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I thought this deserved its on topic here since it became quite the viral hit: the hysterical, no holds barred rant/takedown by freelance writer Jacques Hyzagi on everyone from the Elle Magazine staff, to Anna Wintour, models, gays, to basically every publication in the business, and the saga that became his interview with Rei Kawakubo.
observerELLE on Earth
How a leading women's magazine ruined a once-in-a-lifetime interview with fashion legend Rei Kawakubo
By Jacques Hyzagi
The press used to subsist on leaks; it now thrives on plants. The politician is not a liar or a demagogue but a product. It was therefore revealed a month ago that the hacks Marc Ambinder and Mike Allen of respectively the boring Atlantic and vapid Politico sold their souls to Hillary Clinton’s staff in order to get access: first reads were promised, quote approval, word veto, talking point insertion, narrative change and forced rewrite. Time Warner, Conde Nast and Hearst don’t hire editors in chief anymore but editors able to understand the value of the marketing division to the newsroom and how they should be merged, which is code for content branding.
A strong case in point is ELLE magazine.
Last June I obtained a very hard to get interview with the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garçons. Ms. Kawakubo is the Bob Dylan of fashion—a designer’s designer—probably the most interesting designer alive today and she knows it. She is also the head of an empire that has never accepted outside investors and in such her independence is total. She has her own praetorian guard in the person of her spokesperson/husband Adrian Joffe and an army of yes men and women who run away cowering at her first snap. She refuses to be photographed, has given the same bland elliptical interview every five years for the last thirty years, hates journalists and is known to answer a long, in-depth question with a lethal yes or no. She is fiercely intelligent and has no patience for goobers. She is probably killing herself in her old age by trying to find four times a year entirely new ideas for each collection as she refuses to tap into the archives of fashion and recycle the old into the new like most designers do when they start their ersatz collections. The result is breathtaking.
“Are you neurotic?” I asked her, cutting her cold through one of her standard default rants. A silence fell in the room as if the guillotine had just fallen on the fat neck of this irreverent Robespierre, which actually happened just a few yards from where this interview took place. For a second I thought she was about to end the interview but she smiled at me. She understood what I was doing.
“Have you cut yourself off because of your status?” I later asked her. Of course she said no but every single celebrity has, even the local celebrities in your families and in the god forsaken villages you grew up in before you came to New York to be as far away as possible from this kind of crassness.
Before I could sit in front of her in Paris I had to find a publication that could ship my pathetic *** across the pond. The bores at New York Magazine said no because I would not be able to get her to say anything interesting. The New York Observer cried poverty at even the tiny budget I proposed. David Remnick at the New Yorker very politely took the time to cut and paste an old profile that his magazine ran ten years ago and to tell me that they never repeat a profile except when it’s a puff piece on Hillary. Although Judith Thurman’s “The Misfit” from 2005 is the smartest one written so far on Ms. Kawakubo the piece was academic, bizarrely self-absorbed and often wrong. Very Reader’s Digest meets GQ, like what the entire New Yorker unfortunately became. CDG hated it because Ms. Thurman committed the crime of lèse-majesté when she said that Adrian Joffe was afraid of his wife. I observed them interacting, he is. Mr. Remnick is nice but he’s no William Shawn, as his past reporting on Russia can attest. They were treasure troves of platitudes and predictions that all turned out to be wrong. I realized Anna Wintour had never invited Rei, the goddess of fashion, worshipped by every single designer from Karl Lagerfeld to Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang, to her insufferable annual ball at the Met. Had Rei refused the yearly extortion of ad buying in Anna’s September issue too many falls in a row? So Vogue was out, which left us with Robbie Meyers at ELLE.
