With fashion, my mother was an icon, but she never lived it in the sense that she was never obsessed with fashion. When I was a young girl, my sister wasn't doing fashion, so I started fashion thinking, 'I'm going to do something that they haven't done yet.' That was my silly scheme at the time.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
I really learned a lot from collecting clothes because I got to go back into the history of fashion and fashion photography and jewelry. It changed how I felt about fashion and about what I did forever because I used to look a little bit down on myself for it.
I have often been criticised for doing an about-face from one season to the next - as has my wonderfully inspiring lady designer whom I love so much, Miuccia Prada - but that is what I love about fashion.
I don't really know much about the fashion world. I have a few stylist friends that help me find stuff. So they know all about the vintage fashion world; I just kind of describe to them what I want and they find a lot of it for me.
I grew up in Mississippi, and there's no fashion game there. Even in 'Bling Ring,' I had to learn a lot about fashion - you know, the differences between lapels - and it wasn't until we'd wrapped that I really started getting into it.
Fashion is temporary; fashion is a race. What it's doing is giving you something that you say, "This is the outer wrapping of me." Style is something else. It's not quantifiable. Fashion is about selling. Fashion is about what's in. Style is independent of that; style is individual.
In Gwalior, where I lived initially, I never thought much about fashion. I started understanding fashion only when I moved to Delhi.
I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.
There’s a side to me that likes to make clothes for everyday. But I also think of fashion as an escape. It’s like a dream. It shouldn’t always be practical and about real life. Sometimes you have to do a piece that has a bit more of a wow - almost like, "I don’t know who’s going to wear that. It’s almost too much." That’s a lot of what fashion is about. Even in an economy that isn’t strong and where it’s important to sell clothes, you have to make things that let people dream a little, you know?
I'm very interested in fashion shows. For me they're at the center of everything. What happens on the side, that's the energy - it's fashion week - but fashion shows are at the heart of it. I function more like a stylist. I'm inspired, and then I try to find it on the street. What's great about a blog is that you can do completely crazy things like take the moustache shoes Marc Jacobs did for Louis Vuitton for spring and talk about what that has to do with moustaches. In fashion, what people are looking for is inspiration and new ideas all the time.
My Pirelli calendar is hanging on the wall of my friend's frat house, and he doesn't know anything about fashion. That balance is what leads to big campaigns outside of fashion. But I never want to choose one or the other. Both commercial and high fashion are what make my job so interesting.
When we started Nowhere, maybe the fashion industry recognized something was happening, but they just thought, Oh, those kids . . . whatever. They didn't know what was actually going on with us. Now we are those people in a sense - the current establishment. So I hope there's something happening that is new and independent that we know nothing about.
I think creating the clothes is about creating historical images - and that's about more than fashion. It is about the fashion, the photography, what you are doing in the moment. It's what we call in French rechercher, or the search for that thing. So even though fashion is not scientific, I think being a designer is somewhat like being a scientist.
Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.
...when I came back, I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table...Then I asked her what had happened. 'Nothing,'she said. 'I was thinking about that man...I started thinking about...if he and his wife and their other child are okay, and I don't know. It just got to me.' 'I know,' I said, because I did know. Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.