by Simon Doonan
The truth is that most of us are lucky if we can simply claw our way to the middle.
Most people, me included, are far better suited to work for somebody else rather than inaugurate an eponymous brand or fashion label, especially when they are right out of college. One in a million fashionistas has the nuts and the gnads and the ovaries and the ideas and the shekeltastic infrastructure to become a Wang or a Raf or a Dries or a Miuccia. The vast majority of us do better in a support capacity. In other words, most of us are a gusset or a bust dart. Few of us have what it takes to become the gown itself. Few of us could handle big-time success if it came along, never mind attain it in the first place.
If, perchance, success arrives before maturity and experience, it will really do a number on you. You will morph into a strangely unappealing individual. You will resemble those people who win the lottery and go totally bat-shit. Yes, you will be wearing a mauve ostrich-skin jumpsuit and driving a matching mauve Maybach, but will you be happy?
In my role as dream crusher, I am obliged to divest the kids of today of their grandiosity. This role was thrust upon me inexplicably and mysteriously. I accept it. I inhabit it. I crush. But I also nurture.
The role of the dream crusher goes way beyond merely crushing dreams. I always make sure that I replace every crushed dream with an achievable goal. This process involves the delivery of a twinkly perfect nugget of advice—advice which, I might add, is desperately needed.
Example 1: A young gal accosts me on line at Starbucks.
“You are Mr. Fashion and I want to be a model.”
“How tall are you?”
“Five feet . . . almost.”
“It’s never going to happen.”
“Why?”
“You are twelve inches too short. And so am I.”
“Fuck you!”
“Glad I was able to help. If you like the world of modeling, why not try for a gofer job at a modeling agency and work your way up? In ten years’ time you could be office manager or even an agent. I’ll have a venti Earl Grey tea, please. Bag on the side.”
Example 2: A young lad stops me on the street and asks to show me his line of ornate ladies’ hats. Before I can answer, he begins to show me samples and pictures. They look cute. He asks my opinion of his prospects. I give it to him.
“You need to radically modify your expectations. This can never be more than a hobby.”
“Why?”
“Because hats are a minuscule category in fashion, an endangered species. Look around. No women are wearing hats, which means that no women are buying hats. In the 1930s women never left the house without a hat. Now it is rare to see a hat unless you are at an English garden party or a Southern Baptist church. And since you live in Brooklyn, you need to reconsider, regroup and restrategize.”
“I know all that! [Getting annoyed.] But I am going to create a revolution. I am going to teach women to appreciate hats again.”
“No, you’re not. And here’s why: American women are committed to their hair. Fully committed! They spend all their money having it straightened, augmented, braided, combed out and woven, and they currently show no inclination to cover it up with elaborate concoctions, except on rare occasions.”
“Thanks for crushing my dreams.”
“You are so welcome. Why not try scarves? They are a huge category and there are no sizing issues. Or better yet, go to beauty school and learn to do hair. Have a nice day.”
While most kids today are well served to have their dreams crushed and replaced by more achievable goals, there are a small number of individuals who are not. They are the exceptions, the geniuses. While most of us are better suited to blunder about and baby-step our way through life, these talented supernovas are hitting the big time right out of the cradle.
These exceptions to the rule—the Proenza Schoulers, the Lims, the Thakoons, the Lams, the Prabals and the Altuzarras—are a delightfully, splendidly competent bunch, likable and hardworking too. They have pitched themselves into the pressure cooker of fashion and bravely endure operational, financial and emotional challenges which would probably have plunged the likes of me into a booze-addled abyss. And they are succeeding. No chicken-wire fences or abortive lemon-cake deliveries for them.
Admirable though I find these overachieving prodigies, I do have one tidgy-widgy criticism.
These fashion designers are a little too . . . self-effacing.
The reason for this is quite simple. The young designers of today are all, consciously or unconsciously, basing their public image on the enigmatic Garbo of fashion, namely Martin Margiela. Remote and unknowable, Margiela crafted one of the most mysterious and arty personas ever to have inhabited the fashion asylum. As a result, everyone secretly wants to be him.
