I had already done the deal with [former CEO of Gucci Group] Domenico [De Sole]…Isabella being Isabella, she wanted—she wanted credit for [my] work,” he says. “She must have believed she was responsible for my success, and in some ways she is, for finding me. But on the business level, it’s just not, because I had already put the plans in. I got myself into LVMH, and I got myself out of LVMH and into Gucci…. This conversation was between me and Domenico De Sole in the South of France before she had ever met Tom Ford.” In fact, McQueen prides himself on not being an ivory-tower designer and on having business skills that he thinks are usually given short shrift. Certainly self-promotion in the designer-celebrity sense has played a scant role in his ascent through fashion’s dense ranks. “He’s better than that,” Guinness scoffs. Rather, he’s gotten there on his brilliant talent, dogged determination and, he would add, business-side savvy, through some very trying times. Back in his early days with Givenchy, he told W that he had taken on the grueling assignment so that he could “plow back” money into his own company. Today he speaks of building a lasting luxury brand, “one that will be here 150 years from now, after I’m pushing up daisies.” Now, his every professional thought is of securing the business—on his terms. McQueen claims that he’s “in control of my horse,” although he quickly directs kudos toward Jonathan Akeroyd, CEO of Alexander McQueen since 2004, calling him “a really good CEO from the same side of the tracks.” The
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McQueen company went into the black last year with virtually no advertising, though that may change, since the designer is willingly tempering the extravaganza quotient of his shows in order to divert funds toward an advertising budget, with his sights on major campaigns—“nothing bitty,” he says. Certainly fall’s fabric-and-ropewrapped tree, though powerful, was a far cry from some of his more elaborate productions, such as spring 2003’s shipwreck, spring 2005’s human chess game and his fall 2006 outing, Widows of Culloden, with a finale that featured a Kate Moss hologram. And the changes are not limited to the shows. Three years ago, women’s ready-to-wear made up 90 percent of the McQueen business; it now accounts for 50 percent, followed by women’s accessories and men’s wear, the former a major focus. McQueen hopes that his Novak bag “will become the [new] Kelly bag, and in 50 years’ time turn up in junk shops as a find.” Gradual development of the house’s own stores—a store a year—is part of the plan. Though he isn’t a fan of celebrity culture, McQueen is thrilled with the Los Angeles store, which opened in April and had a big, “lounge-y” party scheduled for mid-May. He thinks “a new generation of directors and actresses” is changing Hollywood, and notes that stars who wear his clothes do so because they want to, and not because they’ve been subjected to a major product-placement initiative. Like his other stores, designed by William Russell, the boutique’s white interior projects a uniform, almost space-age serenity. Yet the venue also possesses a site-specific character. Its most obvious manifestation: Angel of the Americas, the nine-foot sculpture McQueen commissioned from British artist Robert Bryce Muir. The anatomically correct man of steel, its smooth strips of metal resembling articulated musculature, is suspended above the sales floor with its torso extending through the skylight, as if to watch over the life of the city. And to make a sales pitch to the city: A huge billboard atop the store’s roof is intended to display McQueen imagery in mega-proportions.François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Gucci Group’s parent company PPR, calls McQueen a “design genius” and says his brand is “synonymous with creativity and innovation.” “Thanks to a very careful and well-thought strategy and business discipline, Alexander McQueen has grown steadily until it has reached profitability as planned at the end of last year,” Pinault offers via e-mail, adding that he expects continued growth.
photographed by Steven Meisel
Alexander McQueen Winter Collection 2010
Photography David LaChapelle: the man who shot fame. The celebrity snapper on his crazy life of sex drugs and celebrity – and why he won’t talk to Madonna (but loves Mariah)
LA Text by Anna Carnick
DAVID
RENAISANCE MAN
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CHAPELLE
In less than 12 hours, Mariah Carey will arrive at
lebrity, drugs, depression, art, disco and — he in-
David LaChapelle’s Los Angeles studio to be pho-
sists — miracles. On a series of stage sets, as his
tographed for her Christmas album. LaChapelle
friend Michael Jackson’s songs pound from the mu-
chastises himself for telling me (“it’s meant to be
sic system, LaChapelle’s team are garlanding fake
a secret”), then shrugs: “Well, I’ve told you ev-
windows with lights and arranging presents under
erything else.” We’ve been together all day at his
a hideous silver tree. LaChapelle’s close friend Sha-
home, by his pool, in his bedroom and now at his
ron Gault, Madonna’s former make-up artist (and
cacophonous, warrenous workspace, ricocheting
his “unofficial wife”), is organising food. Carey,
this way and that around a life of sex, death, ce-
says LaChapelle, “isn’t a diva. She never pisses on
Kate Moss
David La Chapelle
photographed by David LaChapelle
the little people.” There is a graffitied city backdrop of night-time blues and sulphurous yellows. Fake snow is in bags. “That’s pretty,” I say, looking at wooden cutout reindeer. “Mariah wanted real ones,” LaChapelle says, rolling his eyes. The boyish 47-year-old photographer is in jeans, scrappy T-shirt and hoody and speaks in a spacey Californian drawl. “Flown from Nebraska. Can you imagine, real reindeer?” Well, yes, we can imagine. LaChapelle is famed for his gaudy, extravagant, some have claimed grotesque and empty, celebrity portraits; although he says he has mostly given them up, and now takes pictures only of favourites such as Carey and Lady Gaga.
“I
left magazines at the height of the economy in America. Money was coming in like crazy.”
His photographs are now iconic. More mischievous than Annie Leibovitz’s staged tableaux and less in thrall to his subjects than Sam TaylorWood’s. In his hands — his work has appeared in Interview, i-D, The Face, Details, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ and Vogue — the portrait becomes a circus, a playground, an explosion of glamour, body worship and sexual innuendo in saturated colour. He has captured Eminem with lighted fireworks covering his genitals, Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen in period dress in front of a burning castle, Kanye West sporting a Christlike crown of thorns, David Beckham oiled and glistening in tube socks, and his good buddies Pamela Anderson and the outré transsexual Amanda Lepore, “who’s a woman to the nth extreme”. He’s directed pop videos (including Christina Aguilera’s Dirrty) and an Elton John stage show in Las Vegas that featured enormous inflatables of phallic fruit, lipsticks and hot dogs.
“I am interested in paradoxes: celebrity, our response to it, ex-
“I am interested in paradoxes: celebrity, our response to it, excess, disasters, glamour, beauty,” he says. “Yes, my images are outrageous, but I never set out to shock. When one of the most downloaded videos on the internet is [the former hostage] Daniel Pearl’s beheading, there’s nothing you can do to outshock that. I want people to be stunned. I don’t want it to look like contemporary ‘art’, which often people don’t understand. I’m trying to speak a visual language as powerful as the written or verbal that people understand.”
cess, disasters, glamour, beauty,” he says.