Yes I want it, the woman famous for wearing this soufflé pompadour on her head instantly told me, but please give me the chance to meet you and tell you why talking about the Met Ball slight would be a bad idea. I was never invited either she told me, if this can make you feel any better. Robbie was very excited about the interview but strangely, CDG wasn’t. Who is Robbie? Adrian asked in front of me. The behived he was told. Haaa yes he said. In London The Guardian asked me to write about it and I convinced CDG that we could do a joint venture—London and New York with the same interviews. This could cut the heavy costs of sending people to Paris in the middle of the high season. Robbie as editor in chief sees her job as putting out fires and delegating, a strange mutually defeating combo. She told me that Anne Slowey, the news top editor would work with me on this. I will not do The Guardian piece I told Anne if you need an exclusive. I don’t care, she told me, we are two different outlets. Come meet me at 3pm tomorrow. At 2:30 the meeting was cancelled; something better came up. You would think that the extremely rare interview of the most sought after and talented living designer in the world would be of importance to ELLE. It was to Robbie but apparently not to her underling. I’m sure Anne was annoyed that her boss told her that she had accepted my interview with Rei and that she was assigned to it. Fair to bet that she thought: who is this ******* coming out of nowhere?
By 3:45 the meeting was suddenly back on in a bar in the West Village. Then by 3:30 the location was changed to the East Side. By 4:00 as I just crossed town it was cancelled again and back on by 4:15 at a different place but Anne had to go pick up her young kids by 5 so the meeting would be short. Although Anne had my phone she was sending these directives via CDG as if I was working for them and they were then relaying them to me by phone. I had more luck meeting that Hezbollah leader in downtown Beirut for an interview.
Realizing I was dealing with a power angry maniac I called the meeting off and stood her up. Almost famous people have a tendency to act even more obnoxiously than the famous ones. Graydon Carter, who knows a thing or two about fame, has this parable about a peasant like me arriving in New York from his hamlet and trying to make it in the big city like in a Balzac novel. The provincial enters a dark room and tries to find a door that will enable him to enter another room and so on until he finally reaches success but at each room the door to the next is more difficult to find. Usually in New York society very few arrivistes make it past the first room. I have no idea what he’s talking and it’s probably why his magazine is a giant bore.
I chose Edith Wharton when time came to learn about New York social cues and suffice to say there was no mirth in the house of ELLE. I thought the hell with it I’ll go somewhere else but by then CDG was set on ELLE and the Guardian, the same outlets I had to work (is it clear here that it was CDG I had to convince into accepting the outlets?) hard in convincing in the first place. I understood that once you set the process forward with the egomaniac genius and precise designer, the slightest change might send the whole apparatus crashing. Too often the fear instilled by mediocrity and incompetence, the two t*ts that nourish capitalistic societies, can only feed the beast if patterns and routines are kept as is. The slightest changes might unravel the whole company because they will unveil a paper-like deus ex machina.
We all know most of our colleagues at work are incompetent frauds but it is the smallest unexpected change in our routines that reveal how easy it would be for our collective inefficiency to bring about destruction—how close we are from complete collapse. A box cutter brought down the World Trade Center and our air defense system with it.
I talked to Robbie and explained to her what had happened and that I couldn’t work with a power hungry flake. Ten minutes later Anne was calling me. I could tell I was on speakerphone. We decided that better than Paris, Tokyo should be the venue for the interview since Rei lives and works there. I told Anne that I see Rei as a Romantic from early 19th century, a time when painters started depicting fires, ruins, decay and painted people from the back in a rebuke to the sickening self righteousness of the Enlightenment and by extension as a Dada trying to destroy art.
That’s great I love it, she said, people are so ****ing stupid nobody knows what Dada is. I told her I would ask other big designers to contribute to the piece as a sort of homage to the grande dame of couture—Lagerfeld, Jacobs, Tom Ford, Alber Elbaz, Wang, Nicolas Ghesquière—in order to place Rei in the annals of fashion. I also thought about including people from outside of fashion—people she admires, like Ai Weiwei, for instance—and asking them to produce something for the piece. It would be a great piece.
