Interview conducted on December 9, 2022

By Ryan Lowe, edited by Ben Pigott

Ryan: Thank you for allowing me to interview you. I’ve been following you for… I don’t know how long—feels like quite a while though.

Mel: Yeah I feel that way too. Probably like a couple of years I guess, I don’t know.

Ryan: So just very boring, the same ole same ole, to start the conversation. Who are you? Where are you from? And Why do you love fashion?

Mel: My name is Melissa Battifarano, I’ve been a fashion designer for a little over 20 years now. I am originally from New Jersey, but very close to the city and I’ve been in the city my whole adult life. When you’re in fashion, I think you have a love-and-hate relationship with it but there was nothing else I wanted to do. When I was a kid I was always obsessed with fashion and making clothes for my dolls, cutting my doll’s hair, and painting and drawing. Similar to you, I know your mother passed, my mother passed when I was five. So my father raised me and he was quite older, he was 56 when he had me. He had left my mother’s closet as it was, like a shrine, and everyone used to say, ‘You’re mom is such a fashion plate,’—that’s like an old-timey term. Like always wore heels and furs, and when she was dying my dad kind of bought her everything and she had a lot of her clothes custom-made. So it was kind of just trying to think about this idea, I knew my mother but not so well, thinking 'How would she dress now?’ And kind of creating almost a fantasy in my head and I was just obsessed with fashion—any time I could get magazines, I’d go into the paper store, buy my dad the Times every Sunday and ask ‘Can I buy Vogue? Can I buy Bazaar?’ There were so many magazines at the time. Every time I would get him the paper I would be able to buy magazines. And then I learned about WWD and was like, ‘Oh my God, something comes out every day? I can read fashion every day?’ Like, I was, you know, always obsessed with it. There was nothing else I wanted to do besides go to FIT and study fashion.

Ryan: And so you made it into FIT in New York? Was that a four-year program?

Mel: Yep.

Ryan: So when did you move to New York?

Mel: Where I’m from is a town in New Jersey called Fort Lee, which is about a mile from the city. I commuted, I mean, I was stealing my dad’s car when I was 15 and driving to the city so it was always very close. You could take the train so I grew up here. We would always go to the city as a family. My father was quite elderly so I had to take care of him through college, so I commuted through college and I wasn’t able to move out until I was 25, until we were able to move my father down to Florida.

Ryan: Did you have peers doing fashion? Or was it basically just you?

Mel: No, I didn’t know anybody. We had family friends and the wife was German and when she came here from Germany there used to be quite a big knitting industry here in the city, particularly in Brooklyn. She worked in the knitting mills with a woman who actually ended up becoming a knitting professor at FIT—so she introduced me to this knitting professor and when I went back to FIT she kind of, like introduced me and showed me all the knitting machines and everything and I was just fascinated. So she kind of helped me a little bit in terms of like, ‘This is something you can do for a career,’ but I didn’t know any designers. I didn’t have a family in fashion. I just did it.

Ryan: So you get to school, when is this? 90s?

Mel: I started school in ’96 and I graduated in 2001. I was 17 or 18 when I started there.

Ryan: What did the fashion industry look like then?

Mel: Calvin, Ralph, Donna, Michael Kors, and it was all 7th Avenue. Helmut Lang.

Ryan: And they’re teaching you about these designers at FIT?

Mel: Yes, they are. You have to learn about the fashion industry. I find it crazy, I don’t know if they teach the fashion industry anymore in fashion currently. FIT is a very business-minded school so they taught very practically what is going on—it was very 7th Avenue based at that time, obviously. Now the industry is much different. FIT is on 7th Avenue, a lot of those people went to FIT, you know, like Bill Blass. Everyone was running their own business. It wasn’t this whole crazy licensing thing like it is now like, Donna Karan doesn’t exist, the line was owned by G3, DKNY, Calvin Klein was owned by PVH, it was Calvin, Donna, it was very New York.

Ryan: Did you have a senior collection?

Mel: I did. So what I did was a 2 + 2 program, so you get your associate’s and then you get your bachelor’s. For my two-year degree, I studied fashion art, so I did portfolio presentations and I remember I had to do something, mine was the first woman president—you design a collection around what you think the first woman president would be wearing. For my four-year degree, I did knitwear specialization. I never loved draping, but as soon as I could go into knitting that was the first thing I wanted to do. I never really loved hard wovens or stuff like that. I always loved knits and a little more casual. I did a knitted fur concept. Fur was a huge industry back then so I became friends with this guy from Fox Unlimited, it was a huge fur district—he sold me fox fur pelts and I stripped the fox fur and knitted mini skirts and fox fur sweaters and leg warmers.

