Whether an economic boom is fueled by the fashion industry or technology innovations, it needs a brick-and-mortar foundation. This is not only true in New York and San Francisco; wherever you live, you can find a local hotspot positioned to attract interest from businesses, consumers and investors.
People are frustrated all over the country, whether they're in Oklahoma or Oregon or San Diego or San Francisco or L.A. or D.C. or New York or Omaha or wherever.
New York and San Francisco are distinctly different. San Francisco is driving the American media, not New York. You have young, microwaved millionaires and billionaires reshaping the American media in a way that reflects San Francisco values.
You know what I like about San Francisco? The women are beautiful, fashionable and smart. San Francisco is one of the only cities I like to visit. I love New York and Chicago - I studied there, and L.A. has the same people as New York.
I would stay two years in San Francisco, then move to New York in the summer of 1991, for the love of a man who lived there. When I arrived in New York, I had a job waiting for me, courtesy of a bookstore I'd worked at in San Francisco, A Different Light. They had a New York store as well, and arranged an employee transfer.
You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisco than you see in Seattle. All the money is in San Francisco when you look at the venture fund maps. The PR is in San Francisco. The centricity of the industry is in San Francisco.
Society has a hyper emphasis on thin, and that trend comes from the consumers - it does not come from the fashion industry. The fashion industry needs to make money; that's what we do. If people said, 'We want a 300 pound purple person,' the first industry to do it would be fashion.
I resent the fact that people in places like Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco believe that they should be able to tell us how to live our lives, operate our businesses, and what to do with the land that we love and cherish.
At the end of the day local authorities are responsible for economic growth in their area. They don't buy and sell businesses, they don't build businesses, what they do is work to attract businesses their area, through a combination of things.
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.
Whatever New York loses, if you go to other cities around the world, or around the country, New York still has a kind of energy level you find nowhere else. Paris doesn't have it, London doesn't have it, San Francisco, a great city, doesn't have it.
Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made. You are either a city, or you are not, size has nothing to do with it. I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers. New York is "Yokel", but San Francisco is "City at Heart".
America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.
My main residence is Baltimore. I have an apartment in New York, one in San Francisco, and I live in a rental in Provincetown in the summer.
In San Francisco, the majority of the restaurants are ingredient-driven. In New York, that is true as well, but there's also a greater focus on technique.
It's very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves.
I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.