← The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein
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- [00:00]
A
I'm a big fan of things that no one can take from me. You know, that I love doing and I don't want my identity to be wrapped up in my work. I do think it's part of it is seeing it go away so quickly and thinking, shit, who am I? Who am I and what do I love doing? And how do I get back to that if I have to rely on someone else to give me the opportunity to do that?
- [00:21]
B
Hi, I'm Dan Rubenstein and this is the Grand Tourist. I've been a design journalist for more than 20 years and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food and travel. All the elements of a well lived life. After more than 160 episodes of the Grand Tourist, people ask me what I've learned and I've mentioned this before. After a while I've realized that all great designers, artists, curators and so on have really many things in common. They take risks, they go against the grain sometimes and they follow tradition, sometimes to the letter. They fail and yet they keep pushing through. And their real passions and skills go well beyond the particular occupation they're known for or what they get paid for. My guest today is one of those American creative avatars that has conquered many industries, all with a flair for multi hyphenate success. Reed Gregoff. Reed has been synonymous with American style and taste for decades now. First as a design wunderkind at Tommy Hilfiger, before totally remaking the brand Coach into a style behemoth. He launched his own luxury line, which eventually closed, before taking the reins at Tiffany, where he once again dusted off a legacy brand, helping it reach new heights of creative and financial success. I first remember hearing the name Reed Krakow during my days at House and Garden magazine. At the time he was the creative director at Coach, but to us he was more of a connoisseur, someone that not only excelled at making things that sold, but as a tastemaker and contributor to the culture at large, he was someone who had something to say. Today he holds positions with John Hardy and the Gap, which we'll get into, but he also designs homes with his wife Delphine, is an avid photographer, budding ceramist, and has published many books and articles. And he's a prolific collector, especially of 20th century design. For our second hardcover print issue, out now and available online, I asked Reed to photograph himself and his home to give us an insight into his world and what makes him tick. So make sure you visit thegrandtourist.net to order your copy online now. I caught up with Reed from his home in Connecticut to discuss growing up with a media mogul of a father. What he learned from the likes of Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, what went wrong and what went right with his own brand. Defying the Pearl, clutchers at Tiffany, his new gigs, his new passions, what's collectible today, and much more. Well, I'd love to start at the beginning with you. And I read that you were born in Connecticut and you had a few siblings, and how would you characterize your kind of early life and upbringing?
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A
So I was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, Fairfield County. And it's funny, the movie the Ice Storm, I think, pretty perfectly encapsulates my growing up. It was exactly that period where I was in high school and younger, and I even. It's funny, some of the locations, New Canaan Country Day School and Canaan High and some of the other areas. Places that I remember being when I was. When I was a kid. So it was very. I grew up in a very small but chic modernist house.
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B
Oh, okay. I was about to say New Canaan is known for its modernist residences and.
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A
Exactly, exactly. There are more modern houses in New Canaan, I think, than anywhere, certainly on the East Coast. You know, Frank Lloyd Wright did houses here. Philip Johnson did four houses here. Noyes did a couple houses here. Quite amazing in terms of that. I actually spent most of my time in Westport and Weston growing up. But it was, you know, it was very much that period of. Of kind of reflected, like I said in. In the film the Ice Storm. It was very.
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B
I don't know, that film, actually. Oh, okay. All right.
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A
Yeah, yeah. It's. It's essentially about life in the 1970s during. In Fairfield County. So it takes place right there, actually. But it's. It was, you know, the house I was mentioning, the house I grew up in, was a very chic but small modernist house. We had like a Barcelona table in the living room and knoll couches and design the house. You know what? My mother worked with an architect, a local architect.
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B
So your parents built it?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Oh, okay. Wow.
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A
And it was sort of a typical asymmetrical cedar sided, call it contemporary for the time, home. And it was. The furnishings were mostly modernist and at the time, I guess, somewhat unusual. But so I kind of grew up in that world of sort of clean, minimal, sort of tailored space. It definitely informed my aesthetic a lot.
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B
And you have siblings?
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A
I do. I have one brother, one sister. We're all totally different, as happens in many Families. My brother is very sort of traditional academic. Harvard Business School, Northeastern undergrad. The opposite of me, I would say I was a terrible student and I'll get to that in a moment. And my sister was. Played college sports and you know, always was really active and athletic and that became a big part of her life as well.
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B
And I read that your dad worked, was sort of like a media executive for quite some time. Had a full career, he did.
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A
My father was in media. And so basically it was printed. Printed what I guess today no one really talks about but magazines and their related trade shows actually. So all of those shows at the Javits center and around the world was a business that he ran for many years actually. And so I grew up working a lot of those shows, like the car show and the tech machine show and, and the food show and all these things that kind of amazing. And I worked there in the summers and vacations and worked in doing whatever needed to be done. You know, in those days you could work when you were 14 and no one would have a problem with it.
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B
And if I could go back in time and meet you as a 16 year old kid, you mentioned that you were bad in school. What was a 16 year old, Reed Krakow like?
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A
So I went to four high schools in four years. One of them actually three high schools in four years, one of them twice. Okay, so I was, I don't know, I was definitely one of those people I've grown up to know a lot of them. At the time, it wasn't a thing. But who probably had a terrible case of adhd. And undiagnosed of course, because in those days it was just, you know, why aren't you doing this? Or why aren't you doing your work or why aren't you going to school? So I was definitely really creative. I was always drawing and painting and actually I was playing sports. I was actually recruited to play college hockey. Ended up not wanting to do sports in college because I just didn't feel. It's funny, I remember thinking, I don't want to spend the next four years, you know, hanging around hockey rinks and traveling around with a team. I want to have a different experience. So I ended up not doing that. But when I was 16, I was, yeah, I was pretty mischievous. I would say I was a kid that it's funny having my own kids. You kind of see that at that. You kind of see it sometimes yourself in them. And you realize that you just have to kind of get through that point. You know, there's Nothing really you can say or do other than to be there as a parent. But it just takes time to grow out of it. And the moment I got to college, I kind of found myself and never thought about it again, like what do I want to do? Or I'm basically a straight A student and studied three different things and then went on to go to Parsons. So it's one of those great examples of someone finding themselves after high school. And high school is pretty tough for most people.
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B
And like, why fashion and how did that come about? Were you always interested in fashion anyway?
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A
I was always interested in it for sure. Always interested in art and design just for whatever reason. It was always something that appealed to me. And fashion was. It was just one of the things I was interested in. And as I got to my early 20s, I decided I wanted to go to Parsons and see if it's something that I actually am any good at. It's something that I just felt like I needed to try.
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B
Could you draw? Were you like a good.
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A
I always drew Illustrator. Yeah, always drew. Didn't cut or sew or understand pattern making, none of that. But I went to Parsons and I remember thinking, I will never think about this again. What is it I want to do? I just immediately fell in love with it.
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B
Do you remember an aha moment or anything?
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A
Yeah, I think it was really early on in my days at Parsons and I was at home sitting on the floor working on some project and realized that one, I loved it and two, I might be able to be successful at it. I might be good at it. And I tried so many things. I'd studied music at Berklee School of Music. I had done. Been super involved in sports. I was involved in more classical art. I studied at the school Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, took a few classes. Wasn't. I wasn't a full time student there and I just wasn't. Honestly, I wasn't great at any of those things. I mean, I remember going to Berkeley and it's probably the most competitive place to study jazz. And I was, I think out of 600, I was a guitarist, 600 jazz guitar majors. I probably was number 601, you know, in terms of being the best people were just so. I just never experienced that level of talent. I mean the people that were would sit in a practice room for a day, two days, you know, leave, bring food in, study more, you know, practice skills. I just didn't have that dedication. The same thing with more classical art people. They were in the painting program. I just didn't have that. I say discipline or you have to be 1000% in it to be successful in those businesses. And if you're not, you shouldn't be in it. And I've told that to many people over the years who want to be in fashion. So I. I definitely started to see, like, maybe I can be successful in this. And I loved it. And I had no problem committing to it and spending a lot of time studying, you know, going to classes, doing all the work that I could possibly do. So it was kind of. It was. It was not a specific moment, but it was definitely a period where I actually never thought about it again. I haven't. It was 35 years ago. I haven't thought about what do I want to do when I grow up kind of thing. So I was really lucky to find that.
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B
And like, you know, for the first decade of your career or so, you worked at different places like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. And what was that sort of first decade of life like? You were living in the city, I'm assuming.
