Interview conducted on October 17, 2020
RL: Beginning from the start, tell me about your first fashion week, what you were doing there, and how you ended up doing it?
KG: My first… well there are a few first fashion weeks for me. My first encounters with fashion week were in 1991 or 1992. I started dressing at fashion shows. I used to get paid £36 and I would dress at Jasper Conran, Bettie Jackson, Duffer of St. George, Roland Klein, Clothes Show Live, and Michiko Koshino. I was at St. Martins at the time, I would make money by dressing at shows and that’s kinda how I learned my stuff. I learned how to work a fashion show from dressing at them and it was really fun, and you used to get loads of free champagne, and you’d get offered male models, and it was just really fun. It was like a dream. I was very good at it in some ways and awful at it in others! For me, it was a much more constructive education than being at St. Martins, because it was all firsthand, and you were there. At the time I think, a lot of people used to work for Galliano and later McQueen backstage. But this was normal fashion show stuff.
I think the first time I started going to shows, there is footage of me in 91. A fashion TV show, that BBC2 in the UK commissioned called The Look; I’m there and I’m interviewing Issey Miyake backstage at a fashion show asking him if he enjoyed it or not. We went to Paris through St. Martins and that was really fun; we were very young and arrogant. My time going to the shows was never like everyone else’s; I always felt like an impostor. We snuck into Comme des Garçon in ‘91, Katharine Hamnett when she showed up in Paris, Gaultier. Comme was really amazing, we all applied for tickets when we were at college and they were very charming and sent us standing tickets!
RL: After you went once and got your foot in the door were you going every season then? Did you have to hustle and sneak your way in like the people who are starting to do?
KG: It was never really my thing. I was always much happier working on the show than viewing the show. That was the thing that I liked, being on the back end. Like I’ve rarely done full seasons of going to shows. I started working on shows so young, I was just always that person who was at work, rather than going to the shows. I think you become part of a club when you go to the shows and I was never in that club because I was always in the back. I think because I came from a design background, my thing was always like can we do it like this, or how about this? Someone just posted on Instagram, the Louis Vuitton rubber boot, and it was that thing where I asked if we could do a wellington but on a platform. I just always came in and ended up in the design department rather than putting tops with skirts which, I don't know, that wasn’t the natural thing for me either.
RL: You started Dazed and Confused with Jefferson Hack and Ian Rankin in 1992. Did the fashion week establishment at the time accept Dazed into their events and activities? What fashion week coverage did Dazed do back then?
KG: None. I don’t even remember going to a lot of shows with Dazed... I remember maybe to a Helmut Lang show. Alister Mackie and Katy England came from a much more traditional fashion background of going to shows. I would go to student fashion week, McQueen shows, and some of Lee’s Givenchy shows, and I’d get invited to certain things that I worked for. I worked as a consultant for Gucci with Tom Ford and Tom would invite me to those shows. It was an early patent of I would only go to shows to which I was invited. Dazed, back then, was never really interested in fashion, it was always much more an art and music magazine, they weren’t really bothered about fashion. We never really had any money, there was never the budget to send people to shows. It wasn’t exactly the gold major of London Fashion Week. We’d go to McQueen, Hussein, there was very little. None of us had worked for anyone else so we didn’t know how to monetize fashion.
RL: Who was your clique going to fashion week, the gang you hung around with there? I’m sure there are plenty of stories of you getting up to mischief, the struggles back then that you look back at fondly.
KG: Luella Bartley was my main friend, and Katie Hillier, Giles Deacon, and Issie Blow was a big supporter. My favourite shows are when I would get sat next to Issie; they were so much fun. We were very cliquey, young, arrogant, and beyond obnoxious! Issie was 40 then but she was so much more interested in us than anyone else; everyone was so much older. One time, I and Issie went to a Michael Kors Céline show, and I’ve never enjoyed going to a fashion show more in my life. I think one of the first times I went to Paris for the shows, was when I was dating Lee Swillingham who was at The Face, and I don’t remember going to a single show! There is a really good memory where I and Charlotte Stockdale drove to the shows, that was fun. We drove her Land Rover to Paris and stayed at her flat in Paris. I remember going to Junya Watanabe, Comme des Garçons, maybe Céline by Michael Kors and We drove to every show, and I got the car stuck in the Louvre car park and did a three-point turn on the Pont Neuf. That was one of my favourite fashion weeks, and at one point nine people were staying in her one-bedroom flat. She was part of my posse, she was the posh one, and Issie made more sense around Charlotte.
