A Quote by Kenneth Cole
I've struggled with that over the years: Is fashion relevant? Is it frivolous? Is it trivial? Because I give so much of my essence to it, as do everybody I work with.
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I think fashion is probably one of the most accessible and immediate forms of visual culture. In 1978, when I realized that I wanted to work on fashion, I had gone to Yale to get my Ph.D. in European cultural history. I suddenly realized fashion's part of culture, and I can do fashion history. All my professors thought this was a really bad idea, that fashion was frivolous and unimportant. And, increasingly over time, people have recognized that it provides such a mirror to the way we think, our values and attitudes.
I think the problem is that fashion has become too fashionable. For years, fashion wasn't fashionable. Today fashion is so fashionable that it's almost embarrassing to say you're part of fashion. All the parodies of it. All the dreadful magazines. That has destroyed it as well, because everybody thinks fashion is attainable.
I didn't grow up reading magazines; I was very much in an environment where that would have been deemed trivial, frivolous.
Fashion is an illusion. It's a multibillion-pound industry that has to appear frivolous. Designers work and work and work, all night sometimes.
The No. 1 quote critics give me is, 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to 10 million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture.
I tell everybody, I get so much because I give so much. I give freely, I give all my time, give all my money, give all of my soul. I try to motivate people. I try to inspire them.
I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
You know what I'm great at? Trivial Pursuit. What good is that gonna do you in life? It has the word 'trivial' in the name. The game is basically telling you that you pursue trivial things. Trivial - as in not important. Trivial - as in maybe you should've gone to grad school.
Sometimes I was frivolous. Did you have some frivolous years? I had to live mine out in public.
Everybody's talking about the new democratic world and whether high fashion is relevant. But without high there is no low. I don't like to intellectualize. I've always said fashion is like roast chicken: You don't have to think about it to know it's delicious.
There is unfortunately a world that still exists that dismisses fashion as being a little bit frivolous and the people who work in it are not so smart.
It's much harder, much more work to be your own artist, and it's hard for me to just want to do one thing. I love doing my own music, but I really have to get into a groove with it, which has been difficult over the last few years because I've had so much great work coming in.
I love theater, a performance and designing a visual spectacle. It is like creating a composition with clothes, which have to fit the psychology as well as the body of characters. The performance is frozen in time, the clothes have to stay reliable and help to define the story. Fashion can be much more abstract. It needs no story because the woman is the story. She supplies the text and content. Fashion for retail is the opposite of frozen, it has to change and morph constantly to stay relevant - to be the "fashion.".
I'm a designer, and I work very hard at that. People sometimes want to put down fashion by saying it's frivolous or superficial, but it's not that way at all. It's actually very hard work.
The end goal is to make a piece that everybody has ownership over and everybody's proud of because everybody contributed to it. I think there's a communist, socialist vibe to 'Portlandia' to make it work.
When I started in the business years ago, people would always say, 'You better get as much work as you can now, because once you get over 40, it's over.'
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