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A
Living in the city. It was amazing. I was. I've been really fortunate that I've been in the industry during a period and moved around during that period where I feel like I experienced the best periods of kind of each segment of the industry. Menswear, accessories, womenswear. Had my own business for a while when I. My first job was at Ralph Lauren, actually my first paying job. And it was just an amazing place to be. You know, I was lucky to be there. What were you doing there? So I was an illustrator when I started. I was sitting up in this little room. The offices used to be at 40 West 55th Street. And those offices were literally in a co op. So you had, you know, the neighbor walking their dog, and you'd be walking to a meeting with a bunch of boards, and then you'd walk into. What would you call it, a conference room if you wanted to. But it was really probably used to be a living room. And that was where Ralph started. I mean, there are amazing pictures of him doing his first presentation and what looks like and in fact, is an apartment. So they bought sort of all the different apartments that became available and started becoming sort of to look like an office. But lots of people had. You know, I remember one friend hung her samples on a shower rug and there was a bathtub still there. So it was kind of. It was an amazing place. It was really at the peak of Ralph's popularity. 19. Call it 98. Oh, sorry, not 98. At all. I jumped ahead about 10 years. 88, 89, 90. I was there four or five years. And it was. It was perfect for me because it wasn't pure design. And again, it was really just fortunate that I landed at a place where it wasn't about sort of classical design. It wasn't about a traditional designer role. It was much more about creating a mood, creating an identity, a world to kind of live in. And, you know, in. In hindsight, I mean, today it feels like, well, of course that's what it's about. But then there really wasn't anything that was similar to it. I mean, Calvin was at the time, but design was really about fashion design. You know, the designer was in a studio, the executives were in an office. And, you know, it was years before Tom Ford went to Gucci. So there was no such thing as a designer on the board of a company. There was no such thing as a creative director. Believe it or not, you basically were the designer. If it was your own brand, perhaps, but maybe not even then. But designers designed and marketing people were ad agencies and executives were executives. So it was a great place for me to be because I wasn't pure in any of those ways. I wasn't a pure designer. I wasn't a pure marketing person, certainly. So I really learned what it is to build a brand. You know, I learned what it is to add licensing categories, to add shoes, and to add home and eyewear, jewelry. And it. It was such an amazing education on enduring while it was happening, actually. How do these brands become a world that people can dream to be part of, which, to me is like the essence of American luxury? You know, it's really more about the idea than it is about, let's say, design virtuosity, which I feel like European design is much more about that. And hence they've led. I mean, I think I can say they've led most of design in the fashion world forever, basically. Not to say there aren't people that have contributed, but much less commercial, the European brands, much more driven by aesthetic and by sort of artistic expression. Whereas American is, you know, American is. It reflects the American experience. You know, it is much more utilitarian, it's much more democratic. It's much more about, call it sportswear, I mean, which was really invented in America when you think of Bonnie Cashin and, you know, people that were making clothes that. That had an unmistakable utility to it, at least as a jumping off point. So I feel like, I mean, Claire McCardell is another one. People would have to look them up, but probably. But, you know, they were the first people to take sort of fashion and make it for every day. You know, obviously, Coco Chanel was sort of in. In that world of taking something that's rarefied and seeing it through a more casual lens, an everyday lens. So getting back to Ralph Lauren, it was just a great mix of all these different skill sets. And what's amazing is I didn't know that I was literally learning what I needed to know for my next job that didn't exist when I started. So four or five years into it, I got a call from Tommy, and he had hired a bunch of people from Ralph Lauren, and he called me and hired me to be the creative director, essentially, which, at the time, I'm not sure I knew what it meant, but it was just after Tom Ford went to Gucci, and there was a moment where every brand decided this was the secret formula. Every brand. I mean, it was crazy.
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B
Was your time at. Ralph, like always as an illustrator, or did you change jobs within?
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A
So. Good question. So I actually moved to sportswear, and by the time I left, I was. I was acting creative director, or, sorry, design director. Design director of. There was a sportswear area. It was more activewear. It was, like, sort of casual. It was tennis and golf and ski and swim and all these different things and outerwear. And. And then my boss came back from maternity leave and she got her job back. And then I realized that I was back to being a designer. And that's when, essentially, when I got a call from Tommy. So I really was sort of in the rank and file of designers for, like, almost five years.
- [19:22]
B
And with coach. I'm sorry, with. With Tommy. What did you learned there? Like, what was that period like?
- [19:28]
A
So it was incredibly fortunate to land when I did and have kind of a broader skill set at Ralph. The designers had to set up the showrooms, put together the looks for the mannequins, you know, basically help tell the story of what the collection was about. And that later, was really what gave me the ability to at least think about being what a creative director became, which was. Was marketing. It was doors. It was, of course, design, but basically it was storytelling in its purest form. And how. What are the elements that come together that inform how a customer feels about a brand? Basically, all those different touch points, and it was. It's amazing. It was really luck that, as I said, Tom Ford went to Gucci. There was this desire to have a creative person that understood the broad nature of talking to Customers and also maybe understood the business a little bit at the beginning. So when Tommy asked me to be the creative director, I thought, why not? Of course, I'd never done most of those things before. One of the things in my career that's surprising, I think, is that I've never done any job that I've gotten before I got it, and I'll explain that. So I'd never been a creative director before. There wasn't one when I started at Ralph, so there wasn't the idea of one. So I was essentially given an opportunity to be that person. And, you know, I kind of fumbled my way through it for a year or so. And then by the time I would say a year, 18 months, I kind of figured out, you know, I was styling the ad campaigns, I was setting up the showrooms. I was the design director working with Tommy on kind of everything. And it kind of all flowed pretty naturally. And before I knew it, I could say, you know, I think I understand how to do this. So I was at Tommy during a really amazing time. I mean, we. The shows were sort of a mix of music and pop culture and, of course, clothing. And it was different than everything that was going on at the time. It was quite radical for the time. The shows and the collections and the marketing was really. I mean, he's always been a genius at understanding pop culture. He really.
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B
What does he like to work with?
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A
He is. Is just the nicest, most supportive guy. I mean, we're still friends today. I speak to him, I would say, a couple times a year. I will get to the fact that he did fire me at the end. But you know what Tommy was. He was an amazing example of someone who. His belief in himself and his undying commitment to that is something that created his entire career. You know, it was such a good example of someone. The power of believing in what you're doing. And he became. He went from being someone who. You remember those ads. I don't know if you probably don't remember them, but you probably know of them. The Times Square billboard, where it was like, there are five great American designers, one of them you've never heard of. And in fact, no one had heard of Tommy at the time. It was pretty bold to do that. He always believed in himself, and. And no one could tell him he was going to fail. So he was incredibly inspiring in that way. And I really took that from him, you know, away from him as I left. When I left Tommy. But he was. You know, I would go on shoots, and we would Talk once, maybe. Maybe twice during the days where you had to shoot for a week. You know, you go somewhere and do 100 pictures or whatever. So he. He really allowed me to do as much as I could, which was a lot at the time. So it really was. He was incredibly supportive and generous and never threatened by anything I was doing. You know, sometimes designers have kind of a stranglehold on the brand because it's about their ego. Tommy was always about leveraging people around him that could help with. You know, help with the overall success. So he was. He was an amazing person to work. I've had the fortunate. I've had the fortunate or the luck to work with so many different people that have been supportive and kind of pushed me to do as much as I could, even when I, frankly sometimes didn't think I was able to do those things. But it was. It was like the beginning of hip hop becoming part of popular culture. It was kind of crazy. I mean, people would just come to the office all the time and just show up, and everybody. I don't know, Tupac, Snoop, Julio, Puffy, I can say, but maybe I shouldn't say. I'm trying to think of some Aaliyah before, obviously, she passed away. Salt and pepper. Everyone, literally everyone, they would show up and. And it was. It was kind of funny. Tommy would bring them to my office and. And often leave me with them. He once left me in an Office with Leonardo DiCaprio. Young Leonardo DiCaprio. Like, Romeo must die. Was that. No, not. Sorry, Romeo and Juliet. Not Romeo. And we sort of stared at each other. I had no idea who he was. He certainly didn't know I was. So he was Tommy. He loved being part of that popular culture. He loved. There were always interesting people around, but you name it. Every musician we dressed. David Bowie, Metallica, Lenny Kravitz. It was an amazing time. It was. It was really super creative. And it was a different way of being in the world of fashion. It was much more of a. This amalgam of fashion, popular culture, marketing, understanding, kind of the zeitgeist of what was happening and plugging into that. You know, the ads were always different than everyone else. They were. There was like a looseness and unstudied kind of feel to them. You know, the guys were wearing, you know, Alden's shoes with no laces, and they had, you know, band Aids on their legs where they, you know, had gotten into some, you know, something. They had a scrape on their leg or something. It wasn't retouched. Out. You know, the makeup was non existent on the models. It was, it was pretty beautiful. I mean, it was, it was very authentic in a way that very few brands have been able to capture. And it was, you know, it was just felt real and it definitely felt like something that I understood in a very direct way. So I think I was helpful to him for a bunch of years.