RL: Did you assist in styling shows? What did you learn from them? Do you carry those lessons on to what you do today?
KG: The only show where I assisted someone was Issie Blow and it was a Lainey Keogh show, probably ‘92, maybe ‘93 and it was at Harvey Nichols when Harvey Nichols used to host London Fashion Week shows on their fifth floor. I borrowed the shoes from Johnny Moke. Neither of us knew how to put a fashion show together so we hid behind a curtain and drank champagne; me and Issie. I remember, our feet were sticking out behind the curtain and like school kids, cackling because we didn’t know how to style a show. I remember Sophie Dahl being there and she was amazing, we got Charlotte Tilbury to do the makeup. I literally had no clue what I was doing; Issie employed me because she thought maybe I might know what I was doing but I was just out of college, not even out of college, I would have still been at college if I’d stayed. The fact of the matter was I still didn’t know how to style a fashion show. We were creative directors at Bottega (Veneta), I think when I was 27, and it’s not like I knew how to put a fashion show together than either! There's a story that Miuccia tells about the second Miu Miu show that I styled, the one with the snakeskin platforms, and apparently, I went out in the platforms from the show like really happy cause I got new shoes. Well, you don’t know this stuff, do you... you go to St. Martins and you think you're amazing but they don’t teach you anything.
RL: Where were you working at the time? Dazed/The Face? Was it a matter of them seeing your work in those magazines, and building a relationship with them?
KG: I got increasingly disillusioned working with Rankin and Jefferson. I started dating the art director of The Face and I was hanging out a lot socially with the people from The Face. The situation with Dazed kind of became untenable. There was this idea that maybe I’d edit Homme+ under Ashley Heath. I was very aggressively going for the editorship of Homme+ and Ashley ended up saying “I’ll launch a new magazine for you!” and then it came down to Heath saying “If I'm going to launch a new magazine for you, you need to be the fashion director of The Face”, and I was like “I don’t want to do that”. At the time you could see that The Face’s success was kind of waning, and it felt very corporate to me, and I had come from independent publishing and launching things and things being internally very difficult but the outwards perspective is that it was all so breezy. In the end, they were like we’re going to launch a magazine for you so I went and did The Face and launched Pop with them. I wasn’t going to go from being fashion director of Dazed to being fashion director of Pop at that time and I had about two months of walking around London saying I was unemployed when I really wasn’t. Then The Face became sort of increasingly difficult; I think it was my first introduction to corporate culture. It would be quite difficult with them, but meanwhile Pop was my thing it was a twice-yearly magazine and it was a lot of fun.
RL: So what was the process going from there to styling Prada and Marc’s shows? Was there just an overnight moment where it all happened? It often looks like that to people but it’s usually years of grinding and hard work and making real strong relationships of trust.
KG: I was working silently for Gucci, as a consultant and I did three seasons with Tom (Ford) because he was a friend; it wasn’t very formal. I’d meet him and turn up with some second-hand clothes, he’d sort of humour me for an afternoon, and then I was becoming a bit of a thing. When I went to The Face, it all of the sudden looked very slick and polished. I brought Mert and Marcus with me and Sølve (Sundsbø); I brought in a group of photographers that looked very different from what The Face had looked like, so it was kind of under people's radar. Then coincidentally, Stuart Vevers, who had been one of my students at Westminster, I had been quite nice to him when he came into the Dazed office cause I really liked his collection. He said to the people at Bottega that I should work with him there, so I ended up working with them in New York and Vicenza. They had a guy called Ed Buchanan who was very good but very classic; Laura Moltedo, who was the owner at the time, wanted it to be more fashionable so I brought Giles (Deacon) in. It was so London, it had quite a big impact.
While I was at Bottega, I started working for Fendi, and then quite quickly I got a phone call about working on Miu Miu. I was supposed to be on a trip to Australia but Miuccia called, so I ended up canceling a holiday and went to work with them. I had been there a couple of hours, I took some vintage with me and Miuccia said “do you want to come upstairs and work on Prada?”, and that is what happened.