Critics have long been split over his artistic worth. He has been variously called “the Fellini of photography”, exposing celebrity as the ridiculous pantomime it is, and “the loud child in the living room”, luxuriating at its altar.
His photographs are now iconic.
In 2006, LaChapelle had said “all I could” about celebrity and bought a 20acre organic farm in Hawaii. Courtney Love bought the entry gates for him as a housewarming gift. “I’m a farmer,” he says, enthusing about his honey bees. Gaga has written songs at the property, “walking around in a dress made of vine leaves. She made pasta on my birthday. She’s gifted, really intelligent.” LaChapelle hasn’t hung up his camera. He’s photographed a series of pictures of people underwater and next exhibits — as part of a London show — an image that “took me a year to plan and drove me mental”. The Rape of Africa, which goes on show in London this week, is inspired by Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and features a breast-revealing Naomi Campbell (who has already been photographed nude by the photographer) and a young man as Mars. “It’s the god of war versus the goddess of beauty,” LaChapelle says. “Then there is the idea that the pursuit of gold in Africa is rooted in greed and has led to incalculable suffering. Gold and bricks and money buy the illusion of security. In trying to stave off our own deaths we’re killing Africa, the cradle of civilisation.”
“People find it offensive because it’s a serious message dressed up
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To many, though, it will be seen as a jokey, lurid picture featuring yet another supermodel mate with her boobs out, but LaChapelle is inured to the
in make-up and heels.
photographed by David LaChapelle
Sarah J. Parker David La Chapelle
David La Chapelle
Diane Kruger
photographed by David LaChapelle
Angelina Jolie
David La Chapelle
photographed by David LaChapelle
David La Chapelle
Eva Mendes
photographed by David LaChapelle
now-familiar charge. “People find it offensive because it’s a serious message dressed up in make-up and heels. It looks pretty. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t got something to say. My photographs in magazines were illustrations of the guiding principles behind popular culture at that time — glamour, plastic surgery. This isn’t so different. I haven’t changed what I do. One critic said he’d rather my pictures were grittier, but would you look at my images for that long if the black woman was covered in scabs? That’s photojournalism. That’s not what I do.” LaChapelle’s home, where we first meet, is modest by Hollywood standards and decorated almost drably. “That’s because of my mother; she’s about to move in,” he says, laughing. He is fresh off a flight from Arizona. “I’ve got this family stuff going on,” he says wearily. His mother, Helga, the first person he photographed, when he was 6, has cancer. “She’s had chemotherapy and she’s too ill to move. She’s coming here, I’ve had a lift installed. It’s such a shock. She’s been healthy her whole life. She met my dad on the third day she arrived on Ellis Island from Lithuania. He was poor but smart and made his money in tobacco. When people ask me how I can do advertising campaigns for tobacco Why was LaChapelle in Arizona? He looks winded. “My older sister Sonja just tried to kill herself in Florida. She was always happy, she always took care of other people. She was a nurse, then she worked in housing and for victims of human trafficking, and last year she was let go. She’s unmarried and in her fifties. She took an overdose of pills and was in a coma. The nurses gave us no hope. If she had permanent brain damage I planned for her to live with me. I’m praying to my dad, God, Michael Jackson” — he laughs — “and the next day she came out of it a bit. It was a bad decision taken in a dark moment. Now she’s in this rehab facility in Arizona. I’m not sure what we’ll do next.” Her sudden recovery was, for him, a miracle. “To think we just live on this plane cuts off so many possibilities. Living with magic and the possibility of miracles makes life so much more bearable.” firms I tell them, ‘I wouldn’t be here without tobacco’. She was a vegetarian, a hippy, but on her terms. My dad was a Catholic. After he died, I saw Warren Beatty hit on her when she was 65 at the Chateau Marmont pool. But she’s not a cougar. She was very flattered but she turned him down.” As a boy growing up in Connecticut, he was “a mess”. He says that at the age of 5: “I told my mother not to buy me a car when I turned 16 because I’d have an accident and kill myself. I was shoplifting, a truant, I joy-rode and caused a few accidents. I don’t know why. I ask myself now, ‘What did you have to be so upset about? You had these great parents, a stable home’.” Much of it may have been down to homophobic bullying at school. “I’d wear this fitted cowboy shirt and they’d shout, ‘Where’s your horse, faggot boy?’ Gangs of boys would beat me up. I hated them, but I didn’t want to be like them.” At 14, La-Chapelle contemplated suicide. “I was going to slit my wrists in the bath, but I didn’t want to punish my parents. One day, I thought, ‘Why are you torturing yourself?’ I was suppressing being gay and at that moment I stopped suppressing it.” He dropped out of school “and ran off to New York — my salvation”. He remembers his first visit to Studio 54, at 14. “I saw Andy [Warhol, his eventual employer at Interview magazine]. It was a party for the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music and everybody was there: Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Margaux and Mariel Hemingway, Halston [the fashion designer], Steve Rubell [one of the club’s founders], Calvin Klein. I got into the VIP area, probably because of my youth, and I was kind of good-looking so got a lot of attention. I didn’t talk to anyone. I loved disco, the glamour, celebrity, sure, but they were artists doing stuff. There’d be Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Jones, Keith Haring would doodle something for you. I woke up singing I was so happy. My idea of success was only ever to have enough money to create what I wanted.” He snuck into some life-drawing classes in a grand old building. At 17, after a gentle intervention by his father, LaChapelle went to art school in North Caro-
29 /
lina. As soon as he started taking pictures there — of his fellow students’ nude bodies, male and female, many of them dancers — his passion for photography took root. “It changed my life,” he says. LaChapelle returned to New York in 1981 and saw Warhol at a Psychedelic Furs concert. “I told him I wanted to be a photographer for Interview. I showed him my pictures of my naked friends and he said they were great, but I later found out everything to him was ‘great’. I finally got my first photograph published — of the Beastie Boys in Times Square — in 1984.” LaChapelle worked as a busboy at a nightclub, tried snorting heroin — “but I hated it. Any opiate, even Vicodin, finishes me off for days” — and lived a healthy life, “running six miles a day, eating macrobiotic food”. He also became a rent boy. “I was not in a good place. I had a choice and chose to do it. I didn’t want to have a job. I wanted to be a photographer. But you’re cheapening this thing that can be beautiful and sacred. It takes a lot of time to regain that, which I did. I’m not saying there’s a right or wrong way to experience love or intimacy, but I would hate for those kids who look up to me to think this was in any way cool. It wasn’t.” His first boyfriend, the dancer Louis Albert, died of Aids in 1984. “I had a premonition about it. It was horrible. This was before tests, before ‘safer sex’. He went home to die in Ohio. His parents didn’t want me there or at the funeral, which I understood. I represented New York to them.” In 1984 he came to London and photographed the gender-blending fashion and clubbing scene for The Face and Interview: “I saw way too many club darkrooms and nothing of the English countryside.” He took “lots of Ecstasy”. He also married the pop star Marilyn’s publicist. “Why? I don’t know,” he says. “To get into the UK. It was a disaster.”