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B
Did you go from there to coach or was there a step in between?
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A
So at the end of my time there, it was clear that. And I was young. I mean, I was just creative director when I was 28 and we had huge budgets and we were doing shows at Sony Soundstage and doing all kinds of amazing things that I probably got to. I did get too wrapped up in sort of the fantasy and the spectacle of what was happening and not focused enough on the day to day business. So essentially we talked about starting another division that I would run. We talked about doing more of what I had done in the past, which was more straight ahead design. And when I couldn't make a decision, he made one for me basically and said, you know what, it just doesn't make sense for you to be here anymore. So you may not appreciate it now, but we're going to part. Which is kind of a shock at the time because Tommy was doing amazingly well. Tommy went public in my second year there and the company had grown so enormously over those four or five years. So it was kind of a surprise and it taught me a bunch. It taught me one. Everyone needs to get fired once in their life. Twice as too many, I would say, but boy, does it wake you up to. I mean, I thought I would never work again. I really did. Everyone was calling and wanting an answer of what happened and I didn't have an answer really. And I really thought this might be it, this might be time to do something else. And for about a year no one would touch me because it was kind of a public. In public. That's a terrible way to say it in the industry. It was quite known that I had sort of lost the thread of what was important. And so people are sort of like, you know, there's not a level of maturity there that we want to see from a senior. Because I was, I was, you know, again, an EVP level person or a SVP level person in my late 20s. That's crazy. And I just didn't have the maturity to. It was overwhelming. And I probably. I definitely had issues with just staying focused simply. So I really didn't get a call. Not. There were no emails, but I definitely didn't get a call from anyone, really. And I thought, huh, this. This really made me realize it all can go away in an instant. You know, I went from flying around the world, working with all these amazing celebrities and having a huge team to having nothing. And it was really sobering. I was. I had always wanted to work in Italy, in Milan, and actually went to Milan for a couple days and was hired by Nicola Trussardi to be the creative director of Trussardi and which was a dream to me. It was always like the Italian Hermes, I thought, and I spent time with them. He hired me. He gave me an apartment on Via Jesu. I lived at his house for a while because I wasn't ready to live there in Bergamo. Bergamo, sorry. It was amazing. Until I realized it wasn't. It was a family business. His wife was involved, his kids were involved. He had all kinds of freelance people and stylists and very much how a lot of the businesses were run that way in Europe, not in the US And I thought, I'm never going to be in charge. I'm never going to have the control I need, one, to be happy and two, to be effective. So I came back to. I hadn't resigned. I did one ad campaign and I did a bunch of work. We did a campaign with Mark Borthwick, who's an amazing photographer, and I went back to New York for casting and I never went back to Milan. I got a call. So what happened then was I got a call from a headhunter who said, just, I want the people at Coach to realize that there are different kind of creative people and that have a business head that understand kind of the holistic nature of talking about a brand telling customers a full story versus just design. And then you separate and that's marketing, and then you separate again and that's store design and all those things. And so I met with the people there and it just felt right. And immediately I let Trisardi know I wasn't coming back. Actually never got paid even. I never was that it was that easy to walk away from it. And I started at Coach as the executive creative director at 31, I think. 31.
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B
And what was the brand like when you, when you joined, would you say the state of how people saw a Coach was.
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A
So I should say this is the second time. I've never done this before. I'd never designed a handbag in my life. Never. Not even one. But I was, you know, fortunate that people understood that maybe it's possible to see things differently. And if you're a good designer, you're a good designer. You know, having 30 years of handbag experience is not necessarily what it's about. It's about a great team, people that you can trust. They can fill in around the technical parts that you don't know how to do. But it's really more about the vision, the creative vision. And so Coach was extraordinarily traditional. It was at a moment when Mark went to LV and this sort of, to use that expression, logomania was. Was happening. So it was Gucci and it was LV and Fendi and it was very much about sort of ostentatious consumption. And people wanted to show what that. So Coach was the antithesis of that. Coach had no logo. Coach with leather bags. Nothing more. Nothing. It was totally vertical company. Everything was manufactured within factories owned by Coach. Puerto Rico, Florida, New Jersey, you know, that was Offshore. You know, New Jersey was considered as a joke. Offshore. There was no such thing as. No one was making bags in or accessories or ready to wear, even in Asia, other than kind of entry price point things. So it was a bad time. The business was going backwards. It was less than 500 million. And it was a moment where I think being so young was great. People didn't want me there. I was told to my face that I don't accept you being here. You're just a kid. Why should I buy into what you're saying? And I was told basically. Not basically. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had this much time, 18 months, whatever it was, and if it didn't work, I'm out. Very bluntly, really bluntly. And it was owned by, believe it or not, Sara Lee. So it was part of a massive public company. Sara Lee's market cap was massive at the time. One of the. Maybe 17, 18 billion at the time.
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B
Which sounds like a kind of clarity though. Like, yeah, be given, you know, 18 months is not a ton of time, but it's a nice chunk of time and you at least know. At least, you know, right. It's sort of like it's. Rather than just being on death row and not knowing it's going to come, at least you have a date and you can prepare yourself and you can plan. Was that you saw it.
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A
You know what? I think that's a great way of saying it. Maybe minus the death row. It's a little dramatic for designing purses. But no, I. What was great was. I'm being sarcastic. What was great is I did Have a finite amount of time. I think sometimes it's when it's so open ended, these kind of projects, they can meander and they can, you know, there's nothing better than a deadline to get something done. I find, you know, you need that sort of positive stress to get going and make some decisions and not say, well, I have enough time to think about that tomorrow. So what they were great about was I was able to try a lot of things, drive people kind of a bit crazy.
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B
What drove people the most crazy, I
- [35:38]
A
think it was that I wasn't. This is what I knew. I knew that I didn't know the answer, but I knew that I would know the answer. And people didn't really appreciate that because it was a pain for, you know, manufacturing had to. We were trying to make bags this way. We were trying, you know, a totally different collection. Three weeks later I was canceling something that I had, you know, been probably believed in. And I'm sure I said to people, you know, this is going to be it. And then it would come in and I would just think, this is not it. I was fortunate enough that I was allowed to fail. And that's something that I think so many designers, the vast majority of designers, not given the space and the time to fail. You have to be wrong a few times. You have to be. Otherwise you're not, you're not doing anything. You're just doing what they already do. You have to put yourself out there, you have to fail. You have to be embarrassed, you have to be nervous. You know, I just think it's, it's part of the process. Otherwise, because it always, it's, I always say it's like renovating a house. It always takes twice as long and is twice as painful and expensive as you think it's going to be. So, you know, going into it, everyone's like, oh, coach needs to be more modern. It's got to compete with Gucci and Prada and lv. And it needs to be more exciting, more relevant to today's customer. And those are just a bunch of words. They don't mean a thing. It doesn't. Until you can put something on a table in a room where a bunch of people are hanging out that are the merchant, the business people and they say, what is that? When can we get that you have nothing? I mean, it's, it's, it's so easy to say it, but it's pretty damn hard to. What does it look like if it's a shoe? All those words are using so there was. There was a real aha moment at Coach where the very first collection was called Hamptons. And, oh, no, sorry, Ergo, it's in the line today. It's funny, it's actually pretty popular today. And that was 30 years ago. Literally 30 years ago. And that was the first collection I created with the team. There was an incredible designer, brilliant designer. Lee Roeder is her name, and she filled in all the spaces that I had, all the gaps that I had in my technical understanding. And we went on to design 20 or 30 collections in the next 15 years together and other designers as well. So I found this perfect kind of meeting of technical ability, creativity, understanding what Coach could be and what could Coach be. It was simple. It was utilitarian in that it was useful, and it was graphic. It was very much the embodiment of, like, Eames, form follows function, but in a modern way. So that collection, Ergo, was really the beginning. And the moment people saw it, everyone kept saying, how can we make more of these? I get it. I understand what Coach can be. And then after that collection, it was Hamptons, and after that collection, it was Chelsea. And after that collection and a lot of these, Hamptons is still the line today. Ergo's still on the line today. We did all these remakes of the classic styles. The Duffel, the City, all those bags that were kind of boring and dusty, but we reinvented them in the context of today. So after. And I've seen this a few times after, we kind of found that moment of. Of. Of clarity around what Coach could be. It was. You kind of couldn't stop it. You know, everything clicked. The language clicked. Then the next thing or the next few things. Probably two years later, we said that we needed fabric bags. We can't just have leather bags. I mean, the world was about jacquarded fabric those days. So we created Signature. Coach Signature, which is a big part of the business today, 30 years later. And that was something that was. It was the missing link in terms of volume and in terms of being a global brand. People needed something that was recognizable, that was With. That felt like what was happening with the other brands.
