'I ended up feeling too alone' … Nicolas Ghesquiere on why he left Balenciaga. After parting ways with Balenciaga in November last year, designer Nicolas Ghesquiere has stayed out of the limelight. Until now. The debut issue of System, a new magazine guest-edited by Ghesquiere's longterm collaborator Marie-Amelie Suave, contains his first post-split interview. A Juergen Teller portrait of the 42-year-old at his desk, complete with ornate fireplace in the background, logs and several pairs of splendid orange scissors, is revealing, as is the text. Here are five things we learned – stationery tips aside, of course.
"Those brands [Prada and Chanel] have family and partners surrounding them, and they have creative carte blanche. Prada, for example, has made this model where you can be a business and an opinion leader at the same time, which is totally admirable. It's the same thing at Chanel. Sadly, I never had that. I never had a partner, and I ended up feeling too alone."
"The strongest pieces that we made for the catwalk got ignored by the business people. They forgot that in order to get to that easily sellable biker jacket, it had to go via a technically mastered piece that had been shown on the catwalk."
"There are people I've worked with who have never understood how fashion works. They keep saying they love fashion, yet they've never actually grasped that this isn't yoghurt or a piece of furniture – products in the purest sense of the term. They just don't understand the process at all, and so now they're transforming it into something much more reproducible and flat."
"I didn't actually see all the reactions straight away [after leaving the brand] because I was in Japan at the time; one of my best friends had taken me on something of a spiritual trip to observe people who make traditional lacquer and obi belts; it was such a privileged environment … On the other side of the world, there was this violent announcement being made."
"[I'm] preparing for the next chapter and having the time to observe what's going on in the industry. People could have forever associated me with Balenciaga … Now I can imagine a whole new vocabulary. I'm regenerating again, and that's very exciting because it's a feeling I haven't had since I was in my 20s."
No comments:
Post a Comment