“Y
oung artists get success too quickly, and that can really spin their heads if they’re not centered.”
He dashes to show me some William Blake etchings in the hall, which he bought in a shop near the National Gallery, where he fell in love with the artists of the Renaissance, Michelangelo especially. “They tried to reclaim the nude for what it was, something sensuous, not shameful. Today we’re in our own dark ages. When photography encounters the naked body now, it’s for porn and in contemporary art the body has to be deconstructed, made ugly, to be thought of as ‘art’. I want to reclaim the body from the notion that it is something to trade and to make it beautiful.”
His first magazine portraits were black and white, the predominant style of the time. Where did his trademark high- colour, deranged aesthetic come from? “It’s so grey in England. For English magazines I thought colour, lots of it, screaming Hollywood, California, would be cool. The top photographers then were known for black and white and grunge was happening. I wanted to do something different. I never want to make someone look bad. I’m living my fantasy through those pictures of fame, beauty, glamour and stardom. I want them to look larger than life.” Celebrities trust him [only Jeff Goldblum, “like, whatever”, turned him down]. The pictures and pop videos may be wild, but he says that he didn’t drink or take drugs on set, “although we had a blast” he laughs, recalling one Mariah Carey shoot in the middle of nowhere in which some strippers in a club tearfully told the star that they had named their children after her, and LaChapelle got it on with a guy in the back of a limousine who, afterwards, looked up and said, “I’m not gay and I’ve never been in a limousine”.
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photographed by David LaChapelle
Monica Bellucci David La Chapelle
David La Chapelle
Kate Moss
photographed by David LaChapelle
Making his critically acclaimed, charged urban dance documentary Rize in 2006 was a turning point, as was turning down directing Madonna’s 2005 Hung Up video. “She’s really hard to work for. I didn’t want to be yelled at. She wanted to film a subway scene with people running out. It was just after a subway bombing and I was worried it might be insensitive, but apparently she doesn’t read newspapers. We haven’t spoken since. But I don’t want to direct Hollywood films. I was offered Juno but turned it down.”
“I
nspiration? Trying to express ideas of enlightenment through nature as a metaphor for heaven or enlightenment.”
LaChapelle dismisses Hollywood as a “bullshit world” and is relishing his new gallery show-focused life. He has started a series of photographs of partially smashed heads in cardboard boxes from wax museums and recently completed an homage to Bruce Lee using a lookalike actor. “I am criticised for retouching my pictures,” he says. “You’d be surprised how much we design for real.” He is a perfectionist in slacker’s clothing. “David goes over every pixel,” one of the team says. “His passion seeps into everyone as osmosis,” says another. One of his staff is playing Walt Whitman (complete with bushy beard), a great hero of LaChapelle’s, for another series. These endeavours sound crazy, but less so than celebrities and their agents and the phone ringing. “I can choose what to do now,” he says. “I’d never realised that when I was doing 20 jobs at once and shooting pop videos.” He would love to shoot Barack Obama — “in some kind of repose. He’s a physically beautiful man, which, at that level, is a bit of a first.”
In LaChapelle’s office are a hat and umbrella that belonged to Michael Jackson. He vigorously defends Jackson against all the allegations of child sex abuse. “I know good parents who were happy to leave their children alone with him. It was disgusting the way he was pursued and hunted. He was a good, sweet person.” LaChapelle’s last picture taken of Warhol is framed and sits on the floor, alongside a picture of the two of them during the shoot. Quietly, he says, he is fulfilled: he doesn’t fear ageing or death.
33 /
Ja co bs
Xclusive
Marc
for Luis Vuitton
By Glenn o’ Brien
Photography Mikael Jansson
34 /
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs is a fashion designer who’s changing the meaning of that job. He does what an ordinary superdesigner does, i.e., create fashionchanging clothes for his own labels and for a great French house, but he also does so much more. His collaborations with Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Prince have shaken things up in both the fashion and the art worlds. Not to mention advertising that looks like art or boutiques that feel like clubs. Andy Warhol used to talk about the best art being business art. And it would be hard to find someone who has done more to apply an artist’s thinking to running a creative big business than Marc Jacobs.
GLENN O’BRIEN: You’re going to be our Andy Warhol? MARC JACOBS: I feel really weird about it to be honest, but I guess it’s what I’m gonna do.
GLENN O’BRIEN: You know why we thought of it? It’s because you’ve kind of redefined things in the same way that he did. MARC JACOBS: Well, I didn’t mean to. [both laugh]
GLENN O’BRIEN: It’s not your fault! MARC JACOBS: It’s not my fault! I just have interests outside of the superficial world of fashion. [laughs]
GLENN O’BRIEN: That’s different for someone in your line of work.You know, mixing up art and fashion is something kind of new. MARC JACOBS: No. No, in fact, that’s why I did it in the first place, because it was kind of old, and I thought it was missing. Do you want me to just break right into the whole-[laughing]
GLENN O’BRIEN: Please. MARC JACOBS: I mean, I’m not shy when it comes to talking, so, unlike Andy, you won’t get a lot of, “Um, do you think so? Really?” You won’t get a lot of one-word answers.
GLENN O’BRIEN: “Oh, gee!” MARC JACOBS: “Oh, gee!”
GLENN O’BRIEN: “Oh, really?” MARC JACOBS: I came to Paris when I was hired by Mr. [Bernard] Arnault to work here at Louis Vuitton, and looking at myself in this position, I just thought of myself as this New Yorker in Paris. I started to think in romantic terms, and I always thought back to the time of Schiaparelli and Chanel and Cocteau, when all of these creative people seemed to be doing things together. They were influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalí, and fashion and art had a dance, you know? Well, there’s actually two parts to this. . . . I talk a lot, and it doesn’t often make sequential sense.
GLENN O’BRIEN: No, I prefer when you go out of sequence.
36 /
MARC JACOBS: Okay, so I’m gonna go back and forth. I was looking to
I came to Paris when I was hired by Mr. [Bernard] Arnault to work here at Louis Vuitton, and looking at myself in this position, I just thought of myself as this New Yorker in Paris.