- [40:14]
B
And when, you know, at a certain point, I think there was an overlap of your time at Coach and you having your own law, Correct?
- [40:19]
A
Yeah.
- [40:20]
B
And what made you kind of sit back and say, hey, I want to. I'm not busy enough. I want to have my own line as well?
- [40:26]
A
That is what I. So that's a great question. So I had been a coach for 12 or 13 years, the brand had grown to 5 billion. Close to 5 billion from 500 million, maybe less than 500 million. Actually. We had introduced a zillion new categories. Fragrances, watches, shoes over on and on. And we were kind of running out of room. It was a different. It. The industry had entered a different time. It was more about the designer. And there was a period where most brands had. Even the European brands had, you know, Narcisso Rodriguez for Loewe, Michael Kors for Celine. It was. It was part of the. The language, obviously, Tom Forfeguchi. And we were not getting our share of that customer because we didn't have. Just didn't have that layer to the brand of a credible design talent, a person that people could not just associate, but it would imbue the brand with more of a personal narrative than Coach had. Coach was sort of this monolithic brand. And because of that, and in addition, sorry, we felt that we needed to sell. Need to sell bags that were on another price tier in another world that competed more directly with the European luxury brands, even though we had definitely taken a big bite out of their businesses. So we kind of agreed that this is what would happen. I would start a business, I would maintain my role as creative director. The halo for my business would drive Coach sales, and we would grow a business that over a number of years would be big enough to be accretive to the overall Coach business. And I think the concept was perfect. I really thought it was perfectly. It's a great example of something on paper that looks. I get it. The reality was quite different. You know, what did we learn? No one had done this at the time, tried to build a luxury brand almost overnight. So we had amazing stores in Tokyo and Las Vegas and New York and Chicago, and we had concession in store shops and I think nine sacks. Where the bag sat next to. Excuse me. Where the bag sat next to Gucci and Prada and Fendi and did quite well. The issue was the amount of money you have to invest to stay in that space is just astronomical. And the time to profitability is. It's like 10 years. I mean, if you look at the brands today that are starting to see some kind of like, fertile, let's say a financial position where it starts to feel like the business has cash and can grow. Most of These brands are 20% years. I mean, if you think about it, 15 years, 20 years. And it became clear really quickly that even with the amazing investment that the board was incredibly supportive and more than supportive, insisted on to make the business big. We just couldn't go fast enough. And you know, we were up to about, I'm going to say 30 ish million, 35 million, a little less in three years, which is enormous amount of business to do in that short amount of time. You know, we addressed Michelle Obama for the COVID of Vogue, we won the CFDA award. We had, you know, every celebrity essentially had been carrying every celebrity, many celebrities were carrying our bags. You know, Julianne Moore, Beyonce, on and on and on. Everything was happening but it wasn't happening from a. You just can't go fast enough, you can't grow fast enough, you can't open stores fast enough to make it feel comfortable from a financial standpoint. So when Coach hit a wall, which it did, and for no reason other than things can only go up for so long, I mean the business had double digit growth for more than a decade, which is insane. The stock was trading at 12 times opening. Something crazy like that. I don't remember exactly, but it was an enormous multiple. The market cap was the size of Nike at the time. Things, things don't go on forever. And so the combination of that and needing to focus on Coach and the business not being in, I don't think it's a formula that, as I said on paper it sounded great, but I don't think it's a possibility unless you have another 10 years and an enormous amount of money which the board was more than willing to do. I never wanted my own brand, actually. I never felt comfortable with my own brand. I never enjoyed it. I much prefer being in the background. Much prefer it. I just never like someone like Tommy loves being Tommy Hilfiger. He loves it absolutely loves doing PAs, loves doing interviews. He loves the social aspect of it. I just, I'm a creative person and I like the work. The work is always what's inspired me and made me happy. So it's a bit of a miss. It was a bit of a bad fit for someone with my temperament and someone who really had to be out and about like that. But more than anything, it was just, you couldn't do it quickly enough and without investing enormous amounts of money. So what I did was I thought, okay, I'm going to leave Coach and I'm going to take the business with me. Which again, I was 100% sure was the right thing to do. I was definitely wrong. And being part, being independent was even harder because I had amazing the investors I had. I could not have thought of a better group. They were generous, they were trust Trusting. They were enthusiastic. But it was even worse. That issue of you can't grow fast enough to have people feel good about investment. And me being, you know, I was, I don't know, my late 40s and having a certain way of. I. My life was a certain way. And then I used to say I was. I was the oldest young designer because I, you know, we had a young business, three years, four years old, five years, whatever it was at the end. But I just wasn't cut out for it. And the business itself was built for a massive business. You know, we had 120 people at one point. 100 people. 120 people. But that's what it took to compete with, you know, that's how we could sit next to Prada and Gucci, at Saks, at Bergdorfs, at Colette, everywhere. And we competed. Not only competed, we were often in the top. Very few best performers in those locations. We sold a lot of handbags and. But again, the financial sort of the way it was laid out, I explained it to someone. It's sort of like I had a Ferrari with two wheels and I needed a bicycle, basically, in terms of a business. I needed something, needed what would have worked. And it. You couldn't unwind the business fast enough in terms of scaling back. It was just built to be something else. It was built to be something else, and I was incredibly grateful for it. It was an amazing experience. I'll never wonder again. But what I did learn is that I'm really much better as, say, in the background and also working within the context of another brand.
- [48:39]
B
And then comes Tiffany, which I feel like at that point you. You'd become so good at sort of tapping into a sort of universal sense of luxury and what it. What people were desiring and how.
- [48:53]
A
How to get there.
- [48:55]
B
And so, like, how did you get there with Tiffany? Because obviously, you know, you were part of that big turnaround and. And did a lot of amazing things there that were fresh and exciting and it was such an exciting time. So, like, how did you get there with Tiffany, specifically?
- [49:10]
A
So Tiffany was, I would say, the perfect job for me. I grew up loving the brand. It sounds maybe a bit. A bit cinematic to say it this way, but I do remember being there as a very young kid, like five, six, seven years old, and being on the fourth floor. I remember it like it was yesterday. So it's funny when. Who knows why things stick in your mind, you know, for all of us. And I remember going to the fourth floor where the home collections were and they had these installations from some of the great designers of the day. Ward Bennett, Mario Boda, John Dickinson, on and on, Angela Dongia. And they would each do a section and they would, they would use Tiffany product. And Tiffany at the time was a multi brand in home. You know, they sold Bach Rot and all those things like that. And I just remember being like this incredibly magical place, how I just don't know how it stuck in my brain, but it did. And then growing up, of course, living in the east coast and just being so much part of my life, my friends lives, I knew the aesthetic, I felt so connected to. It's funny, when I went there, I went down a path of creating things without knowing that I was connected to the past. And I'll give you an example of that. Like, the very first thing I did, I went to the store and had a walkthrough just to take a look at the flagship and talk about what I would want to do with it. And they gave me a paper cup that was Tiffany blue and it had Tiffany logo on it. And just, I don't know why, but I was like, this is the perfect Tiffany object. It's utilitarian, it's desirable, it's branded. Let's take this cup and let's give it to our Hollowear group, which is the group that makes sterling pieces, mostly home pieces. And let's have them copy it exactly. The crimping underneath, the caution hot on the side, the way the rim is folded, identical. And that became, that was really quick. That was literally in like my first week. That became a proxy for my life.