Then I suppose, I wasn’t too terrified of the situation. I suggested that Eva Herzigová open the show, and Prada at that time was very skinny, it was a very particular aesthetic and I brought in these very strong women. The first show that I did was very womanly and I wanted these Helmut Newton-looking women. I didn’t think anything of it, I was asked to do the show, and I was thrilled, went and did the show.
They had a casting director, but I think it took me a couple of seasons to realize what a casting director did. It was the same when I was at Katharine Hamnett on placement, I didn’t know what a stylist was until I met Ray Petri and his assistant and Melanie Ward. Then I realized what this job was and it was amazing.
I had friends who worked at Louis Vuitton and I was invited to a party after a Vuitton show. Marc was there and I met him. Shortly after, there was a guy called Keith Warren who was in charge of the menswear at Louis Vuitton. Keith was someone I had met on my first issue of Dazed and I dressed in his show at The Royal College (of Art) so all these relationships came back. Keith wanted me to do Vuitton men's shows, so I was doing Vuitton menswear, Prada, and Miu Miu at the time. I stopped working for Prada, and the minute I stopped working for Prada, Marc asked me if I would do the Vuitton women’s shows.
RL: Was there one show that stood out as the “I made it” show? Or maybe every show is kind of like that and I can imagine that you would be too busy to fully process it and take it in at the time.
KG: That first Prada show was pretty much that. I didn’t know what the etiquette was at the time. There is a funny story in retrospect, which was so unfunny at the time. I didn’t know if I was allowed to say I was working for Prada because they were much more closed back then than they are now. Stylists back then didn’t say what they did. I was working for Fendi and I bumped into the art director of Fendi in a restaurant and she was like “Why didn’t you come to the show?” and I had to say “I forgot” which was embarrassing. It was just one of those things where I didn’t know what to say. Needless to say, I lost the Fendi job.
RL: A lot of your contemporaries grew up with you, the cool London gang. Did you always work together and help each other out? Who was part of that dream team? Are they still going and do you still work together?
KG: Yes, we really did. I mean I hang out with Luella, I see Giles a lot, you know everyone is in different positions. I put the phone down with Katie Hilliard to come and talk with you. We work together differently now; Luella was a part of the latest Miu Miu project we just did, and she was one of the artists that we worked with. I'm still friends with Keith and Stuart who are now at Coach. It’s funny isn’t it, I’ve not worked with Marc for eight months now, which is very strange because we used to have such an intense work relationship, and now we just text; daily but it’s just strange. Miuccia I still work with. It's very strange working with the same intensity towards a show, and then it's a film! You film it and then walk off up the street; you don’t have the release of a performance or show or the reaction of a crowd.
RL: Do you do different things for different designers? What are the differences in the way that they work, and what are their different processes? Does Miuccia have a certain approach as compared to Marc?
KG: The thing I love doing with designers and I especially miss doing from working with Marc is I used to design all the shoes with him. So I designed shoes with Marc for about 16 years, so I really miss doing that. Miu Miu, sometimes I do the shoes, sometimes I don’t. For bags and shoes, I would work more closely with Marc than I do with Miuccia and Fabio. It also changes from season to season, sometimes you’re just there for support, and other times you’re really driving the concept or the idea. It very much changes with each designer and each season.
I tend to start a season with a very small rack of vintage and sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you turn up with those pieces and you keep going back to them, or you keep going back to aspects of them. It can be something very vague like the colour of a jacket or the fabric of something. You can see it the whole way through the collection. You just keep going back to that fabric, and that colour. Sometimes you turn up with the vintage and nothing sticks and it ends up being that the course of that show is very specific.
In the latest Miu Miu show, we had an exercise of looking back at vintage Miu Miu and we pulled out a photo of Chloë Sevigny wearing a check shirt with a zip up the front, and we kept going back to that top. To the point where it was 10 O’clock the night before the show, and I put that top on the girl that came out second to last. I just had this instinct, that that top had been our good luck charm, so let's just show the top and everyone was like “Yeah, let’s show the top. That sounds great!”. Maybe in 20 years of doing shows, there have been two occasions where I’ve been a part of a decision to show a vintage piece. It just really depends on everyone's mood, what they’re doing and what the goal is. In this Miu Miu show, everyone was very stuck on certain codes of what Miu Miu has been in the past and that stuck the whole way through. I didn’t take any vintage this season, which is one of the few times I have ever done that.