Back in the last century, I once blithely snapped a picture of Martin while he was chatting with my colleague at the time, Ronnie Newhouse. This caused a scandale fou. Nobody is ever allowed to snap Monsieur Margiela. I was subsequently chased around the whitewashed showroom by admonishing Margiela acolytes in white couture lab coats. I was only allowed to keep the film in my camera on one condition: I had to promise to give the picture to Ronnie. La Newhouse was an early supporter of Martin’s and he had a soft spot for her.
So, the goal of these young designers is to emulate that mysterious press-phobic Belgian legend. Ask them a direct question and their little toes point inward in an idiotic show of faux humility. They have yet to realize that this kind of ever-so-humble behavior, while it worked for Mr. Margiela, is almost the exact opposite of what we really want from them.
What do we want from them?
We want fabulosity, by which, of course, I mean we want the fabulosity of a great fashion impresario, a Chanel, an Oscar de la Renta, an Yves Saint Laurent.
I would love to teach classes in fabulosity, but my obligations as a dream crusher—the dream crusher—consume all my free time.
In the absence of my teachings, I have enlisted the help of three legendary designers. (Unbeknownst to these dudes, I channeled their thoughts while in a deep trancelike state.) None are humble. Each one has a distinct identity or persona. Each designer’s lesson addresses a different aspect of fabulositay.
• • •
LESSON #1. Valentino’s guide to pug management
Your private plane has landed. You rise from your seat with an air of grandeur and disdain. An assistant holds up a mirror for you to check your tan. It is perfect, which is not surprising since you just spent the last three weeks spread-eagled on the deck of your yacht, circling the island of Capri.
Doors to manual.
Another assistant places your cashmere coat over your shoulders. On go the Aristotle Onassis shades. You appear at the top of the steps and wave at the waiting paparazzi. A blizzard of flashbulbs. Ciao, Roma!
Then like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, you take two runs at it, darting back inside and emerging again, thereby ensuring that the paparazzi get plenty of shots.
You descend to a waiting limo while waving to your fans. You are, of course, followed by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pugs. So many pugs that nobody can figure out how on earth they all fit into that plane. (As Seth Meyers declared at the CFDA Awards in 2012, “Valentino is recovering from surgery. He had an extra arm surgically attached so that he can hold more pugs.”)
This, young designers of today, is fabulositay at its finest!
You and the pugs slither into your limo and purr toward your palazzo, where you are greeted by four hundred liveried servants lined up outside in their starched pinafores, each clutching a geriatric pug. (The older ones stay at home when you travel.)
You swan into the great hall past a swirl of Tiepolos, Caravaggios and El Grecos. You sink into a squishy couch that was probably once owned by Pauline Bonaparte or Pauline de Rothschild, or some broad called Pauline, and are immediately
engulfed by orchids, pugs and the intoxicating ambience which you have created using your wits, your creativity and your genius. You grab a pad and start sketching the fall line . . .
• • •
LESSON #2. The Karl Lagerfeld guide to sartorial idiosyncrasy
Achtung! When I, Herr Lagerfeld, was a young man, I never wore jeans and T-shirts. As a purveyor of luxury and dreams, I always went to great lengths to appear distinguished and glamorous. I was sporting those high Proustian collars and monocles even back in the seventies.
Today’s young designers are less than impressive in the sartorial department. Why do they choose to dress like college students? Why do these attractive young men favor J.Crew T-shirts, Top-Siders and scuzzy jeans? Why would you be so willfully schlumpy and degagé when you could stalk the earth dressed like an eighteenth-century aristocratic vampire?
Every designer needs an iconic look. If the South Park boys cannot make a recognizable cartoon out of you, then you need to up the ante. You need a signature flourish, non?
• • •
LESSON #3. The Azzedine Alaïa guide to social media (hash tag whybother?)