- [51:40]
B
There were there, were there pearl clutchers at Tiffany that may have been like,
- [51:44]
A
oh my God, a zillion, A zillion. And honestly, I think, you know, being a bit older, much older than when I was a Tommy, the gift of being older, I think, is that you kind of know. And this might sound. Sound strange, but it doesn't really matter what you do in these situations. It matters how you do it. And anything can work. And I think that sometimes you can get paralyzed by, I need the perfect idea, I need the perfect concept. And often it really doesn't matter. I mean, I'm. I'm very comfortable starting anywhere on these projects. And with anything, you know, I don't, I don't get stuck on the exact material I hoped was coming in or the exact color or the exact way of making something, the exact technique or craft. I really just focus on the whole and knowing that, you know, there's a lot of space And a lot of time between success and failure in these kind of endeavors. You know, there's just so much that can go right or wrong. So I, you know that the thing that I, I think age has given me is that I never get stressed. I just don't. I know that I will figure it out. And it may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen. And if it doesn't, it wasn't meant to be. But I know most likely I can figure it out. And again, how do I do that? I do it with. I've always had a great team. I have people working with me today that have worked for 20 years, 25 years, 15 years, a whole group of maybe 20 or 30 people that we've worked in different brands together, and we continue to work in different brands. So we all know each other, we all trust each other. I know what I do, they know what they do. That's key. I mean, the, the idea that you can be in control of everything and make every decision is. Just. Doesn't work. It doesn't work for a five billion dollar company. What does work is creating a point of view and a way of thinking. And this is something that I always talk about with people I work with. It's much better to know why someone did something than what they did. And the reason is because you understand how they got there. And you can apply that thinking to something that has nothing to do with that project. A store window, an interior, a new product category. It's how you think of those things. And Tiffany was by far the most natural. For me, it was basically everyday luxury, simply. And the first collection I did, which was a collaboration, which was called Everyday Objects, was this idea that the mundane or the everyday can be elevated in a way that combined craft luxury and something that is utilitarian. So the paper cup was the center of that. But we did not hundreds, but many, many, many pieces. We did a tin can, we did a paper clip, we did a clothespin, we did a Sharpie on and on and on and on. And it was, it's amazing when you hit that moment where you realize like you have like unlocked something. And then from there, when you look at the jewelry we did, it was extremely connected to that paper cup. For instance, like the last collection I did lock. It's exactly the same as a paper cup. Exactly the same. It's a functional, it's a mechanism that is decorative because of its material and because of its execution. It's a lock mechanism rendered at the level of a Piece of jewelry. It's a perfect example of the collection before that was not same. It was just a twist of a wire inspired by chain link fences and things like that. All the collections that I did with my team all grew out of that simplicity, clarity and the idea to create something that you don't need to explain why you want it. People just gravitate towards it. You know, I always say if you have to tell people why something's good, it's probably not that good.
- [56:17]
B
And today, no, sorry. And today you're working both with John Hardy and now also the Gap, which I believe is new. And so what is this period of life in design like for you? With this sort of two, two very different brands, but also kind of, you know, both very American and very, you know, beloved and kind of, you know, super established and everyone knows them and like. So what is this creatively like for you today?
- [56:45]
A
So Hardy, John Hardy came about through my relationship with EL Caterton, the investment group. And I had been talking to them for a while about working together. And I'm a really big admirer of the founder and they've just done amazing things in that space and growing companies. And I was talking with him and basically he said we have these brands we need, we need to fix them. Obviously they're in the business to sell businesses and make money, but some of them had kind of gone, I would say sideways. There's a better way to say it than backwards. Hardy was one of them. 50 year old business, beautiful quality and craftsmanship, I would say. Not much on the design front and a bit too literal, not a bit very literal in terms of the interpretation of Bali, Southeast Asia. And it was really, it was one of the most fun projects I've done. I brought in again six or seven people from my past work. One, two designers from Tiffany, person I've worked with forever in marketing, a chief merchant, store design person. And we were able to literally in a year do most everything that needed to be done. That would take five years at a big company, small company, so much less at stake to be fair. But we created new branding, new packaging, we re platformed the site, new store design. I would say today sales come out of the 80% of new collections. Literally 75, 80%. The first collection I introduced was Spear, which is the number one collection now. The second was Surf. The third was Love not the fourth was thinking the fourth Naga, the reinvention of Naga, which is similar to what I did with T at Tiffany. And strangely, and I would never say I could do it again. It worked quickly. You know, the business is really successful right now. Where we've expanded distribution, we've grown the business enormously in a. In a meaningfully profitable way. We probably had 2,000 SKUs when I started. Today, there's less than half. So the productivity is way, way, way up. It was when I got there, it was a lot of things that looked similar and not a lot like a big collection, but not a lot of choices. Essentially, everything was kind of. Kind of like what you would hope to find at a great jeweler in Bali. The best way to examine, best example, best way to explain it. Today, it's much more seen through a design lens. It's craftsmanship as a starting point, not as an end point. Before I got there, I would say it was craft as the idea. Today, it's much more through the lens of design. I mean, to be honest, Tiffany was very much. We used to talk about the sea of sameness all the time at Tiffany. And it took four or five years to introduce what today are the foundations of the assortment. Still T1 knot lock. Those types of collections. Hardware was. I didn't do hardware. Hardware was done before me, but it took a long time because there's so much at risk, there's so much volume in play, billions of dollars at a place like Tiffany. Tea Tru was the other collection, the foundational collection. And Hardy was fun because it was small and it was. The group was really ready for a change. So Hardy is moving along really nicely. I'm starting to work on some other brands for L Katerton as well that we can talk about in a little while. And then Gap happened entirely. I wouldn't say by accident, but very, very organically. I had met Richard, the CEO, through a friend, investment banker, and we started talking. And you just. Certain people you meet, you just connect with. And we talked and we both said, let's continue conversation. There was no. At the onset, there was no game plan. It was just, you know, like most people in the design world, you know, I have a love and an affinity for Gap, and I'm sure there's some things I can do that will be helpful. And then it grew into, why don't we start an accessories division for Gap Inc. So across all the brands, and that's what we are working on now. And again, I brought in, I don't know, six, seven people that I've worked with in the past. And what's nice about it is that one, it's enjoyable because we all know each other and like each other. But more than that, you kind of don't meander around for one year, two years. Finding the right people, finding the right formula, it takes a long time and usually fails. So many times these things fail because they just. You don't have the right people in place to create the big picture. And it often takes a lot of time. And there's some. I mean, there's been many times where I've hired people that have been the wrong people, and we're kind of taking that guesswork out of it by bringing a team together that's super tenured, and a lot of them are freelance because these small companies like Hardy could never afford the level of talent. So it's a combination of familiarity, being able to bring in best. Best talent in the industry and being able to get going quickly and to understand what we're trying to accomplish. So, you know, Gap has been great, but I'm, of course, again, like most people, a big fan of the brand. I think the work we're doing is going to be exciting and different. There's a beautiful sort of conceptual nature of Gap, that it's part of the American landscape. It's not just a brand. So we're looking at it through. Obviously, great product is what's important, but, you know, how does Gap see the world of accessories in a way that only they could see it? And so it's. I hope. I think it's going to be surprising and exciting. We're getting. We're really actually gotten pretty far in the first two, three months, and I'm really looking forward to launching it because I think it's going to be really exciting.
- [63:52]
B
And, you know, one of my first jobs in the industry was at House and Garden at Connie Nast. And I remember even back in the day, you know, you were known for someone who wasn't just an executive who was working in fashion or designing or working on brand, but you also were like a collector and, and someone who really had an eye that wasn't always synonymous with that kind of thing, although there are obviously many examples of fashion designers who. Big collectors and things like that. But you became something, you know, known and, And. And how it was connected with your. So your ability to turn things around and kind of create new things. And so do you remember, like, what. What. How did that start for you? Were you someone who was always kind of, like, had a creative life at home in terms of, like, collecting and design and things like that, or did that, like, change over time?
- [64:42]
A
So I've always been a collector. Since high school. I'm a.
- [64:45]
B
What'd you collect first?
- [64:47]
A
Honestly? Books or something. I collected first. I mean, I think I did collect beer cans in those days, in the late 70s when people collected. I don't know why people collected beer cans really early on I was collecting like broken pieces of stickly furniture, but I couldn't afford anything. American pottery, Teco, Hampshire, Cluel, people like that. I was collecting prints before. You know, I'm talking in my early, early, early twenties. I couldn't afford a painting or. Or something other than a multiple. And I was collecting a lot of American printmakers. There was a moment where people making prints were not making reproductions. They were actually using print making as a vehicle for creative expression. And I was collecting a lot of those people's work. People like. Well, no one will know them, so I'm not going to say them, but Howard Cook, Louis Lazijk, people like that. They're really American modernists, which I fell in love with. And you could buy for $100, $200, whatever it was. But then after a while, it broadened. You know, I was growing up and starting to have my own place in the city. And really quickly. I mean, when I was at Tommy, actually, I had and Royer and Perrient in my office and no one knew what it was. You know, I had a Basquiat drawing in my office. No one knew what it was. It wasn't that valuable then. People used to think it was. People didn't know what to make of it. I think they thought it was mostly school furniture because it kind of has that look. It's oak and sort of beat up steel.