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
rent an apartment when I first got here. Charlotte Gainsbourg had just had a baby and she was sitting in the bedroom breastfeeding, and I was looking at her apartment, and, in the corner, she had a trunk, a Louis Vuitton trunk that had been painted black. But a lot of the black had come off. It was her dad’s-that being Serge-and he had painted it black. And for some reason, that triggered me thinking about my favorite work of art ever, which is L.H.O.O.Q. by [Marcel] Duchamp. And I thought, This Vuitton monogram is sort of the Mona Lisa of this company.
GLENN O’BRIEN: Yeah. MARC JACOBS: And what I wanted to do, in the same way Serge had done, was deface it. The same way that Duchamp had done with L.H.O.O.Q., by putting this moustache on [the Mona Lisa] and making it something hipper, a little bit anarchic, and just cooler. And by defacing something, making it new again. And so I had this idea of asking Stephen [Sprouse] to come here and do graffiti on top of it.
GLENN O’BRIEN: It was amazing, the success of those bags. MARC JACOBS: And I was so pleased with that particular collaboration, being such a big fan of Stephen’s. I always adored him as an artist and as a fashion designer. I got to become friendly with him through the time we spent together here in the office in Paris. I just felt like it all made sense. My name isn’t Louis Vuitton. This company has this legendary status. It’s a part of what I romanticized about life in Paris as a kid who studied fashion. I looked up to these people who I’d never met. Without any kind of real ego on my part, I just thought, I’m going to approach the people I admire and see if they want to do something together. And that’s how it all started.
GLENN O’BRIEN: But it’s even bolder than what you did at Perry Ellis. When you’re messing with the logo, it’s like adding on a wing to Notre Dame. MARC JACOBS: It was really amazing. And at the time it was a very different set of circumstances here at Vuitton. I basically broke the rules. I was told point-blank that I couldn’t change the canvas or do anything to it. And I got fed up with doing what I thought would please the head of communications. I got tired of playing by the rules. And I thought, The only time I’ve ever made a difference, and the only time anything ever changes, is really when you’re respectful and disrespectful at the same time. Just as I’d been fired for the grunge collection I did at Perry Ellis, I thought, Whoa, you know, this is what I think we should be doing, and we’re going to send it out anyway . . . There was a different president here at Vuitton, and a different head of communications. But the press responded so well, and there was such fervor for these bags. They were knocked off immediately. So I forced the company into getting behind something that they didn’t want me to do in the beginning. It was the public that really said, “This is what we wanna see. This is what makes an old thing that our mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and
“T
he only time anything ever changes is really when you’re respectful and disrespectful at the same time.” 41 /
great-grandparents carried into something that we actually want now.” And so, there was a lesson in this for me. Not that I really needed to learn it, because it was doing what I instinctively wanted to do.
GLENN O’BRIEN: Right. MARC JACOBS: The only comparison I’m making is that the collection that I’m most proud of from Perry Ellis was that collection. It was called Grunge.
GLENN O’BRIEN: When I met Stephen, he was assisting Halston. I was just in Pittsburgh at the archives of the Warhol Museum, and we dug out of a box a collaboration between Andy and Halston. It was a bathrobe with money silk-screened on it.
MARC JACOBS: I was told my first collection wasn’t Perry Ellis enough. The second one was too lady-ish. So, what I learned was that the work that I was proudest of was when I stopped listening to everybody and just responded to what was in my heart. I was listening to this music and looking at the work of photographers and running around with a bunch of models who were less than conventional in terms of their beauty. And so, just as Grunge felt very right, even though it was what I was not supposed to be doing for the image of Perry Ellis, it’s what produced work that has some resonance or meant something in terms of fashion.
GLENN O’BRIEN: It was $100 bills or something. Apparently they actually put this out, and the Treasury Department came after Halston. MARC JACOBS: That’s funny, because I wanted to do money. Last season, because of all the recession talk, I wanted to do a $9 bill print. They sent the print down to our legal department, who told me that I couldn’t reproduce U.S. tender if it was the actual size, and I had to make it noticeably larger or smaller.
GLENN O’BRIEN: Yeah, that’s how they get away with those rolling papers. MARC JACOBS: Yeah! That’s how they do it! And it’s funny, we’re working with Jeffrey Deitch on this big retrospective of Stephen’s work.
GLENN O’BRIEN: He never really got the credit due him as an artist. He had this amazing show at Patrick Fox, the show with these crucified Iggy Pops. MARC JACOBS: Yeah! That’s one of the ones I have. On a canvas stretched on a crucifix shape.
GLENN O’BRIEN: I only have it on a T-shirt. So how did you get the idea to work with Murakami?
42 /
MARC JACOBS: Well, again, it was such a whim. My mind absorbs things in a funny way. I’m on planes quite a bit and I always take stacks and stacks of magazines and I go through them and tear pages out and fold them up, and they get stuck at the bottom of my backpack or whatever. I’d seen an article about Takashi. I just remember the graphic. It was the DOB character, a funny Mickey Mouse-type thing. I didn’t really read the article; I was just drawn to the graphic. A couple months later there was another magazine and a different graphic, but again I tore it out-and I wasn’t aware that it was the same artist. Then I re-
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
ceived a Christie’s catalogue and on the back cover there was a statue of Hiropon-that’s the female figure that’s squirting milk out of her breasts in an arc. I looked at the statue and then I remember going online and reading the essay that accompanied it. It talked about Takashi’s references to Warhol and the Factory, and how Takashi credited the artists he worked with. I lived not far from the Cartier Foundation, so I walked by there one weekend, and there was an enormous show of his work. I went on a Saturday and then on Monday I came to the office and I just thought, I wonder if that guy would ever be interested in collaborating on something for Vuitton? So we sent him an e-mail, and he was really interested. But my e-mail was so vague: “I would love to know if you’d be interested in coming and having a meeting . . .” A few days later, he arrived with a team of Japanese assistants and the other artists he works with. They came into my office-my dog was there, the other designers I work with were there, there was stuff all over the walls. He just started taking pictures and making videotapes, and then we started talking. Neither one of us was very specific about what we wanted out of this thing, but we decided that we would do something together. And, again, I think it drove people in legal a little crazy. They always like to know, “What are we actually commissioning? How do we know what to pay him for if we don’t know what you’re asking him?” And then I say, “Well, it’s gonna be a little bit organic and you’re just gonna have to follow me on it.” Again, we discussed reinterpreting, reinventing, and creating a new monogram. We talked about changing the icons of the symbols within the monogram into other images. We talked about so many different things. And Takashi and I just sort of decided that throughout the summer he would send me things that he had in mind, and I would just make notes on them, or draw on them, or comment on them, and send them back. And so, via the Internet, we ended up with all this work. We started making bags out of the artwork that he sent. Things would come through as jpegs, and I’d just comment and do funny little drawings and write notes in the margins and stuff and send them back, and we’d go back and forth. And then we had the fashion show where we showed all the stuff, and everybody loved it. It was crazy. We opened the show with all these girls carrying these things, and we did the makeup to look like one of his statues, a manga, sort-of-anime figure. And then I had asked him to create the entrance to the show space. We were showing at the Glass Greenhouse, the same place we showed the Sprouse collection. So I asked Takashi to design something that would make for a very important entrance into the space. He did these inflatable sculptures in this multicolored monogram. Takashi was so pleased with what we had done that he then had a show at Marianne Boesky Gallery where he showed his paintings, which were inspired by the work that we had done together. He had an actual art show of work that he had done after seeing the fashion show.