I wanted to talk about the Anna Wintour slight at the Met Ball and she told me everybody is sick and tired of ****ing Anna Wintour. Let me deal with the other designers’ tributes, you do the interview and write the piece, she told me. She never did any of it, of course. My impression of Anne was that she was loud and tacky. I had heard that working with her was a mess akin to making a mule piss in a public bathroom.
I then decided that the interview would take place in Paris, the sooner the better at the end of last June during the men’s collections. Forget Tokyo, I thought, this woman is unstable and the longer this will take the worse it will be. I told CDG of the latest change of plan and Anne told them when she learned the news that she would send someone else to Paris, which was obviously her plan from the beginning. I had that intuition so I bluffed CDG and told them that I heard of Anne’s plan to take me out of the interview. Yes it’s true, they said, but not to worry it wasn’t going to happen. I guess now they wanted the Guardian too.
This went on till the day of departure. I asked Anne to get the green light directly from Robbie regarding the expenses and fees and that I would not step on that plane the next day unless Robbie herself gave me the go. I got it on a Friday night at 10 pm, which is when I bought the tickets, and we left for Paris the next day in the evening. My writing partner accompanied me. Adrian Joffe, Rei’s husband, told me people will come after you from every angle, once they know you got that interview. We met with Rei twice. In order to secure the interview I had to promise a first read with the Faustian understanding that only facts would be checked by CDG, not content. We don’t do first reads Anne screamed on the phone and I don’t want you to meet with her in passing—you must spend time with her, she said, as if she were Katharine Graham.
Fashion is a strange world. Living in New York I had tangentially approached it when, being a douche, I dated models, a fashion editor and a designer who worked with Alexander McQueen. A friend and mentor of mine tried to launch his own line and even had one of his dresses in Barney’s Uptown window. He was gay. He would hit on a friend of mine and I would tell him, Tony, the guy is straight. Straight to bed, he would fire right back. He was a poet, a beautiful loser like me. He ended up living in his bed in his mother’s house in Brooklyn.
Every other gay guy has, like Tony did, a beautiful dress tucked away in his closet for special occasions. Most of the women gay guys worship work in the fashion industry. They all have the aura of a Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Lucille Ball or the mom in Grey Gardens. Steely strong women, cold, authoritarian, powerful, slightly unhinged, aloof but charming, tender but cutting, vain but elitist, superficial but cultured, terribly cruel and laudatory in the same sentence, frivol, cunning and manipulative, overdramatic, superb, all bringing, as Hamish Bowles ridiculously once said, ‘a powerhouse of pizzaz’. Their mothers, for most.
Rei Kawakubo in that respect would be the queen bee.
For someone of her stature to smile when I asked her if she were neurotic goes beyond the fact that no one has ever talked to her like this in 40 years. It was the moment that I could see she was playing, that it was all an act. She knows she is the most important designer alive and she plays the part down to her refusal to give interviews or have her photo taken, which I did anyway on my iPhone. Her work, even for someone like me who hates fashion, is breathtaking. A folly in the sense that Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films were follies.
Anna Wintour herself said it recently, fashion works from the street up to designers not from the top down. The most attractive women in New York wear a leather jacket, beat up boyfriend jeans and used combat boots. Most of the clothes the best designers—mainly gay men—put on the runways are restricting, repressing camisoles that restrain women as if they were hysterics on the way to the loony bin, not to say anything of the sadistic high heels that submissive women awkwardly don, torture apparatus meant to apparently please an ethos from the worst patriarchy.
The models I have dated were fashion proof in their daily lives. They would never be caught dead wearing any of these sartorial debasements. But models more than any designers and fashion editors, who mostly remain part of a very limited, incestuous cast, had a remarkable impact on society over the last three decades. Most of them in order to stay skeletal did coke in the 80’s, ate sushi in the 90’s and sweated on these yoga mats at the turn of the century before any of us did. They all worship Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and spent their afternoons at the Rubin, which makes for easy break ups. They probably did more for Buddhism than the Dalai Lama in his Gucci loafers, all in the name of that size zero so searched after by designers who looove women. When I grew up, size zero was only spoken to in reference to the death camps.