- [66:27]
B
They weren't designed to be luxury items. Exactly the opposite.
- [66:31]
A
Exactly. But it's funny, I've always loved the mix of periods and to me, it's the same as design. It's the same as, you know, my. The way I design has always been this fusion of periods, functionality, the decorate aspect of it. And that's what makes it challenging and exciting. So to me, interiors are no different. And when I met Delphine, we've been together 27 years maybe, you know, we both. It was like one plus one is five. You know, we both were so engaged in it that it really accelerated, you know, my interest in interiors. She and I partnered. Partnered, Worked together on. I think we've done close to 20 houses during that period. Close to 20, yeah. And each one was kind of a different project. And each one opened up this door to a new period, a new, you know, I was collecting I did a book on Lalanne 20 years ago. It's funny, no one wanted it. No one knew what it was even. I mean, I remember seeing it in Yves Saint Laurent's Paris apartment 30 years ago. I didn't know what it was. It was a bunch of sheep in his apartment in Paris. And then, it's funny, years later, I found myself in the apartment photographing it for the book, which is kind of a surreal thing. And so over the last 20 something years, Delphine and I have done so much collaborating, commissioning artists, visiting artists. It's really enriched our lives. And it's really. It's a way for me to keep moving creatively but not get bored of handbags or shoes or. I don't love fashion at all. I shouldn't say that, but I really don't. I don't find it. I'm just not one of those people who loves fashion. I love design. I love sort of the collage of lifestyle design, interiors, the way you live your life. I'm much. And also, I'm not. I'm just never going to be that person. It's funny, my very, very first job was with Anne Klein and I worked for Narciso Rodriguez. And it was the best lesson I ever learned. I recommend it if you can. If you can stand it. I learned what I could never be. I would never be him. Never. I couldn't do anything as well as he did. And I didn't have the purity of thought that he did. I mean, he just does everything at the highest level. Drawing, cutting, sewing, draping. Everything he did was so extraordinary. And working for him, working next to him, I saw so quickly, this is never going to be me. I will never be successful. And I don't know if it was intuitive or if it was deliberate, but I definitely walked away from that. And my move to Ralph Lauren, which was just where I got a job, was a perfect expression of that. It's not. It wasn't a design company. It was. And it was basically a dream and service of design.
- [69:55]
B
And you've also been, you know, photography has been a big part of your life and you had a book, Women in Art, that you did with Aslene, which actually you can still find on Amazon at a very high price. Proud to know. Where did you first, like, pick up a camera and like doing that on your own? Was it through work or through personal.
- [70:17]
A
So it was really through work. I. It's a funny story. I remember we were doing a story with one of the shelter magazines. I think it was Town and country and a well known photographer, very well known photographer. Shot our home in the Hamptons. This was good 20 years ago. 15. Yeah, 20 years ago. And I was so unhappy with the pictures because he just wasn't, it's funny, he wasn't into it. He was more interested in driving like our car. Then we had a vintage Jaguar XK&E type and he just wasn't into it. And the pictures were really poor. And I was really disappointed. And I thought, you know, Delphine and I spent years making this beautiful place that we're really proud of. And he really didn't give it the time I thought it deserved. So I said, you know what? I'm never going do that again. And I literally committed to learning how to take a picture. And so what I did was I got in touch with the head of the photography department at Parsons, and I spent the next two years studying photography with him. And, you know, we would do interiors, we would do portraits, we would do landscapes, we would, you know, everything was film. No, digital, zero digital. You know, learning to load a camera meter picture, you know, understanding focus and understanding lighting. And it was as if I got my, let's say, graduate degree in photography. And I did it until I could do it myself. I didn't want to be one of those, you know, designers that hired himself because at the time digital was, was pretty prominent and you could take a good picture pretty easily. You have three assistants and it's not that hard when you have all that stuff. So I only shot film, medium and large format for good 15 years until pretty recently. I did lots and lots and lots of campaigns for Coach, did some for Tiffany, did all the campaigns for my brand, did some editorial. I shot stories for El Decor, for Ad, for Harper's, for just things that were interesting to people. And I really wanted to be authentic and that I was, I knew what I was doing. I don't know, I think I'm too insecure and I would be too embarrassed, honestly, to do something where I felt like I was pretending Things, insecurity. I just, I admire people that can do things that are competent, that are technical. And I just wouldn't put myself in a position where I was pretending. So a lot of the I did. I've done four or five books. Some of them I did myself. I no assistant. You know, the book on Machia Bonetti I visited, I remember a house in Palm Beach. I was by myself. You know, I visited some craftspeople in Paris. I didn't have an assistant. And it Just gives you a freedom to do things and not have to think about it being a process. So photography was. It has been and continues to be a big part of my life. The very first book I did actually, was on a strange topic. Fighters. I don't know if you've seen that, but UFC fighters. Yeah.
- [73:44]
B
What kind of fighters? Like, boxers.
- [73:46]
A
Ufc.
- [73:47]
B
Oh, okay.
- [73:48]
A
It was done before the UFC became so popular.
- [73:52]
B
Right.
- [73:53]
A
So I had access to everybody, and they were happy to do it. You know, the person who runs ufc, Dana White, was there. And I don't know how we became friends, but strangely, we became friends, and they liked it because also, it kind of put them in the mainstream because we did a story for InStyle, we did a story for Interview magazine with Ingrid Sishy of portraits of these fighters. And it was at a time where they were looking for mainstream approval, so they loved it. I mean, we had. It's hard to believe we had the men's windows at Barney's. We had the windows at Colette was when I had my brand. So it allowed them to be. To demonstrate that they're part of culture, that they're not just this crazy sport that people don't accept anymore. And that was something I did over two years. Traveled to Las Vegas and all these different places.
- [74:51]
B
Why did you slow down?
- [74:52]
A
Slow down?
- [74:53]
B
Or, like, did you ever, like, kind of sort of slow down with the photography? Or is it.
- [74:57]
A
You know what? It's one of those things where it's. For me, and I don't get paid to do it. Not much. Certainly, you know, anytime I shot for any of the brands I work for, of course I can't. Can't put myself in a position where I'm paying myself. So I always just did it because I wanted to do it, because it's an amazing difference between shooting a collection that. Sorry. Seeing a collection that you design through the eyes of a designer versus a photographer, you really are staring at the pieces. You're really understanding how they look, how they fit, what it really means more to a customer, I think, than a designer who sees it for the design. So I love being able to see a collection a different way. It's helpful to me. And I just. The things that I do for me, I never. I always think if I have to think about it or I have to force myself or make time for it, I shouldn't do it. So, like, ceramics. I've been really intensely studying ceramics for, like, five years.
- [76:05]
B
Have you been doing that, like, with an academic, like you did with Parsons?
- [76:08]
A
Exactly. The Same exactly who you've been working with. I mean, I've worked with. There's an artist name. His name is Eric, but Tortoises is his Instagram name. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And I've studied with him in Copenhagen and in Paris and London. I've studied in. In. There's an artist community in Connecticut called Silver Mine. I've studied and I was in Florence studying with. There was a workshop there, a really incredible workshop, where you can. It's very precise. You study just glazing for two weeks, or you study, you know, certain type of throwing or certain type of hand building, exactly the same as photography. So I just like the process and I like understanding how things are made, because for me, most of the creative. The expression comes out of the doing. It doesn't come out of decoration.
- [77:13]
B
And this is like a physical work, too. I mean, is that part of it, too? Yeah, it's not on paper. It's. It's your 100%.
- [77:21]
A
And it's incredibly relaxing. Like you can do it for someone who can't sit still, like myself. I can do it for five, six, seven, eight hours and not. Not leave the room. And it's. It's. It's just. It's. It's a. One of the things you can do forever. And I'm. I'm a big fan. Maybe it's because I was fired that one time. I'm a big fan of things that no one can take from me, you know, that I love doing, you know, And. And I don't want my identity to be wrapped up in my work, you know, I want my own happiness, my identity, my world to be something I control and I create. And I do think it's part of it, is seeing it go away so quickly and thinking, shit, who am I? Who am I and what do I love doing? And how do I get back to that if I have to rely on someone else to give me the opportunity to do that?