“I
got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was αllowed to feel whatever I wanted and like whatever I wanted.”
“Well, it’s gonna be a little bit or-
GLENN O’BRIEN: I think that the art critics raised their eyebrows at the
ganic and you’re just gonna have to
handbags. But when they saw the logoed canvases, it drove them crazy.
follow me on it.”
MARC JACOBS: Art critics are like every other critic. I mean, I’m not judging. Well, I guess I am judging.
GLENN O’BRIEN: It’s okay to judge the judges.
45 /
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
MARC JACOBS: I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It’s only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it’s all about. Whether you like Damien Hirst’s work, whether you like Takashi’s work or Jeff Koons’s work or Richard Prince’s work or whatever great artist you’re talking about, they are doing something that has changed the perceptions of today’s culture. Whether you like it or not, there’s a validity to it. For all the critics who made fun of this installation of a Vuitton shop within Takashi’s MOCA exhibition . . . I saw it as like Martin Kippenberger’s subway grate, you know? It challenged this sort of categorizing. Like, what is the art here? Is it what’s on the bag? Is it the action of buying the bag-that’s the art? Is it watching the people buying the art? Because it’s installed in an exhibition in a museum, is it some kind of conceptual performance piece? It operates on so many levels that it’s hard to categorize. I thought, Well, isn’t that what the state of art is right now? It’s not so easy to define. “Oh yeah, they’re a painter, they’re a sculptor. . . .” It’s just labels. When you go into a record store and it says “alternative” to describe a sort of music, isn’t every music an alternative to another type of music? These labels are ridiculous. I think the need to label things and have things fit so nicely into their boxes is just old.
“I
GLENN O’BRIEN: Once I asked Debbie Harry, “Why do they say Elvis Costello is alternative, and you’re classified as pop?” And she said, “’Cause he’s not pretty.” MARC JACOBS: [laughs] That’s a good answer.
GLENN O’BRIEN: I think what’s happening now is that the program that everybody thought Pop art was about is finally kicking in 50 years later.
48 /
f fashion can allow you to have a bit of the Chanel Mystique through a lipstick, then why shouldn’t art allow you to have that through a sweatshirt that says ‘Cremaster’ on it?”
MARC JACOBS: Well, it totally, totally has. I’m not really well educated-other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don’t know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want. That’s what I always laugh about with Richard [Prince]. When someone says, “Why did you do that?” and you say, “Because I liked it”-I think that’s really enough. And when I think about what came before Pop art, I understand that maybe these people were spilling their guts onto canvas through use of abstract strokes and colors and techniques, but that’s not really moving to me. There’s something about what I see every day, and the banal-I mean, what Pop was. I can kind of worship that, and I can look at that and smile, or I can just say I like it and that’s fine. That’s all I really want. I don’t want to work that hard, you know? I like what Pop did, and I think that we live in a world where, on every level, people like what Pop did. GLENN O’BRIEN: But it took a really long time for Pop to happen fully. Because the art world thinks one way and the artists think another way. MARC JACOBS: That’s what I think is so funny. Has anybody asked
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
Marc Jacobs
Luis Vuitton 2010
the artist? Richard and I just did this conversation, and the woman who was mediating it was going on about the sexuality of the nurses and all this stuff. You know? [laughs] She was saying, “Marc, do you think that the woman, the caregiver, the mother, and the nurse have a problematic sexuality. . . .” I think Richard just has a fetish for nurse books.
GLENN O’BRIEN: Well, nurses are hot, butMARC JACOBS: Of course.
GLENN O’BRIEN: You know, you never really know when Richard is telling you the truth, but what he said to me is that he was sitting in the studio and somebody was interviewing him and said, “So, what are you gonna paint now?” And he happened to have one of those nurse paperbacks and he said, “Uh, I think I’m gonna do nurse paintings.” MARC JACOBS: [laughs] Yes, that’s the story he told finally. I had a conversation with Elizabeth Peyton and I told her that I tend to think of artists as being divinely inspired somehow. In terms of creativity, part of my intimidation was, “I’m a designer. I make clothes and bags and shoes. I have a job that involves making creative choices, but I’m not a divinely inspired human being like an artist!” And she said, “You can still like what you like, and, you know, we like clothes, too!” Stuff like that has made me lose my intimidation about art and putting something up on a pedestal. I realized, I don’t have to look at it that way. I can like it, but it doesn’t have to be this precious thing full of pretense. I saw this documentary on Jeff Koons, and his attitude about art being generous and people not having to have this highly cultured or educated background in order to appreciate it, what a relief! You know? And I think, going back to what you said about Pop, that was so much of a relief to me. It was good to look at it. It felt like mine.
GLENN O’BRIEN: If you grew up with TV and you were smart, you just got it. It didn’t require explication by experts.Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns all came out of this sort of commercial background. Johns and Rauschenberg were window-dressers just like Andy was. Pop said, “Art is for everybody.” And then the dealers said, “No, art is to sell for $100,000.” And so the mechanism of the market fought against what Pop was saying. Or pretending to, anyway. But I think now we’re finally finding a way that art can be both that incredibly precious object and also something that everybody can have. MARC JACOBS: Yeah.
GLENN O’BRIEN: I mean, it’s like not every woman can buy a Chanel couture gown, but every woman can buy a Chanel lipstick. MARC JACOBS: I think that’s totally true. You go to Japan and these artists have merchandise-they make chocolates! They do everything. They don’t care!
GLENN O’BRIEN: But they weren’t trained that it’s a very naughty thing, like we were in the States by a peculiar coalition of dealers and ivory-tower critics. MARC JACOBS: You can go to Graff and buy a diamond that’s flawless. You aren’t going to be able to buy the same diamond at Fortunoff, but it’s still a diamond you can enjoy. If fashion can allow you to have the Chanel mystique through a lipstick, then why shouldn’t art allow you to have that through a sweatshirt that says “Cremaster” on it? MARC JACOBS: Well, yeah. Again, I didn’t mean to do it.
