Style as a concept has been hijacked to mean elite, refined and expensive when it should be thought of as a basic expression of life in much the same way as we all identify with music or speech.
Everybody's version of style is totally different and that's what I think keeps me going out on the street everyday is going out and kind of seeing the variations and what things maybe I'd never seen quite that way that I find very curious and how people will be able to communicate their own persona through their clothing, their posture, the way they wear their hair. I think all those elements end up becoming very interesting because I don't think I'm really particularly a people person. So for me I think it's interesting to kind of be able to read people in that way.
I don't at least for me I don't ever really look for trends. I'm looking for just what captures my attention at that time and rarely do I ever look back and try and put together trends or say this kind of trend is important. For me it's about the individual expression and if you go back and look through the archives you might find certain things become trends, but it's just not something that particularly interests me.
What I am looking for is a certain grace.
I love going to the runway shows. It's not so much for me a shopping trip as it is the appreciation of the craft of these design geniuses who come up with beautiful color combinations and beautiful proportion suggestions and these kind of ideas, so I look at the runway shows in very different ways, just kind of a romantic artistic interpretation of how they would like to see fashion going forward, but for me it's much more abstract. The runway shows are much more abstract than you know what ends up on people is much more real to me.
I think that's what really separates me in the world of fashion is I have a real understanding of actual clothes and how they work and how they should fit and a reasonably good artistic version of photography that kind of captures that. I think that was really kind of the best combination.
The difference between what designers create are you know they're creating a little world every season, you know head to toe, a full look, shoes bags, dresses, the whole thing whereas street fashion is what people are really wearing. There is an element of new. There is an element of previous seasons. There is your own history, you know your sweatshirt from high school and vintage pieces and it's that kind of combination that I find so much more interesting than just the runway, but you know and I love fashion.
It doesn't matter if it's 90 degrees in the summer and it's killer hot in Milan. The guys still put on their jackets to leave their office to go get lunch and bring it back to the office. You never see that in America. Guys barely can put on their shirts to go to the office or keep their tie done, so I think there is a romance that they're willing to and enjoy that formality that they've created there in Milan and all across Italy, but especially in Milan.
I did a different size of photograph at the FIAT gallery - this time the images are 30" by 40," so they're maybe like four times the size of images I've shown before in a gallery. I just saw them now, and once they're in the mat and the frame, they're just beautiful. It's funny because even though it's closer to life-sized, to me anyway, they become not necessarily anymore about the person, but they almost become a little more heroic.
It shocks me when young kids still say, 'I want to do a magazine,'
I think in Japan I think there is a lot of style and a lot of subcultures, but it will be interesting to see how much of them... how much of the people wearing those clothes are really expressing something about who they are or who they want to be and it will be very interesting to see, especially once you get there, once you get to a certain city like in Stockholm you really get to know the people a little bit and what they're saying through their clothes. It's more... To me I think it's much more interesting than just the clothes they're wearing or the length of the skirt.
There's this one photograph of guy I know named Simon. The way he's standing, the background, the way his tie's flipping in the wind-it looks good in the small version, but in the big version, he looks like some kind of Italian fashion superhero or something. Like if the fashion police couldn't handle it, they'd call Simon, wearing a big S on his chest for some kind of fashion superhero.
