With all the new media outlets out there, with all the noise, a voice of authority and calm like Vogue becomes more important than ever. The more eyes on fashion, the more opinions about fashion, the more exploration of fashion around the world, the better it is for Vogue. Vogue is like Nike or Coca-Cola—this huge global brand. I want to enhance it, I want to protect it, and I want it to be part of the conversation.
Women are more sensitive, more practical, more intelligent, more balanced, better able to deal with people, better cooks, better parents, better carers, better leaders, and so on and so forth.
I wasn't that into it or that knowledgeable of fashion until I started working on 'True Jackson.' I feel like it was my duty to learn more because people would feel that I should because I'm on the show. So definitely, that made me more involved with fashion, and now I'm a little fashion guru. It's totally out of control.
I'm going to be a fashion icon in a minute. I'm not going to do it in a corny manner. I have a voice that speaks for a whole other market - not just black people, but high fashion urban people. I mix street wear with high fashion. It's never been seen before.
The New York world is definitely geared toward fashion. So many people work in the fashion industry, photography, all sorts of satellite businesses that have to do with it, so there's no way that it can't affect you, and it just kind of makes you think with more of a fashion edge.
While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.
Technical garments for sporting performance will, I believe, simply become more and more fit for purpose and will perform better and better. What is perhaps more interesting is how this technology will cross over into the fashion mainstream. We already see this trend in everything from footwear to outerwear.
It's going to take baby steps to see a complete turnaround. But there's been such a positive outcome from seeing it at Fashion Week. Plus-size fashion shows are being more welcomed into Fashion Week, and having more plus-size women in major magazines.
Even though I love fashion, I prefer people to fashion. Fashion is to make the person comfortable in her body, it?s not something very serious, you get to play.
There are social and environmental impacts. You might be working with a factory that underpays its staff or mistreats its workers, or mishandles the dyes. I think that conscious fashion, fashion for our soul, needs to keep pushing that needle towards being better and more mindful.
I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.
It would be great if everybody got a conscience. If we started to take more responsibility for the pollution in the world caused by the fashion industry, and to produce less, but better-thought-out goods. Then it becomes worth saving up to buy something beautifully-designed because you can and will keep it, rather than buying a bunch of disposable fashion items you'll probably wear once before throwing away and adding to the waste stockpile. I do think people used to buy clothing with a more thoughtful approach.
I think when I started to get in shape and spend time at the gym, I could be better to other people and be better to myself and get back to loving fashion and experience it myself. I started to wear kilts and lace dresses.
Technology gives big access, and you get more people who are interested in fashion. You can reach many more people now.
If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.
Moving fashion used to be one of my chief goals. It's not necessarily any more. Fashion needs to change when life changes. You only need to move fashion forward when there's a reason to move fashion forward.