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.
It was a no hold barred interview. Rei opened up for the first time about the way she creates, her excitement at the punk movement in the late 70’s, her support for Hillary Clinton, her interest in the Dada movement, her disdain for feminism, the folly of her constant search for the new, her consternation at the corporatization of today’s fashion, her hatred of the jingoistic current Japanese Prime Minister, the restraints that she imposes on herself and therefore her work, the limits of freedom.
None of this will make it in the interview ELLE publishes. Spending time with Rei and her husband Adrian was extraordinary, stimulating, challenging, extremely refreshing. Her work reminds me of Pessoa I told Adrian. Yes of course he said, the Saudade. We left Paris and went to the south of France to write the piece that I had promised would be 10,000 words. The Riviera is the perfect place to make you forget what a schmuck you are. A week later Anne had a copy of the piece on her desk. I’ll edit it next week she told me. I never heard from her.
By late August I contacted her as we had to coordinate with the Guardian, which was running the story front page early-mid September during London fashion week, in order to not overlap. No answer. The Guardian was becoming impatient. Why hasn’t Anne sent me her edits I finally asked Robbie—now the Guardian is going to press in two weeks, don’t you guys want to know what I’m gonna write for them? This is the first time I heard of this Robbie said. When did Anne get your piece? Almost three months ago, I said. She asked me to send to her and a coterie of managing editors the e-mail chain so I could substantiate my claim, as if I were lying. I sent them the discovery of evidence. The Guardian is going before us? Robbie asked me. How is that possible?
I sent her my piece for London. Great, she said—now obviously irritated—this is exactly what we would have run. I could hear the fascist and anti-Semite William Randolph Hearst turning in his grave. The Hearst perfume magazines, among them ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmo, Marie Claire, O can thank for their survival the drug data company, First Data Bank—the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings (part of Fitch group) own at 80 percent by Hearst and the software company Homecare Homebase that bring in the bigger share of Hearst revenues. One can easily see why.
It became clear to me that Anne was hell-bent on sabotaging the piece after I had dared that day to cancel our manic ever-changing meetings. She was not in a position of power to outright kill the piece, since Robbie had originally commissioned it, but she was ready to let it die by Lingchi, a thousand cuts.By that time I had spent thousands of dollars of my own monies and I just wanted to get paid. I know I told you it would be better not to talk about Rei’s slight at the Met Ball by Anna Wintour, but how does she feel about it? Robbie asked me. Not good I told her. What is her relationship like with Adrian, everybody is curious, she asked. I think he’s gay I told her. We really focus on how women live in this world at ELLE, she said, what does she think of being a powerful woman in fashion, of women’s issues, feminism? She hates it, I told her.
Anne finally told me she would send me her edits. That was in October. Two weeks ago her minion Noah asked for my address to send me an advanced copy of the March issue. Where are your edits, I asked Anne? You didn’t receive my emails? She said. I sent them to you before Christmas when we closed the March issue. Adrian helped me with the interview part—we just changed a few things—he acted as the literary translator, his words not mine she said. It’s a terrific interview, she added, sensing the storm coming. I never received your emails because you never sent them you liar, I told her—making sure to cc Hearst’s entire masthead. Since when does the brand rewrite an interview at ELLE? I asked her. Your name is on top in big letters she said trying desperately to massage my ego.
The interview published in ELLE this month is surprisingly tight, concise and actually quite good. Only an eye well trained in the art of George Orwell’s double speak would be able to detect the branded content at play in full force here. It is bland, milquetoast, uninformative, safe above all, boring. An infomercial. Adrian Joffe made sure of it. It has nothing to do with the interview Rei gave us. It is marital beardy betrayal of the worst kind. Anne discarded the text I had written entirely but not before she stole its structures and plagiarized its ideas. Because she cannot write and is not very bright she succeeded, no small feat, in making a fascinating and revolutionary person such as Rei sound mediocre. Her text is replete with platitudes and clichés, with no insight or intelligence to speak for it and now looks like a perfect Wikipedia entry. You could read these lines and rightfully find them quite presumptuous and arrogant. So you will be the judge.
When the Guardian heard about this they made sure that the British fashion magazine 10 would publish a text I would write on Rei. It is now on sale in every newsstand in New York, uncensored, unpurloined. Adrian Joffe did not content brand it. The real interview, which according to her husband was the best she had ever given? It will stay locked in a vault at ELLE and a contract signed by a broke writer will make sure that nobody ever reads it.