Moi, Azzedine Alaïa, I have weathered the social-media revolution and emerged unscathed and profoundly indifferent. Le tweet? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
Not a tweet, nor a chirp nor a chirrup. Has it hurt moi? It would appear to have done the opposite. In those years when tweets and twats were allegedly so critical to any kind of success, my business has become larger than ever. For the women du monde, my frocks and shoes and bags are l’addiction.
You young designers are getting caught up and distracted by le social media. You spend your days smiling over positive comments and weeping at the negative ones. Maybe I am from l’old school, but there seems to me to be something deeply tragique about caring so much about what other people think. The frantic checking of phones seems so—comment dire?—embarrassing.
If you are hoping to establish yourself as a grand chose in the fashion world, then maybe it would be good to suivez-moi and cultivate a little Alaïa-esque hauteur and indifference. If your designs are good maintenant, think of how great they could be if you took all your social-media time and dedicated it to the act of creation. Women cannot wear tweets.
À tout à l’heure!
• • •
CLEARLY THIS CHAPTER has zigzagged all over the place. In recognition of the fact that the careers of younger readers may hinge on a clear understanding of what’s been said, I offer the following recap.
Young people today are exceptionally caring and altruistic, but they are not having as much fun as they should because they are overly fixated on world domination and because they are not cross-dressing on a healthy regular basis.
Most people are not destined for megastardom. Most are better served to approach life, as I did, with a good work ethic but zero expectations. This guarantees that you will always be pleasantly surprised.
The young megastar designers of today are too schlumpy and humble. They need to gussy up, and they also need to spend more time making frocks and less time making tweets.
Lastly, and most important, please remember that transporting gooey cakes across state lines is inconvenient and can endanger the life of the recipient.
tom ford’s moist lip
TOM FORD IS THE ONLY PERSON I know who has successfully integrated the word “cunt” into a memorial speech. No mean feat. It happened when he was eulogizing the late and much-missed New York Times fashion journalist Amy Spindler.
Amy died too young and she knew it. Her natural feistiness was magnified by her cruel and horrible illness. Tom quoted the dying and irate Amy as saying, “Just because I have cancer does not mean I can’t be a cunt.”
Tom’s speech caused a few raised eyebrows. I am not quite sure why. By being honest, he offered mourners a clear and touching reminder of Amy’s tough, vibrant personality and an insight into her final struggle.
There are many other reasons why I love Tom.
He cuts a great suit. Having worked on Savile Row, I am a sucker for a bit of nifty tailoring.
His Tobacco Vanille perfume is intoxicating and makes me wish I smoked cigarettes again. Or maybe even a pipe.
I also love Tom Ford because Tom Ford loves a moist lip. I love a moist lip too. Who doesn’t?
• • •
ONCE UPON A TIME I was planning a party for the launch of Mr. Ford’s huge photographic retrospective monograph. In order to add a little sizzle to the occasion, I suggested to Lisa Schiek, Tom’s PR guru, that we commission sugar cookies bearing an image of Tom’s face and the words EAT ME knocked out in blocky white lettering, à la Ed Ruscha. These scrumptious goodies would be served to arriving guests along with a glass of champagne. We could also, budget permitting, stitch up a bunch of cushions bearing his image and the words SIT ON ME. “I’m sure Richard Avedon won’t mind us taking his iconic portrait of Tom and using it to create TF souvenirs,” I trilled, optimistically.
Lisa was less than enthusiastic. Her response was polite but adamant: instead of cookies and cushions, Tom would prefer us to focus our attention on the male servers. She said that Tom would like to see handsome model-slash-waiters holding drink trays. I received a follow-up memo with styling specifics: the lads should have “a moist lip, dewy cheek and a light tan, as if they had just spent a couple of hours lolling by the pool that very morning.”
