I think about that all the time. I was raised in a different time in fashion. I remember a strong influence in my life was John Fairchild, though when he was alive I was scared to death of him, but he was great. The thing that he pressed into my little brain, which was such a smart thing, and I loved him for it, was that fashion is not like fine art. It’s not supposed to be revered in that way. It’s almost like a kind of applied art…something that you use in your life until it is no longer useful.
The other people who really influenced me a great deal were Polly Mellen and André Leon Talley. They both had this way of really moving past fashion very quickly; it was like here today and then gone. The only way that you could sort of glorify what was new was to kind of turn your back on what was old.
Fashion is not art—it’s just not. Of course, you approach everything the way an artist approaches it, but it needs to be sold, it needs to be worn. If it’s not being worn, it’s not what it is supposed to be. So here I am defrosting all of these clothes after years and years, and they feel very relevant and very fresh.
My ears perked up when you said that nostalgia wasn’t a motivator, because we live in such a nostalgic era that I wonder if there is even room for the next?
When I was starting my company, I was obsessed with looking at my mother’s clothes from the ’60s, and looking at images of Twiggy and stuff—but I wasn’t trying to re-create them, I was just thinking about how relevant it was to say stuff about women. When I was doing my shows, they were really about this idea that I had about women’s lives and how they needed to represent a certain place, politically, socially, and socioeconomically. I thought that’s what it was supposed to be about; I think fashion is nothing if not about socioeconomic politics.
So you think we can find newness?
There is a lot of newness out there. I don’t follow fashion as closely as you. I follow some people who I think are smart at posting certain pictures, and so those are the runway images that I see, and sometimes it’s thrilling and sometimes it just looks overstated, overbearing, and cohesive. I think that’s a problem now. It’s like things that are cohesive are automatically designated good. If everybody looks alike, everybody’s really happy.
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