Ryan: Do you still have any of it?

Mel: I might have some of it in my storage unit still. I have photos of it somewhere, but not as many as I should. Everything’s on a film camera. I wish I had more photos of it. I remember liking how it came out. Joan Voss was my critic, she’s an old-time designer. You’ll still see her stuff at Neiman’s, kind of like an older customer, like an Eileen Fisher, sophisticated kind of thing. She didn’t get me at all and I remember she hated my collection. She was like, ‘This looks like something J Lo would wear,’ and I was like, ‘Well, yeah’ cause I did little, teeny-tiny crocheted hot pants and crocheted mini-skirts and these big, oversized fur sweaters and fur hats. I thought that was a compliment. I was also interning at Tommy Hilfiger at the time and J Lo was consulting on the women’s line, so it was very topical to be doing something like that.

Ryan: Was that the first job outside of FIT?

Mel: Yes. I worked at Tommy Hilfiger all through college. I was there from ’98 through ’01.

Ryan: What was your initial role there?

Mel: I was hired first as an intern and then I was assistant men’s sweater designer.

Ryan: So still along the lines of knitting.

Mel: Yeah, FIT was really weird at that point. You couldn’t get a four-year degree doing menswear. I always wanted to do menswear but you could only do a two-year degree and I wanted to get a bachelor’s. So I was like, let me work in menswear and get my degree. The first half of my career is in menswear. I love menswear because you have to be more cerebral. Maybe not so much today because it’s kind of over the top, there’s a lot of gender-bending and stuff obviously. I think in traditional menswear, men are not as expressive with their clothes as women, which is changing today. But I think you have to be a little more cerebral and well thought out with stitches or cuts or colors and it’s the subtle differences in menswear that make it interesting. Whereas in womenswear it’s sequins on it, and slash it, and give it a slut cut, and okay, women are more into that. But dudes are all about subtlety, so I always thought that was interesting.

Ryan: I read that you designed collections for Champion and Ralph Lauren?

Mel: I worked for Champion when I came back to New York after I worked for Puma. I was at Puma in Boston. Then I worked at Champion, I really wanted to get into women’s, and they were a huge company, made me a bunch of money and they were launching a sportswear line for Target. So I did C9 for Target, which at the time was the biggest line in Target. It was definitely different for me but what I really learned there was a lot of seamless knitting. Seamless knitting knits in a tube, initially it started in hosiery and now you’ll see seamless bras, and seamless underwear, it’s used in activewear and the lingerie world a lot. 

Champion is owned by Hanes, which at the time was a pioneer of seamless knitting. They had their own knitting machines down in North Carolina, so I really loved that. Really diving in and working with the programmers and technicians and the machines. It taught me a lot. As a sweater nerd, it went hand-in-hand. I like to nerd out on things like that, you know, graphing and stuff. It’s cool. When I first started at Tommy Hilfiger I had to do hand graphing, which you don’t have to do now, now you can just send it to the factory. Any of those big flag sweaters by Tommy Hilfiger, you’d have to get graph paper for the different gauges on a lightbox and graph it out. It’s crazy, it’s good to know how to do it.

Ryan: You’re very business motivated, how did you learn to juggle creativity and business like you do today?

Mel: Because of the jobs I’ve taken, I’ve had to. The job with Champion, they would fly me to Minneapolis to present to Target and it was like a hundred dudes—mostly dudes, and you have to sell the sizzle. Yeah, they want to be wowed by the collection but those guys were also buying toasters and socks, and blenders. The buyers that were buying your clothes were also buying those things. You have to learn how to cajole and convince and project and be a great presenter and creative, but you also have to be business minded, or else you’re not going to sell and you’ll lose your job.

Ryan: Did FIT teach you business?

Mel: It did but you definitely have to keep your eyes open and be sharp and astute, learn from your merchants, and the more you know, the better a designer you are. You’re not going to go very far as a designer unless you understand the 360 degrees in business. Unless you just want to be a starving artist and that doesn’t really work if you want to live in New York. You have to. I had a chat the other day with somebody that used to work at Calvin Klein and she’s so far removed from creative now, even though she came from design. I never want to be like that. I need to keep my hands on products and I need to stay designing because that’s what fuels me. That’s what I’m good at. 