I was uneasy. While my EAT ME idea was, admittedly, a little too playful for the sophisticated Ford brand, Tom’s alternative was rather nuanced. The entire concept was a minefield of subjectivity. One person’s moist lip was another person’s slobbery bouche. How moist was too moist? When was moist not moist enough? Was it better to be too moist than too dry? Regarding the cheek: What was the difference between dewy and plain old greasy?
“Return to your station, redew your cheeks and reapply your lip gloss, you lightly tanned, naughty, dry-lipped waiter,” I could almost hear myself saying.
For reasons too complicated to enumerate, but most of which were budget related, I was unable to hire a phalanx of square-jawed Adonises for Tom’s book launch. We were obliged instead to rely on the waiters from our own Barneys restaurant, none of whom had, as far as we could see, either a moist lip or dewy cheek, and most of whom were female. After scouring the kitchen, my team hit pay dirt: a nice-looking bloke with a light tan.
“You’ll do!” we shrieked, and dragged the hapless victim off to the makeup department, where, much to his horror, we glossed his lip and dusted his cheek. We then shoved a drink tray in his hand.
Tom arrived. He glanced at our lone, lightly tanned dude in his ill-fitting white shirt and his seen-better-days schlumpy black pants, and he winced. He then sat down and began signing books for the around-the-block line of fans that had come to worship their idol.
Eventually, Tom habituated to the presence of his undewy, unmoist accomplice. They exchanged polite banter. Mr. Ford is a smart guy. He realized that I had done him a huge service. Why risk comparison with somebody younger, moister and dewier? How much better to have a blokey regular guy. How much better to have a flattering adjacency!
Sales recap: We sold about $50,000 worth of books, including tons of the $350 deluxe white leather-bound version.
Lipgate was, as it turned out, a good warm-up for my next encounter with Mr. Ford. Let us now move on from Tom’s preoccupation with square jaws and moist lips, and head south to the world of grotty feet.
All of us think we have gorgeous feet, especially when we are young. I always thought mine were quite noteworthy: I see them as sturdy little Celtic hooves, perfectly in proportion with my gnomelike physique. My high insteps recall, at least to my eyes, those famous images of Rudolf Nureyev’s appendages. (Avedon, again!)
Suddenly, a few winters ago, that all changed. I was skipping along the beach in Florida when I suddenly noticed th
at my right big toenail looked radically different. It bore a blotch the color of scrambled egg. So perturbed was I by this development that I skipped to an abrupt halt. This is unusual. I am an enthusiastic skipper. Once I get going, I tend to keep right on skipping.
The following week, I skipped over to see my doctor, who diagnosed toe fungus and prescribed ciclopirox, a slow-acting but noninvasive antifungal nail lacquer. Determined to restore the rogue toenail to its former glory in time for my summer vacation, I applied the unguent with great diligence.
Despite my best efforts, the scrambled egg persisted. When it became apparent that the stubborn malady would be accompanying me and my Jonny on our trip to Capri, I zipped out and bought a pair of those hippie flip-flop-style Birkenstocks. Not very glamorous, but here’s the deal: The toe-thong leather flap exactly covered the offending spot of fungus.
I also purchased a Ped Egg. This sleek little foot scraper, much advertised via late-night infomercials, was, at the time, sold as part of a tantalizing buy-one-get-one-free deal. The spare Ped Egg was immediately put to use, very successfully, as a Parmesan cheese grater. The very same design that catches those foul foot scrapings with such deathly efficiency works like a dream to accumulate finely shredded fromage. Just make sure you Magic Marker your Ped Eggs—Sharpie the word “hoof” onto the unsavory one—so they don’t get mixed up.
I have always found this kind of freewheeling functionality to be very stylish. What could be chicer than drying freshly rinsed silk panties in a lettuce spinner kept for this very purpose under your bathroom sink? This kind of lateral thinking was first revealed to me some three decades ago when I worked at that suburban John Lewis department store, where a colleague—the head girdle saleslady—used a pair of plastic salad servers to subdue any uncooperative fleshy pouches that erupted during the trying on of corsets and other foundation garments.