We recently partnered with Slow and Steady to create Cool, Casual, and working with them has reaffirmed that you don't get much smarter than this.
How did you develop the concepts behind Slow and Steady?
The ideas for Slow and Steady were from this incubation period in college, because I went to school for art.
In doing liberal arts, I started thinking of fashion not just in regards to contemporary style, but in regards to history, anthro-
pology, sociology and how we interact with it.
In thinking of those things, the manifesto behind Slow and Steady came about. I wanted to offer something that was timeless but timely in this way where it would address certain ideas about the fundamentals of clothing design. At that time, Gap was still very much like basics, and I was thinking, 'Why can't interesting design be affordable, too?'
You have one collection with three price tiers: $1,000, $10,000 and $100,000. What are you offering?
Yeah, I am still developing the $10,000 tier, but the item in it right now is a black velvet evening gown with a faux-fox decoration at the shoulders. And then the $100,000 exists just as a concept now, and it is a Russian sable fur—which is the most expensive fur—but it is juxtaposed as a very basic silhouette as a trench coat. It's very utilitarian, but still luxury.
And then right now, the $1,000 tier is a pearl-encrusted T-shirt, a four-sided leather Hermes Birkin bag, and a crocodile bodega bag—which is like the plastic bag you get at grocery stores, but it's done in crocodile.
How many of each item do you make?
We do it based on orders, but the four-sided Birkin bag has been doing surprisingly well. But I think that also feeds into the phenomenon of this bag, which is a status symbol. What I like about it is that it is this whole commentary on expanding on the excessiveness of luxury. You have the ultimate luxury bag, which is the Hermes Birkin, but then what I've done with the structure of it is multiple it, so from every angle you can recognize it as the face of the Hermes bag. It's like a metaphor for excessiveness.
Is it hard doing so many different collections?
The whole line exists as a living archive, so everything is still readily available. It's a nice barometer for what people are interested in each season.
What are some of the concepts you wanted to address with the line?
One that really illustrates this is the No. 3 bag collection. People sort of hit the saturation point with the status handbags, and I was looking at all of these leather bags. Increasingly, I couldn't see where the design lay within the status it-bag. I wanted to take the really iconic ones and take away the expensive materials but keep the scale and the identifiable design properties of each one. Each bag is almost like a prototype, but people still recognize it.
Your wedding dress was really interesting, because that's an article of clothing that people really obsess over.
Yeah, collection No. 18, is a $100 wedding dress. For research, it was nice because I learned a lot trying to figure out what is the historical, emotional and psychological value of this dress for women. What does it mean? How did it evolve? Using all of that research, I tried to distill it into a $100 item, and that was a challenge: There are whole practical reasons why wedding dresses are so expensive, and then based on cultural practices, it is supposed to be the ultimate signifier of what a woman is supposed to be, and the wedding day and all these preconceived ideas are supposed to be attached to how you are supposed to behave. And then people are translating that into dollar signs, like 'It has to be expensive because it's going to be once in a lifetime.' I am actually really happy with the dress, because people were really responsive to it, and it was something that people really wanted to wear for their wedding.
How did you adapt these principles for Cool, Casual,?
When I first met with Urban Outfitters, I wanted to revisit what Urban Outfitters was like and I wanted to carry the idea of what Slow and Steady was about into the collection. There are pieces that I had already that would also sort of fit into Urban Outfitters, and so I curated those and then changed them so they were more unique. We had a white leather T-shirt for Slow and Steady, so that evolved into the Cool, Casual, black leather T-shirt.
Do you think a lot of people buy your clothes without knowing the story behind them?
Ideally, everyone's initial response is visual and visceral. For me, coming from an art background, that's something I always consider.
It has to be good design, and it has to be attractive and desirable. Each thing is created to have a purpose. I don't like things that are disposable.
If I am going to make a white T-shirt, it has to have some sort of special value.
We're obsessed with the trenchcoat.
Yeah, that was fun because it was combining very classic pieces and sort of making a hybrid of them. Everyone is really into classic motorcycle jackets, and also the classic Burberry trenchcoat, and I thought it would be funny if they were mashed into each other. I think that is another personality behind Slow and Steady, is that it has something to say. There is a little bit of playfulness and wittiness, but nothing so overt that it starts to wear its message on the front. It's still about clothes.