I can speak to the business side, of course. I think I’m a good blend of both. I think particularly in American fashion the coral designers, the higher up you get, you’re not even touching the product. The highest you can really get as a designer is they put you up to be a chief product officer. You become a senior designer, then design director, then VP of design, SVP, then after SVP you’re usually chief product officer, which is a title now on the C suite. You’re managing people, which I don’t love. I do manage people but doing org charts. I don’t know why you would want a designer to do that. As a designer, I need to stay close to the product. You’re just going in and reviewing overall arching concepts. It’s a lot of people managing. In Europe, it’s more of a creative director, whereas in America they don’t really have that title here so much. It’s much more business minded. It always seems so funny to me to put a creative in that role. 

Ryan: I find your mood boards to be pretty gnarly—what is the next step in building a collection after the mood board?

Mel: Basically the mood board is a proof of concept and why I like doing mood boards is it keeps you honest. I’m breaking down the colors, the silhouettes, the graphic direction, pattern direction, and style references, and all that stuff is encompassed in a mood board. When you work with a team, you have some designers straying off the reservation and you’re like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, this is the mood board. This has been approved, everything that you need to do, just come back and look here.’

When I worked at Ralph we did these huge, elaborate rigs. Tommy Hilfiger, too. These companies used to do rig rooms. Taking that and putting it down on a board. It keeps you honest. Proof of concept. We’re not going to do a military jacket, this is about scuba, or whatever. Know what I mean? 

After you get the mood board approved by the powers that be, I move on to hand sketches. Some people go to the computer, I always start hand sketching. And then graphic and then print and pattern from there. Design the collection. 

It depends, working for a brand like Diesel, I’ll work with the merchant and I’ll have a collection plan. It’s like, ‘Okay we need four bottoms, five tops, three jackets,’ whatever it is. ‘Well, I want to do a catsuit, I also want to do a vest. I also think we should do a three-in-one jacket.’ It’s working hand-in-hand to refine the collection plan and select fabrics. The fabric also has to happen in tandem before you really get to do the sketches. You have to think about cost, you have to understand what your raw materials are, and the fabrics that you can dive into, and balance that with the difficulty of the garment. If I’m trying to make a jacket that’s going to sell for $400, I can’t use a $20 per yard fabric and then also do a three-in-one jacket with 8 pockets on it. It’s not going to cost in.

Ryan: What’s your favorite fabric to work with?

Mel: It depends on what garments I’m making. If I’m doing bodywear I feel like I’m always going back to rib knits. I love what they can do, the way they can form to the body. It can be compressive, it can be sexy. 

Ryan: I see that you did the first activewear collection for Diesel, you did the first Puma x Fenty, and Tory Sport—what traits do you have that make brands trust you from the start?

Mel: With Tory, I have a very good girlfriend, Nicole Saldaña, she’s a prolific shoe designer. She was at Opening Ceremony for many years. She took the job over at Tory and didn’t have a strong background in activewear. She called me to work with her, ‘You know all about activewear, athleisure, sport, bodywear, bras, and Tory wants to do all this stuff and it’s not my wheelhouse. They hired a development girl from Adidas, she says, ‘You worked with Puma, you worked with Fila, come help.’ That’s kind of how that happened. I guess I just have a loud mouth and dive in. A lot of it felt like ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ but I wasn’t faking it at that point because I had so many years in the industry. 

With Rih, I think we really connected on our initial conversation about sport and about vintage and things that I collected, things that she loved. I used to keep these sketchbooks, which I don’t so much anymore, you’d put all of your tear sheets and all of your hand sketches, and collect them in these black books. I showed her one of my black books, they’re over-stuffed with shit, and was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this.’ We hit it off from that chat and I wasn’t going to fail. We got into a lot of, I don’t want to say fights, but that job wasn’t easy. Especially during the beginning, it was crafting what her brand should be. At that point, she was a pop star, a fashion icon in terms of what she wore but didn’t have a fashion collection. How do you separate Rihanna from Fenty? She could wear whatever on a red carpet, that’s gotta be different than what the brand is. It was starting from there. When she moved me over to Savage, it was that all over again. The Fenty name had been established already, there were kinds of codes that she understood, recognized, and wanted to carry through. Even though it was a different product category, the brand already had some life to and Fenty Beauty had already been established. These are the codes of the house. It was a little bit easier when we were trying to extrapolate than when we were starting Savage.