GLENN O’BRIEN: That’s all right. We forgive you.
51 /
photographed by P. Demarcellier
Kylie believes that today lingerie is like shoes and diamonds
there is nothing wrong with little indulgence...
- a girl simply can’t have too many.
& friends...
Adriana says one item is never enough. - Wonderbra 2010
Alessandra just want them all - Emporio Armani 2010
Alessandra just wanna have fun - Calvin Klein 2010
Miranda needs a little more attention - Roberto Cavalli 2010
Victoria herself believes that today lingerie is like honey - you
just stuck with it. - Emporio Armani 2010
Facc
By Tom Ford Photography Craig Mcdean
nicolas ghesquière
64 /
When French designer Nicolas Ghesquière was
would lead womenswear into a new dawn: His work
plucked from relative obscurity in 1997 to be-
consistently managed to be hard-edged, geomet-
come the creative director of Balenciaga—which,
ric, and rigorously precise, while still allowing for
though one of the most esteemed houses in fash-
a free play of the feminine. In other words, women
ion history, had remained slightly adrift since its
inGhesquière’s designs looked like masters of and
namesake died in 1972—no one was quite sure
not slaves to their clothing. Perhaps some of Ghes-
what to expect. And no one was prepared for what
quière’s success can be attributed to his frequent
they found. Within a few seasons, Ghesquière
nods to Cristóbal Balenciaga and his architectural
had developed a reputation as the designer who
silhouettes (plus having access to the exclusive ar-
Nicolas Ghesquiere Balenciaga
chive). Or maybe it’s due to Ghesquière’s training in the early ’90s with the radically imaginative Jean Paul Gaultier. Or it could be the fact that, while so many designers of the ’00s tried to turn themselves into instant household names, Ghesquière held back and worked with singular focus on his collections for Balenciaga. More than a few have wondered just how long it will be before Ghesquière launches his own eponymous label, although he seems perfectly content where he is, having now spent nearly 13 years at the helm. As the next decade strikes, however, the 38 year-old designer does have a few new missions. His spring/summer ’10 collection has a rougher, tougher sense of the street. And this month, in collaboration with his longtime friend and muse Charlotte Gainsbourg, he also helps bring the entire house of Balenciaga into a larger demographic, launching the brand’s first-ever fragrance.
More than a few have wondered just how long it will be before Ghesquière launches his own eponymous label, although he seems perfectly content
Tom Ford, also a notoriously focused designer (and now film director), is, in many ways, very different than Ghesquière—although Ford did help Gucci Group acquire Balenciaga in 2001, largely because of the interest in Ghesquière’s talent. The designers spoke recently by phone—and, somewhat paradoxically for two men who have done so much to define fashion, Ford conducted the interview entirely naked.
TOM FORD: I want to ask you about golf. NICOLAS GHESQUIÈRE: Really?
FORD: Because I was reading somewhere about you playing golf. I don’t think people ever imagine fashion designers doing something like playing golf. You are probably going to hate this question, so we won’t print it if you do not like it. GHESQUIÈRE: [laughs] Okay.
FORD: But you play golf?!
“I
f you put me in a room and said, ‘Okay, let’s try to do a Ghesquière project,’ I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
GHESQUIÈRE: I don’t. [laughs] No, I’m really bad. I grew up in a family that played golf, and my brother was much better than me, so I kind of put that aside. I had to be good at something other than golf. So, no, it wasn’t really my thing.
FORD: So golf clothes have never been a big inspiration? GHESQUIÈRE: Actually, I love golf clothes! I think this is the most interesting part of golf!
FORD: I love golf clothes too! Especially for women! There is this great movie, Ordinary People, with a scene with Mary Tyler Moore . . .I don’t know if you know that movie. It probably came out before you were born, in ’80. GHESQUIÈRE: I was born!
FORD: And she is wearing an incredible golf outfit. Okay, I will get off golf now. And we don’t have to talk about horseback riding either—even though we both ride. I want to talk about your work. First of all, I want to say that you are my favorite contemporary designer. GHESQUIÈRE: Thank you. Coming from you, that’s really special. You are a reference, so it’s important for me to hear that.
FORD: I guess I am old enough now to be a reference.
66 /
GHESQUIÈRE: No, I think you defined a new way of working. You probably don’t know this, but people say there was a before and after Tom Ford in fashion. Designers are more like artistic directors now. Before, there wasn’t
where he is, having now spent nearly 13 years at the helm.
Nicolas Ghesquiere Balenciaga
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Balenciaga
Nicolas Ghesquiere Balenciaga
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Balenciaga
this idea of supervising the artistic direction of the entire house. The old way was to think you could be this couturier or designer or stylist. You transformed the job and the way people practice fashion today. That’s one thing I want to say, and the second is that the day you called me to propose that I be a part of Gucci Group was a huge surprise for me. I can’t thank you enough. I remember this meeting we had in your office. It was right after my sixth or seventh collection, and people were starting to talk, and suddenly every big group called and I was receiving a lot of attention. And then one day, I couldn’t believe you were calling me. Everyone else was saying, “Okay, do you want to design for this house or take over that brand, or do you want to design under your own name?” You were the only person to ask me, “What is your wish? What is your dream? Where do you see yourself in a few years?” I remember I answered that I wanted to keep going with what I was doing, and you said, “Okay, let’s try that. It might not work.” That was because Balenciaga was owned by another group, and we weren’t sure they would want to sell it. But you gave me a new way of thinking. And here we are today.
FORD: I hope you will not take this the wrong way, but it has been wonderful to watch you develop and grow up and to see your confidence increase. How old are you now? GHESQUIÈRE: I’m 38.
FORD: How does it feel? You seem so confident. But how does that feel as a designer? GHESQUIÈRE: We’ve developed the brand. I probably feel more solid because the brand is solid and I feel stronger than my years. But I put so much pressure on myself, which makes me very insecure. With my designs and my ideas, I want to please myself first. I’m always very stressed about making a new proposition every season. But in a way, it’s a kind of addiction. [laughs] In another way, it’s a crazy pressure. I try to stay quiet about the whole situation, because fashion itself can be crazy, and everyone wants a part of you.
FORD: This is something I realized after stepping away from women’s fashion for the last five years. When you are inside, it is such a tiny group of people who think that this is the most important thing in the world. But when you get a little bit of distance, someone will say to you something like, “Don’t you think that shoe is blah?” And I will be like, “What shoe? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It is very, very inside. How do you keep your balance? GHESQUIÈRE: It’s true that fashion is looking at fashion all the time, and this is quite boring.
FORD: What else do you look at besides fash-
ion? GHESQUIÈRE: I love art. I love music. It’s more about the lifestyle you yourself have— that’s the most inspiring thing. The way you share relationships with the people around you.