- [78:16]
B
What does your ceramics look like?
- [78:19]
A
So they. I'm gonna be doing a show in the next year, and they are. It's a good question. What do they look like? They are exactly how I sound. They're exactly what you would think. I mean, they're extreme. I sort of did it. The way I think I do everything is I learn everything, and then I forget it. I learn everything and then I go back to what I thought was interesting at the beginning, now that I can make the shapes that I want to make and the constructions I want to make. So they're often. They're a combination of, like, super refined and very raw. And there's a ceramicist. Peter Voulkos is probably my favorite. He was like the first abstract expressionist potter, and he was making pottery in, like, the 60s and 70s. So there's like a. There's a sort of chance, sort of. I don't know exactly what I'm making until I'm finished. I know the form. I know sort of the foundation of it, but I'm cutting up and recombining and reattaching and doing some things deliberately wrong and some things deliberately properly and some things. And it's just, again, it's growing out of making it and the process of doing it versus I don't decorate any of it. You know, it's very much what you see is the making of the piece itself. Does that make sense?
- [79:50]
B
Yeah, no, for sure. And are you someone who you think, like, okay, after the ceramic show, I'm gonna. I'll move on to something else and kind of keep going, or you kind of feel like, oh, I'm gonna keep.
- [80:00]
A
You know, I don't think so, because I really love it. I really. And I find it to be infinite in what you can do. I mean, it really is infinite. You could spend 30 years doing it and still feel like, what about doing it this way? What about different firing techniques? What about different clays? What about. It's just such a rich pursuit and something that I just love, and I think I'm better at it than a bunch of other things I've done, frankly. It is funny that you kind of think, oh, you're a creative person. You can do this or that. It's really not that way with me. At least I'm a better ceramicist than Amos photographer, for sure. For sure. And I don't know.
- [80:44]
B
Why do you say that?
- [80:46]
A
Because I don't think my work is as interesting in photography as it is in ceramics. Just as a person who knows has collected ceramics for 25 years, and photography has been around it my whole adult life. I don't know. I don't have. I think I can take a good picture. I don't think I have much to say different. Whereas in ceramics, I just. For some reason, I feel like I can create things that are more surprising and different and have more of my point of view and less of you kind of like, lean on the technical part. I always feel like when you don't have anything original, and I would say that's probably me as a photographer, like I said, I can take a good picture. But it's pretty easy to be good at photography these days, especially with digital. It's always impossible to be great. And I would say I'm, I'm good, but I'm not a great photographer. I just, I've been around too many people that are great and I don't. I don't know what it, how I mean, it's such a crazy thing because photography is quite mechanical when you think about it. And, you know, working with David Sims, Maria Testino, you know, Francois Allard, I don't know, but I know I can't do what they do.
- [82:02]
B
And, you know, you've been. I would consider you to be sort of like, you know, top tier level, not just maker, but also connoisseur and collector. And like, you have a really good understanding of, like, the landscape of, you know, lalan before it was worth every ounce in gold. There's so much talk today about how the art world has sort of exploded and it's so overgrown and it's become such an industry now as a collector and someone who's just sort of like, so in it, like, what is your take on the way things are in the sort of collecting world today, 2025, than maybe it was in 2015?
- [82:42]
A
That's a, that's a good question. I think I have two thoughts. One is it's the same as it's always been. You know, Andy Warhol said, you know, you might as well just write a check for whatever it was, quarter million dollars and pin it to the wall versus buying a painting for $250,000. Because you're saying to someone, look at what I have. And. Sounds crass maybe, and a bit cynical, but I think design was always the place where I felt protected from that because, you know, I bought many, many, many things that look like nothing. And people would like the first pair of Purvey director chairs I had, they looked. Someone thought they were from a bus station. I remember someone saying that. So it was for me. And I always felt collectors of design were more about the object itself and not about status. Really wasn't about status. Today, especially with Lalanne, it's entirely become about status. And to me, that isn't great. You know, you have so many billionaires collecting lalan these days. Without naming them, I happen to know a bunch of them who are just buying anything and everything that comes on the market, good, bad, and, and in the middle. So I think to some extent the design market has been. Unfortunately, it's become a market True market. I'm willing to pay X for this. The good, though is that there's lots of things, and I've always done this is collecting kind of against the grain where there's. There's too much today that is out there for people to collect at all. So there are amazing things that nobody wants that were incredibly desirable 10 years ago. It makes no sense. And I always say the same thing. It's like, what's expensive is not good, and what good is not expensive? It's not the way it works.
- [84:37]
B
What are you collecting as cuts against the grain today?
- [84:40]
A
I can't tell you. No, I'm joking. French furniture, Arts and crafts, mostly. Louis xvi.
- [84:52]
B
Right.
- [84:52]
A
Louis xv.
- [84:53]
B
I've heard that from a lot of people.
- [84:54]
A
It's sort of like nobody wants it
- [84:56]
B
pre modern French furniture or anything like that. That, yes. It's just sort of a dime a dozen. People have warehouses filled with it. Yeah.
- [85:04]
A
Because there's an issue with scale. It's small. It's quite small. There's an issue with. It's a strong look. You have to know how to work with it or work it into another interior. And it's not what people are buying to show people they have taste. Now I'm gonna sound a bit cynical. There's just not that many people who have the ability to collect in a meaningful way and, and understand what they're collecting. There just aren't. I mean, I know that world very well and there's very few people, very few people that. So what it becomes is it becomes I have this. So I'm. You need to believe this about me. I have taste. I. I get it. I'm, you know, I'm part of the, whatever you want to call it, the zeitgeist of creativity and, and design. These days. You just have to, you know, look across those collections and there. It's funny because Giacometti used to be sort of. I used to call it the Park Avenue coffee table. Like all of the very wealthy Park Avenue, say, people that owned apartments that worked with designers like Henri Samuel, people like that, you know, king of French interior design. They always had, like, often very classic apartment, but there was always like a few Giacometti pieces mixed in. So it was like, it was a way of disrupting this sort of. I'm classic, I'm traditional, I'm old fashioned, you know. Our home in Paris was done by Amre Samuel before we bought it. And it was funny, it was exactly that. Remember it very well. Seeing images of the interior when we did it. And images when it was done by the former owner. And it's a really good example of kind of what old fashioned, with a little bit of contemporary mixed in is versus integrating it in a meaning in a convincing way. Like we have, we had a lot of Louis XVI furniture. We had Parillon, Matthias, Dupre, Lafont. We had kind of many, many periods mixed together. And to me, that's the interesting part and that's what's hard. There's a few people that are great at it, there's not many, but that's what I am interested in, is a personal take on collecting. So getting back to your question, yeah, the design market is just like the contemporary art market now, but it took a long time. You know, there were things that, that would go for enormous amounts of money, that no one knew what it was, other than three people in the room. And that kept, I think, kind of protected the design market from being kind of overrun with people that wanted a lalan sheep for the garden, you know. And what's so crazy about it is that there's so many of them, you know, of those things out there, there's. It's just the perfect thing to make a market because there's an enormous amount of material over a long period. It's super recognizable. It's not challenging to look at. I mean, when I spent time with them both at their farm outside of Paris. If I tell you no one wanted the piece, I'm telling you no one wanted it. There was. There would not be one lot at Christie's, Sotheby's, in those days, you just wouldn't see it. It's a little bit like you used to see tons of Lalique glass or tons of arts and crafts furniture. You don't see any. You would find Greene and Greene, Stickley, that kind of stuff at Christie's and Sotheby's. Now zero might find a piece or two. So the good is, as I said, is that there's lots of stuff that are still amazing, as they always were, but not expensive, that are much cheaper than they were then. Like 40s furniture is really undervalued right now. Anything by Poirot, Arbus Kine, those types of people, the prices are a fraction of what they were. Serge Roche, fraction of what they were. Who's another good one? 40s is a big one. Viennese furniture, nobody seems to be buying it, but there's amazing Hoffman pieces and what else? And it's funny, Tiffany. I've always loved Tiffany glass and collected lamps and they've come back a little. And I'm not talking about the most rarefied pieces, but they're quite inexpensive compared to what they were in the day, where they were even the most kind of like standard Tiffany lamps were quite expensive. So Tiffany's definitely one of them. Unfortunately, the work of a lot of contemporary people, Ron Arad, Mark Newson, is really not in a good place. The market is just.
