Hasta La Ideas

“People ask why I do monochromatic clothes; the reason is because I’m thinking in proportion to the world. In this room, your head is going to look so much more interesting if it’s on a monochromatic column. Whereas I think people think of outfits and gets a little too fussy, a little too detailed. I’m always thinking of the line of a person standing with their head in a room and I always feel like a stalk, or a stem, or a pillar is nicer. I always think of everything architecturally. The furniture ended up being a natural extension of the clothes. Architecture is what energizes me most for clothes anyway. Looking through architecture books is probably by biggest stimulation.”

–Rick Owens, in an interview with Terry Jones in the “lights, camera, action” issue of i-D

Pictured: Rick Owens’s black plywood and alabaster “Boudeuse” (2012)

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“You know, the first thing I did when we started the Olympic collection [for Team Great Britain] was ask the athletes, ‘Do you care what you wear? Does it make a difference?’ They were surprised: most people don’t ask them questions about what they wear. Ninety per cent of them said feeling good about their clothes helped with performance. And they said they wanted to look like a team when they walked into the Olympic village. The nice thing was many of them were clearly excited to have a designer involved; there was a sense it gave them something of an edge. Then I also asked them how often they worked out.

We really wanted to take away any anxiety associated with getting dressed, so we made a look book the way we do for our regular collections, and then color-coded the clothes to show what goes together. That’s really how I approach everything. I want people to feel welcome when they come into our stores. Because I think if you’re not happy in what you are wearing, it makes a massive difference to how you feel. And if you are happy, you can keep your clothes for ever.”

–Stella McCartney in an interview with Vanessa Friedman for the Financial Times

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“Richard Saul Wurman, who invented the TED conference, in 1984, lives in Newport, Rhode Island, in a gated Gilded Age mansion made to look like an eighteenth-century country home. When I arrived one day, in midwinter, he showed me into his study, which was painted forest-green and packed with baubles: Teddy bears beneath glass bells, sneakers speckled with paint (a gift from the artist Dale Chihuly), a large bowl filled with multicolored baseballs and globe ornaments, three bent spoons, and an action figure in his own image, propped up and ready to fight. Not long after I’d sat down, he stood—’Come with me’—and led me to an adjoining cottage, where the walls were hung with potraits and magazine profiles of Wurman, elegantly laminated.

To spend time with Wurman, a keen, fast-talking seventy-seven-year-old who has trained as an architect, is to enter a world whose careful design, childlike restlessness, and narrative authority feels—for want of a better term—TED-like. He designed much of the furniture on in his house; the grounds are landscaped to his specifications. Wurman’s attention span operates on TED-like rhythms, with frequent scenery changes and breaks, and although an assistant screens his calls, I never saw him turn one down….If you ask him why, given all the things a wealthy and well-connected man could be doing, he has spent four decades organizing conferences, he will look at you as if you asked him why he’s wearing pants. ‘I’m not an athlete, I’m not an entertainer, and I’m not smart,’ he says. ‘I have no skills, I’m abrasive, I can’t type. What would you like me to do?’”

–Nathan Heller, in his article about TED Talks in the July 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker

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“A month before Damien Hirst‘s retrospective opened at Tate Modern in early April, hundreds of his spot paintings filled all eleven Gagosian galleries worldwide, including the two in London. [Larry] Gagosian gave a party for Hirst at the Arts Club on Dover Street, and invited an eclectic mix of artists, dealers, and big-money types, along with the sort of upper-class socialites who now want to be associated with contemporary art—people like David Cholmondely, the current Great Chamberlain, who walks backward before the Queen when she opens Parliament. [Tate Gallery director Nicholas] Serota was there, after a full day that included speaking at a memorial for Lucian Freud, who died last July. Serota excels at this sort of thing. He went off by himself, on the morning of the event, and wrote a brief, evocative, highly personal tribute that compared Freud to a ‘a bantam prize fighter in training—nippy, sinewy, always somehow poised for action.’ At the Arts Club that evening, I sat down with Serota at a table in the back room where Gagosian was entertaining Simon and Joyce Reuben, wealthy British collectors. Gagosian jokingly told Simon Reuben that Serota needed fifty million pounds to complete the Tate Modern’s expansion project, and that Reuben should sell his boat and give it to him. ‘You can have your name on an oil tank,’ he added. Serota said, ‘You’ll be known long after Larry is forgotten.’”

–Calvin Tomkins in “The Modern Man,” a profile of Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota that appears in the July 2 issue of The New Yorker

Pictured: A Damien Hirst “Spot Clock,” yours for £305 at Tate Modern’s gift shop

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Juergen Teller, “Pettitoe, Suffolk, 2011,” a photograph from his “Keys to the House” series exhibited earlier this year at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery.

“I can achieve something in a very quick moment. But it does get very personal. I think I open up a lot too. I don’t come around as the archetype fashion photographer dude, playing the big guy with the horde of assistants. I let them know I’m also nervous or insecure. Then I let them relax. The way I photograph is quite hypnotizing. I found a way to hide my insecurity—I have two cameras and I photograph like this [mimes cameras in each hand moving hypnotically] and this helps me to figure out what I should do, where they should go…it’s so intense, so psychologically draining, it’s like my brain works on overdrive in those minutes—or hours or days—I’m photographing. That’s why I can’t do it so much because I’m really super-concentrated. Other people think it’s a stupid snapshot—I get that a lot—but it’s very precise. And it has to be very fast because if I’m on a job or something, I can’t just doodle around and days go past and I take a picture. Sometimes there’s a lot of money involved and I have a responsibility to the client to get the fucking thing done. A lot of other people say, “Stand like that, stay like that,” and they do a Polaroid and everyone—all the assistants, the hair and makeup, everyone—stands around looking at the Polaroid or nowadays looking at the screen, then they say, “Let’s do it, shoot,” by which time the model is so tense the Polaroid is better than the end product. I ease that up where they don’t feel necessarily, ‘This is the big decisive moment.’”

–Juergen Teller interviewed by Tim Blanks in the fall 2012 issue of Style.com/Print

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