RL: Everyone seems to have a story of something big happening as a result of a chance meeting at a fashion party; what’s yours? Were there any transformative moments or chance meetings at the bar or in the smoking area?
KG: I think I randomly met Tom Ford through friends. He was the first big designer to work with me. Not that anyone knew that he had worked with me but I think that gave him quite a lot of confidence in those kinds of situations.
My first meeting with Marc was pretty chance and it was at the Costes Hotel, I was with Charlotte Stockdale, and I was pretty drunk. Giles and I met at college in the college bar; that ended up being a huge relationship.
Most of my relationships have started in bars. It has to be said!
Jack & Lazaro when I worked with Proenza Schouler, I had met them formally but I knew them socially. Chloe Sevigny was the same way. When you're that age and working in fashion, you kind of collide with certain people. Katie Hilliard and Stuart were both my students, which is on a different kind of axis.
RL: Almost as important as the shows (or maybe more depending on who you ask) are the parties and events at fashion week. You must have seen some legendary parties in your time. Which ones stick out in your memory, what went on there (if you are allowed to say)?
KG: I went to an Azzedine (Alaïa) party, probably in 2000, and Miuccia was there. It was when Prada owned Azzedine, that was pretty legendary. I’ve been to crazy parties in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. I think you're kind of… spoiled in fashion. You do get to go to these amazing things and amazing places. One of my favourite, favourite, favourite nights was in Shanghai when we did the Louis Vuitton train show, at one point I’m looking around the room and there was Yves Carcel, Marc Jacobs, Antoine Arnault, Pietro Beccari, Julie de Libran, and everyone is jumping on this bed and of course, we break the bed! And then we decide to go to another hotel suite and break a second bed! That was an amazing party, and then I got on the flight in the morning and it was terrible. Good times.
RL: What’s changed in the fashion week parties across the years? From the stories I have heard they used to be wild, especially in Milan! They seem so commercialized today, or is that just what we see on social media and in the daily mail? The debauchery happening offline!
KG: I went to Kate Moss’s 25th birthday party that Donatella Versace hosted, which was pretty wild. I think there is a level of discipline now that maybe wasn’t there then, but also I’m much older now. When and if we go back to having parties, you hope that the kids are having fun, and doing whatever they want to do. I’ve hosted some pretty crazy parties, the last two at the Standard went on all night and I don’t remember anyone, in particular, wanting to leave because they were feeling well-behaved. Miu Miu has hosted some pretty wild parties as well.
RL: The Love Magazine parties that you did with Mandi Lennard have been THE party of fashion week in the last few years. What makes a good fashion week party? What are the necessary ingredients?
KG: Dark lighting, alcohol that never runs out, Honey Dijon DJing, chips if you want them! I think you need to offer a potato at a certain point in the evening otherwise everyone else needs to leave because they're too drunk! Also only inviting photographers that don’t hassle people and know when to put the camera down.
RL: Talking about Mandi, you two have also been working with Matty Bovan who is a gift to the fashion industry and a highlight of London Fashion Week every time. You’ve also supported Tomo Koizumi and a lot of young creatives. You’re so busy, it must be really important for you to give up your time to these designers. How come?
KG: Because I can.
It's pretty hard starting, and I think if you’ve got someone like me or my peers helping you, it's pretty easy for us to make a few phone calls and help. To call my friends and get Pat (McGrath), Guido (Palau), Miranda (Joyce), or Syd (Hayes); Great hair, makeup, great models. I think it's important for you to pass on what you’ve learned and they all deserve a break. The people that I’ve worked with are very talented. I always quite like doing it as a contrast to working on massive shows. It's always really refreshing to be brought down to earth, there is no budget, no resources; It makes you feel good and it helps.