- [89:53]
B
It does seem like that industrial designer, starchitect era kind of design just isn't hitting with a new generation of people at all.
- [90:03]
A
No, it's kind of for the same reason French furniture isn't. It's. It's like we had. Delphine and I had a funny agreement that, like, you can only have so many unsittable chairs in a room. Like, there's like a quantity of them that how many places can't you sit or how many things, how many tables can you not put something on? And the big difference is when you think of like or Franck or any of the people that are the most popular or royal, you could do a whole room in those things and you could live very comfortably in a royal room or a room or if Franc, it's more delicate. But he did the entirety. When you talk about people like Mark or Ron Arad, who I did a book on Ron as well, their work is somewhere between sculpture and furniture. And what's ironic is that Lalanne forever in this country was thought of as furniture. And the moment it crossed into contemporary art, it became sculpture. And that prices were commensurate with that. You know, the prices were, I'm not exaggerating, 20x from when I started collecting 30x.
- [91:11]
B
And you know, on the total flip side, on the professional side, there is also a kind of, you know, and I asked this, anyone connected with fashion, sort of a lot of press about and chat or about sort of like fashion's quote, unquote system as it is today, and how it's sort of not working and it's driving a lot of people out of the business. And creatively, like, what is your sort of take on the sort of state of affairs? Is it. Is it as bad as people say it is, or is it really just maybe a certain, a certain type of person or certain type of business is just struggling and things are just evolving?
- [91:47]
A
I mean, I think it's funny, every generation, in every discipline, certainly creative discipline, feels like it's over. You know, there's a moment where it's like, do you see what those people are doing? It's not clothing. That's. And every generation has their sort of, you know, burden to bear. Like, I always laugh when I think of like, you know, Dior. When Saint Laurent came about, it was ready Pret a Porter. And that was like, that's not clothing. And then after Pret a Porter, then Ralph got sued by YSL for the smoking, you know, the tuxedo. And then, you know, then there was Ralph and then he was the establishment and then there was Tommy and then he became the estate. I mean, there's always this. That was just like a narrow swath of the industry. There's always going to be the. Oh my God. Those were the days. I think. I think it's going faster and more violently than ever because of technology, but at the same time, it was incredibly advantageous to be. I remember when I worked on the Vogue Fashion Fund, I was on the committee for maybe 12 years, 13 years. And I remember thinking like, the person who's going to win this will be more famous and more known than 20 years of Calvin's life and business. Literally overnight, instantaneously, millions of people will know this person. So it was a huge advantage. What it did do though is for me at least, it put a lot of people in business before they're ready. It created this sort of, this sort of speed of this person's popular, famous, we love them, and then they move on to something else. There's like this boredom, I think, with creativity in general. I mean, you think of just, you know, social media, everything's so quick and you're onto this, you're off to the next thing. So I do think there's. It's sped things up and I think just people's desire to spend money on things is always evolving. So I think to some extent, fashion did it to itself. I mean, clothing is just insane. $10,000 for a suit. I don't get that. I just don't get it. I mean, it makes no sense to me in the context of what that money means and what you get from it. I'm not saying that some people, of course it's meaningful to them, but I don't get it. You know, handbags getting up to 4,000 bucks for like a bag, you know, and now they're making. Those brands are making like nothing stripped down bags for twelve hundred dollars or fourteen hundred dollars things that to me look like they should be five hundred dollars. You know, something like. So it's. I think the pricing has gotten out of hand for sure. It's not fun to buy clothing anymore when you're spending, like I said, 10 grand on a suit. And also I think people, you know, people just, it's sort of a self fulfilling thing. There's not excitement because it's not really doable. Certainly in America it's very tough to name up and coming designers that, that are creating a real impact. There are some, but it's nothing like when I started those buildings on 40th street and 39th Street. It was like every designer in the world. You had 30, 40, 50 design houses and vibrant design houses. And today I don't know how many do you have in that area? I count on one hand probably. So I think things change. Nothing stays the same. And I think it's just another moment where it's going to evolve and no, it's not going to be about having Fashion week where there's 30 or 40 designers and everyone wants to see their shows. It's just, just different. I think it's hard to evaluate it in the context of what was. I kind of look at it more on the continuum of what's going to happen, what's happening now. So to answer your question, yes, it's incredibly difficult. However, it's much easier to do certain things again because of online business, because of online multi retailers. There are benefits. It just doesn't look the same, doesn't look the same to me.
- [96:10]
B
And you know, you've got your, your, your, you've got things cut out for you. You've got two, you're working on two big major brands creatively like and you've got this ceramic show coming up at some point. What's, what's next for you on, on the, on the boards, beyond all of that, which is already a lot, you
- [96:28]
A
know, it's a good question. I don't think about it too much. I always like, probably I got it from my dad. Like he always said to me, this is what you need to know about working. Don't be a jerk and do a good job. This is simple advice. It's good advice though. And I kind of feel the same way about what you just mentioned. It's just if you're doing good work and you're doing things that are interesting and engaging for you, it will lead to more opportunities. And that's my whole career. I've never had a job that existed before. There was never a creative director at Coach. There was never a creative director at Tommy. There was never, believe it or not, a creative director at Tiffany. In the history of Tiffany, I'm the only person that was ever a true creative director, where I sat on the board and I ran the front of the business and partnered with the CEO. It just. And that doesn't happen if you're, you know, focused and uptight about oh my God, what's going to happen. You know, I've been super lucky. I mean, I say that in. People say that all the time. You know, I'm so fortunate. I am though. I mean, I landed in these industries at the perfect time. I mean, I landed in menswear before it became a big thing. I landed in handbags. You have to remember when I went to coach. If you were to go to Bergdorf's today and look at all those handbag companies, they didn't exist, none of them. You know, there was Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Chanel, those big brands. There were very few American brands and there was no such thing as designer handbags. There's no Balenciaga, Valentino, Celine didn't exist. Those brands exist, of course, but in terms of a meaningful accessories business that was desirable and people really, you know, looked for didn't exist. So it was a perfect time. The jewelry business is very similar. When I got to Tiffany again, there were only, and they're still more or less only like five brands, you know, Van Cleef and Cartier and Bulgari and Tiffany and I don't know, am I forgetting one, maybe one or two. So I was really fortunate to land in these places. When it's funny, where I came from, I could bring a lot to an industry that was much less further along in terms of excitement and integration into sort of like the bigger picture popular culture. Like when I went to Tiffany and we launched a collection called Paper Flowers, we did this incredible installation that Stefan Beckman, who's a set designer, worked with forever did, where it was like a 60 foot long greenhouse made of like chrome and glass and the entire interior was covered in moss and trees and the jewelry was sort of set among it. It was for the jewelry world that was a big deal, but for the fashion world, that was just Tuesday. I mean, people did that stuff all the time. So I kind of, as I said, I kind of dragged those things from different industries into the next one. And often it was something that was surprising and disruptive in that new space.
- [99:45]
B
Having said all that, do you feel satisfied career wise?
- [99:49]
A
How could I not? I mean, how could I not? I mean, I'm. I'm incredibly lucky to have someone in my life, Delphine, who, you know, has been. We do everything together. You know, we travel together, we work together, we don't work together. And I. I can't imagine how. How could I say I wasn't satisfied. You know, I was part of the boom of the public companies. I was, you know, when that's gone, it's disappeared. No more. You know, I've just been. Whatever that trajectory was that I was on, I was incredibly fortunate to be where I was at the time. Of course, you have to do good work, but, you know, I've learned over and over again, there's so many talented people that never reach the success that they deserve because they're just whatever it is. There's something in the ether that. That doesn't allow them to line up with or they don't have. I've always had amazing business partners. Amazing. And. And I learned early on that God knows, if I'm doing any part of their world, we're all in trouble. You know, I said a lot that, like, I'm a good business person for a designer, but I'm a designer or creative director.
- [101:06]
B
And if you had to describe yourself in three separate words, like happy, sad, curious, what would those three words be?
- [101:13]
A
That's a good question. I would say content, excited and thankful.
- [101:25]
B
Thank you to my guest, Reed Krakoff and to Jason Weisenfeld for making this episode happen. The editor of the Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. Don't forget this podcast is part of our hardcover spring print issue, available now for purchase online at the Grand Tourist. And sign up for our newsletter, the Grand Tourist Curator, on our site as well. And follow me on Instagram danrubenstein and follow the Grand Tourist on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment.
- [101:53]
A
Every little bit helps.
- [101:54]
B
Till next time.