I spend tons of time on the music for the fashion shows. I work with this DJ, Jeremy Healy, and we do, like, four or five sessions during the week leading up to the show where we put the music together.
I actually came from the fashion side, so maybe I knew more about fashion - and music like hip-hop because I was a DJ - so it was really successful when we mixed it all up together.
We did so much music together, before he got locked up, it's just, Gucci, he don't hold on to music. He like, Man, let's put this out, let's put that out, let's put this out. That's what he do. He like to put out a lot of music.
We lack an organization that will support fashion week. The five-day week shows a lack of vision and that we are not able to command respect. I am not saying it's anyone's fault in particular, it's our fault. We have the highest concentration of brands, how can we accommodate everyone in four or five days?
Traditionally, with a DJ set, you just go hear DJ that has a good reputation and let the DJ take you somewhere. It was up to the DJ what he wanted to play. Typically in dance music, people didn't know most of the songs a DJ played.
Right now I'm doing four shows at a time, trying to read four outlines every week, four scripts every week, and watching four rough cuts; it's a lot of good work. It's fun to do it, but it does wear you out.
Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn't in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four.
I started in '88 to play House music, it was a huge revolution for me. I went to London and I saw a DJ on stage and that was crazy at the time. I was one of the really respected and famous DJs in Paris, but they would never show me. I was hidden. A DJ on stage and people dancing and facing the DJ, looking at him? I was like 'wow!'
Fashion is like music, and when you put music in a cage it doesn't work.
Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.
When you do a show five days a week and one night a week, the way I was doing, you use up so much music every day that pretty soon you find yourself hustling for material.
I was a DJ in college and had my own punk music-focused show all four years.
I call it 'new forms'. When you're starting out, they ask you to do four or five minute sets, but once you're a headliner, you do like 90 minutes. I try to think of different things to divvy up the show, like doing drawings, playing music... I gotta carry the show, that's the problem.
The truth is the music is really an incredible personal part of the movie. When I was drawing the storyboards for Watchmen, I had just gone to my iPod and was grabbing music. It took me about two weeks to really put my playlist together. But once I had it, I kinda just put my headsets on and drew for five months. But that music's the music that's in the movie.
I've always been into music that was meshed together - not necessarily wall of sound stuff but music where you get duelling guitars and weird harmonics by putting things together, and you might not even know what's playing - it could be four or five instruments doing the same thing, and it's this strange concoction.
I don't listen to a ton of music other than putting my show together, just because my lifestyle isn't too conducive to listening to music all the time. I like to watch basketball, and I would rather not listen to music while I'm doing that.
I'm interested in anyone cutting up music and doing remixes. I just don't think it would work in a live setting right now to do shows with a traditional DJ, but it's something that might happen eventually.