FORD: Do you work all the time or do you actually find time to do other things? GHESQUIÈRE: No, I don’t, really. This job is full-time, and it’s true, sometimes it’s a little bit suffocating. But I’m inspired more by situations than materialistic things.
FORD: How do you feel being French? I am asking you that because I wonder if you consider your style to be French. GHESQUIÈRE: I don’t feel French at all. That was never really a concern, and it’s limiting to think that way. When I first started, I wanted Balenciaga to be international. I thought the focus should be more on the United States, because that was where people were more welcoming of my work. I think Paris is more of a playground for international designers, so I don’t really feel French. And I don’t really want to feel French.
FORD: Funny, your clothes to me look international.But maybe because I know Marie-Amélie [Sauvé] and all the girls in Paris, there is also something very French about the cut. When I lived and worked in Paris, I never understood when people said, “It’s French.” I would say, “What is French?” Maybe it’s the kind of girls you cast, or the way they move. . . . GHESQUIÈRE: I prefer to think about what you are saying as urban fashion. It’s a woman who lives in the city and has a certain lifestyle.
FORD: She is skinny! GHESQUIÈRE: She’s skinny. [laughs] She walks with confidence. She’s a bit masculine, even if she wears quite sexy clothes. All the clothes are very fitted. So there is that silhouette and attitude for that urban type of woman. I prefer to speak to those women, more than just the ones who live in a part of France.
FORD: When you are designing a collection, is the concept of shape or form more important than making a woman’s butt look good? Or do those things all go hand in hand? GHESQUIÈRE: The fit and the booty have to look good, this is true. And it’s never been about caricature in my fashion.
FORD: But you do create shapes. Sometimes your shapes are very inspirational and directional and architectural. I guess I am just saying that I admire your clothes beyond what you are doing conceptually. Like when you pad over the hip. You always make a woman’s body look beautiful. For me, that is the key to your success.You have concept—and you can make a butt look really good!
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GHESQUIÈRE: It is essential at the end of the day.
FORD: Everyone wants to have a great butt. GHESQUIÈRE: Absolutely. It’s true. The only time I did big volumes was when I was trying to evoke the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, on those collections that were more of a reference to his work.
FORD: How much do you actually reference Balenciaga? He was very handsome, by the way. GHESQUIÈRE: He was really elegant, Spanish, and handsome. But for designing, I have this retreat. I can say, let’s go to the DNA of the brand and find something that I can introduce into my work. It’s part of the patrimony of fashion. His work is so influential, that it’s everywhere. I think everyone references Cristóbal. I’m lucky to be in the house where I can use it without any problem.
FORD: I remember I asked you nine years ago where you would see yourself in 10 years, so what about now? Where are you going to be? Are you going to be playing golf?
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GHESQUIÈRE: [laughs] Sure. I’ll have to start, so in 10 years maybe I can have a good handicap. Honestly, I think I will be here at Balenciaga. Maybe not only. I have no idea what I would do for my own collection if that does happen one day. I give so much of myself for Balenciaga that today if you put me in a room and said, “Okay, let’s try to do a Nicolas Ghesquière project,” I wouldn’t be able to do it.
he’s skinny. So there is that silhouette and attitude for that urban type of woman. I prefer to speak to those women.”
FORD: You would figure it out. I felt the same thing. When I left Gucci, I thought I would never, ever, ever. GHESQUIÈRE: You found it quite fast.
FORD: That is just with men’s. I haven’t found it with women’s yet because I haven’t started women’s, but I thought I would never figure it out. Do you worry about your ability to keep a fresh eye as you get older? Have you noticed your eye changing and your woman changing? Do you worry your eye will move or that you will lose it?
GHESQUIÈRE: I do think about that. But don’t you agree we have to think about that every season anyway? It’s so quick. We live with a future where every three or four months, we have to question everything. You think you could be the best, or that you’re nothing and you don’t know what you’re doing. It is exhausting.
FORD: Fashion is ruthless the way every three months you have to think about everything all over again. GHESQUIÈRE: It’s true. But you found something you really wanted to do for a long time—to be a director. If I were to find something that is going to be more important to me than fashion—that would be work and love—then I probably would let go. That’s a possibility. But fashion is an addiction.
FORD: How do you start a collection? What is your first move? GHESQUIÈRE: I draw a lot. It’s quite classic, you know. I do those drawings at the Balenciaga workshop. It’s really a big mess at the beginning. I take a lot of different things that don’t work, and then I make an edit. Actually, I don’t know if it’s a classic process. It’s a mix of drawing and atelier work.
FORD: Do you panic? GHESQUIÈRE: Yes, I do. I make the whole house panic, for sure.
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FORD: At the beginning of every new collection, do you feel like your career is over?
Nicolas Ghesquiere Balenciaga
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Balenciaga
GHESQUIÈRE: Of course!
FORD: “Oh, my god, I will never think of another thing. What will I do?” GHESQUIÈRE: That’s what I think when people do their “best stuff” collection. [laughs] When you start to think, “Oh, I will just present my 10 years of work,” that’s not a good sign.
FORD: I did that for my very last collection. GHESQUIÈRE: Did you? No! You didn’t do that!
FORD: I did it for my final collection at Gucci, because I thought, “Whoever comes in is going to eventually take the work I did and make modern versions of it. Why don’t I do that myself first, before I leave?” So I took all the work from the past 10 years and did a “best of.” It was my last show. GHESQUIÈRE: In that case, it was for a very special reason, so I understand. For me, I go somewhere for three days, and then I come back and I want to change everything, and so it’s a fight with everybody. I’m transforming and convincing. It’s more than designing. It’s shaking people and trying to give them direction. I’m a bit of a control freak. This is a problem as I get older, and it’s something I should work on. I should be more confident—learn to trust people and give them freedom and delegate.
FORD: I think you can only delegate if you are happy with what they are doing. I am great at delegating when someone is doing great work. The problem— and this sounds terrible—is that there are very few people who are strong enough for you to be able to delegate to. If you are a designer, sometimes it is better not to delegate, because someone pays money for something that you, Nicolas Ghesquière, designed, so it should be exactly the way you want it, exactly the way you would have chosen it. People call me a control freak, and I say, “Well, my name is on the shoe.” It means the heel needs to be the way I want it and not the way somebody else wants it, and the toe needs to be exactly the way I want it, and the fabric and the material have to be exactly the way I want it. It is not a democracy—it is a dictatorship.
More than a few have wondered just how long it will be before Ghesquière launches his own eponymous label, although he seems perfectly content where he is, having now spent nearly 13 years at the helm.