It was Giles that sent me Tomo’s stuff a couple of years ago. I loved what he did. You know, it’s that leap of faith from everyone. “Let's have a fashion show!” Then saying to Marc, “Can we have a fashion show in your store?” and then before you know it, there we all are in New York and there's Gwen(doline Christie), Rowan Blanchard, Bella (Hadid), Emily Ratajkowski, Joan Smalls. His clothes were so easy to work with, it was great for him to do, and he’s talented, Matty is talented, Richard Quinn is talented. It’s not difficult to help these people, so it’s nice to be asked. I’m always a bit indebted to them actually; Richard texted me the other day and asked if I wanted to do this thing that he’s working on, and I was like “Oh, good yes” so flattered to be asked.”
RL: Perfect Magazine, much like HFT, is very social media focused, and from what I understand you will do projects as and when they are needed; like the takeover, you did this season of Valentino. Do you think this is the future of fashion week? It’s very much been a lot about content in recent years and the pandemic has pushed it to be that over everything now.
KG: I was just with Tim Blanks, and you know, what's happened in the UK in the three days has spun everything on its head and I imagine we are following the lead from France. It sounds like it may be locked down pretty soon. The UK is partially locked down, probably going to get worse. The US is three weeks behind us. We were thinking maybe come February, not that things will ever go back to how they were, but some idea that maybe there would be a glimmer of recognition of what we did before. I think the last week has just shot that to shit basically. I think people are talking about live events in 2022 now rather than June 2021, so I imagine we’ll be going into another fashion week that's similar to the one that just happened.
RL: I think the idea of fashion week being a content Olympics and everyone across the world being to engage with it virtually is modern and exciting. Does this new way excite you or do you lament the old way? There is a lot to be said for the unmatchable excitement when those heels hit the catwalk and everyone stretches their necks to see that first look. Nothing like that energy. Do you look forward to that again, if it ever happens again?
KG: Yes, I think some people did it very well. I thought the Prada show had a clear vision of clothes, style, hair, makeup, and casting; for me, that was the most successful interpretation of where we’re at. You could see everything so clearly. I think in quite a lot of other shows, the concept was king overseeing the clothes. I think there'll be some lessons learned for how people did it, and others will follow. We are in the job of selling clothes, dreams, and magic. I think some executions of shows this time got lost in concept over information.
I don’t think you feel much, it’s very hard to look at your phone screen and feel anything comparable to Marc’s last show for example. A lot of Lee McQueen shows, you’d be left with so much emotion and they were so provocative. You cannot get that from a phone screen unless it’s a really bad text message! You could perhaps get that from going to a cinema, but you can’t do that anymore either. We’re in a situation where circumstances dictate everything and I think it’s going to take a minute to figure it out!
The thing that everyone seemed to respond the most to this season was Jonathan Anderson’s show in a box because it was just that thing that you can’t compete with what a show could have done.
RL: I guess it depends on what the new generation of fashion fanatics want, if they can story tell, and create the same excitement from their bedroom with a ring light and TikTok then maybe that’s the future. However, fashion week has made a lot of designers and changed a whole lot of lives. How do you feel about it? Would you be where you are now without the pomp and circumstance of the seasonal fashion tour de force?
KG: Nope! But you know, I think I’m one of those people that have worked on a lot of very, very big shows. That’s an answer embedded in 30 years of history.
Something will happen that is exciting, but I don’t know what it is.
What we realized is that the fashion calendar has gone, so to work for a bi-annual, monthly, or daily doesn’t matter anymore. You cannot financially forecast without a fashion calendar, but then the fashion calendar is dictating that it needs to be flexible. We were being asked to do so many collaborations. Valentino came to us with this collaboration within 24 hours and we just did it. The good thing about being a very small team is that we are all flexible and that’s hopefully why it will work we can do anything with any timeline; one of my favourite things is to get asked to jump to do something and then you do it tomorrow; let’s do it. A lot of traditional companies don’t work like that so we wanted to be very flexible and I know having spoken to brands for 30 years now, we’re at the point where you can’t just sell your double-page spread ad. You have to go to a brand with an idea and inevitably it has to be very specific to that brand; you wouldn’t take the same idea to Dior Beauty as Dsquared or Valentino Couture. The brands are dictating to us what they need, we pivot and listen to people and hopefully, some good ideas will happen.