Ryan: Are you still working with Diesel?

Mel: I actually just wrapped up with Diesel, it was a two-year contract. I had a few people that put me in touch with that opportunity. Glenn and I had a chat in December 2020. We were still quarantining, he was in Paris and I was in New York. I didn’t get to Italy until last summer, I couldn’t travel until July 2021. Their former CEO was super into fitness, he was the former CEO of Balmain, Massimo Piombini. He really wanted to do an activewear collection and thought it was right for the brand. I already had a couple of mood boards that I had done, I showed him and he loved them, he sent me a couple more references and he let me do what I wanted to do. I was finally able to go there and have fittings, he gave us input. We were really on the same page about what it should be. He’s very prolific. 

Ryan: So you started a brand after your late father, Tony 1923. How did that all come about? Are you still working on it? 

Mel: I am working on selling what I have before moving forward, just in good faith. I did have nice sales when I had a pop-up, it takes a lot of money to do. I loved doing the show, it was super well-received. A great Vogue article came out of it, a great Highsnobiety article came out of it, and The Cut wrote a nice article on it. Memphy was in my campaign, Sasha, Mazurbate modeled for me. Misa Hylton came to the show. Her son, Justin Combs (Puffs son) modeled in my first campaign. 

Ryan: Who are some of your favorite designers and or stylists?

Mel: John Galliano is my all-time favorite designer, ever. Bar-none. Obsessed. Love.

Ryan: Givenchy? Dior? Margiela? His namesake brand?

Mel: Oh definitely Dior.

Ryan: Do you have a favorite collection?

Mel: A few collections but probably Spring/Summer ’04—the Haute Couture Egyptian collection.

Ryan: What did you think about the most recent Dior show in Egypt?

Mel: I actually really liked it. I liked that Kim Jones pushed the outerwear and I loved some of the 3D-printed headpieces. Obviously, the headpieces that Stephen Jones had done are amazing. I think Kim gives Stephen a lot of creative freedom, which I love. I thought it was really cool, really modern.

Nobody’s doing what Galliano did, which was fantasy. I love to see glamour and I love what he did with it. You know, it was such an all-encompassing thing. He was really creating that fantasy that you just don’t have anymore and putting that love into every fucking thing. From the jewelry, the shoes, and the bags. Loving women, loving cuts, creating that story. Like Amanda Harlech, but with his own collection. Those stories that they would create were just born with a passion. He’s my all-time favorite.

Of course, I love McQueen. I love Calvin. Calvin, to me, was such an innovator. A practical American designer but he created such beautiful, simple, classic garments. Really playing on a woman’s body and that, for an American designer, there isn’t that anymore. Stephen Sprouse.

Ryan: Menswear, womenswear, activewear, or urban? 

Mel: I can’t really pick. I really just enjoy the design process, personally. I never thought I would love lingerie but then I did it and was like, ‘This is ill.’ I enjoy working with a team.

Ryan: Out of all the roles you’ve played in your career, which one taught you the most, and why?

Mel: Definitely Fenty. In the beginning, it was difficult getting my footing but I wasn’t going to fail, I wasn’t going to let it go out the window. Being able to pull something from out of yourself, ‘How am I going to solve this?’ And being able to do that.

Ryan: What do you think the future of fashion holds?

Mel: I think it’s an interesting time. So many brands have closed. So many opportunities have closed. So many teams are getting streamlined and downsized. There’s so much sameness in fashion, nobody wants to take risks. Cancel culture has got to stop. Designers and stylists feel handcuffed, terrified to push the envelope. I think we have to allow a little grace to let people make mistakes. To fall down and learn and come back up. I don’t think we’re in the time anymore of a Karl Lagerfeld—somebody who’s drawing the full collection themselves, it’s one singular vision from somebody’s view, who’s a designer that can drape, sew, pick colors, pick fabrics. It’s so much now a cult of personality. I think that’s where fashion is going to go. There are glimmers of creative directors like Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli—let’s see what happens.

Ryan: Any advice to people who like fashion?

Mel: Keep trying to find mentors. Even if 9 times out of 10 they don’t answer, one time they might, which is cool. And you will outgrow your mentors and that’s the trick, that’s what you want to do. I had one when I worked at Champion, she came from Nike and Adidas and I didn’t know how to speak to groups of corny dudes. And she knew how I learned and now I surpassed her. Keep learning, keep growing. Any chance you get to go to a library, take it.