GHESQUIÈRE: It’s a dictatorship, absolutely. But I’m starting to find pleasure in working with someone who brings back an elaboration to your direction that is quite fresh. I used to be very angry, but I try to be more quiet now.
FORD: Do you have temper tantrums? GHESQUIÈRE: I did, but I’m much better now. I think it was because I was so scared. I was so scared to miss it with Balenciaga. I was so scared that I would not be able to put the brand back on the map. I think the most beautiful thing for me is to revive this brand and to make sure one of the most incredible names in fashion is alive. That’s probably what I’m most proud of. It’s a feeling we share.
FORD: The hard part is, once you do it, you have to keep it there. If there are a few collections that are not as good, it starts to go away. Were you popular as a kid? GHESQUIÈRE: Yes, I was. Yes.
FORD: [laughs] I love that! Most people say, “Oh, no, I wasn’t.” GHESQUIÈRE: I was! I grew up in such a small city, I had to be popular or I’d be dead. So I had to be popular!
FORD: So you had lots of friends, everyone liked you, and you were very beautiful. GHESQUIÈRE: Maybe not all of that, but I had great friends. Most of them were girls, and I was already commenting on the way they were dressing. It was really like a small village.
FORD: Are you still in touch with those friends? GHESQUIÈRE: Some of them, yes. Not all of them, but a few, absolutely.
FORD: It is hard when you go home because usually everyone else looks like
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Nicolas Ghesquiere
Balenciaga
Nicolas Ghesquiere Balenciaga
hell, and you still look good. [laughs] You don’t have much in common with people anymore. GHESQUIÈRE: Yeah, it’s hard to keep a normal relationship with them—they are very nice, and they kind of understand what my life is about. FORD: It is a very different world, though. GHESQUIÈRE: Yeah,it is. And sometimes you never feel lonelier than when you are always doing tons of things and traveling all over the place. I’m sure you are still very busy, but now you are dedicated to your name and directing. There is a real feeling of loneliness sometimes.
FORD: I think loneliness comes with being creative, because you are obsessed with creation. And it is so satisfying that sometimes, I have noticed, I completely neglect my friends and my family, and they fall away. That has happened now. I have worked so hard on my film and my business that I need to take the next six months and spend time with Richard [Buckley, Ford’s partner] and friends. Most of them have just sort of forgotten about me, because I have not been there for them. If you are creative, sometimes you give up a lot of things that other people have. GHESQUIÈRE: Yeah.
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FORD: You worked for Jean Paul Gaultier earlier in your career. Aside from you, he is one of my favorite French designers. He would have been brilliant at Yves Saint Laurent. I do not know if he would have wanted to do it, but for me he would have been the natural successor to Saint Laurent. I can see some of his influence in your work. What did you take from that experience? Are you still friends?
grew up in such a small city, I had to be popular or I’d be dead. So I had to be popular! I had great friends.”
GHESQUIÈRE: Yeah. We had dinner very recently. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I was there when I was 18. It was my first job. I was a little assistant doing the coffee and the photocopying.
FORD: But that is good for you. I interview these people all the time who come to my office and say, “I want to be a fashion designer.” I tell them where they should start, and they say, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get anyone coffee.” Don’t they know it is great to get people coffee?
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GHESQUIÈRE: It’s great because you have a chance to look at the way people work. You know, I never went to fashion school, so in fact, my school was the studio of Jean Paul Gaultier in ’91 and ’92. I remember seeing this great designer working, and he would say what his collection was going to be like, and you’d think, “Oh, my god, that is never going to work.
What is this chaos? That’s going to be awful.” And he was the only one with the solution. He’d mix things up and put it together, making sense, making it fresh. It was very influential for me. We are both French. I’m not of the same generation as Jean Paul, but there is a natural influence, probably. Jean Paul changed something in fashion.
FORD: When I was a young fashion student, Jean Paul Gaultier was just it. And he is still doing his couture collection. I wanted to ask you—and I have always hated this word myself—about the idea of the muse.You know, the women in your life and how you work with them. The reason that word annoys me is this whole stylist thing. I remember when people actually thought the stylists were the designers.You would hear, “So-and-so does this collection.” Like the stylists designed it! But how do you work with women? GHESQUIÈRE: Marie-Amélie is very important. We’ve worked together since the beginning, but that has more to do with the way we live. We spend a lot of time together in and out of work. Marie-Amélie is major in my process. But there is also Charlotte Gainsbourg. I just did my fragrance with Charlotte, and we’ve been friends for more than 10 years. There came a moment when I realized, I’m thinking about Charlotte when I’m designing. So she’s very influential. In a totally different world, there is the artist Dominique GonzalezFoerster, who designed my stores. She and I can see the same thing, and then she can show me a new angle where I see everything differently. And there is Nathalie Marrec, who has been there since the beginning too. She has great style. So there is a group of women who are influential just because they are around me. I don’t know if there really is one muse.
FORD: You worked with Charlotte on the fragrance. How did making a fragrance go? GHESQUIÈRE: It was really fun. As designers, we do so much with material and construction. It’s really architectural; it comes close to building. A scent is so immaterial. It’s really about emotion and sensation. Clothes are too, but it’s not the same. Working with a scent was actually very relaxing for me.
FORD: I think it gives more emotion. This is going to sound crazy, but the first thing I do when I get home is take off all my clothes—at home, just around the house. Like, right now, I am sitting here completely naked. [Ghesquière laughs] I take everything off. I can’t stand clothes! I take everything off—my shoes, my socks, my watch, shirt, everything. I am completely naked. GHESQUIÈRE: [laughs] Do you wear your perfume?
FORD: That is what I was going to say. I stay this way pretty much 24 hours a day. Richard is very funny. He is usually completely dressed. He does not like to be naked. So he is in the house; we are having dinner. I am sitting there naked; he is sitting there completely dressed. [Ghesquière laughs] I also take, like, three baths a day—it is not to be clean, it is because I like to relax and lie in the water. It is the way I calm myself down. But every time I walk past my bathroom, I go in and I put on some perfume. I use different perfumes for different moods. If I feel that I need to calm down, I put on certain fragrances that are more sensual. If I feel that I need to energize, I put on something else. Fragrance for me is so important. How did your fragrance begin? GHESQUIÈRE: It’s a friendship story. It started with a conversation Charlotte and I had years ago. I said, “You know what? The day I do a perfume, I’d like to do it for you.” We started like that. I could have done something very exclusive and expensive. But what I like about this perfume is that it’s the first thing most women can access from Balenciaga. That was a challenge for me.
FORD: [laughs] Because you don’t care about real women! We talked about that. GHESQUIÈRE: In this case, I care.
FORD:Ok. Thank you. GHESQUIÈRE: No. Thank you.
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